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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to find a code assistant that's more generally useful than copying and pasting code back and forth from https://claude.ai and https://chatgpt.com

I use Copilot in VS Code as a typing assistant, but for the most part I find copy and paste into the chat interfaces is the most valuable way to use LLMs for coding.

Even more so with the Claude Artifacts feature, which lets me see an interactive prototype of frontend code instantly - and ChatGPT Code Interpreter, which can run, test, debug and rewrite Python snippets for me.

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I’ve been playing around recently trying to do a bit of refactoring work with copy pasting in Claude and using Cursor. This week I tried a task where I had a small script that used jquery (one Ajax call and a bunch of dom manipulations).

I found that it was pretty easy to get cursor into a place where it had decimated the file and each tab complete suggestion became more and more broken.

Claude was given the task wholesale and did a reasonable job but introduced a subtle bug by moving a tracking call outside of the Ajax promise and I could not convince it to put it right. It kept apologising and then offering up more incorrect code.

I’d say that the original result was good enough that I could pretty much take it and fix it, but only because I knew all the code and libraries well enough. It was only about 150 lines of simple code and by the time I’d finished I was joking with the team that I could have spent all the time wrestling vim macros instead and come out about the same.

What’s your experience been with correctness?

Not op but a similar experience. I used cursor with claud to generate a small bash script to set up a Postgres container, iterate over local migration files, and apply them using psql. The generated code did all correct but called psql from within the container. Even when feeding the errors back in it could not correct the code or identify the bug.

I treat the LLM like a weird kind of pair-programming partner: I fully expect to have to review everything it writes, and I often prompt it with that in mind - I'll tell it exactly what I want it to write, "write a function that takes X and Y and does Z and returns ..." kind of stuff.

I've spent so much time with them now that 90% of the time I get back exactly what I needed, because I can predict what prompt will get me the right result.

I was in in the `concat->copy->[Claude/OAI]->paste` workflow until a few weeks ago. Cursor is a revelation. Nowadays I only very rarely pump things wholesale into Claude[dot]ai when I'm dealing with a massive cross-codebase issue. Otherwise Cursor is my salve.

Had the same experience. Cursor ux and also Zed are designed to make copy pasta'ing back and forth obsolete. It's certainly more comfortable to iterate within the IDE, for me.

Have you tried Cursor? It’s the process you describe, minus the manual work of copy/pasting.

You can just select a block of code, and tell it to (e.g.) “make this function work as a decorator with graceful exception handling” and it will modify your selected code and provide you with a nice diff to apply in one keypress.

Or you can chat with the LLM directly in VS Code, with every snippet easily applied with a click. It can even catalog your codebase in a vector DB for really easy RAG:

“Create a view that allows premium users to view their billing history”

“Okay, I’ve found a function called get_premium_status in auth/user_profile.py. I’ll use that to create api/user/billing_history.py”

(Which then shows the code it will add or change, separated by file, with the option to apply the change)

Interesting you mention this. I actually first started with cursor (ok copy pasta from gpt4 doesn't count). It blew my mind away (may it felt this way due to co mparison with gpt). The cmd-k was awesome.

Then when I tried plain Claude the delta felt way way too small for me. The eng in me kicked in and I started hacking away on continue.dev + claude3 and the delta was very very little. Plus I could bring in more functionality with extra visibility in my own hacks the way I wanted it (macros) which I couldn't with cursor.

That used to be my flow, but I just added Avante to my Neovim and it has been a awesome for working with a single file.

If I need to do something more high level or that requires multiple files I still copy and paste to Claude / ChatGPT.

https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim

I also use this simple workflow. However, copy-pasting can get tedious after a while.

So I built a small tool to streamline this copy-paste process and manage source code context to include in the prompt: https://prompt.16x.engineer/

Seconded.

Would recommend using a tool to save your codebase as an upload-able file.

Parent comment (simonw) has written a tool. I use another called ai-digest. Pick any one. It solves the 'my model doesn't understand my codebase' problem.

The copy/paste flow is what is most optimal for me. Not exactly what you described but the flow of c/p between VS Code was annoying so I built https://github.com/backnotprop/prompt-tower

It's also useful as a solution architect. Claude Artifact can do non-trivial sequence diagrams and state machines.

Using a chat api client like webchat or betterchat are way more cost efficient than Claude.ai. I use https://web.chatboxai.app/ these days but wish it had some features from betterchat.

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