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I'm dialing back my LLM usage

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Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#161

Post by reachableceo »

jm4 wrote: post #120
x187463 wrote: post #11

Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend t…

I think you described it much more succinctly than most people do. It's been my exact experience as well. The LLM can develop much faster than I can build a mental model. It's very easy to get to a point where you don't know what's going on, a bunch of bugs have been introduced and you can't easily fix them or refactor because you're essentially the new guy on your own project. I find myself adjusting by committing c…

“ I'm finding that developing prompts, managing context, controlling pace, staying organized and being able to effectively review the LLM's work are required skills for LLM-assisted coding “

Did you not need all these skills / approaches / frameworks for yourself / coding with a team?

This is , I think, the key difference in those (such as myself) who find LLMs to massively increase velocity / quality / quantity of output and those who don’t.

I was already highly effective at being a leader / communicator / delegating / working in teams ranging from small , intimate , we shared a mental model / context up to some of the largest teams on the planet.

If someone wasn’t already a highly effective IC/manager/leader pre LLM, an LLM will simply accelerate how fast they crash into the dirt.

It takes substantial work to be a highly effective contributor / knowledge worker at any level. Put effort into that , and LLMs become absolutely indispensable, especially as a solo founder.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#162

Post by senko »

x187463 wrote: post #11

Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend t…

> Am I spending too much time on HN

Likely (as am I).

> LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. [...] The other side of it is people who seem to have 'gotten it' and can dispatch multiple agents to plan/execute/merge changes across a project

Yup, can confirm, there are indeed people with differing opinions and experience/anecdotes on HN.

> want to tell you how awesome their workflow is without actually showing any code.

You might be having some AI-news-fatigue (I can relate) and missed a few, but there are also people who seem to have gotten it and do want to show code:

Armin Ronacher (of Flask, Jinja2, Sentry fame): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfOVgz_omlU (workflow) and https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/6/21/my-first-ai-library/ (code)

Here's one of my non-trivial open source projects where a large portion is AI built: https://github.com/senko/cijene-api (didn't keep stats, I'd eyeball it at conservatively 50% - 80%)

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#163

Post by jordanb »

x187463 wrote: post #11

Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend t…

Weirdly this is pretty much the story of code generators.

When I first got into web development there were people using HTML generators based on photoshop comps. They would produce atrocious HTML. FE developers started rewriting the HTML because otherwise you'd end up with brittle layout that was difficult to extend.

By the time the "responsive web" became a thing HTML generators were dead and designers were expected to give developers wireframes + web-ready assets.

Same thing pretty much happened with UML->Code generators, with different details.

There's always been a tradeoff between the convenience and deskilling involved in generated code and the long term maintainability.

There's also the fact that coding is fundamentally an activity where you try to use abstractions to manage complexity. Ideally, you have interfaces that are good enough that the code reads like a natural language because you're expressing what you what the computer to do at the exact correct layer of abstraction. Code generators tend to both cause and encourage bad interfaces. Often the impetus to use a code generator is the existing interfaces are bad, bureaucratic, or obscure. But using code generators ends up creating more of the same.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#164

Post by lenkite »

swat535 wrote: post #126
totalperspectiv wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the mental model part. I really like this method of thinking about programming "Programming as Theory Building" https://gist.github.com/onlurking/fc5c81d18cfce9ff81bc968a7f... I don't mind when other programmers use AI, and use it myself. What I mind is the abdication of responsibility for the code or result. I don't think that we should be issuing a disclaimer when we use AI…

LLMS are great at generating scaffolding and boilerplate code which then I can iterate upon. I'm not going write describe User do ... it ".." for the thousand time.. or write the controller files with CRUD actions.. LLMS can do these. I can then review the code, improve it and go from there. They are also very useful for brain storming ideas, I treat it as a better google search. If I'm stuck trying to model my data,…

We need to invent better languages and frameworks. Boilerplate code should be extremely minimal in the first place, but it appears to have exploded in the last decade.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#165

Post by eikenberry »

generalizations wrote: post #41
x187463 wrote: post #11

Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend t…

It feels like a bell curve: - one big set of users who don't like it because it generates a lot of code and uses its own style of algorithms, and it's a whole lot of unfamiliar code that the user has to load up in their mind - as you said. Too much to comprehend, and quickly overwhelming. And then to either side - it unblocks users who simply couldn't have written the code on their own, who aren't even trying to load…

That last bracket is basically the same as the tech based start-up story. You build the projects fast, but you build a ton of tech debt into it that you'll be forced to deal with unless it is a short lived project. Not that this is 100% bad, but something to know going in.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#166

Post by dwoldrich »

I personally believe it's a mistake to invite AI into your editor/IDE. Keep it separate to the browser, keep discrete, concise question and answer threads. Copy and paste whenever it delivers some gold (that comes with all the copy-pasta dangers, I know - oh, don't I know it!)

It's important to always maintain the developer role, don't ever surrender it.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#167

Post by pmxi »

delusional wrote: post #119

I wish there was a browser addon that worked like ublock but for LLM talk. Like just take it all, every blog post, every announcement, every discussion and wipe it all away. I just want humanity to deal with some of our actual issues, like fascism, war in Europe and the middle east, the centralization of our lines of production, the unfairness in our economies. Instead we're stuck talking about if the lie machine can…

I’m sure you could build a prototype add on to do this pretty quickly with Claude Code or the like

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#168

Post by osmsucks »

jimbokun wrote: post #32

I think LLMs have made a lot of developers forget the lessons in "Simple Made Easy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 LLMs seem to be really good at reproducing the classic Ball of Mud, that can't really be refactored or understood. There's a lot of power in creating simple components that interact with other simple components to produce complex functionality. While each component is easy to understand and…

> LLMs seem to be really good at reproducing the classic Ball of Mud, that can't really be refactored or understood.

This, but but only for code. I've seen "leaders" at work suggest that we "embrace" AI, even for handling production systems and managing their complexity. That's like saying: "We've built this obscure, inscrutable system, therefore we need another obscure, inscrutable system on top of it in order to understand it!". To me, this sounds deranged, but the amount of gaslighting that's going on also makes you think you're the only to believe that...

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#169

Post by gtsop »

danielbln wrote: post #19
quaintdev wrote: post #6

LLMs have limits. They are super powerful but they can't make the kind of leap humans can. For example, I asked both Claude and Gemini below problem. "I want to run webserver on Android but it does not allow binding on ports lower than 1000. What are my options?" Both responded with below solutions 1. Use reverse proxy 2. Root the phone 3. Run on higher port Even after asking them to rethink they couldn't come up wit…

I'm not sure I would measure LLMs on recommending a fairly obscure and rather new spec that isn't even fully supported by e.g. Chrome. That's a leap that I, a human, wouldn't have made either.

So is the expectation for it to suggest obvious solutions that the majority of people already know?

I am fine with this, but let's be clear about what we're expecting

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#170

Post by gtsop »

Hackbraten wrote: post #108
mandevil wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I find that "someone who has read all the blogs and papers and so can suggest something you might have missed" is my favorite use case for LLM, so seeing that it can miss a useful (and novel to me) idea is annoying.

Which is easier for you to remember: facts you’ve seen a hundred times in your lifetime, or facts you’ve seen once or twice? For an LLM, I’d expect it to be similar. It can recall the stuff it’s seen thousands of times, but has a hard time recalling the niche/underdocumented stuff that it’s seen just a dozen times.

> Which is easier for you to remember: facts you’ve seen a hundred times in your lifetime, or facts you’ve seen once or twice?

The human brain isn't a statistical aggregator. If you see a psychologically socking thing once in your lifetime, you might remember it even after dementia hits when you're old.

On the other hand, you pass by hundrends of shops every day and receive the data signal of their signs over and over and over, yet you remember nothing.

You remeber stuff you pay attention to (for whatever reason)

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