Ask HN: Line by Line Agentic Coding

nnotshore about 5 hours ago 4 comments

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I've been suckered into running claude code and codex independently and vaguely scanning the output before moving on. I don't love the code-base familiarity that produces.

Anybody figure out a neat harness setup where one goes file by file, method by method with the agent? Looking for suggestions and what the SOTA is for this sort of thing.

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tripplyons•about 4 hours ago

I like to use Pi (https://pi.dev/), and I recently got it to make an approval extension for itself. It has a lot of documentation built-in for the agent to modify the behavior of the app.

I got it to display all proposed file change diffs and bash commands and made it so I can either approve the action or deny it with a message for it.

It was surprisingly easy to tell it to modify things things the diff viewing algorithm or syntax highlighting for the diffs.

tripplyons•about 4 hours ago

For context, here is the extension it made me: https://gist.github.com/tripplyons/ec953181707b6813d4be9e934...

notshore•about 4 hours ago

haha i just downloaded pi after browsing HN for a bit. i'm really trying to get off the anthropic train before the subsidies explode and we're left holding onto codebases we don't understand and can't afford.

What models do you use for the diff level edits? My concerns would be speed, though I'm coming from letting opus ruminate for minutes at a time so my heuristics may be off.

tripplyons•about 4 hours ago

I use a $200/mo OpenAI Codex sub. Throughout the workday I run an average of 2 concurrent agents of GPT 5.5 with high reasoning on fast mode and use less than half of my subscription usage.

For more interactive/active usage you might be better off using the low reasoning level, but I have usually found high to be a good balance of intelligence and generation speed.