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How I program with LLMs

crawshaw.io

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Re: How I program with LLMs

#251

Post by jpc0 »

Vox_Leone wrote: post #166
dewitt wrote: post #52

One interesting bit of context is that the author of this post is a legit world-class software engineer already (though probably too modest to admit it). Former staff engineer at Google and co-founder / CTO of Tailscale. He doesn't need LLMs. That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me personally. His post reminds me of an…

I have been using LLM to generate functional code from *pseudo-code* with excellent results. I am starting to experiment with UML diagrams, both with LLM and computer vision to actually generate code from UML diagrams; for example a simple activity diagram could be the prompt on LLM 's, and might look like: Start -> Enter Credentials -> Validate -> [Valid] -> Welcome Message -> [Invalid] -> Error Message Correspondin…

Could you add to the prompt that the password is stored in an sqlite database using argon2 for encryption, the encryption parameters are stored as environment variables.

You would like it to avoid timing based attacks as well as dos attacks.

It should also generate the functions as pure functions so that state is passed in and passed out and no side effects(printing to the console) happen within the function.

Then also confirm for me that it has handled all error cases that might reasonably happen.

While you are doing that, just think about how much implicit knowledge I just had to type into the comment here and that is still ignoring a ton of other knowledge that needs to be considered like whether that password was salted before being stored. All the error conditions for the sqlite implementation in python, the argon2 implementation in the library.

TLDR: that code is useless and would have taken me the same amount of time to write as your prompt.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#252

Post by NoOn3 »

dns_snek wrote: post #214
harrall wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it’s more that people hate trying new tools because they’ve already made their choice and made it their identity. However, there are also people who love everything new and jump onto the latest hype too. They try new things but then immediately advocate it without merit. Where are the sane people in the middle?

As an experienced software developer, I paid for ChatGPT for a couple of months, I trialed Gemini Pro for a couple of months, and I've used the current version of Claude. I'd be happy if LLMs could produce working code as often and as quickly as the evangelist claim, but whenever I try to use LLM to work on my day to day tasks, I almost always walk away frustrated and disappointed - and most of my work is boring on t…

I have very similar experience. For me LLM are good at explaining someone else's complex code, but for some reason they don't help me write new code well. I would also like to see any LLM-driven developers work in real time.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#253

Post by charlieyu1 »

I’m a hobby programmer who never worked a programming job. Last week I was bored, I asked o1 to help me to write a Solitaire card game using React because I’m very rusty with web development.

The first few steps were great. Guided me to install things and setup a project structure. The model even generated codes for a few files.

Then something went wrong, the model kept telling me what to do in vague, but didn’t output codes anymore. So I asked for further help, and now it started contradicting itself, rewriting business logic that were implemented in the first response, 3-4 pieces of code snippets of the same file that aren’t compatible etc, and it all fell apart.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#254

Post by jkaptur »

rudiksz wrote: post #244
antirez wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also many years of programming experience and find myself strongly "accelerated" by LLMs when writing code. But, if you think at it, it makes sense that many seasoned programmers are using LLMs better. LLMs are a helpful tool, but also a hard-to-use tool, and in general it's fair to think that better programmers can do a better use of some assistant (human or otherwise): better understanding its strengths, ide…

> "seasoned programmers are using LLMs better". I do not remember a single instance when code provided to me by an LLM worked at all. Even if I ask something small that cand be done in 4-5 lines of code is always broken. From a fellow "seasoned" programmer to another: how the hell do you write the prompts to get back correct working code?

The story from the article matches my experience. The LLM's first answer is often a little broken, so I tweak it until it's actually correct.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#255

Post by otteromkram »

highfrequency wrote: post #246

> A lot of the value I personally get out of chat-driven programming is I reach a point in the day when I know what needs to be written, I can describe it, but I don’t have the energy to create a new file, start typing, then start looking up the libraries I need... LLMs perform that service for me in programming. They give me a first draft, with some good ideas, with several of the dependencies I need, and often some…

I think your biggest takeaway should be that they person writing the blog post is extremely well-known versed in programming and has labored over code for hours, along with writing tests, debugging, etc. He knows what he would like because it's second nature. He was able to get the best from the LLM because his vision of what the code should look like helped craft a solid prompt.

Newer people into programming might not have as good of a time because they may skip actually learning something fundamentals and rely on LLMs as a crutch. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but there might be at some point when everything goes up in smoke and the LLM is out of answers.

No amount of italic font is going to change that.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#256

Post by LeftHandPath »

switchbak wrote: post #241
LeftHandPath wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never used it, simply because I hate autocomplete in emails. Gmail autocomplete saves me maybe 2-5s per email: the recipients name, a comma, and a sign off. Maybe a quarter or half sentence here or there, but never exactly what I would’ve typed. In code bases, I’ve never seen the appeal. It’s only reliably good at stuff that I can easily find on Google. The savings are inconsequential at best, and negative at wo…

"negative at worst when it introduces hard-to-pinpoint bugs" - this is actually very true. I've had it recreate patterns _partially_, and paste in the wrong thing in a place that was very hard to discern. It probably saved me 40 mins, then proceeded to waste 2 hours of me hunting for that issue. I'm probably at the break-even on the whole. The ultimate promise is very compelling, but my current use isn't particularly…

Exactly! I expect that some are able to put it to good use. I am not one of those people.

My experiences with ChatGPT and Gemini have included lots of confident but wrong answers, eg “What castle was built at the highest altitude”. Thats what gives me pause.

Gemini spits out a great 2D A* implementation no problem. That is awesome. Actually, contrary to my original comment, I probably will use AI for that sort of thing going forward.

Despite that, I don’t want it in my IDE. Maybe I’m just a bit of a Luddite.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#257

Post by k__ »

notjoemama wrote: post #7

Our company has a no AI use policy. The assumption is zero trust. We simply can’t know whether a model or its framework could or would send proprietary code outside the network. So it’s best to assume all LLMs/AI is or will send code or fragments of code. While I applaud the incredible work by their creators, I’m not sure how a responsible enterprise class company could rely on “trust us bro” EULAs or repo readmes.

Seems like only working on open source code has its benefits.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#258

Post by kragen »

antirez wrote: post #120
dewitt wrote: post #52

One interesting bit of context is that the author of this post is a legit world-class software engineer already (though probably too modest to admit it). Former staff engineer at Google and co-founder / CTO of Tailscale. He doesn't need LLMs. That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me personally. His post reminds me of an…

I have also many years of programming experience and find myself strongly "accelerated" by LLMs when writing code. But, if you think at it, it makes sense that many seasoned programmers are using LLMs better. LLMs are a helpful tool, but also a hard-to-use tool, and in general it's fair to think that better programmers can do a better use of some assistant (human or otherwise): better understanding its strengths, ide…

That's really interesting. What are the most important things you've learned to do with the LLMs to get better results? What do your problem descriptions look like? Are you going back and forth many times, or crafting an especially-high-quality initial prompt?

Re: How I program with LLMs

#259

Post by aerhardt »

His experience mirrors mine. I'm happy he explicitly mentions search, when people have been shouting "this is not meant for search" for a couple years now. Of course it helps with search. I also love the tech for producing first drafts, and it greatly lowers the energy and cognitive load when attacking new tasks, like others are repeating on this thread.

I think at the same time, while the author says this is the second most impressive technology he's seen in his lifetime, it's still a far cry from the bombastic claims being made by the titans of industry regarding its potential. Not uncommon to see claims here on HN of 10x improvements in productivity, or teams of dozens of people being axed, but nothing in the article or in my experience lines up with that.

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