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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2928 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 19, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What tools are people now using for LLM coding? Claude code?

simonw's llm command line tool: https://github.com/simonw/llm and the related tools like ttok and files-to-prompt.

Combined with decent knowledge of the shell, it's very easy to ask very detailed questions about a code base. Here's an example I just pulled up from my ~/.bash_history that I did last night.

$ llm <<EOF
Modify the json schema so that art_characters is a list of strings and identify other areas where this may cause problems.

$(files-to-prompt schemas/*.json_schema)
EOF

The token usage is also trivial. The query above cost <1 cent. I do dozens of these types of queries daily using the most expensive llm apis, and my total usage this year is under $20. Tools like claude code pack a lot more into the context which makes them more expensive and the additional context confuses them.

The only downside to this approach is that you actually have to understand bash syntax to craft good prompts using heredocs/variable substitution/loops/etc. It's about 10 minutes of work to learn the basics, and 10 hours to learn the subtleties.

Did you see the study that said that devs using AI thought they were 20% faster but they were actually 20% slower? Cal Newport discussed it on his podcast.

Personally I love the help troubleshooting but the code I generate myself.

I like Claude Code. I know how to program and don't use it to vibe code, and it's helped me solve some difficult problems and saved me a lot of time over the past year.

More importantly, what tools are people now using for expert level code that isn't trivial Javascript / Python boilerplate or doesn't interface to trivial apis using such languages?

I do such coding for living for many years now. My experience is in no way exclusive, people use a lot of tools, but what I have been using is Java/Scala/Python, with a little bit of C/C++, a good IDE (JetBrains is pretty good at that, though a lot of people I know also use VS Code) and a lot of head-scratching. All the rest is secondary. So far my conviction is if your main tool is LLM then either a) it's not "serious" coding - and by this I mean no disrespect, a lot of coding needs are quite well covered by trivial JS/Python boilerplate, and there's nothing wrong with that, just as a lot of medical needs are covered by "take this Tylenol and call me if it doesn't resolve itself by the end of the week", but we don't think that's all of medicine, do we? - or, more dangerous, b) you are dangerously deluded as to what coding tasks LLMs are appropriate to. In the latter case, may God have mercy on your soul, because you will find out soon.

Windsurf for one-off stuff where simple iteration will do the trick ("write tests for this code, iterate until tests pass, usual caveats"), the llm cli command for very simple repetitive stuff that doesn't require much context (e.g. simple semantic stuff like "check for out-of-date comments", or stuff where I could figure out eventually how to do it with tree-sitter but it's not worth the time like "replace this function call with that one, here's how to structure it").

For writing core business logic where I'm the domain expert, vim to write the code followed by windsurf for automated code review ("here's the patch, here's the codebase, review the patch for [long list of things] and anything else that stands out to you").

My heuristic is to never use the LLM to do something I don't know how to do myself. Since most of my job involves doing things I do know how to do myself, this does not actually block off very much.

Personally I just want some fast, decent boilerplate refactoring of a simplistic codebase at the moment, and I don’t know what’s available.

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