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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2936 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.

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