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> I see it as a competent software developer but one that doesn't know the code base.

I know what you mean, but the thing I find windsurf (which we moved to from copilot) most useful (except writing opeanapi spec files) is asking it questions about the codebase. Just random minutiae that I could find by grepping or following the code, but would take me more than the 30s-1m it takes it. For reference, this is a monorepo of a bit over 1M LoC (and 800k YAML files, because, did I mention I hate API specs?), so not really a small code base either.

> I will break down the tasks to the same size as if I was implementing it. But instead of doing it myself, I roughly describe the task on a technical level (and add relevant classes to the context) and it will ask me clarifying questions. After 2-3 rounds the plan usually looks good and I let it implement the task.

Here I disagree, sort of. I almost never ask it to do complex tasks, the most time consuming and hardest part is not actually typing out the code, describing it to an AI takes me almost as much time as implementing for most things. One thing I did find very useful is the supertab feature of windsurf, which, at a high level, looks at the changes you started making and starts suggesting the next change. And it's not only limited to repetitive things (like . in vi), if you start adding a parameter to a function, it starts adding it to the docs, to the functions you need below, and starts implementing it.

> For me this method allows me to focus on the architecture and overall structure and delegate the plumbing to Copilot.

Yeah, a coworker said this best, I give it the boring work, I keep the fun stuff for myself.

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My experience is that GitHub Copilot works much better in VS Code than Intellij. Now I have to open them together to work on one single project.
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Yeah, but what did you produce with it in the end? Show us the end result please.
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I cannot show it because the code belongs to my employer.
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Ah yes of course. But no one asked for the code really. Just show us the app. Or is it some kinda super-duper secret military stuff you are not even supposed to discuss, let alone show.
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It is neither of these. It's an application that processes data and is not accessible outside of the companies network. Not everything is an app.

I described my workflow that has been a game changer for me, hoping it might be useful to another person because I have struggled to use LLMs for more than a Google replacement.

As an example, one task of the feature was to add metrics for observability when the new action was executed. Another when it failed.

My prompt: Create a new metric "foo.bar" in MyMetrics when MyService.action was successful and "foo.bar.failed" when it failed.

I review the plan and let it implement it.

As you can see it's a small task and after it is done I review the changes and commit them. Rinse and repeat.

I think the biggest issue is that people try to one shot big features or applications. But it is much more efficient to me to treat Copilot as a smart pair programming partner. There you also think about and implement one task after the other.

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I've been writing an experimental pipeline-based web app DSL with Claude Code for the last little while in my spare time. Sort of bash-like with middleware for lua, jq, graphql, handlebars, postgres, etc.

Here's an already out of date and unfinished blog post about it: https://williamcotton.com/articles/introducing-web-pipe

Here's a simple todo app: https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe/blob/webpipe-2.0/to...

Check out the BDD tests in there, I'm quite proud of the grammar.

Here's my blog: https://github.com/williamcotton/williamcotton.com/blob/mast...

It's got an LSP as well with various validators, jump to definitions, code lens and of course syntax highlighting.

I've yet to take screenshots, make animated GIFs of the LSP in action or update the docs, sorry about that!

A good portion of the code has racked up some tech debt, but hey, it's an experiment. I just wanted to write my own DSL for my own blog.

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