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dosnem • today at 1:40 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

Providing context makes sense to me, but do you have any examples of providing context and then getting the AI to produce something complex? I am quite a proponent of AI but even I find myself failing to produce significant results on complex problems, even when I have clone + memory bank, etc. it ends up being a time sink of trying to get the ai to do something only to have me eventually take over and do it myself.

Replies

simonw • today at 1:56 AM

Quite a few times, I've been able to give it enough context to write me an entire working piece of software in a single shot. I use that for plugins pretty often, eg this:

  llm -m openai/o3 \
    -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/llm-hacker-news/refs/heads/main/llm_hacker_news.py \
    -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/tools/refs/heads/main/github-issue-to-markdown.html \
    -s 'Write a new fragments plugin in Python that registers issue:org/repo/123 which fetches that issue
      number from the specified github repo and uses the same markdown logic as the HTML page to turn that into a fragment'
Which produced this: https://gist.github.com/simonw/249e16edffe6350f7265012bee9e3...
AnotherGoodName • today at 2:54 AM

I had a series of “Using Manim create an animation for formula X rearranging into formula Y with a graph of values of the function”

Beautiful one shot results and i now have really nice animations of some complex maths to help others understand. (I’ll put it up on youtube soon).

I don't know the manim library at all so saved me about a week of work learning and implementing