This resonates with me a lot:
> As ever, I wish we had better tooling for using LLMs which didn’t look like chat or autocomplete
I think part of the reason why I was initially more skeptical than I ought to have been is because chat is such a garbage modality. LLMs started to "click" for me with Claude Code/Codex.
A "continuously running" mode that would ping me would be interesting to try.
Aider hurt my head it did not seem... good. Sorry to say.
If you want open source and want to target something over an API "crush" https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush is excellent
But you should try Claude Code or Codex just to understand them. Can always run them in a container or VM if you fear their idiocy (and it's not a bad idea to fear it)
Like I said sibling, it's not the right modality. Others agree. I'm a good typer and good at writing, so it doesn't bug me too much, but it does too much without asking or working through it. Sometimes this is brilliant. Other times it's like.. c'mon guy, what did you do over there? What Balrog have I disturbed?
It's good to be familiar with these things in any case because they're flooding the industry and you'll be reviewing their code for better or for worse.
I absolutely agree with this sentiment as well and keep coming back to it. What I want is more of an actual copilot which works in a more paired way and forces me to interact with each of its changes and also involves me more directly in them, and teaches me about what it's doing along the way, and asks for more input.
A more socratic method, and more augmentic than "agentic".
Hell, if anybody has investment money and energy and shares this vision I'd love to work on creating this tool with you. I think these models are being misused right now in attempt to automate us out of work when their real amazing latent power is the intuition that we're talking about on this thread.
Misused they have the power to worsen codebases by making developers illiterate about the very thing they're working on because it's all magic behind the scenes. Uncorked they could enhance understanding and help better realize the potential of computing technology.
Have you tried to ask the agents to work with you in the way you want?
I’ve found that using some high level direction / language and sharing my wants / preferences for workflow and interaction works very well.
I don’t think that you can find an off the shelf system todo what you want. I think you have to customize it to your own needs as you go.
Kind of like how you customize emacs as it’s running to your desires.
I’ve often wondered if you could put a mini LLM into emacs or vscode and have it implement customizations :)
I have, but the problem is in part the tool itself and the way it works. It's just not written with an interactive prompting style in mind. CC is like "Accept/Ask For Changes/Reject" for often big giant diffs, and it's like... no, the UI should be: here's an editor let's work on this together, oh I see what you did there, etc...
I'm working on such a thing, but I'm not interested in money, nor do I have money to offer - I'm interested in a system which I'm proud of.
What are your motivations?
Interested in your work: from your public GitHub repos, I'm perhaps most interested in `moor` -- as it shares many design inclinations that I've leaned towards in thinking about this problem.
Unfortunately... mooR is my passion project, but I also need to get paid, and nobody is paying me for that.
I'm off work right now, between jobs and have been working 10, 12 hours a day on it. That will shortly have to end. I applied for a grant and got turned down.
My motivations come down to making a living doing the things I love. That is increasingly hard.
On the one hand, I agree with this. The chat UI is very slow and inefficient.
But on the other, given what I know about these tools and how error-prone they are, I simply refuse to give them access to my system, to run commands, or do any action for me. Partly due to security concerns, partly due to privacy, but mostly distrust that they will do the right thing. When they screw up in a chat, I can clean up the context and try again. Reverting a removed file or messed up Git repo is much more difficult. This is how you get a dropped database during code freeze...
The idea of giving any of these corporations such privileges is unthinkable for me. It seems that most people either don't care about this, or are willing to accept it as the price of admission.
I experimented with Aider and a self-hosted model a few months ago, and wasn't impressed. I imagine the experience with SOTA hosted models is much better, but I'll probably use a sandbox next time I look into this.