In September, I got the chance to pair program for two hours with the legendary Steve Yegge (@Steve_Yegge), where he coached me on what he calls “CHOP, or chat-oriented programming,” and built something that I’ve wanted to build for nearly a year. I learned how to use @SourcegraphCody to level up in ways that I couldn’t quite imagine before. You may have seen the video excerpts I’ve made of videos and podcasts of talks I enjoyed — here’s the first one that I created of the famous Dr. Erik Meijer (@headinthebox), where he talks about how we might be the last generation of developers to write code by hand, and that we should have fun doing it. I created the tool to make these video excerpts during that two-hour pair programming session with Steve! We recorded the entire session — and here, I'm posting the “highlights reels,” where I show the prompts that I used (coached by Steve) to create the app, and the lessons learned along the way. I can’t think of a better way to learn. Dr. Anders Ericsson, renowned for his research on expertise and deliberate practice, wrote the fantastic book “Peak,” where he identifies key elements to acquire new skills and achieve mastery, such as learning to play musical instruments, play sports, and practice medicine. Those elements are: - Expert coaching: you learn best when guided by an expert (that’s Steve!) - Fast feedback: you learn best when you get immediate, actionable feedback, so you can identify and correct errors quickly, and reinforce positive behaviors (check!) - Intentional practice: you learn best when focusing on specific tasks (let’s CHOP more, as opposed to manually typing out code!) - Challenging tasks: you learn best when you tackle tasks slightly beyond your current abilities (check!) I can’t overstate how much I learned in two hours. In this thread, I post segments from that session, with some introductions, a statement of goals, and portions from the approximately 50 minutes required to build the code that uses ffmpeg to generate video excerpts, with transcribed captions. (Building the app in 40 easy steps.) It was fascinating to re-watch the recording — I’ve watched it in its entirety several times, which I found wildly entertaining. But I wanted to see if I could extract the lessons, so people wouldn’t need to watch the entire 90-minute video. I inserted video captions that describe what is going on, with any prompts I’m giving to @SourcegraphCody / Claude / ChatGPT, so you can follow along, as well as other insights or lessons learned. (In the lower-right corner of the video that shows the elapsed time — I was astonished to discover that, with Steve’s help, we had gotten the video extraction working in about 47 minutes. The remainder of the two hours was learning the tools, chit-chatting, joking around, etc.) Among the lessons learned: - in the beginning, my prompts were unambitious — Steve kept encouraged me to “type less, and lean on the LLM more.” - despite Steve saying that the tools fully supporting CHOP still being a long way off, you’ll see that the interaction model becomes very evident by the end — give the LLM the relevant context, ask it to build or modify something for you, and ideally, it’ll appear in place, or it’ll be something you can copy/paste into your code base. - a key skill is breaking tasks down to make steps more concrete for the LLM — or as Steve (and many Clojure programmers) likes to say, you reify your tasks (i.e., you make it more concrete or realized) - having a good way to run your tests quickly becomes critical, because you often won't read the code that the LLM wrote — until the tests fail. - when tests fail, a technique is just to ask the LLM to “try it again,” but lots of human judgment is required here. Sometimes this works, while other times, you’ll be iterating in circles, never getting closer to your goal 1/??

We're hosting an AI Dev Tools Night on June 24 at the @sourcegraph offices in San Francisco! We got an awesome list of speakers lined up including @beyang, @itsajchan, @thedanigrant, and more. Link to RSVP in comment!