[HN Gopher] Peer Programming with LLMs, for Senior+ Engineers
___________________________________________________________________
Peer Programming with LLMs, for Senior+ Engineers
Author : pmbanugo
Score : 58 points
Date : 2025-05-24 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pmbanugo.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (pmbanugo.me)
| pmbanugo wrote:
| I've been experimenting with LLMs for coding for the past year -
| some wins, plenty of frustrations. Instead of writing another "AI
| will change everything" post, I collected practical insights from
| other senior engineers who've figured out what actually works. No
| hype, just real experiences from people in the trenches.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| I want to note that the headlines gave me an idea for a
| nonprofit: "Peer Programming with LLM's for _Seniors_. "
|
| Somebody jump on that. It's yours. :)
| pmbanugo wrote:
| re-reading the title makes me feel like I used a wrong title.
|
| Could be a good idea for a non-profit like you said. I know
| someone who's exploring something similar but for disabled
| folks who aren't tech-savvy (for-profit)
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| That's kind of them. I'll pray their effort succeeds.
| westurner wrote:
| What are some of the differences between Peer Programming with
| LLMs and Vibe Coding?
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| I would say that the difference is taking an engineering
| approach to the process itself. Iterating on the context,
| putting the system into various states, etc. Treating the AI
| like a very knowledgeable intern who also has a very fixed
| short term memory and can't form new long term memories but can
| be taught to write things down like in Memento. The thing is,
| though, it has a much much larger short term memory than me.
| diggan wrote:
| > What are some of the differences between Peer Programming
| with LLMs and Vibe Coding?
|
| "Vibe Coding" is specifically using the LLM _instead_ of
| programming anything, barely caring about the output. If
| something is wrong, don 't even open the file, just ask the
| LLM. Basically "prompting while blindfolded" I guess you could
| say.
|
| Peer programming with an LLM would be to use it as another tool
| in the toolbox. You still own your program and your code. Edit
| away, let the LLM do some parts that are either too tricky, or
| too trite to implement, or anything in-between. Prompts usually
| are more specific, like "Seems X is broken, look into Y and
| figure out if Z could be the reason".
| tptacek wrote:
| I think the consensus boils down to: you're vibe coding if
| you don't understand the code before you merge it.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| (Site is unreadable for me on Firefox 138, but the text is still
| there if you select all. Qutebrowser based on Chromium 130
| doesn't render it either.)
| vvillena wrote:
| No problems here, both the normal view and reader mode seem to
| work well.
| diggan wrote:
| > Peer Programming with LLMs, For Senior+ Engineers
|
| > [...] a collection of blog posts written by other senior or
| staff+ engineers exploring the use of LLM in their work
|
| It seems to be _by_ senior engineers if anything, I don 't see
| anything in the linked articles indicating they're _for_ senior
| engineers, seems programmers of all seniority could find them
| useful, if they find LLMs useful.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Yes, although those who are not senior engineers will not
| preemptively see the value in the documented approaches. One
| has to be a senior to preemptively appreciate the value in
| them.
| hoppp wrote:
| I use the llm as a glorified search engine. Instead of googling I
| ask it stuff. Its fine for that but its a hit or miss. Often the
| output is garbage and its better to just use google.
|
| I dont use it much to generate code, I ask it higher level
| questions more often. Like when I need a math formula.
| mattnewton wrote:
| The space is moving so fast that, if I wrote down my workflows
| and workarounds just two months ago, so much of it would be stale
| today. I think all these recommendations need to list the models
| and harnesses being described front and center.
| brumar wrote:
| Very important comment. My workflow changed dramatically with
| the increased capabilities of these tools.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Though I haven't tried it, I would probably enjoy peer
| programming with an LLM more than I do with a real person (which
| I have tried and hated).
|
| I could assign the LLM the simple drudgery that I don't really
| want to do, such as writing tests, without feeling bad about it.
|
| I could tell the LLM "that's the stupidest fucking thing I've
| ever seen" whereas I would not say that to a real person.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| It seems like we need to use forceful language with these
| things now. I've had copilot censor everything I asked it.
| Finally I had to to say, "listen you cracked up piece of shit,
| help me generate a uuid matcher. "
| pmbanugo wrote:
| That's what the recent Copilot feature on GitHub can do. You
| assign it tasks and it comes back with a PR. You could also
| assign it to review a PR.
| jbellis wrote:
| I would have said that Harper Reed's workflow (brainstorm spec,
| then co-plan a plan, then execute using LLM codegen) is basically
| best practice today and I'm surprised that the author adds that
| "I've not been successful using this technique to build a
| complete feature or prototype."
|
| Here's an example of using this pattern with Brokk to solve a
| real world bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_7MqowT638
| cheshire_cat wrote:
| This is showing the workflow of your tool quite well, but would
| be way more convincing & impressive if you had actually fixed
| the bug and linked to the merged PR.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| is it really more efficient to have an LLM generate code, then
| review that code, fix errors and spend some time to fully
| understand it? I wish there were tangible stats and metrics
| around this. Is it really more efficient than just writing the
| code yourself, but using LLMs to look up things or demo
| solutions?
| tptacek wrote:
| Yes, but the bar for skepticism is higher than that, because
| LLMs also compile code and catch errors, and generate and run
| tests; compile errors and assertion failures are just more
| prompts to an LLM agent.
| what wrote:
| Citation needed. Here is copilot "fixing" a failing test: htt
| ps://github.com/dotnet/runtime/commit/fe173fc8f44dbd0a9ed...
|
| It rewrote some comments, changed the test name and added
| extra assertions to the test. Baby sitting something like
| that seems like an absolute waste of time.
| viraptor wrote:
| Depends on the code, but often yes. The less you care about
| that specific result, the more efficient it is. One-off tools
| under 2k lines where you can easily verify the result? Why
| would I not generate that and save time for more interesting
| stuff?
| enos_feedler wrote:
| What if every piece of software any consumer needed could be
| described this way? Outside of system code this could be
| everything we ever need. This world is nearly upon us and it
| is super exciting.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-24 23:00 UTC)