Comment by epolanski

One major part of successful LLM-assisted coding is to not focus on code vomiting but scaffolding.

Document, document, document: your architecture, best practices, preferences (both about code and how you want to work with the LLM and how do you expect it to behave it).

It is time consuming, but it's the only way you can get it to assist you semi-successfully.

Also try to understand that LLM's biggest power for a developer is not in authoring code as much as assistance into understanding it, connecting dots across features, etc.

If your expectation is to launch it in a project and tell it "do X, do Y" without the very much needed scaffolding you'll very quickly start losing the plot and increasing the mess. Sure, it may complete tasks here and there, but at the price of increasing complexity from which it is difficult for both you and it to dig out.

Most AI naysayers can't be bothered with the huge amount of work required to setup a project to be llm-friendly, they fail, and blame the tool.

Even after the scaffolding, the best thing to do, at least for the projects you care (essentially anything that's not a prototype for quickly validating an idea) you should keep reading and following it line by line, and keep updating your scaffolding and documentation as you see it commit the same mistakes over and over. And part of scaffolding requires also to put the source code of your main dependencies. I have a _vendor directory with git subtrees for major dependencies. LLMs can check the code of the dependencies, the tests, and figure out what they are doing wrong much quicker.

Last but not least, LLMs work better with certain patterns, such as TDD. So instead of "implement X", it's better to "I need to implement X, but before we do so, let's setup a way for testing and tracking our progress against". You can build an inspector for a virtual machine, you can setup e2es or other tests, or just dump line by line logs in some file. There's many approaches depending on the use case.

In any case, getting real help for LLMs for authoring code (editing, patching, writing new features) is highly dependent on having good context, good setup (tests, making it write a plan for business requirements and one for implementation) and following and improving all these aspects as you progress.