Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

Not being able to enter flow state is a very interesting observation. I've felt it too to the extent that I went down a whole new rabbit hole of what it means to be in flow state. Let me know if anybody here wants to know more, happy to post some links.

To answer your question - I discuss the approach with Claude Code (e.g., should I implement my own ACT model in JAX or PyTorch, Python or Rust or Julia, etc.). Then write the initial part of the code myself. Opening up a blank vscode is a simple joy of life I refuse to give up :-) I'll ask Claude for advice if I get stuck, it will helpfully offer to write that code for me, I obstinately decline. Eventually, I'll get bored of some minutiae or other, at which point I'll ask Claude to complete just that part of it.

YES!

It's still very wip, I spent a couple of weekends on it so far, but I'm working on a harness that eschews autonomy and instead aims to work as a pair programming partner. Key to that are distinct "driver" and "navigator" modes, with the capacity to flip between them rapidly.

https://gitlab.com/philbooth/opair

(not really usable yet, but after tomorrow's session I expect to be developing opair in opair, which is mildly exciting)

I'm building "workboxes" to work on my startup. It helps me develop features insanely fast. A workbox is a simple worktree-in-a-sandbox per feature. I have a simple front end where I can launch new workboxes: I input a prompt (a documented grilling session) and it creates a branch, a PR, and starts an opencode coding session on an e2b sandbox based on a custom template with the app's monorepo. Each workbox has a public https endpoint so I can manually test the web app after the coding session is complete. At any point I can either approve the PR, send a follow-up prompt, or connect to the opencode session for more control.

I think my next step is to perform the grilling session inside the front end, currently I perform it in my terminal and then paste in the front end.

If you like videos, I saw an interesting video yesterday about systems thinking, software as ecosystem particularly with AI. More of an overview but gives an insight into seeing where we might be able to experiment with different ways Its more focused on teams and companies than individual developers but I think it could be applied to the single dev.

"Software engineering at the tipping point" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n41YjR5QfU

The tab model was a lot of fun, you felt like you're getting a speed boost while coding. I think vibe coding (or agentic engineering) is a different paradigm altogether.

I have tried out some of the popular tools and I'm using opencode on desktop and I use pi via termux on android for when I'm on the go. I think the current direction of PRD -> review -> execute -> debug is in many cases the right mindset.

Working with a team of fresh graduates, I see that working with any vibe coding tool is like being a manager, not a developer. I think that's what you miss, you miss being a developer but the vibe coding tools make you a manager which isn't something that you might enjoy.

Nonetheless, I do think that there are some interesting things to do with pi. I'm just getting started, if anyone has an interesting workflow in pi, I would be interested in trying it out!

I'm in the same boat and I'm not a fan on the current way of working of agents, but I think tooling is what needs to catch up.

So, I actually decided to try to tackle it myself and worked some months (full time) on it.

https://beolis.com is the result of that, it's a local cli in a kanban board style with a remote server to keep the team on track (I've been using it myself for some time and actually started to ask some friends to use it just yesterday -- feedback very welcome, I still wanted to do some additional things before asking more people to use it, but oh well, I'm a fan of building in public anyways and it's probably better to have feedback sooner rather than later).

The main point there is that you work mostly in the ticket description (your own spec) and the plan (the spec as the agent sees it, generated with a custom workflow) and then having another custom workflow to implement it (you can choose how you want it -- https://beolis.com/blog/post/custom-coding-workflows has some info on what I'm using myself).

As a result, at least for me, I do spend more time immersed in a flow state (although I'm in that state writing the specs and reviewing code -- although in some cases it's more work to write the spec in a way the agent can work when things get more complicated vs just diving into the code, so, going into "code" mode is something I still have to do, agents are definitely not perfect).

I guess I'm lacking in docs on how to effectively use it. I have plans to create a video next week and post it in the blog, so, if you're interested, keep track of it ;)

Something I'm thinking about and doing a bit of experimentation with is using LLMs to write specialist higher level code.

Rather than ask them to write web-apps in webby languages with open source frameworks etc, providing a very fixed, on-rails development process where everything is abstracted away. Accept that it'll be less powerful, but take the trade-off that it'll hopefully be faster and produce much more controllable software.

Concrete example, why do we let the LLM choose a database, schema, migration procedure, library, etc. We could decide to only support one database, enforce schema design (such as every table containing access control), enforce a migration process, enforce a library, even do schema design in a fixed config file rather than arbitrary DDL. Same for auth, deployments, even UI.

I have a custom harness that runs in a macOS VM. It has e-mail and its own accounts. I assign it tasks in Linear, it does them and spins up PRs for me to review. This works pretty well, generally. I have to spend time writing stories and doing code review, but I don’t have to follow its (their — I have 3 of them) every move.

I have also noticed that, waiting for an LLM answer makes my mind wander to completely unrelated topics.

What I've found useful is to create a tasks.md file where each bullet point / task is one implementation. Bullet points that belong together and can be done in the same chat session are grouped together.

I easily enter a flow state during writing these detailed implementation plans. Then I can also start multiple chat sessions for parts that don't interfere with each other, while I'm waiting for an LLM answer for one part I can get started on the next or start reviewing one of the previous answers.

I have also explored more complex, e.g. using Kanban board for tasks, but I found great value in these simple yet effective setups.

I think the value right now is to focus less on external orchestration if at all. trust the (current best) model to do it better than anything you bolt on to the harness. focus your energy on providing clearer specs. I think the optimal spec is a disambiguated (through liberal use of the AskUserQuestion tool) 1 intent, 2, input/output contracts 3 constraints and 4 preconditions. focus on that and get out of the models way. I think of it like this, imagine a person who was not as smart as you was trying to tell you how to do a task. would you want more verbosity and step by step instructions or would you want them to just cut to the chase (ie, what are you trying to do, what are the obstacles, I'll let you know if I have questions).

also let the model verify itself. don't give it an objective that is vague, give it clear exit criterias for goals and let it loop until it gets there so much of the orchestration scaffolding seems like massive technical debt

oddly, I do the opposite of a lot of conventional advice when it comes to models. I use no memory, I think there is something similar to context rot when everything is stored. I like creating markdown files as memory that the model can grep if needed. I also havent found a real use for hooks yet, I have tried but they always seem to get in the way. skills on the other hand are very undervalued. they are so much more powerful than many realize. I used to think agents were where the power was. I think its actually skills. agents are really for context preservation. skills are what increase capabilities

I'm not even talking about quantity of items in memory, I mean dilution of intent. I really love a model with a clean slate and only the items it needs. I fear the memory guides the model in areas that might not be what I want with the current prompt

progressive disclosure is a big one. you can make context available but it is only loaded when needed. like lazy loading for prompt engineering. skills are to be used to instruct the model how to do something specific that is not in its training data. like how to access my proprietary system, how to interface with a custom program. you can embed templates in skills, you can embed code that executes in skills and only the output is loaded into context. skills expand capabilities, agents constrain context

(constraining context is a very good thing btw, don't mean to infer that agents are somehow inferior to skills)

Yes, like many others I've been experimenting a lot. What I've got so far is a harness-of-harnesses - ie, a harness which sits on top of Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode. I still use Claude Code or Codex directly for the initial planning of features, to investigate issues, and for small fixes, but whenever there's something even just a bit complex to do, I use my second-level harness.

Summarizing it a lot, what it does is:

* help you make better plans

* split plans into iterations, in a module-aware way for projects which have strict modularity (for now I'm doing this specifically with TypeScript and dependency cruiser) - this helps a lot when a project becomes complex

* ask an agent to implement an iteration, and then programmatically run a lot of checks after each iteration - not just regression tests, but also checks against project principles and conventions

* when possible, automatically fix deviations; when not possible, raise them to myself for an end-of-plan review

In this way, instead of having to constantly be engaged with the chat interface, with all the shorter or longer wait times which break my flow, I spend a lot of highly focused time during initial planning and final review. A plan implementation can go on for hours, and the various anchoring mechanisms added to the tool keep drift to a minimum.

At some point I'm planning to release this tool as open source. As this is the result of months of trial and errors, dogfooding, and vibecoding on the tool itself, the codebase is chaotic and the UI is still full of experiments I mostly basically abandoned, and I'm not used to releasing stuff in this status. But perhaps, in this brave new world, I should just do it and see what happens?

I think the fundamental aspect of flow is that it requires a high amount of cognitive engagement. Most of the time you're just not getting that from interacting with an LLM because the process is relatively passive. There are also forced breaks while it does its internal CoT which breaks flow.

I think a lot of people get a sort of novelty effect when first interacting with an LLM which can feel superficially like flow, but it's different in that it eventually wanes and what really happens in practice is you're encouraged to disengage and this makes it almost impossible to get into a true flow state.

The risk here I think is that if you get humans disengaging from the task at hand, there's a higher chance of bugs being introduced. You might move slightly faster in the short term but be forced to hit the brakes in the medium/long term.

Just yesterday I tried to find an annoying and persistent bug in the cummunication between a Lyrion Media Server and my player. I used Opencode's native Big Pickle AI, and first it was a pain in the back, because it gave me a new code, I had to start the player and test the control in the server's web GUI, report the errors back, and so forth, and it tried a lot, but never found the real cause.

Then I got tired, and told it to use PlayWright to control the browser and test by itself. After some hangs, that I had to stop manually, it did all by itself, and finally fixed the bug. I had to increase the agents' steps setting in the config, but that was it. While it was fixing the bug, I surfed the web, and kept an eye on it, but it did everything on it's own. impressive.

I am currently in the process of launching my AI teams platform that I've been working on since at least January. It's https://PersonaStack.ai. I'm doing it without VC money and all by myself. I've used over 110B tokens so far building it.

You get some amazing results with teams of AIs if you do it right. The key is to control behavior with what integrations and responsibilities each agent has. That way they naturally adapt, delegate, fact check each other, and generally act more autonomously.

This is already running the automated news site ainews.personastack.ai complete with social media posts 100% automated.

It also runs the issue triage, coding, reviews, and releases for the Kuberhealthy open source CNCF project, which is another thing of mine.

I don't think the next step is really smarter models. It's how we make the models more effective, and teams, when done right, net the best results I've seen.

Hoping to get noticed here soon, but it's extremely hard to do solo I'm finding.

I created a small PI extension that always watches relevant directories and answers me in place, without switching context, or using a chat interface. Still experimenting but I like it.

https://github.com/piqoni/pi-piqo

One of the things I've been talking about with my senior developers is how the bottleneck has shifted even more dramatically to human code understanding vs code generation. AI is still not suitable for generating production grade code without a human checking it (yet), but it can produce a huge amount of code for humans to check. We've been experimenting with ai finding better ways of communicating what is in a change at different abstraction levels etc by always generating diagrams showing what it did etc, with the concept being that anything that can speed up human understanding of changes addresses the core bottleneck of the whole process.

Just want to add:

I'm trying to do the same amount of work faster, not do work in parallel or agent orchestration. I'm not against letting the model go off and do things on it's own, that has its time and place.

But if I can do something in 15 minutes instead of 1 hour without the annoying prompt response loop, without the feeling that there could be blind spots, and while keeping all of the context (or at least most) in my head. That's a bigger win than spinning up 5 agents to do different things.

I'm in the middle of it so don't have any conclusions for you, but I started mucking with building my own cli coding app and there are _tons_ of levers available that aren't apparent from claude code or codex.

Including altering the turn concept. I think it is still ultimately call and response but instead of everything is a quarter note you can get a little closer to a beat you like.

I'm currently rolling out Matt Pocock's Sandcastle project so that I can have those brakes removed. What will be left is just the grilling(/wayfinding).

My current flow heavily relies on Matt Pocock's Skills and Sandcastle project. I find them highly valuable in practice: grilling(/wayfind) into a spec and extract issues. Those live in Linear projects. I'm pointing my Sandcastle set-up at such Linear projects (or loose issues), which results in an MR.

Currently at the point of self-improving the prompts and Sandcastle set-up with a retrospective pass of the logs.

I don't think you would expect to get into a flow state if you were intermittently directing another (human) programmer to do work, and you shouldn't expect to with LLM-driven coding either. Perhaps you are best finding out ways to extend the length of time where the LLM can work without prompting, then use that downtime to focus on other tasks that will help you to guide it better the next time you need to prompt it.

A) spec driven development

B) opinionated skills that use GitHub tickets, merge gates and execution of ticket graphs

Well, it always depends on your environment. In my case, nothing forces me to heavily use AI, so my workflow is kind of the old way, but with less hassle.

- Do your thinking alone. (AI part: search, understanding)

- Specing. (AI part: search, understanding, completing some text)

- Coding like the old days. (AI part: search, understanding, code examples)

- Okay, now I have a good idea of how my feature is going to work

- Look for fluff code and delegate it to AI to write/review it.

- Focus on the part of the code I want to have fun doing.

- Review.

- Repeat.

It’s slower than the approach of doing specs and letting AI do the rest, while focusing your role only on code review. However, I’m more in control of what I build, I can explain what I built better than everyone else, and I build up my knowledge. (also I have less problems, because less code haha)

Will I go for the full Agentic way ? Maybe but I will find a way to slow it down so I can be in control

using tools like claude code and codex constantly boosts our dopamine, making hyperflow impossible. these days, most engineers work on multiple projects simultaneously to satisfy their dopamine receptors.

I keep a TODO file where I just write my ideas in free text, and every once in a while I tell claude "I updated the TODO file".

This is basically like queueing up prompt.

I wish Claude Code had a thing like that builtin. Like a "user ideas scratchpad".

Ive built a couple things in the past few months that have leaned heavily on LLM as my programmer. Mainly Claude code, but occasionally codex also. Its a different way to produce. I spend more time doing something like plain text feature mapping. simple .md files, good flow and creativity. Then once i'm happy with it, i pass it off to the dev team- claude to code up and integrate. I feel like im flowing in the part of the process I always was. But the buzz of getting something working is gone. More like slow satisfaction of getting something useful at the end.

The fundamental problem i keep seeing across all harnesses is the use of the exact same UX afforded by a git based backend. If we want to stay in flow, the LLMs edit backend would have to be based off something like crdts to handle simultaneous edits.

I've been working on inverting the control theory for the agent loop. Instead of the user initiating everything, the agent runs automatically in the background and calls the user for feedback as part of tool use. The end game for me is to get rid of the chat interface altogether and move back toward async email and other messaging channels. The chatbot UI as a means of driving the business always felt like a temporary stepping stone / clever demo.

I think there are 10-100x productivity gains lurking in here. It is very expensive for a human to reserialize their mental state into a prompt each time a task needs working on. An agent can do this ~instantly and with high frequency 24/7. The higher the rate of evaluation the less change has to be dealt with between any two iterations. So, the likelihood that a given iteration needs human help goes down as you increase the rate of evaluation per unit of wall clock time. Tighter and faster control loops tend to require less severe corrective measures than slow and sloppy ones.

This is the most plausible reason for so many tokens in the future. I can actually see a million tokens per second making sense. I have a pretty good idea how I'd approach this if I actually had access to this kind of infrastructure. 1Mtok/s is baby tier in terms of raw information theory. The politics of employing a system like this are far more terrifying to me than any technological aspects. Humans really like having control over things, even when that control is pure downside for the business.

My current approach which I've been testing on two MVPs with what I would call 'moderate success' (but hey, actual success!)

3 tier, philosophy-spec-design. Increasing detail. Design files include db model explanations and pseudocode/function headers - that level of detail.

For each thing I need to change, I have a, prompt ready to go to ask the agent to follow about 5 steps and it outputs a 'reviewfile' with details of what it things about the thing I posited. I review its output. I have another prompt ready to then get an agent to generate a taskfile + update the design documentation. The taskfile explains in great detail what has changed and what needs to be implemented. I review the taskfile and got diffs of the design doc changes. Finally an agent implements the taskfile. I review all changed code and commit.

It gets there, but still definitely misses some stuff. It's very adequate for a MVP I'm finding.

Edit: this seems to only work with Opus. Sonnet can't do it (maybe I'm just lucky and Opus is seriously compensating for an awful approach and I'm just lucky?)

Related question: are there any close-to-gpt5.5/opus-level good autocompletion models?

I built a terminal that is also an agent comms system. Way back when Claude Code first came out I hacked together something to get two of them talking to each other and inserting text and reading from each others respective TTYs, and it was horribly hacky, so I set about actually understanding how CLIs, TUIs, and terminals work (I had written a simplified terminal based on jquery-terminal a long while ago during Covid that hacked tool runs using GPT-2, so this was overdue). I've been writing code for decades, so have all of it handy in case I need to point the LLMs to a particular way of doing things. Refactoring constantly is key.

There's cmux in this space, but I had already used Hyper for years, so I decided it was time to fork something and build on it. Cmux does tabs in panes AND panes in tabs. Hyperia does addressable panes in tabs and windows. I've tried to keep it minimalistic, which helps with flowing back and forth between different projects (I typically work on 3-4 at a time). I added a Rust sidecar, making all objects addressable over MCP, so Claude Code, Codex, or a small local model on Ollama can split panes, run commands, and read screens, with one hard rule enforced in the harness rather than the prompt: an agent can never move my focus, other than asking for permissions to access a new object. ACLs too. Hyperia also carries an agent loop that wires into it's own MCP server, so a local model in a Javascript "shell" can control resizing the terminal (handy for videos), or opening a project and setting up the agent panes.

I stay typing in a pane while the agents work in theirs, in my peripheral vision, and web panes sit right next to terminals so docs, webapps/sites and the agent chat live in the same window. Reviewing becomes glancing instead of context switching, which is the closest thing to ideal flow with prompts I've gotten out of this auto-AI stuff. Tab and pane clicks copy the address into the buffer, then I paste and issue commands referencing what I want dealt with. I have an SDR radio on my box that allows me to talk to a given pane (WIP not in the build yet). Working on getting the local agent stuff done and wired to the radio.

The upshot of this approach is enabling agents running in one tab, all mounting the same directory, with one in charge of the others. Claude Code is great at this, and it saves on the tokens it would normally use for doing it itself. I talk to Claude, or whatever I pick, and it talks to the rest of the agents and coordinates the work. I like Antigravity a lot because it moves crazy fast for coding. With Claude in control and GLM-5.2 doing auditing and explaining to me how development is going. As an example. No unseeable agent army here. No need for it, actually.

About the only thing that trips me up at the moment is having to work on Hyperia itself, which I don't do inside of it because of restarts. When I work on Hyperia, I start an agent in Windows terminal and wire it into the MCP for testing. I build installers constantly as well, and then run through the Q&A process by using it to work on other projects I'm doing.

I use Zed for code editing and viewing, but rarely. I also just open things in special sticky notes (or have the agent do it) so I understand how we're doing things. GLM-5.2 took to the planning stickys like a fish in water.

https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/hyperia

https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/nemesis8 (n8)

Both are open source, obviously. It's worth mentioning they will remain that way and will never require a service plan or any other cost. I built them because I needed it for another project I will be selling, not aimed at developers at all.

n8 implements the agent runs in containers. This is a separation of concerns - in runs in any terminal and controls the session starts and search for previous sessions (as well as monitoring the usage of tokens, CPU, network and file access). Working on the dashboard for that now, so I can easily see which files are changing, how much they changed, and what changed in them. I co-founded Loggly, so that crap is in my wheelhouse.

This isn't the tab completion model. It works great for the way my brain works, but I also think having an agentic terminal is a good move for anyone writing code and we'd all be better off if we ran agents in containers over our bare metal. It makes it way easier to see what the agent is doing (and resuming later), and allows it to do most of its work in the container, as opposed to running loose on my box..

> but I haven't been able to enter flow state like I can when I hand write code.

Fixing that for you.

I haven't been able to enter flow state like I can when I write code.

I build a lot of my own tools, to suit exactly how I want to work. Obviously, having a little thinky guy in the computer to do most of the busy work of making new tools accelerates that, but tools that make the LLMs suit me also accelerates my general work.

Some stuff I've built:

https://github.com/swelljoe/tandem - Tandem is a sysadmin buddy that travels with you over ssh. Just a wrapper over tmux and claude code (or whatever agent you like), it opens two panes in tmux, one with an ssh session to one of the hundreds of devices I maintain, and one with a local Claude Code configured to use a local work space and instructed via CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md to use tmux to interact with the remote machine. I built it because a lot of my coworkers were installing Claude Code on our robots and authenticating there to get help with robot troubles, and that felt bad. This allows them to keep all sensitive stuff locally and still get help troubleshooting directly on the device. I happen to find it useful, sometimes, too.

https://github.com/swelljoe/nelson - Nelson is a fancy Ralph loop for security bug hunting that I built to help audit my own software. It's also grown to include a benchmark suite I'm using to figure out which models are worth using for security work. I've published some of those benchmark results, and have a few hundred hours/dollars worth of new ones to publish this weekend. Turns out the benchmarking is more interesting, so that's gotten more attention than the bug-hunting side, but the benchmarks inform how the bug-hunting side works, and I added multi-model/multi-pass scans and de-dupe features recently because I found that letting models have a couple bites at the apple increases discovery, and there are bugs that only some models catch, and it's not always the top model that finds them. There's some overlap, but also some divergence. This research has also led me to start working on a harness for security auditing tasks; giving the agent tools and project structure data to lift detection and reduce false positives.

https://github.com/swelljoe/flar - FLAR is the Fast Light Agent Restrictor. It bubblewraps an agent so it is quite safe to use agents on your local machine, even with `--dangerously-skip-permissions` (which makes agents more fun to use). The sandbox feature found in most agents is porous and can be expanded by the agent harness itself. Similarly, if the agent introduces a supply chain attack into your code and runs it before you get a chance to audit/review it in a PR or run it through an SBOM dependency checker, the blast radius is exactly the project directory and the credentials/history of the one agent. (Whereas, without flar, the blast radius is your whole .ssh, github creds, all agent creds, your keyring, whatever secrets are in your home, etc.) This one is new. Just made it because I was talking about how I always put agents in VMs because I don't trust them. Someone suggested `srt` (https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime) and I like the idea but I don't like how complicated and huge and JavaScript it is. You can read and understand the entirety of `flar` in one sitting. Anyway, to break out of "prompt/response", you have to skip permissions, or call it via `claude -p` or API with tasks to perform. Nelson does the latter and `flar` does the former.

That's not to mention all the side projects and other stuff I've been able to make a lot of progress on.

The biggest one is finishing https://venturous.app/ (or, at least I made it do what I most wanted it to do, which is provide map overlays of US public lands and mobile data provider coverage so I can find cool places to camp free while staying connected). This is a re-implementation of an old defunct app called FreeRoam that I absolutely loved when I traveled full-time. I built half of it over several months by hand, and then Claude helped finish it in a few weekends and holidays. I'll get Claude to help build the mobile apps someday.

You are the bottleneck.

Why should AI be limited to human time. Is a mountain? A galaxy?

I’m writing a JSX templating language — to manage context, branching, etc automatically. You hand it a spec/existing work and it automatically applies a recipe.

So far that’s been much nicer for anything large or complex, because I was spending all my time on context piping.

Computers are like a bicycle for the mind.

LLM AI is like Uber for the mind.