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How I program with agents

crawshaw.io

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Re: How I program with agents

#301

Post by [deleted] »

Verdex wrote: post #20
hombre_fatal wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like writing code, and it definitely isn't satisfying when an LLM can one-shot a parser that I would have had fun building for hours. But at the same time, building a parser for hours is also a distraction from my higher level ambitions with the project, and I get to focus on those. I still get to stub out the types and function signatures I want, but the LLM can fill them in and I move on. More likely I'll even ha…

Parsing is an area that I'm interested in. Can you talk more about your experience getting LLMs to one-shot parsers? From scratch LLMs seem to be completely lost writing parsers. The bleeding edge appears to be able to maybe parse xml, but gives up on programming languages with even the most minimal complexity (an example being C where Gemini refused to even try with macros and then when told to parse C without macro…

[deleted]

Re: How I program with agents

#302

Post by clbrmbr »

bArray wrote: post #9

LLMs for code review, rather than code writing/design could be the killer feature. I think that code review has been broken for a while now, but this could be a way forward. Of particular interest would be security, undefined behaviour, basic misuse of features, double checking warnings out of the compiler against the source code to ensure it isn't something more serious, etc. My current use of LLMs is typically via…

Yeah Claude Code (Opus 4) is really marvelous at code review. I just give it the PR link and it does the rest (via gh cli). — it gives a md file that usually has some gems in it. Definitely improving the quantity of “my” feedback, and certainly reducing time required.

Re: How I program with agents

#303

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

randito wrote: post #279
asim wrote: post #39

The agentic loop. The brain in the machine. Effectively a replacement for the rules engine. Still with a lot of quirks but crawshaw and many others from the Google era have a great way of distilling it down to its essence. It provides clarity for me as I see it over and over. Connect the agent tools, prompt it via some user request and let it go, and then repeat this process, maybe the prompt evolves over time to be…

> a consistent path to interacting with the world e.g sms, mail, weather, social, etc. Here's an interesting toy-project where someone hooked up agents to calendars, weather, etc and made a little game interface for it. https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/04/12/how-i-made-a-useful-...

I would not want to read that every morning. Just show me the calendar and weather. The graphical representations are much faster to digest.

Re: How I program with agents

#304

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

monkeydust wrote: post #18
bArray wrote: post #9

LLMs for code review, rather than code writing/design could be the killer feature. I think that code review has been broken for a while now, but this could be a way forward. Of particular interest would be security, undefined behaviour, basic misuse of features, double checking warnings out of the compiler against the source code to ensure it isn't something more serious, etc. My current use of LLMs is typically via…

Why isn't this spoken more about? Not a developer but work very closely with many - they are all on a spectrum from zero interest in this technology to actively using it to write code (correlates inversely seniority from my sample set) - very little talk on using it for reviews/checks - perhaps that needs to be done passively on commit.

My work has been adding more and more AI review bots. It's been like 0 for 10 for the feedback the AI has given me. Just wasting my time. I see where it's coming from, it's not utter nonsense, but it just doesn't understand the nuance or why something is logically correct.

That said, there have been some reports where the AIs have predicted what later became outages when they were ignored.

So... I don't know. Is it worth wading through 10 bad reviews of 1 good one prevents a bad bug? Maybe. I do hope the ratio gets better though

Re: How I program with agents

#305

Post by ivanbalepin »

verifex wrote: post #124

Some of my favorite things to use AI for when coding (I swear I wrote this not AI!): - CSS: I don't like working with CSS on any website ever, and all of the kludges added on-top of it don't make it any more fun. AI makes it a little fun since it can remember all the CSS hacks so I don't have to spend an hour figuring out how to center some element on the page. Even if it doesn't get it right the first time, it still…

same here, i dread CSS because it has to look good visually, not regress, work on a ton of devices and is very time-consuming to get right. But every time i tried Cursor with different models it produces CSS code that is just really bad. And the CSS hacks it knows somehow just don't add up to a good solution. Maybe it'll catch up, but so far the result has been worse than mine, so - still coding manually.

Re: How I program with agents

#306

Post by michaelsalim »

verifex wrote: post #124

Some of my favorite things to use AI for when coding (I swear I wrote this not AI!): - CSS: I don't like working with CSS on any website ever, and all of the kludges added on-top of it don't make it any more fun. AI makes it a little fun since it can remember all the CSS hacks so I don't have to spend an hour figuring out how to center some element on the page. Even if it doesn't get it right the first time, it still…

I get the temptation to use it for CSS too. But whenever I do, it produces a bunch of debts that are annoying to spot. Sure it looks nice visually, but you need to review it even more so than normal code.

Re: How I program with agents

#307

Post by hombre_fatal »

Verdex wrote: post #197
wrs wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I don't really understand the goal of "one-shot" parser generation, since I can't even do that as a human using a parser generator! There's always an iterative process, as I find out how the language I wanted isn't quite the language I defined. Having somebody or something else write tests actually helps with that problem, as it'll exercise grammar cases outside my mental happy path.

The comment that started this whole thread off mentioned LLMs oneshot-ing parsers. I didn't think an LLM could one shot a parser and I am interested in parsers which is why I asked about more info. It's not a goal of mine but because of interests in parsing I wanted to know if this was something that was happening or if it was hyperbole.

By one-shot in my original post, I mean that it comes up with a decent, working implementation that I can then refine.

As opposed to getting there through incremental revisions where I must dictate the directions the LLM takes -- I don't necessary know the directions it should take because I might be agnostic about it.

I find success in breaking the problem down into tokenize and parse just like I do when writing parsers myself.

    tokenize(string) -> Token[]
    parse(Token[]) -> Node[]
And definitely get it to generate tests every step of the way. The insane part is when the LLM can run tests itself and can iterate on code until all tests pass.

Or you extend it with a feature just by writing some failing tests and it does the rest.

Re: How I program with agents

#308

Post by CRConrad »

Aachen wrote: post #224
dahart wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right that it’s branding, but it also has meaning: a display resolution that (approximately) matches the resolution of the human retina, under typical viewing conditions. The fact that the term is easily understood by the lay public is what makes it a good name and smart branding. BTW the term ‘retinal display’ existed long before Apple used it, and refers to a display that projects directly onto the retina.

A screen that directly projects onto the retina sounds like a great reason to call it a retinal display. So then Apple hijacking the term to mean high DPI... how does that fit in? There's not that many results about this before Apple's announcement in 2010, many of them reporting on science and not general public media: https://www.google.com/search?q=retinal+display&sca_esv=3689... Clearly not something anyone reall…

> So then Apple hijacking the term to mean high DPI... how does that fit in?

It fits in quite easily and obviously: Just typical Apple being Apple, marketing hyperbole.

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