I know the argument I'm going to make is not original, but with every passing week, it's becoming more obvious that if the productivity claims were even half true, those "1000x" LLM shamans would have toppled the economy by now. Were are the slop-coded billion dollar IPOs? We should have one every other week.
How I write software with LLMs
71–80 of 544 posts
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#72In the plethora of all these articles that explain the process of building projects with LLMs, one thing I never understood it why the authors seem to write the prompts as if talking to a human that cares how good their grammar or syntax is, e.g.:
> I'd like to add email support to this bot. Let's think through how we would do this.
and I'm not not even talking about the usage of "please" or "thanks" (which this particular author doesn't seem to be doing).
Is there any evidence that suggests the models do a better job if I write my prompt like this instead of "wanna add email support, think how to do this"? In my personal experience (mostly with Junie) I haven't seen any advantage of being "polite", for lack of a better word, and I feel like I'm saving on seconds and tokens :)
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#73I'm not sure the notion I keep seeing of "it's ok, we still architect, it just writes the code"(paraphrased) sits well with me. I've not tested it with architecting a full system, but assuming it isn't good at it today... it's only a matter of time. Then what is our use?
> Then what is our use? You will have to find new economic utility. That's the reality of technological progress - it's just that the tech and white collar industries didn't think it can come for them! A skill that becomes obsoleted is useless, obviously. There's still room for artisanal/handcrafted wares today, amidst the industrial scale productions, so i would assume similar levels for coding.
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Re: How I write software with LLMs
#74Genuine question: what's the evidence that the architect → developer → reviewer pipeline actually produces better results than just... talking to one strong model in one session? The author uses different models for each role, which I get. But I run production agents on Opus daily and in my experience, if you give it good context and clear direction in a single conversation, the output is already solid. The ceremony…
In machine learning, ensembles of weaker models can outperform a single strong model because they have different distributions of errors. Machine learning models tend to have more pronounced bias in their design than LLMs though.
So to me it makes sense to have models with different architecture/data/post training refine each other's answers. I have no idea whether adding the personas would be expected to make a difference though.
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what's the evidence What’s the evidence for anything software engineers use? Tests, type checkers, syntax highlighting, IDEs, code review, pair programming, and so on. In my experience, evidence for the efficacy of software engineering practices falls into two categories: - the intuitions of developers, based in their experiences. - scientific studies, which are unconvincing. Some are unconvincing because they atte…
My friend, there’s tons of evidence of all that stuff you talked about in hundreds of papers on arxiv. But you dismiss it entirely in your second bullet point, so I’m not entirely sure what you expect.
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Re: How I write software with LLMs
#76Agent bots are the new “TODO” list apps. Seems cool and all, but I wish I could see someone writing useful software with LLMs, at least once.
So much power in our hands, and soon another Facebook will appear built entirely by LLMs. What a fucking waste of time and money.
It’s getting tiring.
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#77In the plethora of all these articles that explain the process of building projects with LLMs, one thing I never understood it why the authors seem to write the prompts as if talking to a human that cares how good their grammar or syntax is, e.g.: > I'd like to add email support to this bot. Let's think through how we would do this. and I'm not not even talking about the usage of "please" or "thanks" (which this part…
Because some people like to be polite? Is it this hard to understand? Your hand-written prompts are unlikely to take significant chunk of context window anyway.
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#78[flagged]
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#79I write very little code these days, so I've been following the AI development mostly from the backseat. One aspect I fail to grasp perfectly is what the practical differences are between CLI (so terminal-based) agents and ones fully integrated into an IDE. Could someone chime in and give their opinion on what are the pros and cons of either approach?
For me, I use an IDE if I plan to look at the code.
So, to you basically the distinction is "fully vibe-coded" vs. "with human in the loop"?
Re: How I write software with LLMs
#80In the plethora of all these articles that explain the process of building projects with LLMs, one thing I never understood it why the authors seem to write the prompts as if talking to a human that cares how good their grammar or syntax is, e.g.: > I'd like to add email support to this bot. Let's think through how we would do this. and I'm not not even talking about the usage of "please" or "thanks" (which this part…
Because some people like to be polite? Is it this hard to understand? Your hand-written prompts are unlikely to take significant chunk of context window anyway.
Polite to whom?