GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
whynothugo.nl
GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
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Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#2I think what people are missing is that they work sometimes and sometimes they don't work.
People think "Oh, it works better when somebody else does it" or "There must be some model that does better than the one I am using" or "If I knew how to prompt better I'd get better results" or "There must be some other agentic IDE which is better than the one I am using."
All those things might be true but they just change the odds, they don't change the fact that it works sometimes and fails other times.
For instance I asked an agent to write me a screen to display some well-typed data. It came up with something great right away that was missing some fields and had some inconsistent formatting but it fixed all those problems when I mentioned them -- all speaking the language of product managers and end users. The code quality was just great, as good as if I wrote it, maybe better.
Plenty of times it doesn't work out like that.
I was working on some code where I didn't really understand the typescript types and fed it the crazy error messages I was getting and it made a try to understand them and didn't really, I used it as a "rubber duck" over the course of a day or two and working with it I eventually came to understand what was wrong and how to fix and I got into a place that I like and when there is an error I can understand it and it can understand it too.
Sometimes it writes something that doesn't typecheck and I tell it to run tsc and fix the errors and sometimes it does a job I am proud of and other times it adds lame typeguards like
if (x && typeof x === "object") x.someMethod()
You might be able to somewhat tame this randomness with better techniques but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and if I just told you about the good times or just told you about the bad times it would be a very different story.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#3Well, it takes a while to learn Vim and then get value from it.
It also takes a while to learn using an LLM and get value from it.
The keys are how to build prompts, ways of working, and guidelines that help the AI stay focused.
You end up spending much more time guiding and coaching rather than coding, that can take a while to get used to.
Eventually though, you will master it and be able to write secure, fast code far beyond what you could have done by yourself.
Note: Also, prep yourself for incoming hate every time you make claims like that! If you write bad code, it's your fault. If your LLM writes bad code, you're a moron! hah
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#4I really wish posts like this included the parameters that they were using. What model? What was the question? How many shots? Etc etc
You’re going to get vastly different responses if you’re using Opus versus 4o.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#5The worst thing is when LLMs introduce subtle bugs into code and one just can't spot them quickly. I was recently doing some Langfuse integration and used Cursor to generate skeleton code for pushing some traces/scores quickly. The generated code included one parameter "score_id" that was undocumented in Langfuse but somehow was accepted and messed the whole tracking up. Even after multiple passes of debugging I couldn't figure out what the issue with tracking was, until I asked another LLM to find any possible issues with the code, that promptly marked those score_id lines.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#6I really wish posts like this included the parameters that they were using. What model? What was the question? How many shots? Etc etc You’re going to get vastly different responses if you’re using Opus versus 4o.
Do you really?
Frontier models seems remarkably similar in performance.
Yeah some nuances for sure, but the whole article could apply to every model.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#7I find myself on both sides actually.
I did have some great luck producing quite useful and impactful code. But also lost time chasing tiny changes.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#8One blogpost I found on HN completely leveled up how I use LLMs for coding: https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/
Having the AI ask me questions and think about the PRD/spec ultimately made me a better system designer.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#9I have a degree in CS from MIT and did professional software engineering from 2004 - 2020.
I recently started a company in another field and haven’t done any real development for about 4 years.
Earlier this summer I took a vacation and decided to start a small software hobby project specific to my industry. I decided to try out Cursor for the first time.
I found it incredibly helpful at saving time implementing all the bullshit involved in starting a new code base - setting up a build system, looking up libraries and APIs, implementing a framework for configuration and I/O, etc.
Yes, I still had to do some of the hard parts myself, and (probably most relevant) I still had to understand the code it was writing and correct it when it went down the wrong direction. I literally just told Cursor “No, why do it that way when you could do it much simpler by X”, and usually it fixed it.
A few times, after writing a bunch of code myself, I compiled the project for the first time in a while and (as one does) ran into a forest of inscrutable C++ template errors. Rather than spend my time scrolling through all of them I just told cursor “fix the compile errors”, and sure enough, it did it.
Another example - you can tell it things like “implement comparison operators for this class”, and it’s done in 5 seconds.
As the project got more complicated, I found it super useful to write tests for behaviors I wanted, and just tell it “make this test pass”. It really does a decent job of understanding the codebase and adding onto it like a junior developer would.
Using an IDE that gives it access to your whole codebase (including build system and tests) is key. Using ChatGPT standalone and pasting stuff in is not where the value is.
It’s nowhere near able to do the entire project from scratch, but it saved me from a bunch of tedious work that I don’t enjoy anyway.
Seems valuable enough to me!
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#10I have a degree in CS from MIT and did professional software engineering from 2004 - 2020. I recently started a company in another field and haven’t done any real development for about 4 years. Earlier this summer I took a vacation and decided to start a small software hobby project specific to my industry. I decided to try out Cursor for the first time. I found it incredibly helpful at saving time implementing all t…
Last summer I came back to software after about 12 years away and I pretty much had an identical experience to you with using AI as a helper to come back. I've now spent the last 6 months coding as much as I can in between consulting gigs. I'm not sure if I would have been able to get caught up so quickly without AI.
I haven't had this much fun programming since I was at university hacking away on sun workstations, but admittedly I only write about 10% of the code myself these days.
I'm currently getting Claude Code to pair program with GPT-5 and they delegate the file edits to Gemini Flash. It's pretty cool.