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GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

whynothugo.nl

121–130 of 226 posts

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#121
post #112
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

> 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…

This corroborates my observation that the people I've seen most excited about LLMs are management types who know how to code but not really. They love to talk about how productive LLMs make them. I think the alleged increased productivity is just in their heads.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#122

I hate AIs because I think overall they're bad for the environment, centralizes power, and worsen quality. That said I never really doubted that they can help you get more done. I use it occasionally to refactor or generate some boilerplate. But very often though I need to rewrite most of the functionality, I find it more true the more code it generates. The agentic stuff I've tried have been terrible. Yeah I persona…

You sound like me. I've found some good uses for them generating ansible files for example (the output is regularly wrong, even with the latest and greatest model, but easy enough to correct). But otherwise, there always seems to be a cutoff in the complexity of a project where the ROI of just having to have built everything myself, and thus being completely immersed in the codebase, seems like it would have been muc…

Yeah I agree, it's also so sad to have a future where we're dependent on giant US-based companies for all our thinking.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have had multiple conversations with the cursor devs on their discord about this and there is no way to verify those claims, or even that they respect your ignore rules for secrets.

Yes its an accident waiting to happen Eventually they will get hacked

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#124
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…

These are some of the things I do to try and get good results:

- I prime the context of the LLM with any extra rules or instructions I want it to follow.

- I also prime the context with every single file it needs to see in order to be able to do its job properly. Sometimes this can be two files but sometimes it can be 15 files.

- I instruct the LLM in bullet point format for smaller edits. For larger edits I ask the llm to convert my prompt to markdown. Most of my prompts are created by an LLM

- In 90% of cases I only prompt once per chat, and start a new chat each time. Unless I'm using an agent like Claude Code in which case I use one context window per feature.

- I keep notes of small things that it's done not quite how I want so I can go back and change them.

- I use a program called RepoPrompt to make all this faster and easier.

I'm working on making a game right now and this was the last prompt I did last night. The prompt itself was written by Opus and the implementation was done by GPT-5 High. The actual file edits were performed by Gemini 2.5 Flash to save on API costs.

--- Prompt from Opus:

I need to implement a GameTick event bus system for Ionforge. This will add:

1. A new GameTick model (Sendable, Codable, Hashable) with turnNumber, secondsUntilNextTick, and inGameDateTime

2. A GameTickEvents enum following the pattern of OreInventoryEvents using Combine PassthroughSubject

3. A GameTimerService protocol with tickPublisher, start(), and stop()

4. A MockGameTimerService that generates ticks every 600 seconds using Task.sleep

5. Modify GameServiceActor to own the timer service, subscribe to it, broadcast to GameTickEvents, and cache latestTick

6. Modify PlayerServiceActor to subscribe to GameTickEvents and cache latestTick

The goal is to create an event-driven tick system that can later be swapped from mock to real API. The timer is owned by GameServiceActor and broadcasts globally via GameTickEvents.

Please implement these changes following the existing patterns in the codebase, particularly matching the OreInventoryEvents pattern for the event bus.

--- Response from GPT-5 High:

- Create a new GameTick model (Sendable, Codable, Hashable) with turnNumber, secondsUntilNextTick, and inGameDateTime.

- Add a GameTickEvents enum mirroring the existing OreInventoryEvents pattern (Combine PassthroughSubject).

- Define a GameTimerService protocol that exposes a Combine publisher and start/stop controls.

- Implement MockGameTimerService using Task.sleep to emit ticks every 600 seconds.

- Update GameServiceActor to:

  - own a GameTimerService (mock by default),

  - subscribe to its publisher,

  - broadcast via GameTickEvents,

  - cache the latest tick.
- Update PlayerServiceActor to subscribe to global GameTickEvents and cache the latest tick.

- Keep edits targeted and minimal using delegate edit scopes, with proper Combine imports.

---

GPT-5 then outputted about 120 lines of code across 7 files that compiled and worked on the first try.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#125
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This corroborates my observation that the people I've seen most excited about LLMs are management types who know how to code but not really . They love to talk about how productive LLMs make them. I think the alleged increased productivity is just in their heads.

There are always gonna be those business that claim that LLMs/Scrum/NFTs/Crypto/web3 is the next coming of Jesus, and that's normal, their survival depends on that. There are also gonna be developers swearing by XYZ, either because it genuinely worked for them (causation is not correlation) or because they don't want to appear clueless in an industry that's vibe based and tells you that if you don't succeed using shiny tool XYZ, you are doing it wrong.

The same way it was modern in some companies to hire a dedicated Scrum master for a full time position within a team, I already can imagine companies having job openings for an "Expert LLM-prompter" (or, to make it sound more legit: "Staff LLM-prompt engineer"). Take it from the funny side: the companies obsessed about productivity and efficiency will most likely be staffed with 100s of scrum masters and 100s of prompt engineers and probably one or two guys that actually do the real work. That's kind of hilarious, you gotta admit.

The emperor has had no clothes for quite some time already, but vibes do be vibing, that's the society we live in. Don't worry, you are not alone in finding the hype hard to bear. I don't think LLMs will become irrelevant as fast or as much like crypto/web3/nfts and Meta's metaverse did, but to me the amount of shouting and clothes tearing for what's essentially a fancy autocomplete (fight me on this) is just such a turn off.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#126
post #118
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Bu…

Hey, fwiw I'm almost certainly not using Claude in the best possible way - I have a 'pro' (as in the ~$20 a month plan) and I just prompt. But in the 'Settings' section there's a bit that says: "What personal preferences should Claude consider in responses?" - I add stuff in there.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#127
post #31

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 litera…

One side effect of writing most of my code with an llm for the past six months is that I'm so much better at reading code I didn't write. It's also forced me to split my code up in smaller more modular files to make it easier for me to understand, which has the happy side effect of having a better designed system. It's counter intuitive but I think I've become a better programmer for it because it's forced me to level up my weaknesses.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 that it might not be reasonable to expect people to keep up with the latest. For this specific thing (LLM-assisted coding), we are still in nerd territory where there are tremendous gains to be had from keeping up and tinkering. There's a lot of billions dollars being invested to give devs who don't want to do this the right tools. We aren't quite there yet, largely because the frontier is moving so fast. I m…

I find that X and Discord are more useful than HN for trying to keep up to date. Which is a shame I think but it is what it is.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#129
post #112
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

> 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…

I think that in that study all but one of the devs had hardly any experience with using AI tools.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#130
> "anything beyond writing a simple function always leads to useless junk."

A strong statement like this was a reasonable take six months ago, perhaps. But with Claude Opus 4.1, o3-codex/gpt5, and Gemini Pro 2.5 this statement is pretty simply disproven with half an hour with them.

Just last week I spent an afternoon rewriting an old Android app that was done in butterknife and got something functional and tested in a few hours. It involved an 8,000 line diff. The work had been quoted to me by a contractor as likely to take 3-4 months and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

I designed a new website for my wife's band with a custom player widget, carousel photos, fully adaptive to large and small screens, good accessibility features, built from easy to edit JSON, SEO-optimized with microformats, and fast-loading. The first version I got running in 15 minutes. The final polished version took a few more days of ducking onto my laptop a few minutes here and there during an event. Without AI this would have taken me weeks to pull off and wouldn't have looked nearly as nice.

IMO part of the key to the flow here is to avoid a temptation to one shot. First establish ground rules for working together in your AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md that lays out your software engineering best principles (use git semantics, write out your plans, add lint and tests to commit hooks...). Then have it read through existing code and architecture. Then carefully put together an architecture and set of constraints into your README/PRD. Then build a high level engineering plan divided up into sequences tasks and write it down (vs just keeping in context). Only then do you allow any code to start to get written. And yes, you still need to supervise it (and iterate on your AGENTS/CLAUDE to avoid repeating yourself). But yeah, it's about 10-100x faster than me now with a flow like that. (Context on me: been programming 40 years, Stanford CS, ACM international programming competition finalist.)

This new flow is extremely fun and addictive. It's also a new thing that uses technical knowledge but isn't exactly the same thing as coding. It's like having a pool of hard working inexpensive idiot savant never-worked-in-industry interns at your beck and call - the more you pour into giving them context and process, the better results you are gonna get.

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