Ask HN: Become a 10x developer with LLM? Myth? Reality?

> Keep in mind if I hand-wrote this I still have to write out the text-values which are 50% of the prompt's length. It did the names/IDs and the boilerplate.

This is the kind of thing that I really struggle with when trying to do something like this. Often the part that takes me the longest when writing snippets like those _is_ the copy (or at least, collecting my thoughts and/or notes to get the copy into my working memory), the code is quick enough. If I spend that same amount of time (or more) writing the prompt, I don't feel like I've saved much time.

It helps me not break my flow to go to StackOverflow/documentation, I can stay in the zone more continuously. It does worry me about the future of StackOverflow, because it is unclear how they continue to snowball and stay current if folks are not using the site directly.

Also, this is tangential, but: when I'm doing PoC application websites, etc it is also helpful to generate images/placeholders/etc easily with image generators (not LLM, but in the realm) so i can stay focused on the backend functionality. I recently created a PoC internal use website in an hour because I didnt have to mess around with finding just the right stock images, etc. Good PoCs, IMHO, should have enough visuals so as not to distract from testing and the goals of the PoC.

I've been able to use phind + Co-pilot to learn python, build and deploy a FastAPI service on the OpenAPI spec, without really knowing any of those things. Just ask GPT-4 how FastAPI works, how OpenAPI works, and ask it to format and write your YAML for you.

It's an amazing TA — better than any I've had in undergrad, and way better than office hours, where your prof don't really care and wants to go back to their research.

I don't have to read through docs for hours and build a mental model — that stuff is taken care of by asking Chat.

Now I'm learning how to deploy my own pytorch model for a real-life use case, by using a combination of SAM and Roboflow. I have absolutely no background in any of these, I just ask it dumb questions until I get it. It's also helping me understand how and when to use hashing and merkle trees for a related project.

For me this is xInfinite because I'm doing stuff I'd been too lazy to learn and understand (e.g. vision).

And I'm at the core a UX / product designer and absolutely not an engineer.