Funny enough, I posted an article I wrote here yesterday with the same sort of thesis. Different technologies (mine was Docker) but same idea of LLM leading me astray and causing a lot of frustration
I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project
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Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project
#12> AI isn’t a co-pilot; it’s a junior dev faking competence. Trust it at your own risk. This is a good take that tracks with my (heavy) usage of LLMs for coding. Leveraging productive-but-often-misguided junior devs is a skill every dev should actively cultivate!
What you're doing is sacrificing learning for speed.
Which is fine, if it's a conscious choice for yourself.
Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project
#13I've had a similar experience, shipping new features at incredible speed, then waste a ton of time going down the wrong track trying to debug something because the LLM gave me a confidently wrong solution.
Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project
#14I've had a similar experience, shipping new features at incredible speed, then waste a ton of time going down the wrong track trying to debug something because the LLM gave me a confidently wrong solution.
Well that's kind of on you for not noticing that it was the wrong solution, isn't it?
Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project
#15I've had a similar experience, shipping new features at incredible speed, then waste a ton of time going down the wrong track trying to debug something because the LLM gave me a confidently wrong solution.
Well that's kind of on you for not noticing that it was the wrong solution, isn't it?
I think the parents post happened to everybody, and if it hasn’t it will.
The edge between being actually more productive or just “pretend productive” using large language models is something that we all haven’t completely figured out yet.
Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project
#16In my experience LLMs will help you with things that have been solved thousands of times before and are just a matter of finding some easily researched solution.
The very moment when you try to go off the beaten path and do something unconventional or stuff that most people won't have written a lot about, it gets more tricky. Just consider how many people will know how to configure some middleware in a Node.js project... vs most things related to hardware or low level work. Or even working with complex legacy codebases that have bits of code with obscure ways of interacting and more levels of abstraction that can be reasonably put in context.
Then again, if an LLM gets confused, then a person might as well. So, personally I try to write code that'd be understandable by juniors and LLMs alike.
Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project
#17I've had a similar experience, shipping new features at incredible speed, then waste a ton of time going down the wrong track trying to debug something because the LLM gave me a confidently wrong solution.
Well that's kind of on you for not noticing that it was the wrong solution, isn't it?
Sometimes the solution is 99% correct but the other 1% is so subtly wrong that it both doesn't work and is a debugging hell.
Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project
#18the "AI lies" takeaway is way off for those actually using these tools. Calling it a "junior dev faking competence" is catchy, but misses the point. We're not expecting a co-pilot, it's a tool, a super-powered intern that needs direction. The spaghetti code mess wasn't AI "lying", it was a lack of control and proper prompting. Experienced folks aren't surprised by this. LLMs are fast for boilerplate, research, and ex…
“Experienced folks” in this case means folks who’ve used LLM’s enough to somewhat understand how to “feed them” in ways that make the tools generate productive output.
Learning to properly prompt an LLM to get a net gain in value is a skill in it of itself.
Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project
#19Context matters a lot, copy-pasting snippets to a webpage is _way_ less effective than Cursor/Windsurf.
Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project
#20Today, I needed to write a proxy[0] that wraps an object and log all method calls recursively.
I asked claude to write the initial version. It came up with a complicated class based solution. I spent more than 30 minutes getting a good abstract to come out. I was copy pasting typescript errors and applying fixes it suggested without thinking much.
In the end, I gave up and wrote what I wanted myself in 5 minutes.
0] https://github.com/cloudycotton/browser-operator/blob/main/s...