Cline

cline is somehow extremley aggressive. it even commits to github for no reason when not asked

Imo current models can already break things up into bite sized pieces. The limiter I've seen is twofold 1) Maintaining context of the overall project and goals while working in the weeds on a subtask of a task on an epic (so to speak) both in terms of what has been accomplished already and what still needs to be accomplished and 2) Getting an agentic coding tool which can actually handle the scale of doing 50 small projects back to back. With these agentic tools I find they start projects off really strong but by task #5 they're just making a mess with every change. I've played with keeping basically a dev-progress.md file and implementation-plan.md file that I keep in context for every request and end each task by updating files. But me manually keeping all this context isn't solving all my problems. And all the while, tools like Cline are gobbling up 2M tokens to make small changes.

Agree with your experiences. I've also found that if I build a lightweight skeleton of the structure of the program, it does a much better job. Also, ensuring that it does a full fledged planning/non-executing step before starting to change things leads to good results. I have been using Cline in VSCode, and I've been enjoying it a lot.

you can use the vscode cline to give a task and it uses a LLM to go out and create the app for you. In django i had it create a backend, set admin user, create requirements.txt and then do a whole frontend in vue as a test. It even can do screen testing and tested what happens if it puts a wrong login in.