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Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs

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Re: Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs

#41

Post by bavell »

simonw wrote: post #34
WD-42 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Begs the question again: if you need to go out of your way to find an example of correct usage of the api to paste into the prompt, why are you even bothering? I find copilot useful when I already know what I want and start typing it out, at a certain point the scope of the problem is narrowed sufficiently for the LLM to fill the rest in. Of course this is more in line of “glorified autocomplete” than “replacing juni…

"if you need to go out of your way to find an example of correct usage of the api to paste into the prompt, why are you even bothering?" Because it's faster. Here's an example: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr That's an entirely client-side web page you can use to open a PDF which then converts every page to an image (using PDF.js), then runs each image through the Tesseract.js OCR program and lets you copy out th…

It's faster if all you're concerned with can fit in a static html file but what about for more complex projects?

I've struggled with getting any productivity benefits beyond single-file contexts. I've started playing with aider in an attempt to handle more complex workflows and multi-file editing but keep running into snags and end up spinning my wheels fighting my tools instead of making forward progress...

Re: Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs

#42

Post by joseda-hg »

potatoicecoffee wrote: post #32

I like looking at stack overflow for coding examples and seeing a couple of nerds getting angry at each other about the best way to do stuff. or some interesting other ways of doing stuff. this is also why i come to HN! so its weird when people want to drop that small joy from their workday

It is lovely when doing exploratory research, less so when in a hurry and you don't want to take the extra mental effort to figure out which of the nerds is right or if one of them is talking out of left field

Re: Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs

#43

Post by WD-42 »

simonw wrote: post #34
WD-42 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Begs the question again: if you need to go out of your way to find an example of correct usage of the api to paste into the prompt, why are you even bothering? I find copilot useful when I already know what I want and start typing it out, at a certain point the scope of the problem is narrowed sufficiently for the LLM to fill the rest in. Of course this is more in line of “glorified autocomplete” than “replacing juni…

"if you need to go out of your way to find an example of correct usage of the api to paste into the prompt, why are you even bothering?" Because it's faster. Here's an example: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr That's an entirely client-side web page you can use to open a PDF which then converts every page to an image (using PDF.js), then runs each image through the Tesseract.js OCR program and lets you copy out th…

That's a nice little self contained example. I have yet to see this approach work for the day job: a larger codebase with complex inter-dependencies, where the solution isn't so easily worded (make the text box pink) and where the resulting code is reviewed and tested by one's peers.

We actually had to make a rule at work that if you use an LLM to create an PR and can't explain the changes without using more LLMs, you can't submit the PR. I've seen it almost work - code that looks right but does a bunch of unnecessary stuff, and then it required a real person (me) to clean it up and ends up taking just as much time as if it were just written correctly the first time.

Re: Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs

#44

Post by energy123 »

AgentMatrixAI wrote: post #7

Prompt quality and knowing your domain is critical. One issue I had early on was experimenting with LLMs to generate a frontend application in a brand new framework I was unfamiliar with (Svelte at the time) which lead to situations where I would cruise along and get stuck in a loop. The other issue came from the increasing context size that led to more unpredictable behaviors (i would ask it to change the color of a…

Same experience with context size and prompt quality.

Some other things I picked up:

- If you formulate a good prompt with small (but sufficient) context and it still makes mistakes after one attempt to feed the error message back to it, it's probably not going to be able to ever get it, no matter how many iterations you do with it. It will get stuck in a rut forever. Better not to argue with it.

- o1-2024-12-17 is genuinely a big step change.

Re: Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs

#45

Post by numba888 »

Looks outdated by now. Try R1.

Seriously, I've been using LLMs for coding for a while and can say early experience was disappointing, but they get better and better fast. The latest o1 looks a lot better than 4o. It's reasonable to expect with proper human supervision and interface they will be able to handle big files and projects in a year or two. Interesting times...

Re: Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs

#46

Post by singularity2001 »

potatoicecoffee wrote: post #32

I like looking at stack overflow for coding examples and seeing a couple of nerds getting angry at each other about the best way to do stuff. or some interesting other ways of doing stuff. this is also why i come to HN! so its weird when people want to drop that small joy from their workday

i've never been as disgusted by a website as by stack overflow so getting rid of that drastically improves joy

Re: Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs

#47

Post by m3kw9 »

AgentMatrixAI wrote: post #7

Prompt quality and knowing your domain is critical. One issue I had early on was experimenting with LLMs to generate a frontend application in a brand new framework I was unfamiliar with (Svelte at the time) which lead to situations where I would cruise along and get stuck in a loop. The other issue came from the increasing context size that led to more unpredictable behaviors (i would ask it to change the color of a…

By that time you can have your personal humanoid robot clean your gutter. You just do nothing but prompt, what a life that’s gonna be.

Re: Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs

#48

Post by bandrami »

AgentMatrixAI wrote: post #7

Prompt quality and knowing your domain is critical. One issue I had early on was experimenting with LLMs to generate a frontend application in a brand new framework I was unfamiliar with (Svelte at the time) which lead to situations where I would cruise along and get stuck in a loop. The other issue came from the increasing context size that led to more unpredictable behaviors (i would ask it to change the color of a…

How much of this is a cage we've built for ourselves? When I made my first website in 1998 even if we had had LLMs asking one how to change the color of a button would be ludicrous because I'd change an HTML attribute (did CSS exist back then? don't remember) either in a static file or in a perl script. That's it. And the modern "throw a hundred and seven frameworks at it" stack doesn't really do anything that simple CGI CRUD app couldn't do.

Re: Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs

#49

Post by bandrami »

numba888 wrote: post #45

Looks outdated by now. Try R1. Seriously, I've been using LLMs for coding for a while and can say early experience was disappointing, but they get better and better fast. The latest o1 looks a lot better than 4o. It's reasonable to expect with proper human supervision and interface they will be able to handle big files and projects in a year or two. Interesting times...

They also said that a year or two ago

Re: Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs

#50

Post by frogsRnice »

joseda-hg wrote: post #42
potatoicecoffee wrote: post #32

I like looking at stack overflow for coding examples and seeing a couple of nerds getting angry at each other about the best way to do stuff. or some interesting other ways of doing stuff. this is also why i come to HN! so its weird when people want to drop that small joy from their workday

It is lovely when doing exploratory research, less so when in a hurry and you don't want to take the extra mental effort to figure out which of the nerds is right or if one of them is talking out of left field

As opposed to wondering if the llm is hallucinating?

You have to expend a mental effort to think about your solutions anyway; I guess it’s pick your poison really.

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