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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?

#51

Post by joshstrange »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #41
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…

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 off the rails. At a certain point it’s easier to add the new feature or make the modification yourself. Even if the LLM could do it, it would burn tons of money and time.

I expect things to get better, this will not always be the state of things, but for now “vibe coding” (specifically not reviewing/writing code yourself) is not sustainable.

Most people doing it have a github profile that is a mile wide and a meter deep.

LLM’s are amazing and useful, but “vibe coding” with them is not sustainable currently.

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

#52

Post by lyu07282 »

souenzzo wrote: post #16

my code setup hasn't changed in 10 years I tried to use many LLM tools. They are generally not capable of doing anything useful in a real project. Maybe solutions like MCP, that allow the LLM to access the git history make the LLM become useful for someone that actually works on a project.

I find that hard to believe, I also don't think LLMs provide the value some others are seeing but there is also code search and refactoring tasks that LLMs can help with. Instead of heaving to write a codemod, I can just write a prompt and accomplish the same thing in much less time. To say they have literally zero value just seems uninformed tbh. That's the sort of black and white thinking that isn't very helpful in the conversation.

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

#54

Post by therealmarv »

prmph wrote: post #45
therealmarv wrote: post #42

There are two key points which are important to get most out of LLM coding assistants: 1. Use a high quality model with big context windows via API (I recommend Openrouter). E.g. Google Gemini 2.5 Pro is one of the best which keeps constant good quality (OpenAI reasoning models can be better in problem solving but it's kinda a mixed bag). Other people swear by the Claude Sonnet models. 2. Upgrade your code tools you…

It's not about the tools. The complaint here is a general one that shows up no matter what tools you are using

And I tell from personal experience: The tools matter (!) for more complex problems.

Op said literally "Am I just not using the tools correctly?" and I said for the 2 of 3 tools OP tried are so new and experimental I would put them away (for now).

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

#55

Post by gedy »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #41
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…

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…

> 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.

Not discounting your experience, but a lot of these examples are about frameworks that never had good bootstrapping, such as Rails does/did. LLMs are really good at boilerplate, but maybe this points to these such stacks needing too much fiddling to get going, vs 10x coder AI.

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

#56

Post by infecto »

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…

You’ll usually find three kinds of people talking about LLMs online:

1. The ones writing Medium posts about being 100x more productive. 2. The skeptics, like yourself, who construct made-up examples to prove it’s impossible to get value, framing things in a way where failure is the only plausible outcome. 3. And then there’s the middle group, people quietly getting real, uneven, but worthwhile value.

You’d be surprised. The vast majority of engineering isn’t that unique. Usefulness often depends on the age of the codebase and the dynamics of the team. I’m firmly in the middle camp: far from perfect, but I get real value from these tools as they stand today. It’s like having a junior engineer who can scaffold out the basics so I can spend my mental energy on the parts that actually matter.

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

#57

Post by melvinroest »

namaria wrote: post #44
melvinroest wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm learning math through Math Academy, ChatGPT and YouTube (mostly 3Blue1Brown and similar channels). Without that specifc combination, it would've been hell. Now it's just nice. A few years I did it with something similar to Math Academy (from the Universiteit of Amsterdam). ChatGPT wasn't intelligent enough back then so I didn't use it. It felt a lot tougher. ChatGPT answers questions that a teacher would find obs…

> So I ask ChatGPT and one of the things it said is that historically it meant "measure" This is a great example of why using LLMs to learn is perilous. This is nonsense.

Is it? I didn't bother to check as it wasn't too relevant. I wasn't stuck anymore. Worst-case it's a memnonic that is untrue. Best case: it is. For actual derivations I check the work.

This is what it wrote by the way.

I posted an image and asked:

Why is this m

m for angle mangle?

ChatGPT:

In geometry we often need to distinguish the angle itself (a geometric object) from the numerical size of that angle (a real-number measurement, usually in degrees or radians). To keep the two ideas separate we put a little “m” in front of the angle symbol:

m∠B reads as “the measure of angle B.”

* ∠B refers to the actual wedge-shaped region determined by the two rays that meet at vertex .

* m∠B is the single number—e.g. \90∘—that tells you how “wide” that wedge is.

So in the worked example the author writes

m∠A + m∠B + m∠C + m∠D = 360∘

because they are adding the sizes of the four interior angles of a quadrilateral, not the angles themselves.

If you dropped the m you’d be adding geometric objects, which doesn’t make sense; the m reminds the reader that what’s being added are real-number measures. (Some textbooks use ∣∠B∣ or simply write the letter with a bar over it, but “m∠” is by far the most common in U.S. and many international curricula.)

So the mysterious “m” isn’t another variable—just a shorthand for “measure of.”

---

Edit: this took quite some work to write well as ChatGPT answers don't copy/paste neatly into HN. So I won't be doing this for the other example.

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

#58

Post by infecto »

prmph wrote: post #45
therealmarv wrote: post #42

There are two key points which are important to get most out of LLM coding assistants: 1. Use a high quality model with big context windows via API (I recommend Openrouter). E.g. Google Gemini 2.5 Pro is one of the best which keeps constant good quality (OpenAI reasoning models can be better in problem solving but it's kinda a mixed bag). Other people swear by the Claude Sonnet models. 2. Upgrade your code tools you…

It's not about the tools. The complaint here is a general one that shows up no matter what tools you are using

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.

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

#60

Post by bobxmax »

gyomu wrote: post #33
bobxmax wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are. People are building sophisticated products in days not months now. If you can't see that, it's your issue.

Would you be so kind as to link to some of these sophisticated products? Would love to check them out.

Go look at the latest YC batch. 30% of them were built with 90% of the code being written by LLMs.
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