zlacker

>>laurex+(OP)
I don't understand the productivity that people get out of these AI tools. I've tried it and I just can't get anything remotely worthwhile unless it's something very simple or something completely new being built from the ground up.

Like sure, I can ask claude to give me the barebones of a web service that does some simple task. Or a webpage with some information on it.

But any time I've tried to get AI services to help with bugfixing/feature development on a large, complex, potentially multi-language codebase, it's useless.

And those tasks are the ones that actually take up the majority of my time. On the occasion that I'm spinning a new thing up quickly, I don't really need an AI to do it for me -- I mean, that's the easy part!

Is there something I'm missing? Am I just not using it right? I keep seeing people talk about how addictive it is, how the productivity boost is insane, how all their code is now written by AI and then audited, and I just don't see how that's possible outside of really simple rote programming.

>>brooke+Hm
The first and most important question to ask here is: are you using a coding agent? A lot of times, people who aren't getting much out of LLM-assisted coding are just asking Claude or GPT for code snippets, and pasting and building them themselves (or, equivalently, they're using LLM-augmented autocomplete in their editor).

Almost everybody doing serious work with LLMs is using an agent, which means that the LLM is authoring files, linting them, compiling them, and iterating when it spots problems.

There's more to using LLMs well than this, but this is the high-order bit.

>>tptace+Gv
What agent do you recommend?

>>__mhar+Yw
I think they're all fine. Cursor is popular and charges a flat fee for model calls (interposed through their model call router, however that works). Aider is probably the most popular open source command line one. Claude Code is probably the most popular command line agent overall; Codex is the OpenAI equivalent (I like Codex fine).

later

Oh, I like Zed a lot too. People complain that Zed's agent (the back-and-forth with the model) is noticeably slower than the other agents, but to me, it doesn't matter: all the agents are slow enough that I can't sit there and wait for them to finish, and Zed has nice desktop notifications for when the agent finishes.

Plus you get a pretty nice editor --- I still write exclusively in Emacs, but I think of Zed as being a particularly nice code UI for an LLM agent.