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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

#91

Post by bandrami »

skydhash wrote: post #79
DecoySalamander wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has changed over the years is our expectations and requirements. Sure, you can skip "all the noise" and slap an attribute on your button, but then you'll have to track down another 20 buttons in your codebase that need a color update. You can be smart with your approaches, but at a certain project size and complexity, frameworks are unavoidable. The only choice you really have is to learn an established one or h…

That’s the problem template languages solve. That button could be a partial, and you include it where you want a button. And with grep, you can track it down.

One of Allaire’s selling points for CFML was that their IDE would track all the matching partials in a project if you edited one

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

#92

Post by dwaltrip »

dgfitz wrote: post #31
dwaltrip wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the new tools are embedded in your editor so you don’t have to copy paste in either direction. My experience is that it can still be tricky to get high quality results when letting the AI actually edit the code for you. A few of my attempts went rather poorly. I’m hoping tweaks to how I use the tools improve this. Or I’ll just wait until better versions are released :) I use Claude in the web interface quite…

Have you seen this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845933

Yeah that jives.

We are trying to learn how to use these tools effectively. They are a bit alien. And the landscape / ecosystem is a confusing mix of crazy hype and real progress that is rapidly changing month by month.

You definitely can't give them a complex task and then walk away. Maybe in the next year or so that will more be possible. We shall see.

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

#93

Post by ItsBob »

SkyBelow wrote: post #81
jpt4 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that analogy is remotely accurate, it strikes me as a strictly negative value proposition for the tool.

Depends upon the user. Are you fast (and confident) at evaluating the output and discarding the bad suggestions? This is why I think using AI hurts some developers and helps others, and the usefulness is best for those who already have a good deal of experience.

I'm a senior developer so I spot the bullshit, like sometimes it makes up table names in the sql. Things like that.

It's definitely not fire-and-forget: more like extreme autocomplete (at least that's how I use it)

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

#94

Post by IanCal »

skydhash wrote: post #90
IanCal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or I could type a paragraph to an LLM and copy paste and then edit the parts it gets wrong? I think there's something you're missing in their description. They're not asking a model to do anything, it's automatically running and then suggests what should come next. Also in editors like cursor I can ask for a change directly in the editor and be presented with an inline diff to accept/reject.

I don’t know if you’re a vim user, but what makes people like vim is that once you master it, it’s not about typing and deleting characters. It’s about text manipulation, but live instead of typing an awk or sed script. It’s like when driving a car, you don’t think about each steps like watching the speedometer, verifying the exact pressure on the gas and brakes, and the angle of the steering wheel. You just have a g…

Yes, and this isn't the same.

It's a tradition to torture car analogies so let me do so, this is more like when you start to say goodbye to people at a party your car identifies the pattern and warms up, opens the door as you walk to it and then drives you home. If you sit and take the wheel to drive towards a hotel you booked nearby it spots that and starts doing that for you.

> Something like duplicate the current function, change the name of the parameter and update the query as well as some symbols, can be done quickly as soon as the plan to do so appears. And it’s mostly in automatic mode.

And with these things I might move the cursor to where I want to put the new function, and then it's just immediately suggested for me. One key press and it's done. Then it suggests the other two based on the type definition somewhere else.

Obviously this is the happy path.

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

#95

Post by bandrami »

baq wrote: post #63
bandrami wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Isn't Lean just the same Six Sigma stuff you were selling us a year ago?" "No no no no no. This has a totally different name"

Yeah except throwing shit together for an internal react ui is now a pleasant couple hours instead of painful couple days.

Right but throwing shit together for an internal perl cgi wireframe used to be like 15 minutes.

We've regressed is all I'm saying

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

#96

Post by SkyBelow »

ItsBob wrote: post #93
SkyBelow wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends upon the user. Are you fast (and confident) at evaluating the output and discarding the bad suggestions? This is why I think using AI hurts some developers and helps others, and the usefulness is best for those who already have a good deal of experience.

I'm a senior developer so I spot the bullshit, like sometimes it makes up table names in the sql. Things like that. It's definitely not fire-and-forget: more like extreme autocomplete (at least that's how I use it)

I don't ever use it for fire and forget, but I've been wondering how well that might work in small side projects where hidden bugs aren't a big concern. Like using a fire and forget to spin up a small javascript game. But never in production code that I might get a 2am Saturday incident call on.

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

#97

Post by skydhash »

IanCal wrote: post #94
skydhash wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if you’re a vim user, but what makes people like vim is that once you master it, it’s not about typing and deleting characters. It’s about text manipulation, but live instead of typing an awk or sed script. It’s like when driving a car, you don’t think about each steps like watching the speedometer, verifying the exact pressure on the gas and brakes, and the angle of the steering wheel. You just have a g…

Yes, and this isn't the same. It's a tradition to torture car analogies so let me do so, this is more like when you start to say goodbye to people at a party your car identifies the pattern and warms up, opens the door as you walk to it and then drives you home. If you sit and take the wheel to drive towards a hotel you booked nearby it spots that and starts doing that for you. > Something like duplicate the current…

Let's continue torturing the poor car. It'd be great if it works that way, but what I fears is when the AI chauffeur decide on a route that appears to go where I want, but instead it's a dead end, and you don't know the exact intersection for the correct path. Or it take a long sinuous dirt road ignoring the highway. Or it sends me off a cliff because it assumes it's piloting a plane. To manage those risks, you have to keep your hand on the steering wheel and know the route beforehand. In this case, I would prefer a GPS map and have something that is a bit less fragile.

I don't mind writing code, and if it become boilerplatey, it's a good time to rethink those abstractions or write a few functions. And there's snippets for shorter sections.

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