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Comment by anhner | Hacker News Reader

and what are those strengths, if you don't mind me asking?

  - Providing boilerplate/template code for common use cases
  - Explaining what code is doing and how it works
  - Refactoring/updating code when given specific requirements
  - Providing alternative ways of doing things that you might not have thought of yourself

YMMV; every project is different so you might not have occasion to use all of these at the same time.

I appreciate your reply. A lot of people just say how wonderful and revolutionary LLMs are, but when asked for more concrete stuff they give vague answers or even worse, berate you for being skeptical/accuse you of being a luddite.

Your list gives me a starting point and I'm sure it can even be expanded. I do use LLMs the way you suggested and find them pretty useful most of the time - in chat mode. However, when using them in "agent mode" I find them far less useful.

"Agent mode" is vastly different in many ways. I suggest you read up on how people write things like CLAUDE.md files. But as I said earlier, every project is different, and one what one person was successful with won't necessarily make you successful, so you may find it more helpful to get somebody to coach you through prompting agents for your particular projects.

Here's a concrete example of what can be done with Opus 4.5, and how to do it: https://burkeholland.github.io/posts/opus-4-5-change-everyth...

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