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GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

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Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#161

Post by socalgal2 »

jama211 wrote: post #154
socalgal2 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This took less than an hour while I was watching TV. I certainly could not review all of those changes in an uninterupted hour. I'd need to test the design changes on multiple browsers, check they respond to zoom and window sizing. I'd have to read through the tests and check that they were not just nonsense and returning true to pass. There's no way I could do all that while watching TV in 1 hour.

This is for a janky backend admin panel, not a customer facing product. If it’s way better than it was before, which likely wasn’t responsive either, it’s a win. Understanding the context of a project is important.

And the tests? To me, if it was something important enough to have tests for in which case it's important to check the tests are valid so I'd have to review them

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#162

Post by ath3nd »

jama211 wrote: post #159
ath3nd wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very insightful. You are not alone: https://rgoldfinger.com/blog/2025-07-26-claude-code-is-a-slo... > Are we at the point of doing rain dances for these models and describing the moves as "counterintuitive and sublte" Yes, we are. LLM cultists can downvote as much as they like, but the reality is that with all the incantations and coaxing, we not only don't see a positive effect, we see a net negative effect on the q…

Also in general I find developers usually overestimate the value of good code outside of mission critical systems. The true value return of spending way more time and effort to improve code quality often simply isn’t worth it from a holistic perspective.

> The true value return of spending way more time and effort to improve code quality often simply isn’t worth it from a holistic perspective.

Sure, if you want to do with 100 developers what 10 can do better, cheaper and faster, don't spend time on code quality. Just vibe it. More work for the experts to fix that mess later.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#163

Post by ath3nd »

jama211 wrote: post #158
ath3nd wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very insightful. You are not alone: https://rgoldfinger.com/blog/2025-07-26-claude-code-is-a-slo... > Are we at the point of doing rain dances for these models and describing the moves as "counterintuitive and sublte" Yes, we are. LLM cultists can downvote as much as they like, but the reality is that with all the incantations and coaxing, we not only don't see a positive effect, we see a net negative effect on the q…

And like plastic, a fantastic material for many jobs, it’s just has its own pros and cons

> And like plastic, a fantastic material for many jobs

Yes, by the same logic arsenic has many pros (and some cons, admittedly) in paint production, thorium is a not bad material for toothpaste (google it), and asbestos is just dandy for fire insulation (with some teeny tiny negatives for your lungs).

The fact that plastic is in the bloodstream of every living being and it's a strong endocrine disruptor and there is literally a garbage patch of it floating in our oceans is a small price to pay for the convenience and pleasure of drinking coca-cola from a lighter-than-glass bottle! Fantastic material indeed! What other fantastic materials are there? Lead for pipes? White phosphorus for matches?

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#164

Post by bgwalter »

simonw wrote: post #148
bgwalter wrote: post #145

> several of them are written by well-known developers who’ve been around for over a decade All of whom had greater output in terms of volume and impact before LLMs. And it is always the same people who now get voted to the top as opposed to a couple of months ago, when one of them got ratio'd for one of his exuberant blog posts.

You're just making things up to fit your own narrative at this point.

It is worse than that. I'm backed by the thriving $2 trillion anti-LLM industry! Admittedly it is an unfair fight since the pro-LLM people have no backing.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#165

Post by leptons »

PaulHoule wrote: post #53
solarkraft wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My (not GP) intuitive answer would be hell no. Typescript messages are pretty hard to google and even parse manually and the LLM suggesting multiple approaches and ways to think about the problem does seem useful. It sometimes uncovers unknown unknowns you might never find otherwise. I have had cases in which a web search and some good old fashioned thinking have yielded better results than using an LLM, but on avera…

Personally I think Stack Overflow and Google are 95% trash for that kind of problem. The answers are in (i) the Typescript documentation and (ii) the documentation of libraries that I'm using. I could get lucky with a Google search and it could be worth trying, but I wouldn't expect it to work. Personally my preference is to have a language and libraries with great documentation (Python, Java, Typescript isn't too ba…

"felt emotionally supported by an LLM"

Wow. This sounds so foreign to me. Being emotionally supported by the proverbial "tin can". If that makes you happy, then I'm happy for you, I guess?

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#166

Post by tabemann »

At my day job (not going to name the company) they have been pushing AI coding, and frankly I have found it to be essentially useless.

As a simple test, I used Claude under GitHub Copilot to develop a simple program to blink an LED using a task under zeptoforth (my Forth implementation for ARM Cortex-M, which is on GitHub so it should have been in their training set) on a Pimoroni Pico Plus 2... which took a few hours to complete because it was constantly hallucinating my API's and getting minor points wrong that I had to tell it to fix... for it to only screw something else up the next time around... repeatedly.

Then the next day they had us do an "agentive AI training" where we were supposed to use "agentive AI" to program example stuff... and I found it worked to a point ─ until it didn't work, and I could never actually make it do what I really wanted it to no matter how hard I "vibed". It just hit a stopping point where no amount of prompting would make it work.

And then there's the actual use cases for AI at my day job ─ I have not seen any that apply to me. I write only limited amounts of code ─ I do not churn out the boilerplate that AI is sold as obviating ─ and the code I do write has to be correct, for values of correct where simply looking correct is not sufficient (and an AI won't know the underlying math behind things or how to avoid things like race conditions).

If I actually used AI I would be spending more time trying to understand its output and having to fix it than I actually spend developing code, and I would have a harder time trusting the resulting code. I know how my code works because I wrote it ─ the same would not be true if I had an AI write my code for me.

Sure, there are people at my day job who have gotten fully on-board with the AI thing, and who see it as being useful for things like, say, changing the C++ standard for a whole project at a time. However, I would not be able to trust the project after that point myself. Yes, it would take much more time to manually update the code, but then it would be much easier to trust afterwards, and would require far less fixing to handle all the cases where the AI screwed up.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#167

Post by lowsong »

avalys wrote: post #9

I have a degree in CS from MIT and did professional software engineering from 2004 - 2020. I recently started a company in another field and haven’t done any real development for about 4 years. Earlier this summer I took a vacation and decided to start a small software hobby project specific to my industry. I decided to try out Cursor for the first time. I found it incredibly helpful at saving time implementing all t…

> I recently started a company in another field and haven’t done any real development for about 4 years.

Don't take this as an insult, but "people who used to be full-time engineers, and are now a bit removed" are exactly the kind of people who are the very worst at evaluating LLM coding tools.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#168

Post by fathermarz »

Not all LLMs are created equal and can be used for different aspects and workflows. I think the important bit is to gravitate to the tool that gives you the closest to your expected outcome.

Copy pasting code into ChatGPT gives me unreliable results, because I don’t know how to talk to it. I find copilot annoying in Visual Studio. The workflow of cursor/windsurf is not intuitive for me. Gemini context is wicked but I didn’t like how it constructed its outputs. I tried Claude Code and became a believer, not because it’s perfect, but because it fits my cadence and allows me to pivot quickly.

I still use chat for the occasional MSSQL syntax check, or Gemini for writing a technical doc. But there are so many variables and trial and error involved.

I keep reading posts like this thinking that there is a flavour of fear holding people back. Nothing to fear, just level set your expectations, don’t believe the hype and be open to the vibes.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#169

Post by godelski »

avalys wrote: post #9

I have a degree in CS from MIT and did professional software engineering from 2004 - 2020. I recently started a company in another field and haven’t done any real development for about 4 years. Earlier this summer I took a vacation and decided to start a small software hobby project specific to my industry. I decided to try out Cursor for the first time. I found it incredibly helpful at saving time implementing all t…

  > but it saved me from a bunch of tedious work that I don’t enjoy anyway.
I play music and find practicing scales and learning music theory much more tedious and less enjoyable. I'd much rather be playing actual songs and having that flow where it is like the music is just coming out of me. But the reason I do the tedious stuff is because I don't get the latter stuff without the former. I can still learn to play songs without learning scales and just practice the lines. This is much more enjoyable and feels much faster. I'd even argue it is much faster if we're only measuring how fast I learn a single song. But when we talk about learning multiple songs, it is overall slower. Doing the tedious stuff helps me learn the foundation of everything. Without doing the tedious things I'd never develop the skills to sight read or learn to play a song by ear.

I don't think this is different with any other skill. I see the same effect in programming. I even see the same effect in writing a single program. I think this is totally a fine strategy for "smaller" programs because the "gap" is small. But as the complexity increases then that gap widens. Most of my time isn't spent writing lines of code, most of my time is spent planning and understanding. Complexity often comes from how a bunch of really simple things interact. The complexity of music is not the literal notes, it is how everything fits together. Personally, I'll take a bit more time to write those lines if it makes me quicker at solving the harder problem. I still write notes on pen and paper even if I never look at them afterwards because the act of writing does a lot to help make those things stick.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#170

Post by tptacek »

godelski wrote: post #169
avalys wrote: post #9

I have a degree in CS from MIT and did professional software engineering from 2004 - 2020. I recently started a company in another field and haven’t done any real development for about 4 years. Earlier this summer I took a vacation and decided to start a small software hobby project specific to my industry. I decided to try out Cursor for the first time. I found it incredibly helpful at saving time implementing all t…

> but it saved me from a bunch of tedious work that I don’t enjoy anyway. I play music and find practicing scales and learning music theory much more tedious and less enjoyable. I'd much rather be playing actual songs and having that flow where it is like the music is just coming out of me. But the reason I do the tedious stuff is because I don't get the latter stuff without the former. I can still learn to play song…

I'm having trouble with this sentiment, because most progress in programming environments involves eliminating and automating away drudgery. The analogy you're making to playing scales and learning music theory applies just as much --- maybe even more so --- to automated memory management!
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