2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026 • Hacker News Board

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#61

Post by NichoPaolucci » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

deergomoo wrote: post #6

> As for documentation, I've found this simple instruction to vastly improve LLMs' output: > Never write READMEs, docstrings, or comments. I will write those myself later. And yes, I really mean this. This is quite validating as I came to the exact same conclusion myself. We’re required to use an LLM for every task at work that touches code†, and I was really struggling to get Claude to stop with the long waffly comm…

I'm in the same boat. We have very little documentation where I work, and one of my goals was to improve that as I got onboard. We have a newer dev that started ripping +3K, +5K, +10K line PRs against our documentation repository.

I have tried to shut it down, it immediately nullifies the docs and make it genuine slop.

I truly believe that documentation should be human written and human readable. It's all of the stuff that AI does NOT pick up on. Small inconsistencies, only the necessary details. IE: Don't just rewrite the code that we have into readable english (We are software developers after all. We can read code.) - comments / documentation to me has always been the "in between the lines" stuff that can't be put into the code.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#62

Post by Rustwerks » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

I've found a variant of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect with regards to LLM coding. They're really magical if you're not familiar with the language, domain, or frameworks you are trying to use. But if you're familiar with those things then you'll often catch them lying to your face and producing a lot of plausible nonsense.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#63

Post by geraneum » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

> Never write READMEs, docstrings, or comments. I will write those myself later. And yes, I really mean this.

The precise and rigorous practice of “engineering” in 2026.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#64

Post by robofanatic » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 8:33 PM UTC

I think LLMS have reached to a point where now its just about money. you have to decide whether you really want to spend your tokens to do X or you can just do it yourself and use the tokens for something else.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#65

Post by fibonacci112358 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 8:33 PM UTC

deergomoo wrote: post #6

> As for documentation, I've found this simple instruction to vastly improve LLMs' output: > Never write READMEs, docstrings, or comments. I will write those myself later. And yes, I really mean this. This is quite validating as I came to the exact same conclusion myself. We’re required to use an LLM for every task at work that touches code†, and I was really struggling to get Claude to stop with the long waffly comm…

I have the opposite problem with Code, it barely writes any comments even for fairly complex C++ code blocks (systems programming stuff), have to prompt it to add extra details about why it did something. Request in agents.md doesn't seem to help much.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#66

Post by kaffekaka » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 8:34 PM UTC

monknomo wrote: post #24

openasocket wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+10, I can't stand AI-generated comments. Half the time they are paragraph-length translations of every 5 lines of code into English prose, or just regurgitating whatever prompt they were given. When they actually try making high level comments they are worse than useless. It's really hard to put into words exactly why. It's something about how they are very verbose, but at the same time vague and stated in a slightl…

locally correct and globally incoherent is how they seem to me. I, and a number of folks I have talked to, find some of them incomprehensible. Like each sentence makes sense, but the overall thing does not.

I have the same impression. It is an interesting phenomenon. Is it one of the ways we will gradually learn that AI in the form of LLMs is fundamentally lacking?

I use AI all the time, it gives a tremendous boost in speed for many tasks and it is most certainly here to stay, but there is something off about certain things, like code comments. Like a weird person.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#67

Post by techpression » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 8:35 PM UTC

I spent 30min with Opus 5 generating some CSS and components for my Phoenix LiveView template project (which I use for starting new projects). Then I spent around 5 hours parsing and cleaning up the output. I could of course not have done that, but since it's my spare time project I can care about the code and quality.

I did get wins for sure (and I did save time), and I'm sure most people wouldn't even spend five minutes cleaning up, but this is definitely one place where people talk about different things regarding whatever x speedup they get.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#68

Post by infecto » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 8:36 PM UTC

pantelisk wrote: post #55

While I agree with the premise, I think this angle only applies on work one was going to do no matter what. The real power of these tools is that there are so many ideas people would like to try, but never have the time or motivation to pursue. So the comparison is not only "built with and without LLM" but "would you even build this if you didn't have the LLM?". The gap in productivity in this case is much more wide.

Agree so much. So many small bugs, nits, tweaks I just send off to an LLM agent to figure it out.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#69

Post by SkepticalWhale » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 8:38 PM UTC

pantelisk wrote: post #55

While I agree with the premise, I think this angle only applies on work one was going to do no matter what. The real power of these tools is that there are so many ideas people would like to try, but never have the time or motivation to pursue. So the comparison is not only "built with and without LLM" but "would you even build this if you didn't have the LLM?". The gap in productivity in this case is much more wide.

Yes but I’ve seen some devs waste a lot of time using AI to build something that was a bad idea to begin with.

Without AI they might have first spent more time validating the idea was worth it.

Re: 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

#70

Post by baron3dl » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 8:40 PM UTC

I won't argue this title isn't the author's experience, but it's misleading to rest a quantitative claim on a qualitative argument, while also refusing to fully exploit the technology.

From a firm that has fully embraced agentic engineering, they offered topline stats on their measurements of a 4x boost from November to February, and 8x on top from February to May. That's 32x since November 2025, coding with LLMs.

And like whatever, this is second hand and I'm not going to disclose the source. Actual hard, published, and peer-reviewed research is needed here to backup quantitative claims. 2x, 10x, 32x, whatever.