I have been getting more value out of LLMs recently, and the great irony is it is because of a few different packages in emacs and the wonderful CLI LLM chat programming tool 'aider'.
My workflow puts LLM chat at my fingertips, and I can control the context. Pretty much any text in emacs can be sent to a LLM of your choice via API.
Aider is even better, it does a bunch of tricks to improve performance, and is rapidly becoming a 'must have' benchmark for LLM coding. It integrates with git so each chat modification becomes a new git commit. Easy to undo changes, redo changes, etc. It also has a bunch of hacks because while o1 is good as reasoning, it (apparently) doesn't do code modification well. Aider will send different types of requests to different 'strengths' of LLMs etc. Although if you can use sonnet, you can just use that and be done with it.
It's pretty good, but ultimately it's still just a tool for transforming words into code. It won't help you think or understand.
I feel bad for new kids who won't develop muscle and sight strength to read/write code. Because you still need to read/write code, and can't rely on the chat interface for everything.
My workflow puts LLM chat at my fingertips, and I can control the context. Pretty much any text in emacs can be sent to a LLM of your choice via API.
Aider is even better, it does a bunch of tricks to improve performance, and is rapidly becoming a 'must have' benchmark for LLM coding. It integrates with git so each chat modification becomes a new git commit. Easy to undo changes, redo changes, etc. It also has a bunch of hacks because while o1 is good as reasoning, it (apparently) doesn't do code modification well. Aider will send different types of requests to different 'strengths' of LLMs etc. Although if you can use sonnet, you can just use that and be done with it.
It's pretty good, but ultimately it's still just a tool for transforming words into code. It won't help you think or understand.
I feel bad for new kids who won't develop muscle and sight strength to read/write code. Because you still need to read/write code, and can't rely on the chat interface for everything.