In the end, the greatest use I get from coding agents and stuff is hijacking the Stack Overflow principle - it's much easier to trick myself into correcting the poor code Claude generates than it is to start writing code from a blank slate.
GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
21–30 of 226 posts
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#22Haven’t even really tried them. The sand is shifting way too fast. Once things stabilize and other people figure out how to really use them I’ll probably start but for now it just feels like effort that will have been wasted.
All the models feel a bit different to use, and part of being good with LLMs (I suspect) is being able to assess a model before you really start using it, and, learning the nuances in the models that you will use, for that alone I think it's worth spending time with them.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#23One 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.
> This is working well NOW, it will probably not work in 2 weeks, or it will work twice as well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This all feels like spinning the roulette wheel. I sometimes wonder if AI proponents are just gamblers who had the unfortunate luck of winning the first few prompts.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#24You're (they're?) not alone. This mirrors every experience I've had trying to give them a chance. I worry that I'm just speaking another language at this point.
EDIT: Just to add context seeing other comments, I almost exclusively work in C++ on GPU drivers.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#25A lot of this is classic gaslighting. Gaslighting is the manipulation of someone into questioning their perception of reality (per Wikipedia).
Basically, a lot of people who are experts are being told this story and they think they are the only one who doesn't get it.
There are plenty of gains to be had with AI/LLMs but just not in the way it's typically marketed.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#26This exactly mirrors my experience. I can't see the whole LLM/GPT thing as anything but another blockchain level scam. It isn't zero value it is actually a negative value as the time it takes is an opportunity cost.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#27Well, 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…
So you're taking an easy task, formal logic, and replacing it with a more difficult and time consuming task, babysitting a random number generator. How is that a net-positive?
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#28I have a feeling this person is using far-from-frontier models, totally disconnected from the development environment. Using, like, gpt-4o is extremely not useful for programming. But using Claude Code in your actual repo is insanely useful. Gotta use the right tool + model.
How is anyone just supposed to know that? It's not hard to find vim, but no one says, "You need to be running this extra special vim development branch where people are pushing vim to the limits!" Yes, it's fragmented, and changing fast, but it's not reasonable to expect people just wanting a tool to be following the cutting edge.
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#29[dead]
Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
#30I 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 th…
>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…
My (not GP) intuitive answer would be hell no. Typescript messages are pretty hard to google and even parse manually and the LLM suggesting multiple approaches and ways to think about the problem does seem useful. It sometimes uncovers unknown unknowns you might never find otherwise.
I have had cases in which a web search and some good old fashioned thinking have yielded better results than using an LLM, but on average I’m pretty sure the LLM has the edge.