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Agentic Coding Recommendations

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Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#61

Post by bananapub »

phito wrote: post #41
petesergeant wrote: post #11

Randomly, my advice: don't sleep on this. Three or four weeks ago I was posting how LLMs were useful for one-off questions but I wouldn't trust them on my codebase. Then I spent my week's holiday messing around on them for some personal projects. I am now a fairly committed Roo user. There are lots of problems, but there is incredible value here. Try it and see if you're still a hold-out.

I will definitely sleep on agents. Normal LLM use, fine, but I am not giving up reasoning.

this is kind of a weird position to take. you're the captain, you're the person reviewing the code the LLM (agent or not) generates, you're the one asking for the code you want, you're in charge of deciding how much effort to put in to things, and especially which things are most worth your effort.

all this agent stuff sounded stupid to me until I tried it out in the last few weeks, and personally, it's been great - I give a not-that-detailed explanation for what I want, point it at the existing code and get back a patch to review once I'm done making my coffee. sometimes it's fine to just apply, sometimes I don't like a variable name or whatever, sometimes it doesn't fit in with the other stuff so I get it to try again, sometimes (anyway, obviously do whatever you want, but deriding something you've not looked in to isn't a hugely thoughtful process for adapting to a changing world.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#62

Post by exfalso »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #34

Can someone recommended some source for vibe coding eg. how to prompt it properly, what tools to use? Does someone have any experience on anything other than small projects from scratch?

My reading of the status quo is that people who use it for toy or greenfield projects written from scratch are having a blast. Until the project reaches a certain complexity in size and function when it starts to break down.

People working on existing projects in turn are scratching their heads because it's just not quite working or providing much of a productivity boost. I belong to this camp.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#63

Post by jedisct1 »

Pretty much my experience as well, although I would highly recommend Roo Code + Claude (via the API) to build entire projects, and Claude for "batch" tasks or finalization.

AI models are trained on data that can be 1 or 2 years old. And they're trained of what the saw the most. So, language changes, breaking API changes, dependencies that don't work any more, name changes, etc. are going to get them super confused.

Go indeed works well because of its standard library that avoids the need for many dependencies, and its stability.

I found PHP to actually be the best target language for coding agents. For the same reasons, and also for the ton of documentation and example code available. That doesn't prevent agents from automatically using some modern PHP features, applying static analysis tools, etc.

For frontend stuff, agents will almost always pick React + Tailwind because this is what they saw the most. But Tailwind 4 is very different from Tailwind 3, and that got them super confused.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#64

Post by dist-epoch »

yuri91 wrote: post #16

So using agents forces (or at least nudges) you to use go and tailwind, because they are simple enough (and abundant in the training data) for the AI to use correctly. Does this mean that eventually in a world where we all use this stuff, no new language/framework/library will ever be able to emerge? Competing with the existing alternatives will be too hard. You won't even be able to ask real humans for help on platf…

As an example, XML is suddenly cool again, because LLMs love it.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#65

Post by tonnydourado »

Gotta say, 100/200 bucks monthly feels prohibitively expensive for even trying out something, particularly something as unproven as code-writing AI, even more particularly when other personal experiences with AI have been at the very least underwhelming, and extra particularly when the whole endeavor is so wrapped up in ethical concerns.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#66

Post by Keats »

bananapub wrote: post #51
Keats wrote: post #33

I've been trying Claude Code with Sonnet 4.0 for a week or so now for Rust code but it feels really underwhelming (and expensive since it's via Bedrock right now). Everytime it's doing something it's missing half despite spending a lot of time planning at the beginning of the session. What am I missing?

it shouldn't be expensive - you can pay for Pro ($20/month) or Max ($100 or $200/month) to get what would cost >> $1000/month in API costs.

Yep i know but I have free AWS credits sooo

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#67

Post by dimitri-vs »

Keats wrote: post #33

I've been trying Claude Code with Sonnet 4.0 for a week or so now for Rust code but it feels really underwhelming (and expensive since it's via Bedrock right now). Everytime it's doing something it's missing half despite spending a lot of time planning at the beginning of the session. What am I missing?

Same. I have a very efficient workflow with Cursor Edit/Agent mode where it pretty much one-shots every change or feature I ask it to make. Working inside a CLI is painful, are people just letting Claude Code churn for 10-15 minutes and then reviewing the diff? Are people even reviewing the code?

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#68

Post by vultour »

petesergeant wrote: post #11

Randomly, my advice: don't sleep on this. Three or four weeks ago I was posting how LLMs were useful for one-off questions but I wouldn't trust them on my codebase. Then I spent my week's holiday messing around on them for some personal projects. I am now a fairly committed Roo user. There are lots of problems, but there is incredible value here. Try it and see if you're still a hold-out.

I spent a good part of yesterday attempting to use ChatGPT to help me choose an appropriate API gateway. Over and over it suggested things that literally do not exist, and the only reason I could tell was that I spent a good amount of time in the actual documentation. This has been my experience roughly 80% of the time when trying to use an LLM. I would like to know what is the magical prompt engineering technique that makes it stop confidently hallucinating about literally everything.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#69

Post by dukeyukey »

tonnydourado wrote: post #65

Gotta say, 100/200 bucks monthly feels prohibitively expensive for even trying out something, particularly something as unproven as code-writing AI, even more particularly when other personal experiences with AI have been at the very least underwhelming, and extra particularly when the whole endeavor is so wrapped up in ethical concerns.

You can use Claude Code either pay-as-you-go with an API key, or subscribe to the $20 Pro subscription.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#70

Post by bananapub »

andyferris wrote: post #59
bananapub wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it shouldn't be expensive - you can pay for Pro ($20/month) or Max ($100 or $200/month) to get what would cost >> $1000/month in API costs.

Can you use Claude Code with Pro? I was trying to figure this out and I thought you couldn't (unless you enter an API key and pay for tokens).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44179604
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