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Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?

#101

Post by voidhorse »

lm28469 wrote: post #18
gyomu wrote: post #13

There are two kinds of engineers. Those who can’t stop raving about how much of a superpower LLMs are for coding, how it’s made them 100x more productive, and is unlocking things they could’ve never done before. And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best. The only thing I don’t understand is why people from the former gro…

That's because they fall under the "engineers" category like my local postman and Michael Schumacher both fall under the "driver" category. Most people don't work on anything technically hard, most problems are business logic issues that aren't solved technically or legacy code workarounds for which you need to put 3-10 domain experts in a room for a few hours to solve.

Completely agree. If anything LLMs have just made this completely transparent and are revealing that actual engineering in software is limited to rare cases.

All of theses middling developers who are so excited about these tools don't seem to realize that they are perfectly primed to eventually eliminate precisely the kind of worker responsible for hooking up existing APIs for solved problems into a web app, the kind of work the market hitherto greatly over esteemed and overpaid for isn't my going to be so esteemed or highly valued anymore. The only real work that will remain is actual hard engineering work (solving novel technical modeling problems, not just plugging apis together). All of these lazy devs are hyped for precisely the automation that's goin. to significantly reduce their pay and labor prospects in the long term lol. I'm shocked at times at how people can fail to see the writing on the wall when it's been written in gargantuan red ink

Re: Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?

#102

Post by dogtierstatus »

gyomu wrote: post #13

There are two kinds of engineers. Those who can’t stop raving about how much of a superpower LLMs are for coding, how it’s made them 100x more productive, and is unlocking things they could’ve never done before. And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best. The only thing I don’t understand is why people from the former gro…

This is a quality vs quantity issue. There were x number of extremely competent and ~10x moderately competent programmers.

LLMs have only made this to 100x moderately competent programmers and may be 2xed extremely competent ones?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?

#103

Post by estebarb »

In my experience it works better in more constrained and repetitive domains. For example: it is better doing a Ruby on Rails website than a ASP.NET web service.

Particularly, with data structures it is garbage: it nevers understands the constrains that justify writing a new one instead of relying on the ones from the standard library.

And finally, it is incapable of understanding changes of mind. It will go back to stufd already discarted or replaced.

The worst part of all is that it insists in introducing its own "contributions". For example, recently I have been doing some work on ML and I wanted to see the effect of some ablations. It destroyed my code to add again all the stuff I had removed on purpose.

Overall, it provides small typing/search savings, but it cannot be trusted at all yet.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?

#104

Post by birn559 »

As coding even today becomes more popular every year, a lot of people are junior level or work in an environment that only need junior level skills. I assume those benefit a lot from LLMs.

Also a lot of marketing and it's cool to hype LLMs and I guess people like to see content about what it can do in YouTube and Instagram.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?

#105

Post by 0x000xca0xfe »

Nope, at least Claude code is very useful IME.

Great for annoying ad-hoc programming where the objective is clear but I lack the time or motivation to do it.

Example: After benchmarking an application on various combinations of OS/arch platforms, I wanted to turn the barely structured notes into nice graphs. Claude Code easily generated Python code that used a cursed regex parser to extract the raw data and turned it into a bunch of grouped bar charts via matplotlib. Took just a couple minutes and it didn't make a single mistake. Fantastic time saver!

This is just an ad-hoc script. No need to extend or maintain it for eternity. It has served its purpose and if the input data will change, I can just throw it away and generate a new script. But if Claude hadn't done it, the graphs simply wouldn't exist.

Update: Sorry, missed "writing self-contained throwaway pieces of code"... well for core development I too haven't really used it.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?

#106

Post by mbac32768 »

lm28469 wrote: post #18
gyomu wrote: post #13

There are two kinds of engineers. Those who can’t stop raving about how much of a superpower LLMs are for coding, how it’s made them 100x more productive, and is unlocking things they could’ve never done before. And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best. The only thing I don’t understand is why people from the former gro…

That's because they fall under the "engineers" category like my local postman and Michael Schumacher both fall under the "driver" category. Most people don't work on anything technically hard, most problems are business logic issues that aren't solved technically or legacy code workarounds for which you need to put 3-10 domain experts in a room for a few hours to solve.

Right yes, I imagine most people who program are in companies that have nothing to do with high tech, writing SQL or scripts or CRUD apps. LLMs are probably amazing here.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?

#107

Post by morsecodist »

prmph wrote: post #93
infecto wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tools do matter. The original complaint is dribble. The poster does not even know what model they used in cursor which is surprising, it’s the most important part of the process. They also compared two entirely brand new tools that are not adjacent to cursor.

Ok, that's the "you're holding it wrong" thing. When I start to stray into even moderately complex work, LLMs become pretty useless quick. Tell me your setup, and I will give a quick sample task that it will fail at. Stop the fanboyism please

Thank you. It is so frustrating that you hear that LLMs are a PhD level intelligence capable of any task you can throw at it and when it can't solve your problem you hear: "well you are using a1.36 and b1.37-high is really the one this time" (despite the fact that you have been hearing these claims since before that model came out) or "you are prompting it wrong, have you tried describing all of your app features and your entire approach to coding in a text file then using that to get the AI to make a list of prompts then refining those prompts into different text files and put those back into the AI..."

Re: Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?

#109

Post by lc_eckert09 »

They’re fantastic for making some basic websites or dealing with boilerplate.

I write compilers. Good luck getting an LLM to be helpful in that domain. It can be helpful to break down the docs for something like LLVM but not for writing passes or codegen etc

Re: Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?

#110

Post by RajT88 »

joshstrange wrote: post #51
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find LLMs 100x more productive for greenfield work. If I want to create a React app with X amount of pages, some Redux stores, Auth, etc. then it can smash that out in minutes. I can say "now add X" and it'll do it. Generally with good results. But when it comes to maintaining existing systems, or adding more complicated features, or needing to know business domain details, a LLM is usually not that great for me. T…

I couldn’t agree more and I’ve said the same thing many times. I have yet to see an LLM-generated app not collapse under it’s own weight after enough iterations/prompts. It gets stuck in loops (removing and adding the same code/concept), it gets hung up on simple errors, etc. For greenfield it’s amazing, no doubt, but unless you are watching it very closely and approving/reviewing the code along the way it will go of…

Coding LLM's: Ruby off rails?
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