[goosejuice]

antirez's series looks awesome. My two cents w/ composer:

Don't rely on the LLM for design. Start by defining some tests via comments or whatever your tools allow. The tab completion models can be helpful here. Start the interfaces / function defs and constrain them as much as possible. Let the LLM fill in the rest using TDD. The compiler / test loop along with the constraints can get you pretty far. You'll always need to do a review but I find this cuts out a lot of the wasted cycles you'll inevitably get if you "vibe" with it.

For Cursor specifically, you'll want to aim for prompts that will get you from A to B with the least amount of interactions. Cursor will do 25 tool calls (run the tests / compile, whatever) with one interaction. A little planning goes a long way to doing less and paying less.

[jstummbillig]

If you are optimizing for less tool calls, I think you are rapidly and increasingly optimizing for the wrong thing here.

[goosejuice]

I agree. I'm not suggesting to optimize for that. We want the best acceptable outcome in the least amount of time.

More toolcalls per interaction is typically a product of planning ahead, which in my experience produces better outcome. Each toolcall is a verification of the last step. Without those guardrails I find I waste a tremendous amount of time.