I have a biased opinion since I work for a background agent startup currently - but there are more (and better!) out there than Jules and Copilot that might address some of the author's issues.
The current state of LLM-driven development
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Re: The current state of LLM-driven development
#12Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial. There is no learning curve. You can safely ignore them if they don’t fit your workflows at the moment. I have never heard anybody successfully using LLMs say this before. Most of what I've learned from talking to people about their workflows is counterintuitive and subtle. It's a really weird way to open up an article concluding that LLMs make one a worse prog…
The first two points directly contradict each other, too. Learning a tool should have the outcome that one is productive with it. If getting to "productive" is non-trivial, then learning the tool is non-trivial.
Re: The current state of LLM-driven development
#13Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial. There is no learning curve. You can safely ignore them if they don’t fit your workflows at the moment. I have never heard anybody successfully using LLMs say this before. Most of what I've learned from talking to people about their workflows is counterintuitive and subtle. It's a really weird way to open up an article concluding that LLMs make one a worse prog…
I agree with your assessment about this statement. I actually had to reread it a few times to actually understand it.
He is actually recommending Copilot for price/performance reasons and his closing statement is "Don’t fall for the hype, but also, they are genuinely powerful tools sometimes."
So, it just seems like he never really gave a try at how to engineer better prompts that these more advanced models can use.
Re: The current state of LLM-driven development
#14Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial. There is no learning curve. [...]
LLMs will always suck at writing code that has not be written millions of times before. As soon as you venture slightly offroad, they falter.
That right there is your learning curve! Getting LLMs to write code that's not heavily represented in their training data takes experience and skill and isn't obvious to learn.
Re: The current state of LLM-driven development
#15I disagree from almost the first sentence: > Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial. There is no learning curve. You can safely ignore them if they don’t fit your workflows at the moment. Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial to start, but you find you get a bad taste early if you don't learn how to adapt both your workflow and its workflow. It is easy to get a trivially good resu…
"There's no learning curve" just means this guy didn't get very far up, which is definitely backed up by thinking that Copilot and other tools are all basically the same.
Basically, they are the same, they are all LLMs. They all have similar limitations. They all produce "hallucinations". They can also sometimes be useful. And they are all way overhyped.
Re: The current state of LLM-driven development
#16Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial. There is no learning curve. [...] LLMs will always suck at writing code that has not be written millions of times before. As soon as you venture slightly offroad, they falter. That right there is your learning curve! Getting LLMs to write code that's not heavily represented in their training data takes experience and skill and isn't obvious to learn.
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Re: The current state of LLM-driven development
#17Deeply curious to know if this is an outlier opinion, a mainstream but pessimistic one, or the general consensus. My LinkedIn feed and personal network certainly suggests that it's an outlier, but I wonder if the people around me are overly optimistic or out of synch with what the HN community is experiencing more broadly.
Linkedin posts seems like an awful source. The people I see posting for themselves there are either pre-successful or just very fond of personal branding
Re: The current state of LLM-driven development
#18Yet another developer who is too full of themselves to admit that they have no idea how to use LLMs for development. There's an arrogance that can set in when you get to be more senior and unless you're capable of force feeding yourself a bit of humility you'll end up missing big, important changes in your field.
It becomes farcical when not only are you missing the big thing but you're also proud of your ignorance and this guy is both.
Re: The current state of LLM-driven development
#19I disagree from almost the first sentence: > Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial. There is no learning curve. You can safely ignore them if they don’t fit your workflows at the moment. Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial to start, but you find you get a bad taste early if you don't learn how to adapt both your workflow and its workflow. It is easy to get a trivially good resu…
"There's no learning curve" just means this guy didn't get very far up, which is definitely backed up by thinking that Copilot and other tools are all basically the same.
> "There's no learning curve" just means this guy didn't get very far up
Not everyone with a different opinion is dumber than you.
Re: The current state of LLM-driven development
#20Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial. There is no learning curve. You can safely ignore them if they don’t fit your workflows at the moment. I have never heard anybody successfully using LLMs say this before. Most of what I've learned from talking to people about their workflows is counterintuitive and subtle. It's a really weird way to open up an article concluding that LLMs make one a worse prog…
Pianists' results are well known to be proportional to their talent/effort. In open source hardly anyone is even using LLMs and the ones that do have barely any output, In many cases less output than they had before using LLMs.
The blogging output on the other hand ...