Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

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> Why aren't you guiding your LLM usage? Is that what I said - to spam it and not guide anything? Or to have a careful workflow where you agree on design and maximize your human judgement/leverage?

You didn't say anything positively or negatively regarding this so I made an assumption that you were using the LLM relatively unguided (e.g. a bit of oversight, not the kind of thing that heavy code reviews used to involve pre-agents.) Feel free to add clarity on your actual usage loop.

> As opposed to before, when engineers perfectly reasoned about code behavior from first principals and QA was unnecessary?

In my experience, most engineers are quite good at reasoning about code behavior for non-QAed code paths. Obviously things fall through the cracks. But I've been in the ground floor of plenty of Big Techs in their early stages before agents and, yes, a lot of initial development had spotty test coverage and yet most of the engineers had good mental models of what was happening. It used to be a very valuable skill to wrap your head around a torrid piece of code with few or no tests but was nonetheless a core piece of your application. Conversely, agentic development can bring cognitive debt [1].

===

This isn't a fight. We aren't sparring over what's right and wrong. I'm just curious how other people use agents in their work as someone who is also now in a startup that uses LLM agents heavily and has no limitations on spend.

[1]: https://martinfowler.com/fragments/2026-02-09.html

> You didn't say anything positively or negatively regarding this so I made an assumption that you were using the LLM relatively unguided

I feel like this statement betrays your lack of advanced experience coding with LLMs.

OP's elaboration of the steps they are going through (planning, agreeing on plan, getting one LLM to draft execution plan, approving it, then executing with a separate LLM, then reviewing/testing) made it super obvious to me that they are guiding their LLMs quite considerably as part of their work.

Anyone making blanket statements about LLMs producing garbage is just telling on themselves about not having proper SDLC practices in place.

Planning, agreeing on a plan, separating planning and implementation LLM, using separate review LLMs, these are all table stakes. This isn't "guidance" if you're getting paid to write software. If you think "unguided" means "I typed a prompt into claude code and waited yolo" I don't know what to say but, you have a very different idea of what professionals do than I do.

I find for my own work that I need to read the diff the LLM produces then offer feedback on the diff in its own loop before I am satisfied, and this is after all the unattended QA steps through Codex Computer or Claude MCPs happen. Then auto reviewers come in and then reviewers come in. Of course, at our stage, we rarely have this luxury and it's only reserved for the very core of our codebase.

This is still much less guidance than we used to do for code before agents became popular. Even at Series A companies, before agents, we used to socialize tech specs, get buy-in from multiple engineers, create test plans, etc etc.

> Anyone making blanket statements about LLMs producing garbage is just telling on themselves about not having proper SDLC practices in place.

> I feel like this statement betrays your lack of advanced experience coding with LLMs.

Are we in school debate club? I don't know what's going on lol, I'm just curious how people are using LLMs! Is it just that irresistable to take a cheap shot at each other?

> "unguided" means "I typed a prompt into claude code and waited yolo"

Yes, this is literally what that means.

> Are we in school debate club?

Not that I know of but that's the conclusion I drew from your statement.

It's not a cheap shot unless you took it personally?

I suppose I could have said "the fact that OP's explanation of how they work did not lead you to conclude they were in fact guiding their LLM usage quite a bit tells me that perhaps you have not been working with LLMs in any advanced capacity".

For the SDLC comment I admit it was a broader statement (based on observing people generalizing that "LLMs produce bad outputs") and not specifically aimed at you, and I didn't make that clear, so my bad.

> If you think "unguided" means "I typed a prompt into claude code and waited yolo" I don't know what to say but, you have a very different idea of what professionals do than I do.

What exactly does "unguided" mean to you, then?

Not having human input in the loop, i.e. allowing agents to act without guidance. I understand the idea of having agents guide agents, but really how much do we gain when Sol scolds Fable?

> how much do we gain when Sol scolds Fable?

You might be surprised at how much benefit you get from the model council[0] pattern.

The common pattern I've seen is "build with Claude, review with GPT", or vice-versa.

It's been proven to be very effective.

0: https://www.google.com/search?q=model+council+pattern&udm=14

I use it. We have more workstreams than people and so we have to rely on this pattern for most of our new products, but I still find the code doesn't meet my bar. To me it produces passable but not good, maintainable code. Good enough for our experimental products with the cognitive debt associated with heavy agentic development. We take this calculated tradeoff of velocity for cognitive debt and middling quality because we're a startup and we feel that velocity matters more than correctness, but that is just a bet as the nature of startups go.

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