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Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#91

Post by weitendorf »

We're working on a browser-harness that makes forking, rpcs, and mapreduce first class tool calling primitives. Among other things, this makes it easier to manage your own context, because you can visualize your agents, subagents, and active work and resources as they interact with each other across locally and remote environments. And it eliminates all the complexity of mcp and local sandboxing because that is literally the problem browsers were made to solve!

To be clear the browser IS the harness, it's not just a browser-based UI but also the sandbox and orchestration layer. By giving LLMs deep browser access (through CDP and some special hooks) they can verify their own UIs immediately after writing them, navigate the web natively, and run commands that directly manipulate the active DOM. This creates a very tight feedback loop for UI work, but also let's you create or run browser automations, or query a site by running a javascript query on its contents, or a web page without deploying or uploading it anywhere, which is pretty powerful. What I really like is that this makes it easy to dispatch cheap models to generate and verify tons of little visualizations using svg.

Locally it's just a browser, but to manage remote instances you can either access them as tabs on any local browser, or as inline collapsible iframes. I'm trying to be cautious with the security side of it so we're not marketing it as a product yet, but would love to work with some anybody who is interested and does a lot of UI or cloud work!

I'm excited about this particular moment in tech because I think work is going to end up looking like playing Starcraft with data and AI, surrounded by rich custom media as you work, which feels really futuristic to me!

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#92

Post by tony_cannistra »

anthonyfrisby wrote: post #88

I had this exact problem, tried opening multiple agents in different terminals but that just frays your flow state even more. There is one great workaround I’ve found. Walk coding. Walkoding, if you like. Use a harness, create a harness if you like, then load it up in telegram and off you go. I’ve been on solo hiking trips and shipped numerous features. It means you can stay concentrated on your task, while not sitti…

I've also tried this. Very interesting, but must be used sparingly in my experience. Hiking is a place where before I used to go to think, or not think at all. Prompting an AI while doing so can feel very bad if really what I'm looking for is some disconnection or quiet thinking time.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#93

Post by theodorewiles »

IME LLMs are kind of like a projection of your current expertise - your prompting and guidance etc. biases LLM plans kind of 'in the direction' of your thinking. I think this is one reason why it seems like senior engineers get more lift vs. juniors.

What I am exploring is another step to the classic 'research / plan / implement' pattern: 'research / plan / LEARN / implement' where LEARN involves the human doing AI tutoring sessions to ensure a deep understanding the concepts etc. that the LLM is planning to implement so you can refine / iterate on plans and direct the LLM in ever more effective ways. My idea is that this then compounds your human capital and reduces the occurance of 'sounds smart, doesn't work' pattern.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#94

Post by pigpop »

danmaz74 wrote: post #46

Yes, like many others I've been experimenting a lot. What I've got so far is a harness-of-harnesses - ie, a harness which sits on top of Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode. I still use Claude Code or Codex directly for the initial planning of features, to investigate issues, and for small fixes, but whenever there's something even just a bit complex to do, I use my second-level harness. Summarizing it a lot, what it does…

I think this is a really good insight. It's definitely the back and forth in Claude Code or whatever harness you use that breaks flow and leads to frustration. This seems to be what Fable is solving since it is capable of doing much larger chunks of work without needing input constantly. Having a much more involved planning session than just turning on plan mode and then handing that off to be implemented is a much better approach. It's sort of what I've arrived at by accident where I often start planning changes in the web app and spend a long time going into detail about my vision and then working through the details without having Claude write any code other than perhaps a few small exploratory artifacts to visualize certain things and then taking all of that and moving over to Claude Code for implementation.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#95

Post by skeeter2020 »

npollock wrote: post #74
tombot wrote: post #73

"I haven't been able to enter flow state like I can when I hand write code." new flow state is having 10 terminal tabs in diff worktrees and trying to remember what each bit is

exactly, it's like Bobby Fischer playing 10 games of chess simultaneously

so Step 1: Be Bobby Fischer? super helpful for us mortals...

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#96

Post by worik »

aleqs wrote: post #85

I'm working an an agentic graph-based workflow execution engine/framework. The concept of the harness is completely abstracted away/generified - a 'node/agent's is a harness (cc, codex, open code, pi, etc) + model (I test different model and harness combinations). I have a set of tasks from trivial to complex - a set workflows (a workflow is a set of initial nodes and their behaviour) is defined and each one is asked…

> The main bottleneck at this point is the cost of all of the token

Are you using Chinese models? Quite a bit cheaper, but maybe still too expensive?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#97

Post by y0eswddl »

tony_cannistra wrote: post #92
anthonyfrisby wrote: post #88

I had this exact problem, tried opening multiple agents in different terminals but that just frays your flow state even more. There is one great workaround I’ve found. Walk coding. Walkoding, if you like. Use a harness, create a harness if you like, then load it up in telegram and off you go. I’ve been on solo hiking trips and shipped numerous features. It means you can stay concentrated on your task, while not sitti…

I've also tried this. Very interesting, but must be used sparingly in my experience. Hiking is a place where before I used to go to think, or not think at all. Prompting an AI while doing so can feel very bad if really what I'm looking for is some disconnection or quiet thinking time.

yeah, makes perfect sense to go for a hike through nature whole checking a phone every 3-8 minutes...

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#98

Post by ArtRichards »

I saw another post today about a startup making an oven for baking bread. I feel that often the main issue lies with what you need 'the code' to accomplish.

My flow state is thinking about and understanding this: am I solving a problem that needs to be solved now, for the right person?

I created this to help me understand it (project foundations + create milestones) and then bring it to reality (ship milestones).

https://artrichards.github.io/agent-playbook-suite/blog/

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#99

Post by danmaz74 »

kosolam wrote: post #86
danmaz74 wrote: post #46

Yes, like many others I've been experimenting a lot. What I've got so far is a harness-of-harnesses - ie, a harness which sits on top of Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode. I still use Claude Code or Codex directly for the initial planning of features, to investigate issues, and for small fixes, but whenever there's something even just a bit complex to do, I use my second-level harness. Summarizing it a lot, what it does…

Ha I’m doing the same. 2 months in or so, lost track of time a bit. Started with running all the usual suspects pi, claude code, codex, goose, but mostly migrated to own agent (ha!) for greater level of control. Also doing it in python for C lang as first target (ha!). Anyhow post a link if you’d release yours I’d be interested to take a look at adjacent work.

Interesting. From time to time I'm thinking about completely replacing the agent layer with my own, so that I would be able to enforce some rules at a lower level, but I'm wondering if it's worth it. What's been your experience with that?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#100

Post by tasoeur »

I’m exploring agentic for creative coding / visual effects. Think touch designer but with a prompts graph. It compiles to native code (swift and metal). The first version is available here and I’ll be releasing a v2 soon that will be open source:

- https://sxp.studio/apps/subz

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