Development speed is not a bottleneck • Hacker News Board

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#151

Post by tharkun__ » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 12:16 AM UTC

daliusd wrote: post #142

tharkun__ wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wanted to use Aider. But it's impossible. How do people actually use it? Like, I gave it access to our code base, wanted to try a very simple bug fix. I only told it to look at one service I knew needed changes, because it says it works better in smaller code bases. It wanted to send so many tokens to sonnet that I hit the limits before it even started actually doing any coding. Instant fail. Then I just ran…

I don't know about Aider, I am not using it because of lack of MCP and poor GitHub Copilot support (both are important to me). Maybe in the future that will get better if that will be relevant. I am using opencode.ai with Claude Sonnet 4 usually. Sometimes I try to switch to different models, e.g. Gemini 2.5 Pro, but Sonnet is more consistent for me. It would be good to define what's "smaller code bases". Here is wha…

Well apparently we're "big" then. About 15 years old code base. About 100 services or libraries. The service I tried to first use it on because of the "only use it on small code bases" was only about 300 files though (doesn't include tests even). But I guess Aider got overwhelmed (or rather overwhelmed the LLM with the repo map) by the entire code base's repo map (that's what it said it was updating before it proclaimed that there were too many tokens.

Monorepo.

And that was me already knowing what I wanted and just telling it to do it. I never added any files but the one service but it knows the entire repo.

Claude code on the other I tell "I need to do X thing across the code base" and it just goes and does it (sometimes badly of course) but it has no issue just "doing its agent thing" on it.

Aider wouldn't even be able to do both code and tests in one go? Like the whole idea of "only add the files you need" makes no sense to me for agentic use.

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#152

Post by cestith » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:47 AM UTC

thenanyu wrote: post #105

cestith wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you wait to put together a representative sample of users and gather the data long enough for the numbers to matter, you’ve gated further changes. If you’ve gated further changes for a week, why does it matter that the feature change was done in an hour or a day?

Releasing it to users does not take a long time. Randomly select 5% of your user base and give them the feature. If your development process was mature, this would be a button you could push in your deployment env.

Deployment isn’t the problem. If you’ve pushed a new version of a feature that five percent of users use per week and you’ve pushed it to five percent of the userbase how long do you need to wait to have reliable data on that before you push another experimental version?

Re: Development speed is not a bottleneck

#153

Post by vrighter » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 11:17 AM UTC

vessenes wrote: post #6

This is just so, so wrong. LLMs change the surface of what's "hard" to do in a coding exercise. Many a project has so much boiler plate, edge cases, etc. that months+ can be taken up dealing with what is ultimately a very boring activity. Add on time to assimilate APIs, bug test, etc. This stuff does matter.

edge cases are exactly what I wouldn't trust an LLM with.