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

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

#111

Post by fibuladev »

esafak wrote: post #104
fibuladev wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We built a conversational terraform platform at work, you describe what you need for your infra and it produces the terraform code following company standards and rules. What is important for us is the LLM never writes any code. It just extracts a structured spec from the conversation, and a deterministic engine (plain python, no LLM) renders the code from approved modules only. So there is no "code quality" discussi…

tf is yaml anyway, and llms can output it natively in structured output mode.

Sure, structured output gives you valid syntax, but thats not the problem we are solving. Our engine simply cannot produce anything outside of the approved module registry (pinned versions, mandatory tags etc). LLM with structured output still can produce plausible but wrong configs. Also same spec always renders the same code, thats what reviewers and auditors actually care

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

#112

Post by hellohello2 »

5555watch wrote: post #109

I'm probably a weird outlier. Coming from academia, it's ranging from 1x to infinity-x (as in, certain tasks wouldn't even be touched if not for AI). For stuff that I'm used to (R) I can write nice and compact spaghetti (long %>% pipes). I'm not comfortable when a working script doesn't fit the screen (plus a few scrolls max). My style is probably easy only to me. When I teach, I don't teach it in particular. AI give…

Interesting. Framing it as 1x to infinity-x matches my experience too. I've have good success with it reproducing papers with existing code, but not such much with one-shotting new code. Do you have any particular setup for this i.e. special validation prompts or multi-agent stuff or do you just ask something like reproduce paper X until it gets results Y?

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

#113

Post by elcritch »

altern8 wrote: post #46
gashad wrote: post #5

This reminds me of themes I recently saw in [Harness Engineering is not Enough: Why Software Factories Fail]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib5GBkD555M ) (Warning: the last 3 slides seem like an advertisement). One thing I liked is how Dex has a little graphic he glossed over showing software development is - 25% planning & aligning with other teams - 25% coding - 25% testing/verifying - 25% code review/rework One…

AI is great because my job is a lot easier, but it produces some extremely crappy code that would've NEVER passed a code review 1 year ago. You could argue that it speeds up development by 5X or more, but then it slows down testing/verifying, code review, and in many cases it makes it impossible to review/rework by hand. I just do what I'm told at work but even though I'm sure I'm in the minority I'm extremely skepti…

I read this a lot, do you have examples of this? Last year the code produced by LLMs was pretty sloppy, but recent SOTA models seems pretty good to me. I'm curious if I'm missing something or it's folks using different models or difficulty levels.

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

#115

Post by bthornbury »

for me, almost all of the work is specs

I am no longer:

- reading docs for hours and hours

- typing (barely at all)

- writing code

- manually doing tight debug loops

- using an IDE

to do this I had to give up reading or even controlling the code and focusing on behavior/design-level control (not superficial, still dictating overall technical architecture)

i have agents doing everything from writing the code, verifying the code, hardening, increasing test coverage, analyzing behavior, algorithmic perf improvements, managing/deploying to cloud resources, etc... (pretty much everything)

and I am accomplishing projects that would take months or years in a fraction of the time.

that's way more than 10x.

somehow, this is harder and more cognitively demanding than writing code

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

#116

Post by jvuygbbkuurx »

5555watch wrote: post #109

I'm probably a weird outlier. Coming from academia, it's ranging from 1x to infinity-x (as in, certain tasks wouldn't even be touched if not for AI). For stuff that I'm used to (R) I can write nice and compact spaghetti (long %>% pipes). I'm not comfortable when a working script doesn't fit the screen (plus a few scrolls max). My style is probably easy only to me. When I teach, I don't teach it in particular. AI give…

Infinity is a ridicilous statement. Even the work that wouldn't have been done before is now time away from work that needs to be done. At worst it's negative x.

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

#117

Post by cherrylemonsoda »

5555watch wrote: post #109

I'm probably a weird outlier. Coming from academia, it's ranging from 1x to infinity-x (as in, certain tasks wouldn't even be touched if not for AI). For stuff that I'm used to (R) I can write nice and compact spaghetti (long %>% pipes). I'm not comfortable when a working script doesn't fit the screen (plus a few scrolls max). My style is probably easy only to me. When I teach, I don't teach it in particular. AI give…

[flagged]

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

#119

Post by andy99 »

5555watch wrote: post #109

I'm probably a weird outlier. Coming from academia, it's ranging from 1x to infinity-x (as in, certain tasks wouldn't even be touched if not for AI). For stuff that I'm used to (R) I can write nice and compact spaghetti (long %>% pipes). I'm not comfortable when a working script doesn't fit the screen (plus a few scrolls max). My style is probably easy only to me. When I teach, I don't teach it in particular. AI give…

I would have said 0x to infinity-x. Some stuff I think it would be a good idea and waste a bunch of time and then give up and just write it myself. And like you say, there’s lots of stuff I would just never have done, basically any kind of front end for example, if I didn’t have an LLM to do it.

I also do mostly research or one-of script development, for which I find LLMs less useful, as I want simplicity and I want to understand exactly what is happening. The only time I find LLMs help really there is if there’s some part I can abstract away like writing and interface to an api or something.

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