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The current state of LLM-driven development

blog.tolki.dev

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Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#32
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I'm not a native speaker, but to me that quote doesn't necessarily imply an inability of OP to get up the curve. Maybe they just mean that the curve can look flat at the start?

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#33
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The amount of misconceptions in this comment are quite profound. Copilot isn't an LLM, for a start. You _combine_ it wil a selection of LLMs. And it absolutely has severe limitations compared to something like Claude Code in how it can interact with the programming environment. "Hallucinations" are far less of a problem with software that grounds the AI to the truth in your compiler, diagnostics, static analysis, a r…

>Copilot isn't an LLM, for a start

You're being overly pedantic here and moving goalposts. Copilot (for coding) without an LLM is pretty useless.

I stand by my assertion that these tools are all basically the same fundamental tech - LLMs.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#34
Personally, I’ve had a pretty positive experience with the coding assistants, but I had to spend some time to develop intuition for the types of tasks they’re likely to do well. I would not say that this was trivial to do.

Like if you need to crap out a UI based on a JSON payload, make a service call, add a server endpoint, LLMs will typically do this correctly in one shot. These are common operations that are easily extrapolated from their training data. Where they tend to fail are tasks like business logic which have specific requirements that aren’t easily generalized.

I’ve also found that writing the scaffolding for the code yourself really helps focus the agent. I’ll typically add stubs for the functions I want, and create overall code structure, then have the agent fill the blanks. I’ve found this is a really effective approach for preventing the agent from going off into the weeds.

I also find that if it doesn’t get things right on the first shot, the chances are it’s not going to fix the underlying problems. It tends to just add kludges on top to address the problems you tell it about. If it didn’t get it mostly right at the start, then it’s better to just do it yourself.

All that said, I find enjoyment is an important aspect as well and shouldn’t be dismissed. If you’re less productive, but you enjoy the process more, then I see that as a net positive. If all LLMs accomplish is to make development more fun, that’s a good thing.

I also find that there's use for both terminal based tools and IDEs. The terminal REPL is great for initially sketching things out, but IDE based tooling makes it much easier to apply selective changes exactly where you want.

As a side note, got curious and asked GLM-4.5 to make a token field widget with React, and it did it in one shot.

It's also strange not to mention DeepSeek and GLM as options given that they cost orders of magnitude less per token than Claude or Gemini.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#35
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

No, it's sometimes just extremely easy to recognize people who have no idea what they're talking about when they make certain claims.

Just like I can recognize a clueless frontend developer when they say "React is basically just a newer jquery". Recognizing clueless engineers when they talk about AI can be pretty easy.

It's a sector that is both old and new: AI has been around forever, but even people who worked in the sector years ago are taken aback by what is suddenly possible, the workflows that are happening... hell, I've even seen cases where it's the very people who have been following GenAI forever that have a bias towards believing it's incapable of what it can do.

For context, I lead an AI R&D lab in Europe (https://ingram.tech/). I've seen some shit.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#36
post #23
post #8

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. 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 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. Because for all our posturing about being skeptical and data driven we all believe in magic. Those "counterintuitive non-trivial workflows"? They work about as well as just prompting "implement X" with no rules, agents.md, careful lists etc. Becau…

On top of this a lot of the “learning to work with LLMs” is breaking down tasks into small pieces with clear instructions and acceptance criteria. That’s just part of working efficiently but maybe don’t want to be bothered to do it.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#37
> By being particularly bad at anything outside of the most popular languages and frameworks, LLMs force you to pick a very mainstream stack if you want to be efficient.

I haven't found that to be true with my most recent usage of AI. I do a lot of programming in D, which is not popular like Python or Javascript, but Copilot knows it well enough to help me with things like templates, metaprogramming, and interoperating with GCC-produced DLL's on Windows. This is true in spite of the lack of a big pile of training data for these tasks. Importantly, it gets just enough things wrong when I ask it to write code for me that I have to understand everything well enough to debug it.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#39
"LLMs won’t magically make you deliver production-ready code"

Either I'm extremely lucky or I was lucky to find the guy who said it must all be test driven and guided by the usual principles of DRY etc. Claude Code works absolutely fantastically nine out of 10 times and when it doesn't we just roll back the three hours of nonsense it did postpone this feature or give it extra guidance.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#40
I have not tried every IDE/CLI or models, only a few, mostly Claude and Qwen.

I work mostly in C/C++.

The most valuable improvement of using this kind of tools, for me, is to easily find help when I have to work on boring/tedious tasks or when I want to have a Socratic conversation about a design idea with a not-so-smart but extremely knowledgeable colleague.

But for anything requiring a brain, it is almost useless.

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