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GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

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Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#31

Post by Groxx »

SoftTalker wrote: post #17

Haven’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.

yeah, tbh I think that even if they are the cat's pajamas and they end up taking over absolutely all text-based work everywhere and literally everyone agrees they're better at it than humans...

... the current state-of-the-art won't be what we use, and the prompts people are spending tons of time crafting now will be useless.

so I don't think there's all that much FOMO to F over. either the hype bubble pops or literally everyone in those trades will be starting over with brand new skills based on whatever was developed in the past 6 months. people who rode the wave will have something like 6 months of advantage...

... and their advantage will quickly be put into GPTs and new users won't need to learn that either ("you are a seasoned GPT user writing a prompt..."). unless you worry endlessly about Roko's Basilisk, it's kinda ignorable I think. either way you still need to develop non-GPT skills to be able to judge the output, so you might as well focus on that.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#32

Post by solarkraft »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #11

I 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.

> Using, like, gpt-4o is extremely not useful for programming

I disagree! It can produce great results for well defined tasks. And I love the “I like this idea, now implement it in VSCode” flow ChatGPT desktop provides on macOS.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#33

Post by kaashif »

martinald wrote: post #20

I'm completely equally lost the other way. I've went through multiple phases of LLM usage for development. GPT3.5 era: wow this is amazing, oh. everything is hallucinated. not actually as useful as I first thought GPT4 era: very helpful as stackoverflow on steroids. Claude 3.5 Sonnet: have it open pretty much all the time, constantly asking questions and getting it to generate simple code (in the web UI) when it goes…

Yeah, as a primarily backend engineer dealing with either weird technical problems Claude can't get quite right or esoteric business domain problems Claude has no idea about (and indeed, it may be only a few people in one company could help with) - Claude isn't that useful.

But random stuff like make a web app that automates this thing or make an admin panel with auto complete on these fields and caching data pulled from this table.

It is like infinity times faster on this tedious boilerplate because some of this stuff I'd just have never done before.

Or I'd have needed to get some headcount in some web dev team to do it, but I just don't need to. Not that I'd have ever actually bothered to do that anyway...

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#34

Post by throwawaysleep »

martinald wrote: post #20

I'm completely equally lost the other way. I've went through multiple phases of LLM usage for development. GPT3.5 era: wow this is amazing, oh. everything is hallucinated. not actually as useful as I first thought GPT4 era: very helpful as stackoverflow on steroids. Claude 3.5 Sonnet: have it open pretty much all the time, constantly asking questions and getting it to generate simple code (in the web UI) when it goes…

> while I was watching TV

This to me is one of the real benefits. I can vibe code watching TV. I can vibe code in bed. I can vibe code on the plane waiting for takeoff with GitHub Copilot Agents.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#35

Post by Barrin92 »

I spend a fair amount of time on open source and one thing I noticed is that in real pieces of software it doesn't look like all these 10x and 100x AI engineers are anywhere to be found.

VLC has like 4000 open issues. Why aren't the AI geniuses fixing these? Nobody has ever any actual code to show, and if they do it's "here's an LED that blinks every time my dog farts, I could've never done it on my own!". I'm feeling like Charlie in that episode of It's Always Sunny with his conspiracy dashboard. All these productivity gurus don't actually exist in the real world.

Can anybody show me their coding agent workflow on a 50k LOC C codebase instead of throwaway gimmick examples? As far as I'm concerned these things can't even understand pointers

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#36

Post by VladVladikoff »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #34
martinald wrote: post #20

I'm completely equally lost the other way. I've went through multiple phases of LLM usage for development. GPT3.5 era: wow this is amazing, oh. everything is hallucinated. not actually as useful as I first thought GPT4 era: very helpful as stackoverflow on steroids. Claude 3.5 Sonnet: have it open pretty much all the time, constantly asking questions and getting it to generate simple code (in the web UI) when it goes…

> while I was watching TV This to me is one of the real benefits. I can vibe code watching TV. I can vibe code in bed. I can vibe code on the plane waiting for takeoff with GitHub Copilot Agents.

To me this is sad. I love programming. It was always a fun job. I don’t want to watch TV instead of programming.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#37

Post by dbalatero »

8organicbits wrote: post #23
jackdawed wrote: post #8

One 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.

I've seen comparisons to gambling before (activating reward centers, sometimes it pays out big, etc), but couldn't find the article when I searched.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#38

Post by martinald »

kaashif wrote: post #33
martinald wrote: post #20

I'm completely equally lost the other way. I've went through multiple phases of LLM usage for development. GPT3.5 era: wow this is amazing, oh. everything is hallucinated. not actually as useful as I first thought GPT4 era: very helpful as stackoverflow on steroids. Claude 3.5 Sonnet: have it open pretty much all the time, constantly asking questions and getting it to generate simple code (in the web UI) when it goes…

Yeah, as a primarily backend engineer dealing with either weird technical problems Claude can't get quite right or esoteric business domain problems Claude has no idea about (and indeed, it may be only a few people in one company could help with) - Claude isn't that useful. But random stuff like make a web app that automates this thing or make an admin panel with auto complete on these fields and caching data pulled…

One thing I'd recommend for weird business domain projects as a starter is getting it to create a "wiki" of markdown files of all the logic (I suspect this may have been on your to-do list anyway!). You may be pleasantly surprised at how well it does it, and then you can update your claude.md file to point to them (or even put it in there, but it is maybe overkill).

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#39

Post by dbalatero »

tyfighter wrote: post #28
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #11

I 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.

I agree with your comment, but I also chuckled a bit, because Neovim _is_ a fast changing ecosystem with plugins coming out to replace previous plugins all the time, and tons of config tweakers pushing things to the limit. That said… one does not have to replace their working Neovim setup just because new stuff came out. (And of course, minimalist vim users don't use any plugins!)

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#40

Post by 8organicbits »

avalys wrote: post #9

I 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…

> all the bullshit involved in starting a new code base

Have you looked at cookiecutter or other template repos? That's my go to for small projects and it works pretty well. I'd worry the LLM would add bugs that a template repo wouldn't, as the latter is usually heavily reviewed human written code.

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