Low signal, see the post he refers to: https://crawshaw.io/blog/programming-with-llms

I've been using Claude to help me with an ESP32 project using the esp-idf and wifi dual core stuff. It's gotten be all the way to where I wanted to be by writing specific detailed things I want the code to do and specific things I don't want it to do. It also helped me learn some specific memory mapping lingo and lets me ask questions that help me further understand the nuances.

The code it would produce did have errors but after telling it "this code gives me this error" it would rewrite it usually fixing the error or causing a new one. You can quickly find out if it's in an "error-spiral" after a few back and forths at which you do some googling to see if maybe the way you're doing it is completely off base or if there's something the ai is missing.

Have you tried Cursor instead of copilot? It feels more like a chat-driven development experience, but baked into the IDE.

I am using Continue, I don't use in place edits -- they are mostly wrong; I still rely on copy paste (gpt 4o api). Just don't mess up my code, let's discuss it first.

Plus they have some artificial 2000 edits limit -- for a feature thats less effective than side window.

What if you need to make design changes, but don’t have the skills?

I use chat driven development all the time.

I tried aider, which is intended to do your coding for you. But I found that it did too much - not only modifying code but committing it. I want to check the code before it's committed, check for anti patterns, be able to ask for improvements etc...

A handy tip for anyone on Linux, is you can easily copy whole files to your clipboard like this:

xclip -sel clip src/service.ts

I use this all the time to paste code into the chat.