My Adventures with LLM Coding Agents: Level Up Your AI-Assisted Development

This post details a hobbyist's journey using Large Language Model (LLM) coding agents to build software beyond their skill level. The author shares hard-won tips for maximizing efficiency, including effective context management (providing relevant information without overwhelming the model), meticulous design documentation, detailed planning and task breakdown, comprehensive logging for debugging, and defensive Git strategies. The author emphasizes the importance of using tools to extract information from large files, compacting context to avoid losing the big picture, and treating the agent as a tool rather than a collaborator. By following these strategies, the author successfully completed a complex project.