91–100 of 252 posts
People really want a quick, low effort fix that appeals to the energy conserving lizard brain while still promising all the results.
In reality there aren't shortcuts, there's just tradeoffs, and we all realize it eventually.
This 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 solutio…
I use it the same way but cursor is constantly insisting on making code changes. Is there a trick to get it to introspect on the codebase without wanting to modify it?
Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend t…
This is definitely something I feel is a choice. I've been experimenting quite a bit with AI generated code, and with any code that I intend to publish or maintain I've been very conscious in making the decision that I own the code and that if I'm not entirely happy with the AI generated output I have to fix it (or force the AI to fix it).
Which is a very different way of reviewing code than how you review another humans code, where you make compromises because you're equals.
I think this produces fine code, not particularly quickly but used well probably somewhat quicker (and somewhat higher quality code) than not using AI.
On the flip side on some throwaway experiments and patches to personalize open source products that I have absolutely no intention of upstreaming I've made the decision that the "AI" owns the code, and gone much more down the vibe coding route. This produces unmaintainable sloppy code, but it works, and it takes a lot less work than doing it properly.
I suspect the companies that are trying to force people to use AI are going to get a lot more of the "no human ownership" code than individuals like me experimenting because they think its interesting/fun.
Can relate. I've also shifted towards generating small snippets of code using LLMs, giving them a glance, and asking to write unit tests for them. And then I review the unit tests carefully. But integrating the snippets together into the bigger system, I always do that myself. LLMs can do it sometimes but when it becomes big enough that it can't fit into the context window, then it's a real issue because now LLMs doe…
The hard parts of engineering have always been decision making, socializing, and validating ideas against cold hard reality. But writing code just got easier so let's do that instead.
Prior to LLMs writing 10 lines of code might have been a really productive day, especially if we were able to thoughtfully avoid writing 1,000 unnecessary lines. LLMs do not change this.
Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend t…
honestly my theory is part of it is people who are very caught up in the "craft" part of it and now hate these LLMs for producing shit that pretty much works but isn't like this "perfect specimen" of coding architecture that they now have to pour over. honestly, the vast majority of basically CRUD apps out there we are inflating our skills a bit too much here. even if the code is junk you can adapt your mindset to ac…
Ultimately I am responsible for any code I check in even if it was written by an LLM, so I need to perform these lengthy reviews. As others have said, if it is code that doesn't need to be maintained, then reviewing the code can be a much faster process. This is why it is so popular for hobby projects since you don't need to maintain the code if you don't want to, and it doesn't matter if you introduce subtle but catastrophic bugs.
Ultimately the tech feels like a net neutral. When you want to just throw the code away after it is very fast and good enough. If you are responsible for maintaining it, its slower than writing it yourself.
Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend t…
But I’m in no rush to invite an army of people to compete with me just yet. I’ll be back when I’m sipping coladas on a beach to tell you what I did.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the mental model part. I really like this method of thinking about programming "Programming as Theory Building" https://gist.github.com/onlurking/fc5c81d18cfce9ff81bc968a7f... I don't mind when other programmers use AI, and use it myself. What I mind is the abdication of responsibility for the code or result. I don't think that we should be issuing a disclaimer when we use AI…
Isn't this what Brooks describes, stating more than 50 years ago that there's a fundamental shift when a system can no longer be held in a single mind, and the communication & coordination load that results from adding people? It seems with a single person offloading the work to an LLM right at the start they give up this efficiency before even beginning, so unless you're getting AI to do all the work it will eventua…
Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
— Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?
Should LLM users invest in both biological (e.g. memory palace) and silicon memory caches?
Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend t…
One example I deal with frequently is creating Pytorch models. Any real model is absolutely not something you want to leave in the hands of an LLM since the entire point of modeling is to incorporate your own knowledge into the design. But there is a lot of tedium, and room for errors, in getting the initial model wiring setup.
While, big picture, this isn't the 10x (or more) improvement that people like to imagine, I find in practice I personally get really stuck on the "boring parts". Reducing the time I spend on tedious stuff tends to have a pretty notable improvement in my overall flow.
Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend t…