alt Hacker NewsThis resonates with me a lot:
> As ever, I wish we had better tooling for using LLMs which didn’t look like chat or autocomplete
I think part of the reason why I was initially more skeptical than I ought to have been is because chat is such a garbage modality. LLMs started to "click" for me with Claude Code/Codex.
A "continuously running" mode that would ping me would be interesting to try.
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I absolutely agree with this sentiment as well and keep coming back to it. What I want is more of an actual copilot which works in a more paired way and forces me to interact with each of its changes and also involves me more directly in them, and teaches me about what it's doing along the way, and asks for more input.
A more socratic method, and more augmentic than "agentic".
Hell, if anybody has investment money and energy and shares this vision I'd love to work on creating this tool with you. I think these models are being misused right now in attempt to automate us out of work when their real amazing latent power is the intuition that we're talking about on this thread.
Misused they have the power to worsen codebases by making developers illiterate about the very thing they're working on because it's all magic behind the scenes. Uncorked they could enhance understanding and help better realize the potential of computing technology.
On the one hand, I agree with this. The chat UI is very slow and inefficient.
But on the other, given what I know about these tools and how error-prone they are, I simply refuse to give them access to my system, to run commands, or do any action for me. Partly due to security concerns, partly due to privacy, but mostly distrust that they will do the right thing. When they screw up in a chat, I can clean up the context and try again. Reverting a removed file or messed up Git repo is much more difficult. This is how you get a dropped database during code freeze...
The idea of giving any of these corporations such privileges is unthinkable for me. It seems that most people either don't care about this, or are willing to accept it as the price of admission.
I experimented with Aider and a self-hosted model a few months ago, and wasn't impressed. I imagine the experience with SOTA hosted models is much better, but I'll probably use a sandbox next time I look into this.