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GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

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Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#111

Post by dreadnip »

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 guess the main takeaway is that you don’t care about the quality of the generated code. The end result is all that matters.

If I ask it to “add drag & drop”, I already know in my mind what the correct code should look like, because I’ve implemented it many times in the past. LLMs just never deliver the -code- that I want. The end result might look ok and the drag & drop will work, but the code will be atrocious and on first glance I can pick out 10-20 mistakes that I’ll have to ask it to fix. And even if I ask for a fix, I’ll never get the same code quality as hand written code. And how can I push this kind of sub-par code to an employer’s repo when I know that I can (and should) write better quality code myself. This is what I’m being paid for right?

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#112

Post by ath3nd »

calrain wrote: post #42
throwawa14223 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I get your position, and I don't want to sound dismissive, but when you really learn how to manage an LLM for a complex piece of software far beyond what you have time for, you see the benefits. Try

> LLM for a complex piece of software far beyond what you have time for, you see the benefits.

Are LLMs the new Agile/Scrum?

"Once you really learn Scrum, it will solve all world problems and clean your house? Your experience is totally different? Skill issue. Try again."

I get your position and don't want to sound dismissive either, however I want to point out that in the only recent study actually trying to measure the productivity gains of LLMs it was observed that there is an actual 19% reduction of gains for experienced developers when using an LLM.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

I asked an LLM to tell me why it "thinks" you observe an increase of productivity while studies show that for experienced developers it's a decrease, and it came up with the following "ideas":

"LLMs Fill Gaps in Knowledge Instantly. Junior developers often face friction from:

- Unfamiliar syntax

- Unclear documentation

- Uncertainty about best practices"

Again, I don't want to sound dismissive, but have you considered that instead of people not seeing the gains you are talking about due to a skills issue with how to fine prompt LLMs, that it's you seeing gains you wouldn't otherwise had you been more skillful?

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#113

Post by sanderhnoj »

hckrfucrs wrote: post #57
calrain wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your position, and I don't want to sound dismissive, but when you really learn how to manage an LLM for a complex piece of software far beyond what you have time for, you see the benefits. Try

I have lost a few friends to llm sycophancy induced psychosis wherein they believe, and are encouraged to believe by the llm that, they are the sole individuals who have cracked "prompting", and, in fact, by so doing, have summoned the singularity for their sole benefit and under their sole control. You sound exactly like them.

Unsure if OP's friend, but this comment reminded me of this viral post:

https://xcancel.com/GeoffLewisOrg/status/1945212979173097560

> A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say "I find it kind of disturbing even to watch it."

From https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#114

Post by 000ooo000 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #35

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 feelin…

You only have to look at the C# GitHub repos where MS enabled Copilot, and the utter ridiculousness of those interactions between the likes of Stephen Toub and the bot. It's comical.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#115

Post by anonzzzies »

mavamaarten wrote: post #110
anonzzzies wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Nah, I specifically said HTML/CSS; I don't think crap CSS (if it works and is fast) will make the world a worse place. I don't include any logic/code into this take, just design/layout/ux. And in my workplace that's also the markup stuff that gets rewritten the most, so it's throw-away anyway compared to the backend stuff (we have code running that's well over 20 years old on the backend; frontend is 1-3 years).

I agree with you we should have quality standard, but I also think it's 100% inevitable that this will all go out the window, in most companies and if that happens, our asses will be bitten.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#116

Post by andrepd »

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…

> Another example - you can tell it things like “implement comparison operators for this class”, and it’s done in 5 seconds.

Wow, it can do the same thing as a derive macro, but only sometimes, and it only takes 10,000x as long and 100,000x as much power :)

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#117

Post by aprilfoo »

I learned that the core of science and engineering is the ability to understand and control the systems that we build. This obviously involves complex tools, that need to be mastered too. Modern AI seems to be able to achieve results bypassing this basic principle, like magic: what can go wrong?

So i cannot take seriously the gods in the art of the prompt claiming that they can watch TV while the code writes itself. But i believe that those who are already good in their domain can do a better job with such powerful tools, when they can master them too.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#118

Post by gndk »

iamben wrote: post #107
socalgal2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm having good results with similar stuff, but not sure about the best approach. What exactly do you mean by "your global settings"? Do you have a global CLAUDE.md file? Or do you do this via the UserPromptSubmit hook and return an additionalContext? I use this hook to constantly reinforce some things, like "be concise. use context7." It even works to put "ultrathink" in there to always have it in thinking mode. But I wonder if these constant reminders are overdoing it.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#119

Post by sanderhnoj »

thrown-0825 wrote: post #82
hckrfucrs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have lost a few friends to llm sycophancy induced psychosis wherein they believe, and are encouraged to believe by the llm that, they are the sole individuals who have cracked "prompting", and, in fact, by so doing, have summoned the singularity for their sole benefit and under their sole control. You sound exactly like them.

You sound like the child of a psychotherapist.

[dead]

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#120

Post by xorcist »

bionhoward wrote: post #62
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a hobby project that seems fine, but for commercially valuable work how do you handle privacy concerns?

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

What does that mean in practice? Will you get your money back if they do?
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