I'm dialing back my LLM usage
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Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage
#2[deleted]
Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage
#3two weeks ago I started heavily using Codex (I have 20y+ dev xp).
At first I was very enthusiastic and thought Codex is helping me multiplex myself. But you actually spend so much time trying to explain Codex the most obvious things and it gets them wrong all the time in some kind of nuanced way that in the end you spend more time doing things via Codex than by hand.
So I also dialed back Codex usage and got back to doing many more things by hand again because its just so much faster and much more predictable time-wise.
Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage
#4This is pretty much the conclusion I've come to as well. It's not good at being an autocomplete for entire chunks of your codebase. You lose the mental model of what is doing what, and exactly where. I prefer to use it as a personalized, faster-iterating StackOverflow. I'll ask it to give me a rundown of a concept I'm not familiar with, or for a general direction to point me in if I'm uncertain of what a good solution would be. Then I'll make the decision, and implement it myself. That workflow has worked out much better for me so far.
Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage
#5This parrots much of my own experience.
I don’t have it write of my Python firmware or Elixir backend stuff.
What I do let it rough in is web front end stuff. I view the need for and utility of LLMs in the html/css/tailwind/js space as an indictment of complexity and inconsistency. It’s amazing that the web front end stuff has just evolved over the years, organically morphing from one thing to another, but a sound well engineered simple-is-best set of software it is not. And in a world where my efforts will probably work in most browser contexts, no surprise that I’m willing to mix in a tool that will make results that will probably work. A mess is still a mess.
Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage
#6LLMs have limits. They are super powerful but they can't make the kind of leap humans can. For example, I asked both Claude and Gemini below problem.
"I want to run webserver on Android but it does not allow binding on ports lower than 1000. What are my options?"
Both responded with below solutions
1. Use reverse proxy
2. Root the phone
3. Run on higher port
Even after asking them to rethink they couldn't come up with the solution I was expecting. The solution to this problem is HTTPS RR records[1]. Both models knew about HTTPS RR but couldn't suggest it as a solution. It's only after I included it in their context both agreed it as a possible solution.
Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage
#7I've gone the other way and put a lot of effort into figuring out how to best utilize these things. It's a rough learning curve and not trivial, especially given how effortless stuff looks and feels at first.
Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage
#8My point of view: LLMs should be taken as a tool, not as a source of wisdom. I know someone who likes to answer people-related questions through a LLM. (E.g.: "What should this person do?" "What should we know about you?" etc.) More than once, this leads to him getting into a state of limbo when he tries to explain what he means with what he wrote. It feels a bit wild - a bit like back in school, when the guy who copied your homework, is forced to explain how he ended up with the solution.
Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage
#9These seem like good checkpoints (and valid criticisms) on the road to progress.
But it's also not crazy to think that with LLMs getting smarter (and considerable resources put into making them better at coding), that future versions would clean up and refactor code written by past versions. Correct?
Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage
#10I've found the Cursor autocomplete to be nice, but I've learned to only accept a completion if it's byte for byte what I would've written. With the context of surrounding code it guesses that often enough to be worth the money for me.
The chatbot portion of the software is useless.