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

I think the value right now is to focus less on external orchestration if at all. trust the (current best) model to do it better than anything you bolt on to the harness. focus your energy on providing clearer specs. I think the optimal spec is a disambiguated (through liberal use of the AskUserQuestion tool) 1 intent, 2, input/output contracts 3 constraints and 4 preconditions. focus on that and get out of the models way. I think of it like this, imagine a person who was not as smart as you was trying to tell you how to do a task. would you want more verbosity and step by step instructions or would you want them to just cut to the chase (ie, what are you trying to do, what are the obstacles, I'll let you know if I have questions).

also let the model verify itself. don't give it an objective that is vague, give it clear exit criterias for goals and let it loop until it gets there so much of the orchestration scaffolding seems like massive technical debt

oddly, I do the opposite of a lot of conventional advice when it comes to models. I use no memory, I think there is something similar to context rot when everything is stored. I like creating markdown files as memory that the model can grep if needed. I also havent found a real use for hooks yet, I have tried but they always seem to get in the way. skills on the other hand are very undervalued. they are so much more powerful than many realize. I used to think agents were where the power was. I think its actually skills. agents are really for context preservation. skills are what increase capabilities

I'm not even talking about quantity of items in memory, I mean dilution of intent. I really love a model with a clean slate and only the items it needs. I fear the memory guides the model in areas that might not be what I want with the current prompt

progressive disclosure is a big one. you can make context available but it is only loaded when needed. like lazy loading for prompt engineering. skills are to be used to instruct the model how to do something specific that is not in its training data. like how to access my proprietary system, how to interface with a custom program. you can embed templates in skills, you can embed code that executes in skills and only the output is loaded into context. skills expand capabilities, agents constrain context

(constraining context is a very good thing btw, don't mean to infer that agents are somehow inferior to skills)

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I’m writing a JSX templating language — to manage context, branching, etc automatically. You hand it a spec/existing work and it automatically applies a recipe.

So far that’s been much nicer for anything large or complex, because I was spending all my time on context piping.

Related question: are there any close-to-gpt5.5/opus-level good autocompletion models?

I keep a TODO file where I just write my ideas in free text, and every once in a while I tell claude "I updated the TODO file".

This is basically like queueing up prompt.

I wish Claude Code had a thing like that builtin. Like a "user ideas scratchpad".

I'm currently rolling out Matt Pocock's Sandcastle project so that I can have those brakes removed. What will be left is just the grilling(/wayfinding).

My current flow heavily relies on Matt Pocock's Skills and Sandcastle project. I find them highly valuable in practice: grilling(/wayfind) into a spec and extract issues. Those live in Linear projects. I'm pointing my Sandcastle set-up at such Linear projects (or loose issues), which results in an MR.

Currently at the point of self-improving the prompts and Sandcastle set-up with a retrospective pass of the logs.

Ive built a couple things in the past few months that have leaned heavily on LLM as my programmer. Mainly Claude code, but occasionally codex also. Its a different way to produce. I spend more time doing something like plain text feature mapping. simple .md files, good flow and creativity. Then once i'm happy with it, i pass it off to the dev team- claude to code up and integrate. I feel like im flowing in the part of the process I always was. But the buzz of getting something working is gone. More like slow satisfaction of getting something useful at the end.

One of the things I've been talking about with my senior developers is how the bottleneck has shifted even more dramatically to human code understanding vs code generation. AI is still not suitable for generating production grade code without a human checking it (yet), but it can produce a huge amount of code for humans to check. We've been experimenting with ai finding better ways of communicating what is in a change at different abstraction levels etc by always generating diagrams showing what it did etc, with the concept being that anything that can speed up human understanding of changes addresses the core bottleneck of the whole process.

I have a custom harness that runs in a macOS VM. It has e-mail and its own accounts. I assign it tasks in Linear, it does them and spins up PRs for me to review. This works pretty well, generally. I have to spend time writing stories and doing code review, but I don’t have to follow its (their — I have 3 of them) every move.

Not being able to enter flow state is a very interesting observation. I've felt it too to the extent that I went down a whole new rabbit hole of what it means to be in flow state. Let me know if anybody here wants to know more, happy to post some links.

To answer your question - I discuss the approach with Claude Code (e.g., should I implement my own ACT model in JAX or PyTorch, Python or Rust or Julia, etc.). Then write the initial part of the code myself. Opening up a blank vscode is a simple joy of life I refuse to give up :-) I'll ask Claude for advice if I get stuck, it will helpfully offer to write that code for me, I obstinately decline. Eventually, I'll get bored of some minutiae or other, at which point I'll ask Claude to complete just that part of it.

  * https://youtu.be/VbUFMYs0kXQ?si=xiNw4ZFlla8k-p7w  The person who gives this talk (Rian Doris) has a good newsletter that I still read. I just checked their website and it has gone in full commercial mode, so YMMV.

  * https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_your_elusive_creative_genius

  * https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465074871

  * https://www.betterup.com/blog/meaning-of-personal-values

If you like videos, I saw an interesting video yesterday about systems thinking, software as ecosystem particularly with AI. More of an overview but gives an insight into seeing where we might be able to experiment with different ways Its more focused on teams and companies than individual developers but I think it could be applied to the single dev.

"Software engineering at the tipping point" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n41YjR5QfU

I don't think you would expect to get into a flow state if you were intermittently directing another (human) programmer to do work, and you shouldn't expect to with LLM-driven coding either. Perhaps you are best finding out ways to extend the length of time where the LLM can work without prompting, then use that downtime to focus on other tasks that will help you to guide it better the next time you need to prompt it.

I'm in the same boat and I'm not a fan on the current way of working of agents, but I think tooling is what needs to catch up.

So, I actually decided to try to tackle it myself and worked some months (full time) on it.

https://beolis.com is the result of that, it's a local cli in a kanban board style with a remote server to keep the team on track (I've been using it myself for some time and actually started to ask some friends to use it just yesterday -- feedback very welcome, I still wanted to do some additional things before asking more people to use it, but oh well, I'm a fan of building in public anyways and it's probably better to have feedback sooner rather than later).

The main point there is that you work mostly in the ticket description (your own spec) and the plan (the spec as the agent sees it, generated with a custom workflow) and then having another custom workflow to implement it (you can choose how you want it -- https://beolis.com/blog/post/custom-coding-workflows has some info on what I'm using myself).

As a result, at least for me, I do spend more time immersed in a flow state (although I'm in that state writing the specs and reviewing code -- although in some cases it's more work to write the spec in a way the agent can work when things get more complicated vs just diving into the code, so, going into "code" mode is something I still have to do, agents are definitely not perfect).

I guess I'm lacking in docs on how to effectively use it. I have plans to create a video next week and post it in the blog, so, if you're interested, keep track of it ;)

I am currently in the process of launching my AI teams platform that I've been working on since at least January. It's https://PersonaStack.ai. I'm doing it without VC money and all by myself. I've used over 110B tokens so far building it.

You get some amazing results with teams of AIs if you do it right. The key is to control behavior with what integrations and responsibilities each agent has. That way they naturally adapt, delegate, fact check each other, and generally act more autonomously.

This is already running the automated news site ainews.personastack.ai complete with social media posts 100% automated.

It also runs the issue triage, coding, reviews, and releases for the Kuberhealthy open source CNCF project, which is another thing of mine.

I don't think the next step is really smarter models. It's how we make the models more effective, and teams, when done right, net the best results I've seen.

Hoping to get noticed here soon, but it's extremely hard to do solo I'm finding.

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> but I haven't been able to enter flow state like I can when I hand write code.

Fixing that for you.

I haven't been able to enter flow state like I can when I write code.

You are the bottleneck.

Why should AI be limited to human time. Is a mountain? A galaxy?

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YES!

It's still very wip, I spent a couple of weekends on it so far, but I'm working on a harness that eschews autonomy and instead aims to work as a pair programming partner. Key to that are distinct "driver" and "navigator" modes, with the capacity to flip between them rapidly.

https://gitlab.com/philbooth/opair

(not really usable yet, but after tomorrow's session I expect to be developing opair in opair, which is mildly exciting)

I've been working on inverting the control theory for the agent loop. Instead of the user initiating everything, the agent runs automatically in the background and calls the user for feedback as part of tool use. The end game for me is to get rid of the chat interface altogether and move back toward async email and other messaging channels. The chatbot UI as a means of driving the business always felt like a temporary stepping stone / clever demo.

I think there are 10-100x productivity gains lurking in here. It is very expensive for a human to reserialize their mental state into a prompt each time a task needs working on. An agent can do this ~instantly and with high frequency 24/7. The higher the rate of evaluation the less change has to be dealt with between any two iterations. So, the likelihood that a given iteration needs human help goes down as you increase the rate of evaluation per unit of wall clock time. Tighter and faster control loops tend to require less severe corrective measures than slow and sloppy ones.

This is the most plausible reason for so many tokens in the future. I can actually see a million tokens per second making sense. I have a pretty good idea how I'd approach this if I actually had access to this kind of infrastructure. 1Mtok/s is baby tier in terms of raw information theory. The politics of employing a system like this are far more terrifying to me than any technological aspects. Humans really like having control over things, even when that control is pure downside for the business.

I created a small PI extension that always watches relevant directories and answers me in place, without switching context, or using a chat interface. Still experimenting but I like it.

https://github.com/piqoni/pi-piqo

I'm building "workboxes" to work on my startup. It helps me develop features insanely fast. A workbox is a simple worktree-in-a-sandbox per feature. I have a simple front end where I can launch new workboxes: I input a prompt (a documented grilling session) and it creates a branch, a PR, and starts an opencode coding session on an e2b sandbox based on a custom template with the app's monorepo. Each workbox has a public https endpoint so I can manually test the web app after the coding session is complete. At any point I can either approve the PR, send a follow-up prompt, or connect to the opencode session for more control.

I think my next step is to perform the grilling session inside the front end, currently I perform it in my terminal and then paste in the front end.

Well, it always depends on your environment. In my case, nothing forces me to heavily use AI, so my workflow is kind of the old way, but with less hassle.

- Do your thinking alone. (AI part: search, understanding)

- Specing. (AI part: search, understanding, completing some text)

- Coding like the old days. (AI part: search, understanding, code examples)

- Okay, now I have a good idea of how my feature is going to work

- Look for fluff code and delegate it to AI to write/review it.

- Focus on the part of the code I want to have fun doing.

- Review.

- Repeat.

It’s slower than the approach of doing specs and letting AI do the rest, while focusing your role only on code review. However, I’m more in control of what I build, I can explain what I built better than everyone else, and I build up my knowledge. (also I have less problems, because less code haha)

Will I go for the full Agentic way ? Maybe but I will find a way to slow it down so I can be in control

Something I'm thinking about and doing a bit of experimentation with is using LLMs to write specialist higher level code.

Rather than ask them to write web-apps in webby languages with open source frameworks etc, providing a very fixed, on-rails development process where everything is abstracted away. Accept that it'll be less powerful, but take the trade-off that it'll hopefully be faster and produce much more controllable software.

Concrete example, why do we let the LLM choose a database, schema, migration procedure, library, etc. We could decide to only support one database, enforce schema design (such as every table containing access control), enforce a migration process, enforce a library, even do schema design in a fixed config file rather than arbitrary DDL. Same for auth, deployments, even UI.

Just want to add:

I'm trying to do the same amount of work faster, not do work in parallel or agent orchestration. I'm not against letting the model go off and do things on it's own, that has its time and place.

But if I can do something in 15 minutes instead of 1 hour without the annoying prompt response loop, without the feeling that there could be blind spots, and while keeping all of the context (or at least most) in my head. That's a bigger win than spinning up 5 agents to do different things.