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GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

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Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#101

Post by anonzzzies »

DGCA wrote: post #86
jvanderbot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm convinced the vast difference in outcome with LLM use is a product of the vast difference in jobs. For front end work it's just amazing. Spits out boilerplate and makes alterations without any need of help. For domain specific backend, for example robotics, it's bad. Tries to puke bespoke a-star, or invents libraries and functions. I'm way better off hand coding these things. The problem is this is classic Gell M…

Frontend dev for 13+ years here. In my experience it’s pretty bad at anything but basic frontend stuff. I’ve tried all the models, editors, Claude code etc. It’s constantly wrong about the simplest things. Just now it was hallucinating about CSS grid properties. I’m convinced that how good AI seems is inversely correlated to someone’s knowledge in that domain, as you also mentioned. Still super useful in my day to da…

I am very bad at frontend and I know frontend peeps keep saying claude/llms are bad at it, but now, for the first time in my 40 year career, I deliver frontend that are looking better and functioning better than whatever I see in hip products people 'designed with love in blah'. And our clients agree. If the css is correct or not, I don't know as I never really found the energy to learn it and now I don't need to and can focus on the business logic. The endresults look and work phenomenal: not sure why I would care if the css is the best. Especially nice when I have been using something for a long time and some things I always found lacking: now I add them in in minutes: auto completion here, move creation inline there, add drag and drop: ah but on mobile make it like that. Everything just works and in hours vs days or weeks it was before.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#102

Post by crnkofe »

I rarely use LLMs nowadays. Most of the time I'm fixing difficult to debug issues spanning multiple projects and a variety of backend systems and there's just no easy way to plug them to all this spaghetti. Autocomplete also spews out complete BS and was the first thing I disabled.

I did find they very useful when writing completely new stuff (things like "write a It'd be nice to hear in detail how its been useful for other devs. There's too much propaganda around on how amazing it is and not nearly enough use cases.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#103

Post by Derbasti »

jvanderbot wrote: post #44
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…

I'm convinced the vast difference in outcome with LLM use is a product of the vast difference in jobs. For front end work it's just amazing. Spits out boilerplate and makes alterations without any need of help. For domain specific backend, for example robotics, it's bad. Tries to puke bespoke a-star, or invents libraries and functions. I'm way better off hand coding these things. The problem is this is classic Gell M…

This rings true to me, but I'm not a frontend dev. So I'm not a good judge if what makes good frontend code. Where I do know my stuff, I'm not at all impressed by LLM code.

So perhaps LLMs are just entry level devs in general. Who can't learn. Who won't ever gain seniority. It would make sense, after all, they were trained on the Internet and Stack Overflow, which is mostly filled with entry level questions and answers.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#104

Post by tomduncalf »

mort96 wrote: post #69
bionhoward wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursor has a privacy mode with zero data retention and no training

And you're working in a context where you're comfortable shipping all your (employer's? client's?) code to some random US company based on their promises?

If you work for a large org you’ll have some kind of enterprise agreement in place guaranteeing this. I can’t imagine they’d risk violating it regardless, the outcry could ruin them

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#105

Post by thrown-0825 »

tyfighter wrote: post #24

You'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.

it really only works for problem domains saturated with medium blogspam and youtube tutorials.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#106

Post by mort96 »

tomduncalf wrote: post #104
mort96 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're working in a context where you're comfortable shipping all your (employer's? client's?) code to some random US company based on their promises?

If you work for a large org you’ll have some kind of enterprise agreement in place guaranteeing this. I can’t imagine they’d risk violating it regardless, the outcry could ruin them

If you work for a large org which has an official AI policy and agreements, sure. In those cases there is no problem; you're sending your employer's code to these companies in compliance with your employer's policy.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#107

Post by iamben »

socalgal2 wrote: post #94
dnh44 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

> I haven't had this much fun programming I'm glad you're having fun. I wish I was having fun. I've had mixed results but quite often, for me, the GPT goes off the rails and does something completely stupid. It then doubles down. It's like talking to complete idiot who happens to have moments of lucidiy. If I get lucky and get a lucid response it's great. But so often I get the nonsense response. I mean literally as…

A couple of things that really helped me (Claude is my choice for coding):

- add to your global settings a few lines that say something like "don't write any code until you fully understand my requirements, ask questions until you are completely clear", this mostly stops it just going ahead and writing best guess just the first time. And then,

- when it looks it's going off the rails, cut your loses straight away and ask it to write a prompt for another chat. Tell it to cover everything it knows about what you're working on and what you want to do. Paste that into the new chat and get it to ask if it needs clarification (and then if needed, paste between the two chats). The new chat often solves the problem the other one was stuck on first time.

Hope they help - coding with AI has made me enjoy the process once again. I'm actually completely silly projects I've always wanted to do because I can get past the blockers so much more easily.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#108

Post by ath3nd »

rediscovery wrote: post #93
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I 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…

Behavioral psychology goes a long way in explaining the weird distribution of responses to using LLMs to generate code: "Gambling-like behavior in pigeons: ‘jackpot’ signals promote maladaptive risky choice" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06641-x The tech industry is actively promoting gambling addiction and the scary thing is that people are willingly walking into that trap. Take a look at this comment:…

Very insightful.

You are not alone: https://rgoldfinger.com/blog/2025-07-26-claude-code-is-a-slo...

> Are we at the point of doing rain dances for these models and describing the moves as "counterintuitive and sublte"

Yes, we are. LLM cultists can downvote as much as they like, but the reality is that with all the incantations and coaxing, we not only don't see a positive effect, we see a net negative effect on the quality of our software. On the ground level of OSS we are drowning in AI generated slop: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/15/curl_creator_mulls_ni...

On the enterprise level we are creating more and worse code, faster. In the news, we are generating more and worse and factually wrong articles, faster. In our personal lives, guided by our sycophantic LLMs assistants, we offload more and more cognitive chores, becoming dumber and dumber.

LLM-produced slop is like the plastic of text: cheap and easy to use and proliferate, and then 40 years later you realize it's everywhere in the environment and in your brain, and that it's toxic to all life.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#109

Post by Terr_ »

rediscovery wrote: post #93
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I 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…

Behavioral psychology goes a long way in explaining the weird distribution of responses to using LLMs to generate code: "Gambling-like behavior in pigeons: ‘jackpot’ signals promote maladaptive risky choice" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06641-x The tech industry is actively promoting gambling addiction and the scary thing is that people are willingly walking into that trap. Take a look at this comment:…

"Gambling pathologies: It's not just for end-users anymore!"™

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#110

Post by mavamaarten »

anonzzzies wrote: post #101
DGCA wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frontend dev for 13+ years here. In my experience it’s pretty bad at anything but basic frontend stuff. I’ve tried all the models, editors, Claude code etc. It’s constantly wrong about the simplest things. Just now it was hallucinating about CSS grid properties. I’m convinced that how good AI seems is inversely correlated to someone’s knowledge in that domain, as you also mentioned. Still super useful in my day to da…

I am very bad at frontend and I know frontend peeps keep saying claude/llms are bad at it, but now, for the first time in my 40 year career, I deliver frontend that are looking better and functioning better than whatever I see in hip products people 'designed with love in blah'. And our clients agree. If the css is correct or not, I don't know as I never really found the energy to learn it and now I don't need to and…

I agree to a point. But I also would like to point out how alarming your take is.

I mean you can easily compare this to trades and construction. Would you want a house that's built in a week by cheap foreign workers that don't know what they're doing? The end result looks great on the outside, and you can always let some other cheap worker fix some issues you're having! The electricity works! Until it doesn't and a fire breaks out.

I get it - the hype is based around the quick gains you can absolutely have. The gains are insane, I have been able to be more productive at boilerplate and repetitive tasks too. But just building software isn't hard. Building software that lasts, building software that is rock solid, efficient and maintainable, that's hard!

It's sickening to me how quickly people want to throw that in the garbage. All because it saves a few $ in development time, quality is suddenly a metric that is completely ignored, rather than weighed in.

It's going to bite people in the ass.

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