https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Kiro:\u00a0A new agentic IDE"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://kiro.dev/blog/introducing-kiro/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_charlysl","story_44560662"],"author":"charlysl","children":[44561530],"comment_text":"Is it something similar to Harper Reed's "My LLM codegen workflow atm"?
https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/","created_at":"2025-07-14T15:35:18Z","created_at_i":1752507318,"objectID":"44561401","parent_id":44561071,"story_id":44560662,"story_title":"Kiro:\u00a0A new agentic IDE","story_url":"https://kiro.dev/blog/introducing-kiro/","updated_at":"2025-07-15T12:48:11Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"jbellis"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["harper","reed","llm","codegen"],"value":"I would have said that Harper Reed's workflow (brainstorm spec, then co-plan a plan, then execute using LLM codegen) is basically best practice today and I'm surprised that the author adds that "I\u2019ve not been successful using this technique to build a complete feature or prototype."
Here's an example of using this pattern with Brokk to solve a real world bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_7MqowT638"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Peer Programming with LLMs, for Senior+ Engineers"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://pmbanugo.me/blog/peer-programming-with-llms"}},"_tags":["comment","author_jbellis","story_44081081"],"author":"jbellis","children":[44083907],"comment_text":"I would have said that Harper Reed's workflow (brainstorm spec, then co-plan a plan, then execute using LLM codegen) is basically best practice today and I'm surprised that the author adds that "I\u2019ve not been successful using this technique to build a complete feature or prototype."
Here's an example of using this pattern with Brokk to solve a real world bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_7MqowT638","created_at":"2025-05-24T20:09:02Z","created_at_i":1748117342,"objectID":"44083493","parent_id":44081081,"story_id":44081081,"story_title":"Peer Programming with LLMs, for Senior+ Engineers","story_url":"https://pmbanugo.me/blog/peer-programming-with-llms","updated_at":"2025-05-25T17:26:56Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"buss_jan"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["harper","reed","llm","codegen"],"value":"There recently was a post by Harper Reed that goes into how to prepare the right prompts before you start coding with LLMs and break that down into smaller debuggable step. It might kill the vibe, but it keeps you in the drivers seat.\nhttps://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Why Vibe Coding Is Killing Your Project"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://filipk.beehiiv.com/p/vibe-coding-is-killing-your-side-project"}},"_tags":["comment","author_buss_jan","story_43361175"],"author":"buss_jan","children":[43361971],"comment_text":"There recently was a post by Harper Reed that goes into how to prepare the right prompts before you start coding with LLMs and break that down into smaller debuggable step. It might kill the vibe, but it keeps you in the drivers seat.\nhttps://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/","created_at":"2025-03-14T10:41:06Z","created_at_i":1741948866,"objectID":"43361277","parent_id":43361175,"story_id":43361175,"story_title":"Why Vibe Coding Is Killing Your Project","story_url":"https://filipk.beehiiv.com/p/vibe-coding-is-killing-your-side-project","updated_at":"2025-03-14T12:28:33Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"tydunn"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["harper","reed","llm","codegen"],"value":"Super cool! I enjoyed reading Harper Reed's post too. For anyone, who hasn't seen it: https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/"},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["llm"],"value":"Show HN: LLM-Tetris-A Classic Tetris Game in Go, 95% AI-Generated"},"story_url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["llm"],"value":"https://github.com/plar/llm-tetris"}},"_tags":["comment","author_tydunn","story_43182739"],"author":"tydunn","comment_text":"Super cool! I enjoyed reading Harper Reed's post too. For anyone, who hasn't seen it: https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/","created_at":"2025-02-27T05:10:08Z","created_at_i":1740633008,"objectID":"43191550","parent_id":43182739,"story_id":43182739,"story_title":"Show HN: LLM-Tetris-A Classic Tetris Game in Go, 95% AI-Generated","story_url":"https://github.com/plar/llm-tetris","updated_at":"2025-02-27T05:15:24Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"BeetleB"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["harper","reed","llm","codegen"],"value":"Thanks for the concrete examples! These seem to be more sophisticated than the cases I use them for. Mostly I'm using them for tedious, simpler routine code (needing to process all files in a directory in a certain way, output them in a similar tree structure, with changes to filenames, logging, etc).
Your Django ORM may be more complicated than the ones I use. I haven't tried it much with Django (still reluctant to use it with production code), but a coworker did use it on our code base and it found good optimizations for some of our inefficient ORM usage. He learned new Django features as a result (new to him, that is).
> I tried to prompt it with a chat style discussion, but it often did bigger edits I would have liked, and failed to share a high-level plan in advance, something I often requested.
With Aider, I often use /ask to do a pure chat (no agents). It gives me a big picture overview and the code changes. If I like it, I simply say "Go ahead". Or I refine with corrections, and when it gets it right, I say "Go ahead". So far it rarely has changed code beyond what I want, and the few times it did turned out to be a good idea.
Also, with Aider, you can limit the context to a fixed set of files. That doesn't solve it changing other things in the file - but as I said, rarely a problem for me.
One thing to keep in mind - it's better to view the LLM not as an extension of yourself, but more like a coworker who is making changes that you're reviewing. If you have a certain vision/design in mind, don't expect it to follow it all the way to low level details - just as a coworker will sometimes deviate.
> My biggest frustrations were not coding problems per se, but just general inability to follow instructions and see implications, and lacking the awareness to step back and ask for confirmations or better directions if there are "hold on, somethings not right" kind of moments.
You have to explicitly tell it to ask questions (and some models ask great questions - not sure about Sonnet 3.7). Read this page:
https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/
I don't follow much of what's on his post, but the first part where you specify what you want it to do and have it ask you questions has always been useful! He's talking about big changes, but I sometimes have it ask me for minor changes. I just add to my prompts "Ask me something if it seems ambiguous"."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Claude 4"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4"}},"_tags":["comment","author_BeetleB","story_44063703"],"author":"BeetleB","children":[44070318],"comment_text":"Thanks for the concrete examples! These seem to be more sophisticated than the cases I use them for. Mostly I'm using them for tedious, simpler routine code (needing to process all files in a directory in a certain way, output them in a similar tree structure, with changes to filenames, logging, etc).
Your Django ORM may be more complicated than the ones I use. I haven't tried it much with Django (still reluctant to use it with production code), but a coworker did use it on our code base and it found good optimizations for some of our inefficient ORM usage. He learned new Django features as a result (new to him, that is).
> I tried to prompt it with a chat style discussion, but it often did bigger edits I would have liked, and failed to share a high-level plan in advance, something I often requested.
With Aider, I often use /ask to do a pure chat (no agents). It gives me a big picture overview and the code changes. If I like it, I simply say "Go ahead". Or I refine with corrections, and when it gets it right, I say "Go ahead". So far it rarely has changed code beyond what I want, and the few times it did turned out to be a good idea.
Also, with Aider, you can limit the context to a fixed set of files. That doesn't solve it changing other things in the file - but as I said, rarely a problem for me.
One thing to keep in mind - it's better to view the LLM not as an extension of yourself, but more like a coworker who is making changes that you're reviewing. If you have a certain vision/design in mind, don't expect it to follow it all the way to low level details - just as a coworker will sometimes deviate.
> My biggest frustrations were not coding problems per se, but just general inability to follow instructions and see implications, and lacking the awareness to step back and ask for confirmations or better directions if there are "hold on, somethings not right" kind of moments.
You have to explicitly tell it to ask questions (and some models ask great questions - not sure about Sonnet 3.7). Read this page:
https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/
I don't follow much of what's on his post, but the first part where you specify what you want it to do and have it ask you questions has always been useful! He's talking about big changes, but I sometimes have it ask me for minor changes. I just add to my prompts "Ask me something if it seems ambiguous".","created_at":"2025-05-23T03:39:32Z","created_at_i":1747971572,"objectID":"44069658","parent_id":44069453,"story_id":44063703,"story_title":"Claude 4","story_url":"https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4","updated_at":"2025-05-23T22:14:48Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"imiric"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["harper","reed","llm","codegen"],"value":"The trick for greenfield projects is to use it to help you design detailed specs and a tentative implementation plan. Just bounce some ideas off of it, as with a somewhat smarter rubber duck, and hone the design until you arrive at something you're happy with. Then feed the detailed implementation plan step by step to another model or session.
This is a popular workflow I first read about here[1].
This has been the most useful use case for LLMs for me. Actually getting them to implement the spec correctly is the hard part, and you'll have to take the reigns and course correct often.
[1]: https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"GitHub Copilot Coding Agent"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-19-github-copilot-coding-agent-in-public-preview/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_imiric","story_44031432"],"author":"imiric","children":[44038596],"comment_text":"The trick for greenfield projects is to use it to help you design detailed specs and a tentative implementation plan. Just bounce some ideas off of it, as with a somewhat smarter rubber duck, and hone the design until you arrive at something you're happy with. Then feed the detailed implementation plan step by step to another model or session.
This is a popular workflow I first read about here[1].
This has been the most useful use case for LLMs for me. Actually getting them to implement the spec correctly is the hard part, and you'll have to take the reigns and course correct often.
[1]: https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/","created_at":"2025-05-19T22:16:01Z","created_at_i":1747692961,"objectID":"44035529","parent_id":44034168,"story_id":44031432,"story_title":"GitHub Copilot Coding Agent","story_url":"https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-19-github-copilot-coding-agent-in-public-preview/","updated_at":"2025-05-21T07:38:54Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"rwiggins"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["harper","reed","llm","codegen"],"value":"It's certainly bad form to turn a GitHub reply into a blog post(?). (Disclosure: I only saw the commit refs that say "blog post", that appear to be a reply.)
As a maintainer (but not on this project), I feel an implicit (professional) responsibility to carefully review PRs, especially from random people. And as a profession, we know it's often harder to read code than it is to write it. This goes double for LLM code, which sometimes lacks a coherent mental model.
So in general, the asymmetry of "I did very little work here, but I'd like you to spend your time carefully reviewing it nonetheless" can be very annoying.
But to talk about specifics: this PR's description is mostly a waste of time. The first section is a pure duplication of the diff. If I wanted before/after code blocks, I'd click the "Files Changed" tab. Ditto for "Docs-only: 4 insertions, 1 deletion, docs/graph.md only. No change to the player bundle, layout or any other page." - yeah, I can see that in the diff, thanks. (Well, that's what it was in the original diff, before the follow-up changes.)
The testing and AI disclosure sections are similarly overly verbose. I don't need commentary on the policy, nor do I need a statement permitting me to reject the PR.
As an outsider, yeah, my reaction is pretty negative. I'd much prefer a description like "Fixes #3224. Migrated from v2 asciinema-player to v3 AsciinemaPlayer.create, as described in v2 to v3 migration guide [link]. Tested locally as best I could."
A maintainer needing to ask to migrate the other v2 uses isn't a great look, either. The follow-up "fixed the other 5" comment could simply end at "fixed the other 5", without all of the nonsense afterward.
I have to wonder whether all of this truly saved anyone time."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"We used an AI agent to fix an open-source bug. Someone asked to ban us"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/pull/3229"}},"_tags":["comment","author_rwiggins","story_49824957"],"author":"rwiggins","children":[49825447],"comment_text":"It's certainly bad form to turn a GitHub reply into a blog post(?). (Disclosure: I only saw the commit refs that say "blog post", that appear to be a reply.)
As a maintainer (but not on this project), I feel an implicit (professional) responsibility to carefully review PRs, especially from random people. And as a profession, we know it's often harder to read code than it is to write it. This goes double for LLM code, which sometimes lacks a coherent mental model.
So in general, the asymmetry of "I did very little work here, but I'd like you to spend your time carefully reviewing it nonetheless" can be very annoying.
But to talk about specifics: this PR's description is mostly a waste of time. The first section is a pure duplication of the diff. If I wanted before/after code blocks, I'd click the "Files Changed" tab. Ditto for "Docs-only: 4 insertions, 1 deletion, docs/graph.md only. No change to the player bundle, layout or any other page." - yeah, I can see that in the diff, thanks. (Well, that's what it was in the original diff, before the follow-up changes.)
The testing and AI disclosure sections are similarly overly verbose. I don't need commentary on the policy, nor do I need a statement permitting me to reject the PR.
As an outsider, yeah, my reaction is pretty negative. I'd much prefer a description like "Fixes #3224. Migrated from v2 asciinema-player to v3 AsciinemaPlayer.create, as described in v2 to v3 migration guide [link]. Tested locally as best I could."
A maintainer needing to ask to migrate the other v2 uses isn't a great look, either. The follow-up "fixed the other 5" comment could simply end at "fixed the other 5", without all of the nonsense afterward.
I have to wonder whether all of this truly saved anyone time.","created_at":"2026-09-24T02:15:29Z","created_at_i":1790216129,"objectID":"49825383","parent_id":49824957,"story_id":49824957,"story_title":"We used an AI agent to fix an open-source bug. Someone asked to ban us","story_url":"https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/pull/3229","updated_at":"2026-09-24T07:09:38Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"sottol"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["harper","reed","llm","codegen"],"value":"I've sort of been thinking about this as well. Personally, I'd like to re-capture the era of personal blogs and niche knowledge discovery of the earlier web I experienced - crossed with something easy to host/publish and not requiring a browser.
I don't really have any coherent picture but I would like to see these ideas I think:
- Anti-commercial/anti-tracking: maybe requiring some sort of open-source license for all published content that makes it harder to commercially exploit the information, ideally this would be by and for the community, especially in light of recent aggressive LLM-training crawling. I would also like to exclude advertisement and tracking.
- Browser-less: The idea would be to do away with the complexity of the modern web (as people say, browsers are basically operating systems), back to more of its hyper-text roots. Simple documents, mostly textual information. I could imagine a mix of basic markdown and some pre-wired complex/interactive views like "forum" or "blog" and so on (differences in how data is loaded, presented, ...) - the idea would be to implement the "app" part in the browser-replacement and not in the web-page itself if that makes sense. This would lead to more uniformity but that might be a good thing. I'm not even sure if/how images would fit in or videos.
- Peer-to-peer?: Hosting should be as simple as hitting a "publish" button on an article. I like the idea of decentralization, so maybe there could be some sort of peer-to-peer federation where users could "host" content that they've read, liked or general content that's part of a certain (sub-) community. This might require some ranking like HN or a similar mechanism to (unfortunately) censor certain content if the community would not believe it to match their values - so not ultimate freedom. P2P would be more about decentralization, and maybe anti-tracking than pure censorship-resistance.
A session might look like opening the "non-browser" app - it would be fast and require very little memory. Then you'd select or type a community/site and you view of all the content with filters and sorts, depending on the community/site's "template" (again, this is not JS/HTML - basically a native form rendered directly if you will). When you feel like it, you click the "create" button, a text-area + preview pops up and you write your post or article in markdown. When happy, you "publish" and it gets slowly disseminated through all the P2P nodes of your community. This could encompass communities like HN or reddit even if the voting mechanics are worked out, personal blogs, ... but would probably exclude e-commerce stores or video sites because the engine would be potentially too simplistic - and that's fine by me."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/im-building-parallel-internet-and-its.html"}},"_tags":["comment","author_sottol","story_48450694"],"author":"sottol","children":[48452354,48452952,48458249,48460201],"comment_text":"I've sort of been thinking about this as well. Personally, I'd like to re-capture the era of personal blogs and niche knowledge discovery of the earlier web I experienced - crossed with something easy to host/publish and not requiring a browser.
I don't really have any coherent picture but I would like to see these ideas I think:
- Anti-commercial/anti-tracking: maybe requiring some sort of open-source license for all published content that makes it harder to commercially exploit the information, ideally this would be by and for the community, especially in light of recent aggressive LLM-training crawling. I would also like to exclude advertisement and tracking.
- Browser-less: The idea would be to do away with the complexity of the modern web (as people say, browsers are basically operating systems), back to more of its hyper-text roots. Simple documents, mostly textual information. I could imagine a mix of basic markdown and some pre-wired complex/interactive views like "forum" or "blog" and so on (differences in how data is loaded, presented, ...) - the idea would be to implement the "app" part in the browser-replacement and not in the web-page itself if that makes sense. This would lead to more uniformity but that might be a good thing. I'm not even sure if/how images would fit in or videos.
- Peer-to-peer?: Hosting should be as simple as hitting a "publish" button on an article. I like the idea of decentralization, so maybe there could be some sort of peer-to-peer federation where users could "host" content that they've read, liked or general content that's part of a certain (sub-) community. This might require some ranking like HN or a similar mechanism to (unfortunately) censor certain content if the community would not believe it to match their values - so not ultimate freedom. P2P would be more about decentralization, and maybe anti-tracking than pure censorship-resistance.
A session might look like opening the "non-browser" app - it would be fast and require very little memory. Then you'd select or type a community/site and you view of all the content with filters and sorts, depending on the community/site's "template" (again, this is not JS/HTML - basically a native form rendered directly if you will). When you feel like it, you click the "create" button, a text-area + preview pops up and you write your post or article in markdown. When happy, you "publish" and it gets slowly disseminated through all the P2P nodes of your community. This could encompass communities like HN or reddit even if the voting mechanics are worked out, personal blogs, ... but would probably exclude e-commerce stores or video sites because the engine would be potentially too simplistic - and that's fine by me.","created_at":"2026-06-08T20:58:34Z","created_at_i":1780952314,"objectID":"48451931","parent_id":48450694,"story_id":48450694,"story_title":"I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet","story_url":"https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/im-building-parallel-internet-and-its.html","updated_at":"2026-06-14T22:57:27Z"}],"hitsPerPage":8,"nbHits":13,"nbPages":2,"page":0,"params":"query=harper+reed+llm+codegen&hitsPerPage=8&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":22,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"queue":31,"roundTrip":17},"afterFetch":{"merge":{"mergeLoop":{"prepareNextHit":2,"total":2},"total":3},"total":3},"fetch":{"query":13,"scanning":4,"total":18},"total":22},"query":"harper reed llm codegen","serverTimeMS":54}