For me: Chat is like writing comments, but not a the right place in the source code.
Perhaps I should comment all todos and then write "finish todos" as the always-same text prompt.
replies(1):
And that's not even to say that I don't write code comments. When working on large legacy codebases, where you often need to do 'weird' things in service of business goals and timelines, a comment that explains WHY something was done the way it was is valuable. And I leave those comments all the time. But they're still a code smell.
Comments are part of your code. So they need to be maintained with the rest of your code. Yet they are also "psychologically invisible" most of the time to most programmers. Our IDEs even tend to grey them out by default for us, so that they get out of the way so we can focus on the actual implementation code.
This means that comments are a maintenance obligation that often get ignored and so they get out of sync with the actual code really fast.
They also clutter the code unnecessarily. Code, at its best, should be self-explanatory with extremely little effort needed to understand the intent of the code. So even a comment that explains why the code is weird is doing little more than shining a flashlight on smelly code without actually cleaning it up.
And don't get me started on "todo" comments. Most professional shops use some kind of project management tool for organizing and prioritizing future work. Don't make your personal project management the problem of other people that share and contribute to your codebase. There is zero rationale for turning shared code into your personal todo list. (and it should be obvious that I'm talking about checked in code .. if it's your working branch then you do you :) )
So if programming using LLMs is similar to writing comments (an interesting analogy I hadn't considered before), then maybe this is part of the reason I haven't found a problem that LLMs solve for me yet (when programming specifically). I just don't think like that when I'm writing code.