AI Coding Tips Thread

[mid_gen]

There's a few AI threads knocking about now, but thought one just focused on coding tools would be good.

The state of the art is moving so rapidly at the moment, and new tools and tech appearing so fast, it's hard to stay on top. Share your best tips here!

Today I've been configuring a couple of Sub Agents in Claude. One is a miserable C++ programmer like me that is an old school guy that insists on clean, well engineering code, with minimal dependencies. One is a Fintech specific reviewer that ensures certain domain specific stuff is adhered to.

I've added a pre-commit hook to Claude to make sure any changes are run past both these sub agents. Works really well, it now addresses all teh stuff that I was having to nag Claude about before.

Second thing today, I've added the Playwright MCP server, which is a web automation system (that we also use for E2E testing). What this means is that Claude can inspect the debug browser window (web app I'm developing), and instead of guessing it's got things right, it can now capture screenshots and inspect the images, click through the app, and make sure it actually works as expected. Pretty cool stuff.

 

[Cromulent]

I haven't really been making full use of AI when coding. I have Github Copilot which I use in the Jetbrains IDEs, Visual Studio Code and Xcode. I basically just have the chat screen open and ask it questions about my code. For more detailed answers I have Google Gemini Pro through my Google Workspace account which is very good for detailed replies.

I should look into optimising my usage though or look at all the available alternatives. Any hints and tips gratefully received .

 

[mid_gen]

I haven't really been making full use of AI when coding. I have Github Copilot which I use in the Jetbrains IDEs, Visual Studio Code and Xcode. I basically just have the chat screen open and ask it questions about my code. For more detailed answers I have Google Gemini Pro through my Google Workspace account which is very good for detailed replies.

I should look into optimising my usage though or look at all the available alternatives. Any hints and tips gratefully received .

I don't type code anymore, full stop.

My workflow revolves entirely around directing Claude to do the typing for me, it's much faster than I could hope to be. Lots of tips and tricks involved to get things to work efficiently though.

My first pro tip though, is to use Claude rather than CoPilot.

Anthropic are the leaders in practical implementations of LLM tools, they are leading the way with things like MCP, and I think their Sub Agent architecture is so much simpler and easier to work with than LangGraph.

 

[Cromulent]

I don't type code anymore, full stop.

My workflow revolves entirely around directing Claude to do the typing for me, it's much faster than I could hope to be. Lots of tips and tricks involved to get things to work efficiently though.

My first pro tip though, is to use Claude rather than CoPilot.

Anthropic are the leaders in practical implementations of LLM tools, they are leading the way with things like MCP, and I think their Sub Agent architecture is so much simpler and easier to work with than LangGraph.

Hmm. Seems like Copilot lets you pick Claude 4.0 as one of the backend options. It is a premium service though so you only get a limited number of premium requests.

 

[Tweaker]

I mostly use chatgpt to figure out the design, approach, what are good library choices. Then write a prompt in cursor to write that code, often but scaffolding myself, and having cursor fill in the rest, especially if it is really simple, e.g implementing a new provider for storing data. I typically write the first test, then have cursor write more tests based on my approach. I mostly write Golang, so adding new test cases in table tests is pretty easy

 

[mid_gen]

Been refining my workflow a bit yesterday and this morning. Getting to the point now with this Playwright MCP, sub agent tester and reviewer, that I can pretty reliably just give Claude a ticket ID, and then set it off working for a while, and come back to review the change after it's been properly E2E tested for me.

 

[Noxia]

Not really allowed to use it beyond some basic stuff at my work yet but it's being adopted at least.

 

[Nemiyen]

I'm not a programmer by trade but can get things to do what I want, e.g. Macros to formulate data or automated things that would annoy me doing them manually.

I wrote a macro to pull an export from our OT environment into a usable import format for another system. Someone in our dev team ran it through ChatGPT and turned it into a sheet that opened the file from Excel and output into another file in another folder. It put my messed up code into an array (I just get code working, optimising is not my thing) tidied up my crazy if not if statements and spat out something that looked really good. All by just typing things like "now make the code write to a file in an output folder" or "now append the date to the output file" etc.

Got to say I was impressed!