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Comment by CuriouslyC

17 hours ago

I have actually had great success with agentic coding by sitting down with a LLM to tell it what I'm trying to build and have it be socratic with me, really trying to ask as many questions as it can think of to help tease out my requirements. While it's doing this, it's updating the project readme to outline this vision and create a "planned work" section that is basically a roadmap for an agent to follow.

Once I'm happy that the readme accurately reflects what I want to build and all the architectural/technical/usage challenges have been addressed, I let the agent rip, instructing it to build one thing at a time, then typecheck, lint and test the code to ensure correctness, fixing any errors it finds (and re-running automated checks) before moving on to the next task. Given this workflow I've built complex software using agents with basically no intervention needed, with the exception of rare cases where its testing strategy is flakey in a way that makes it hard to get the tests passing.

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CuriouslyC

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Xevion  17 hours ago

>I have actually had great success with agentic coding by sitting down with a LLM to tell it what I'm trying to build and have it be socratic with me, really trying to ask as many questions as it can think of to help tease out my requirements.

Just curious, could you expand on the precise tools or way you do this?

For example, do you use the same well-crafted prompt in Claude or Gemini and use their in-house document curation features, or do you use a file in VS Code with Copilot Chat and just say "assist me in writing the requirements for this project in my README, ask questions, perform a socratic discussion with me, build a roadmap"?

You said you had 'great success' and I've found AI to be somewhat underwhelming at times, and I've been wondering if it's because of my choice of models, my very simple prompt engineering, or if my inputs are just insufficient/too complex.

  • CuriouslyC  16 hours ago

    I use Aider with a very tuned STYLEGUIDE.md and AI rules document that basically outlines this whole process so I don't have to instruct it every time. My preferred model is Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is definitely by far the best model for this sort of thing (Claude can one shot some stuff about as well but for following an engineering process and responding to test errors, it's vastly inferior)