What's your AI programming tool stack?

Tooling
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Hey y’all! @tbeason suggested that I put up a little thread asking people about what misc AI tooling they actually use. I mostly just want to understand how people are using these tools in the ecosystem.

First – a note on general language model performance in Julia. @svilupp has a fantastic leaderboard for which LLMs tend to do better. At the moment Claude 3 Opus is the leader in Julia using the test specifications here. Test submissions are welcome!

My stack is a little clumsy right now because I haven’t quite dialed it in, but I use

  • Cursor as my editor. It’s a fork of VS Code with really good AI tooling. I do a lot of front-end stuff as well and it’s really nice to go to a a new file, hit Ctrl + K, and ask for exactly the file I want. You can even provide links to docs, other files, etc. to use as context. Very good tool, I shelled out for the pro version. You get Claude Opus calls for code gen and chat.
  • Claude Pro for very long architectural discussions or lots of guided code discussions, mostly because I use a lot of calls and I like the UI. I also do lots of non-programming chats with Claude, though using Claude via Cursor is better. I just haven’t nailed down the workflow yet.
  • PromptingTools.jl for misc LLM calls, mostly using Ollama as a backend with OpenAI for paid calls. I would switch to Claude but I just haven’t set up the API key and I am lazy.
  • AIHelpMe.jl for Julia-specific stuff when I’m in the REPL. It’s good shit and we should use it more.

What’s yours? What are you noticing as pain points or as things you really like?

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Thanks @cpfiffer !

My stack

  • I use ChatGPT Plus for lots and lots of things. It is really surprisingly good. I would consider Claude but do not expect the differences to be large enough to pay the “switching costs”.
  • I am trying out Cursor instead of VS Code. I have not yet found it to be entirely helpful and often jump back to ChatGPT to get AI help for something. It does offer nice autocomplete but it often misses the mark. Likely I just need to learn a bit more about all of its features and how to use them.

Curious to see what everyone else is doing.

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IMO the interface for ChatGPT is much better than Claude’s. The difference is not terribly large.

This is my sense too. I think I need to learn to be more competent with the chat functionality in the editor, but I find the fact that the chat history gets wiped almost every time to be a little discomfiting.

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I’d love to run this as a full-on community survey for my JuliaCon talk!

But for the time being, here is my response:

  • Cursor - if you haven’t tried, you don’t know the power of auto-completion in the middle of the sentence! I can never go back to Copilot… And all the things Cameron mentioned!
  • ChatGPT Plus (just images for the in-image editing)
  • PromptingTools.jl with Groq Llama70b as the default (part of my startup.jl)
  • AIHelpMe.jl - only when I work with AlgebraOfGraphics/Makie, I get it running automatically, so it’s warmed up :smiley:
  • ProToPortal.jl - personal mini-project that I actually love! I missed a GUI with MY templates in my stack and I love to use it when I cannot be at my computer (deployed on fly.io) + it’s much faster than ChatGPT and I’m an impatient person.

ProToPortal is probably too niche/too personal, but if you’re interested, I just open-sourced it: [ANN] ProToPortal.jl: A Portal to the Efficient Coding On The Go and the Magic of PromptingTools.jl

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For a free alternative for people (not companies), Codeium works well.

In general, though, I’m inclined to using chatbots, rather than integrating the tool inside the code editor. I suspect that reading non-relevant suggestions are slowing down my work, rather than increasing my productivity. Still trying to find an approach that works perfectly for me, but not there yet.

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