Live data from Hacker News

Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs

pgaleone.eu

1–10 of 97 posts

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

#2
I did a similar thing but with backend-heavy code, and I agree with this assessment:

> In particular, I asked ChatGPT to write a function by knowing precisely how I would have implemented it. This is crucial since without knowing the expected result and what every line does, I might end up with a wrong implementation.

In my eyes, it makes the whole idea of AI coding moot. If I need to explain every step in detail - and it does not "understand" what it's doing; I can virtually the statistical trial-and-error behind its action - then what's the point? I might as well write it all myself and be a bit more sure the code ends up how I like it.

link: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7289241...

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

#3
post #2

I did a similar thing but with backend-heavy code, and I agree with this assessment: > In particular, I asked ChatGPT to write a function by knowing precisely how I would have implemented it. This is crucial since without knowing the expected result and what every line does, I might end up with a wrong implementation. In my eyes, it makes the whole idea of AI coding moot. If I need to explain every step in detail - a…

Because as op pointed out it's faster. It has ready access to the correct usage of different libraries.

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

#5
Yeah this seems to be similar to my experiences.

I use Zed’s AI assistant with Sonnet, and will generally give it 10-20k tokens of sample code from elsewhere in the codebase, shared libraries, database schema, etc. and more or less have a very specific expectation of exactly the code I want to get. More often than not, it will succeed I’ll get it faster than typing myself.

However, it’s also pretty good at poking holes in your design, coming up with edge cases, etc. Sure, most of its observations will likely be moot somehow, but if it lists 10 points, then even if only 2 are valid and I didn’t think of, it’s already valuable to me.

I’ve also used Cline a bit, it’s nice too, though most of the time a single run of Claude works just fine, and I like Zed’s AI Assistant UX (I actually don’t use it for coding other than that).

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

#6
post #2

I did a similar thing but with backend-heavy code, and I agree with this assessment: > In particular, I asked ChatGPT to write a function by knowing precisely how I would have implemented it. This is crucial since without knowing the expected result and what every line does, I might end up with a wrong implementation. In my eyes, it makes the whole idea of AI coding moot. If I need to explain every step in detail - a…

Because as op pointed out it's faster. It has ready access to the correct usage of different libraries.

So does the language features of basically any modern editor.

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

#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 button and it would completely change the entire page).

almost all the tools i've used to date for designing frontend framework, none really replaces using cursor and being able to dive deep, however cline does seem to have gotten significantly better.

the day where you can come back to a fully working web app with moderate complexity after cleaning the gutter is still some way off but thats the dream

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

#8

Anyone got a line on a local first AI Tooling. Happy to pay100$. Don't want a subscription.

continue.dev, aider, Zed’s AI assistant are all free and will work with a local Ollama installation.

You will of course need an insanely beefy and expensive machine to run any useful models at reasonable speeds, which would likely cover API usage costs for many, many years (an entire lifetime, likely).

Post reply on HN