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Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

This hits the nail on the head for me. Low complexity prototypes and modules are something o1 or R1 can reason well about. For more complex coding tasks, we‘d need IMO a feedback loop with a linter and a compiler, and maybe even a debugger and CI workflows. Basically an agent that works exactly like I do.

The reasoning process is nice, because the CoT can fact check itself. But it can’t catch compiler bugs across multiple files/modules, because an LLM is not a compiler.

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This exists though. Cline, Aider, Cursor, etc. all hook into the diagnostics of the IDE and can run arbitrary commands (including compilers) and feed outouts back to the LLM. Take Cline, it has a planning mode that you can plug a reasoning model into and that will outline the best path to implementation. Then you switch to action mode where a (usually) completion model takes over, implements in multiple steps and validated diagnostics (or compilation output) as it implements the plan.

Correct, same with windsurf, you can ask it to first generate unit tests, then the code, and it will run the test, analyze the results, comment where and why it made mistakes, improve its own code, and repeat the tests until it works.

What I’ve also found very useful in windsurf is to have it analyze existing code bases, you can ask it to generate markdown documentation for specific functionality, including mermaid diagrams.

Also helps to have it first generate design documents, improve the designs until satisfactory, and then have it generate the tests and code accordingly.

Now also in GitHub Copilot: https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...

Doesn’t work for me for Swift development yet. Should have been more specific.

I haven’t seen a tool that can debug btw

I've had cursor suggest changes for debugging (like prints), you do have to copy paste the results though.

I've also had cursor generate a CURL request to test an endpoint and determine what responses it had so it could generate a struct to store the result.

So I'd say they are getting there.

openhands can do printf debugging

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