architect / editor different AI models

[jstitch]

Talking about workflows and possible efficiencies achieved on them, I like what aider proposes in its architect chat mode, about using one AI model to ask about possible changes to code from certain point of view, and an editor chat mode using perhaps another AI model to execute what the architect proposed, if us as users/drivers approve. So, besides doing double requests to models, costing more than a single request, aider blog shows that there are arguably better performance of the final result in refactors using the AI assistant in this way.

ref https://aider.chat/2024/09/26/architect.html

[automata]

Yes, that's a great point, I believe we can expose a bit how to enforce the architect+editor model in aider: https://aider.chat/docs/usage/modes.html

For other tools, like Cursor, I'm not sure we can config which strategy to follow though.

[jstitch]

you're right... I think there's no automatic configuration in certain tools. But, since aider proposes that workflow, would it be very vague or misguiding to talk about the workflow? would it be valuable? aider swears it definitely advances the efficiency of the results asking first a question to certain model (the architect), and then feeding the result to an editor model asking it to implement it (the editor). By means of calibrating which LLM to use in each case you may (by aider's account) obtain more efficient results....

that is a workflow, no matter if manual or automatic. Aider has it auto, but it may be manually implemented.

what do you think?

[automata]

I totally agree! I think we can maybe discuss about that on ways to implement AI coding agents, I started a draft here: #13

Hmm and I believe you're right, that workflow can even impact prompting: for instance, instructing one LLM to architect first, then moving to another LLM to code, that's already a change on mind set, right? I'm going to emphasize it a bit more in the text! Here I implicitly used one specific LLM as an architect: https://github.com/automata/aicodeguide/blob/main/README.md?plain=1#L173 and here I switched to another as a coder: https://github.com/automata/aicodeguide/blob/main/README.md?plain=1#L235 but it would be interesting to make it more explicit.

What do you think?

[jstitch]

nice, have you tried yourself with some project? how it went?