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by lubujackson4 hours ago |
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upvoteby ripe3 hours ago|
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> LLMs are great with focused questions, up and down abstraction layers and across all kinds of concerns. Stack up these focused concerns into a rich understanding of what you are doing or writing.

I agree. This is much better advice than what the article tries to do, which is to give best practices around how to use or not use AI to code.

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upvoteby fkozlowski2 hours ago|
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Agreed — I also always append to my agents.md — "If there are any technical choices available, please surface them to me so I can understand them and choose"
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upvoteby jondwillis1 hours ago|
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If your harness has an “AskUserQuestion”-like tool, you can prompt it to use that, or, as I have done, add a stop hook that uses a smaller model to check if there was any similar prose that was output toward the end of the previous response.

Happy to share the implementation or package it up if anyone is interested.

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upvoteby 2 hours ago|
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deleted
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upvoteby bkircher4 hours ago|
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Wish I could upvote twice or something
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upvoteby plastic-enjoyer3 hours ago|
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> This misses the best use of AI in my opinion, which is to gain understanding. Whst is this bit of code doing? Is there a risk of data leaking here? Are permissions enforced downstream of this function?

Do I understand when I just let AI regurgitate the function and behavior of the code?

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upvoteby righthand2 hours ago|
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Do you need that analysis every time from an LLM? Those are things I’d expect anyone to grow out of pretty quickly once you get used to understanding code. Especially someone with Senior in their title.
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upvoteby wonnage3 hours ago|
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Doing this may give you understanding but won’t really teach you how to understand. For students (as the article is focusing on them), the latter is equally important.
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upvoteby api3 hours ago|
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Closely related: one of the biggest AI superpowers I've found is testing. "Please implement a comprehensive unit testing suite for this, making sure to test ..."

You still have to check the work and shouldn't trust it blindly, but in my experience it's pretty damn good.

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upvoteby acedTrex4 hours ago|
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Exactly, i so wish the narratives around LLMs in most fields were around how they can enable us to be better ourselves...
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upvoteby isjjdndksks3 hours ago|
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SOMEONE didn't read the article

> You code and you have the AI check your work. Treat it like a reviewer. That’s my advice in a sentence.

Bro you're giving the same advice as the article

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upvoteby lubujackson30 minutes ago|
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Quite different advice, actually. I do not trust an LLM to review or to code by itself, but it can enlighten or expose blindspots, without requiring me to dig through the codebase, especially around unrelated downstream impacts. The point is to use LLMs as a research and concept navigation tool rather than a reviewer or "decider". Broad asks like "is this code good" are vague and lossy, narrow asks allow much less room for unknown unknowns.
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upvoteby andai3 hours ago|
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>Preferably, don’t give the AI access to the codebase. Copy-paste snippets of your code in the web interface.

Well, I can't ask it for an overview of a system it can't see.

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upvoteby qayxc3 hours ago|
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> Preferably, don’t give the AI access to the codebase. [...] If the AI does have access to the codebase, this access is read-only.

also

> I don’t follow all these religiously.

So if you need an overview of a system, you can and should provide access to the entire codebase. Even the rule itself says "preferably", not "don't ever". If you have different needs, you can always just look at it as a useful guideline. It's just a blog post by some rando on the internet, not the epiphany of AI coding's Ten Commandments.

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upvoteby ithkuil2 hours ago|
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Using AI to review our own comments before posting could be a good idea
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upvoteby frevib3 hours ago|
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> Whst is this bit of code doing?

This only applies to bad code. A formal programmic language beats an informal language anytime. Why on earth would you translate an unambiguous formal language to English?

> Is there a risk of data leaking here?

> Are permissions enforced downstream of this function?

If you trust AI to give you that answer, you are going to run into serious issues.

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upvoteby raincole2 hours ago|
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> Why on earth would you translate an unambiguous formal language to English?

Why on earth are all the books about programming, science and math written in English (and other natural languages) instead of a formal one then?

Why on earth did comments even got invented?

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upvoteby dghlsakjg2 hours ago|
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A formal programmic language beats an informal language anytime. Why on earth would you write a comment in an ambiguous informal language when you could translate it to code?
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upvoteby bryanrasmussen1 hours ago|
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programmer looks at formal programmic language which has so beaten the informal language that one cannot tell the reason why this stupid bit of code exists in the silly form it does is to prevent an edge condition in a particular browser while still working fine for other browsers.

Luckily genius programmer who understands formal programmic language and does not need weak comments to clarify why the world is not perfect, fixes the stupid looking code to be beautiful, opening company up to some really super neat, seemingly random bugs in one browser that nobody will understand for several months.

tldr: one important reason comments exist is to clarify why code you might expect to look another way looks the way it does, of course if the only reason it looks the way it does is this is the way the AI wrote it I guess I agree the comment is unnecessary.

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