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.
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.
I have this workflow where I trigger a bunch of prompts in the morning, lunch and at the end of the day. At those same times I give it feedback. The async nature really means I can have it work on things I can’t be bothered with myself.
If you aren't building up mental models of the problem as you go, you end up in a situation where the LLM gets stuck at the edges of its capability, and you have no idea how even to help it overcome the hurdle. Then you spend hours backtracking through what it's done building up the mental model you need, before you can move on. The process is slower and more frustrating than not using AI in the first place.
I guess the reality is, your luck with AI-assisted coding really comes down to the problem you're working on, and how much of it is prior art the LLM has seen in training.
If it helps, for context: I'll go round and round with an agent until I've got roughly what I want, and then I go through and beat everything into my own idiom. I don't push code I don't understand and most of the code gets moved or reworked a bit. I don't expect good structure from LLMs (but I also don't invest the time to improve structure until I've done a bunch of edit/compile/test cycles).
I think of LLMs mostly as a way of unsticking and overcoming inertia (and writing tests). "Writing code", once I'm in flow, has always been pleasant and fast; the LLMs just get me to that state much faster.
I'm sure training data matters, but I think static typing and language tooling matters much more. By way of example: I routinely use LLMs to extend intensely domain-specific code internal to our project.
I haven't seen any mentions of Augment code yet in comment threads on HN. Does anyone else use Augment Code?
It keeps _me_ from context switching into agent manager mode. I do the same thing for doing code reviews for human teammates as well.
Like most of the code agents it works best with tight testable loops. But it has a concept of short vs long tests and will give you plans as nd confidence values to help you refine your prompt if you want.
I tend to just let it go. If it gets to a 75% done spot that isn’t worth more back and forth I grab the pr and finish it off.
It has a very good system prompt so the code is pretty good without a lot of fluff.
With a web-based system you need repomix or something similar to give the whole project (or parts of it if you can be bothered to filter) as context, which isn't exactly nifty
Cursor is fine, Claude Code and Aider are a bit too janky for me - and tend to go overboard (making full-ass git commits without prompting) and I can't be arsed to rein them in.
Inconsistency and crap code quality aren't solved yet, and these make the agent workflow worse because the human only gets to nudge the AI in the right direction very late in the game. The alternative, interactive, non-agentic workflows allow for more AI-hand-holding early, and better code quality, IMO.
Agents are fine if no human is going to work on the (sub)system going forward, and you only care about the shiny exterior without opening the hood to witness the horrors within.
I have definitely not seen this in my experience (with Aider, Claude and Gemini). While helping me debug an issue, Gemini added a !/bin/sh line to the middle of the file (which appeared to break things), and despite having that code in the context didn't realise it was the issue.
OTOH, when asking for debugging advice in a chat window, I tend to get more useful answers, as opposed to a half-baked implementation that breaks other things. YMMV, as always.
Regardless, Gemini 2.5 Pro is far far better and I use that with open-source free Roo Code. You can use the Gemini 2.5 Pro experimental model for free (rate limited) to get a completely free experience and taste for it.
Cursor was great and started is off, but others took notice and now they're all more or less the same. It comes down to UX and preference, but I think Windsurf and Roo Code just did a better job here than Cursor, personally.