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Comment by michaelchisari | Hacker News Reader

To clarify, AI should not do the design itself. You develop the design in conversation with AI.

I come in knowing what I need to build and at least one idea or more of how it should be done. I present the problem, constraints, potential solutions, and ask for criticisms and alternatives. I can keep it as broad as possible or I can get more granular like struct layouts, api endpoints, etc. I go back and forth until there's an approach I prefer and then I code that approach.

| it can code pretty well given a very tight and limited scope.

It's wildly better at tight and limited scope than large scale changes but even then I would rather code it myself.

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> It's wildly better at tight and limited scope than large scale changes but even then I would rather code it myself.

One thing I would like to see is the use of LLMs for smarter semi-manual editing.

While programming I often need to make very similar changes in several places. If the instances are similar enough I can get away with recording a one-off keyboard macro to repeat, but if there are differences that are too difficult to handle this way I end up needing to do a lot of manual editing.

It would be nice to see LLMs tightly integrated into the editor so I can do a simple "place the cursor at things like this" based on an example or two. I'm sure more ideas for using LLMs more quickly perform semantic changes you intended are possible, instead of just prompting for a big diff. I feel there's a lot more innovation possible in this direction, where you're still "coding it yourself" but just faster.

I've had a similar thought. A super refactor feature would be amazing, but wouldn't fit into the current zeitgeist of agent everything. Hopefully as the hype starts to die down and prices go up, we'll get some of these smaller, more targeted features.

You don't need a special feature for this. Just tell the coding assistant what to do.

Then watch it f'up half your codebase because it thinks it's slightly related to your examples. The alternative, giving it 10 examples, is actually more work.

I don’t think you’ve actually used any of these tools. 10 different examples in the same session would almost certainly make them perform worse.

You should try using the existing agents for your semi-manual editing. You don't need editor support. The coding agent can find "things like this" faster than you can. Just tell it what to look for and how to change it.

What I did was make one commit by hand (involving multiple files), and then told Codex (last year's Codex!) to make the equivalent changes to other instances in the code base.

Wait, have you been using Cursor? This is exaclty what it does fairly well.

> I come in knowing what I need to build and at least one idea or more of how it should be done. I present the problem, constraints, potential solutions, and ask for criticisms and alternatives

Never understood that argument. Because there’s two steps in design. Finding a good solution (discussing prior art, tradeoffs,…) and then nailing the technical side of that solution (data structures, formula,…). Is it the former, the latter or both?

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