alt Hacker NewsI’ll chime in to say that this happened to me as well.
My project would start good, but eventually end up in a state where nothing could be fixed and the agent would burn tokens going in circles to fix little bugs.
So I’d tell the agent to come up with a comprehensive refactoring plan that would allow the issues to be recast in more favorable terms.
I’d burn a ton of tokens to refactor, little bugs would get fixed, but it’d inevitably end up going in circles on something new.
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danabramov • yesterday at 12:05 AM
Curious if you have thoughts on the second half of the post? That’s exactly what the author is suggesting a strategy for.
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That's kind of what learning to code is like, though. I assume you're using an llm because you don't know enough to do it entirely on your own. At least that's where I'm at and I've had similar experiences to you. I was trying to write a Rust program and I was able to get something in a working state, but wasn't confident it was secure.
I've found getting the llm to ingest high quality posts/books about the subject and use those to generate anki cards has helped a lot.
I've always struggled to learn from that sort of content on my own. That was leading me to miss some fundamental concepts.
I expect to restart my project several more times as I find out more of what I need to know to write good code.
Working with llms has made this so much easier. It surfaces ideas and concepts I had no idea about and makes it easy to convert them to an ingestible form for actual memorization. It makes cards with full syntax highlighting. It's delightful.