How to use LLM codegen tools

Harper Reed documents his current LLM codegen workflow: effectively using LLMs in an agentic way via different prompts. He first uses an architect and then a project planner and finally a software engineer.

His post is full of actual prompts you can use to cast the LLM into different roles, and tools he uses to provide LLMs with the context about existing codebases.

When I describe this process to people I say “you have to aggressively keep track of what’s going on because you can easily get ahead of yourself.”

I find that using a planning step (ala the Greenfield process above) can help keep things under control. At least you will have a doc you can double-check against.

—— via Martin Fowler