81–90 of 140 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of paths to become T shaped.
> become T shaped. my middle manager buzzwords this 26 times a day. triggers me.
It's your choice, but it's definitely not ,,just another tool''. Most of my LLMs made lots of mistakes, but Codex with $200 subscription changed my workflow totally, and now I'm having 40 pull requests/day merged. Treat LLMs as interns, increase your test coverage with them to the point that they can't ruin your codebase and get really good at reviewing code and splitting tasks up to smaller digestible ones, and prom…
What kind of tasks you give Codex? I gave it an honest chance, but couldn’t get a single PR out of it. It would just continue to make mistakes. And even when it got close I asked it a minor tweak and it made things worse. I iterated 7 times on the same small problem.
Currently in the stage of evaluating Codex (mostly comparing it to Aider and my own homegrown LLM setup). I'm able to get changes out of it, that mostly make sense, but you really need to take whatever personal guidelines you have for coding and "encode" them into the AGENTS.md, and really focus on asking the right question/request changes in the right way.
Without AGENTS.md, it seems to go of the wrong end really quickly, and end up with subpar code. But with a little bit of guidance, I do get some results at least. This is the current AGENTS.md I'm using for some smaller projects: https://gist.github.com/victorb/1fe62fe7b80a64fc5b446f82d313...
With that said, it does get mislead sometimes, and the UX isn't great for the web version. It's really slow, you can't customize the environment, the UI seems to load data in a really weird way leading to slowdowns and high latencies, and overall it's just cumbersome. My homegrown version is way faster for the iterations, + has stateful PRs it can iterate on and receive line comment feedback on, but the local models I'm using are obviously worse than the OpenAI ones, so I'd still say Codex is probably overall better, sadly.
My 2 centes: 1. Learn basic NNs at a simple level, build from scratch (no frameworks) a feed forward neural network with back propagation to train against MNIST or something as simple. Understand every part of it. Just use your favorite programming language. 2. Learn (without having to implement with the code, or to understand the finer parts of the implementations) how the NN architectures work and why they work. Wh…
My problem with 5. is that there are many unknowns, especially when it comes to agents. They have wildly different system prompts that are optimized on a daily basis. I’ve noticed that Gemini 2.5 Pro seems way dumber when used in the Copilot agent, vs me just running all the required context through OpenRouter in Continue.dev. The former doesn’t produce usable iOS tests, while the latter was almost perfect. On the su…
I haven't used Claude Code much, so cannot really speak of it. But Copilot and Cursor tends to make me waste more time than I get out of it. Aider running locally with a mix-and-match of models depending on the problem (lots of DeepSeek Reasoner/Chat since it's so cheap), and Codex, are both miles ahead of at least Copilot and Cursor.
Also, most of these things seems to run with temperature>0.0, so doing multiple runs, even better with multiple different models, tend to give you better results. My own homegrow agent that runs Aider multiple times with a combination of models tend to give me a list of things to chose between, then I either straight up merge the best one, or iterate on the best one sometimes inspired by the others.
Worst case, you’ll be a more interesting, well-rounded, and curious person with a broad set of programming skills.
Depends on what you want to do. But my 2 cents are that like all new technology, LLMs will become a commodity. Which means that everybody uses them but few people are able to develop them from scratch. It's not different from other things like databases, GPU drivers, 3D engines for games, etc. That all involves a lot of hardcore computer science and math. But lots of people use these things without being hindered by…
But the question is what mindset will allow you to put yourself ahead of the rest. Because I suppose the OP doesn't want to end up as just another mediocre programmer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the question is what mindset will allow you to put yourself ahead of the rest. Because I suppose the OP doesn't want to end up as just another mediocre programmer.
There are a lot of paths to become T shaped.
You don’t need much expertise in NNs to still be able to get huge value out of them today