181–190 of 434 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cursor is an IDE. You can use its powerful (but occasionally wrong) autocomplete, and start asking it to do small coding tasks using the Ctrl+L side window.
I don't want to leave my IDE
(We may have differing definitions of "leaving" ones IDE).
I have found that if I ask the LLM to first _describe_ to me what it wants to do without writing any code, then the subsequent code generated has much higher quality. I will ask for a detailed description of the things it wants to do, give it some feedback and after a couple of iterations, tell it to go ahead and implement it.
What is the overall feedback loop with LLMs writing code? Do they learn as they go like we do? Do they just learn from reading code on GitHub? If the latter, what happens as less and less code gets written by human experts? Do the LLMs then stagnate in their progress and start to degrade? Kind of like making analog copies of analog copies of analog copies?
Sorry if I missed it in the article — what’s your setup? Do you use a CLI tool like aider or are you using an IDE like cursor?
Terminal with vim in one side, the official web interface of the model in the other side. The pbcopy utility to pass stuff in the clipboard. I believe models should be used in their native interface as when there are other layers sometimes the model served is not exactly the same, other times it misbehaves because of RAG and in general no exact control of the context window.
It tried a few ways to read the PDF before coming up with installing PyPDF2, using that to parse the PDF, then updated all the JSON files. It took about 5 minutes to do this, but it ended up 100% correct, updating 7 different fields across two dozen JSON files.
(The reason for the PDF export was to get past the Confluence page being behind Okta authentication. In retrospect, I probably should've saved the HTML and/or let Claude Code figure out how to grab the page itself.)
How would I have done that with Gemini using just the web interface?
> Gemini 2.5 PRO | Claude Opus 4 Whether it's vibe coding, agentic coding, or copy pasting from the web interface to your editor, it's still sad to see the normalization of private (i.e., paid) LLM models. I like the progress that LLMs introduce and I see them as a powerful tool, but I cannot understand how programmers (whether complete nobodies or popular figures) dont mind adding a strong dependency on a third part…
I personally can’t wait for programming to ‘die’. It has stolen a decade of my life minimum. Like veterinarians being trained to help pets ultimately finding out a huge portion of the job is killing them. I was not sufficiently informed that I’d spend a decade arguing languages, dealing with thousands of other developers with diverging opinions, legacy code, poorly if at all maintained libraries, tools, frameworks, e…
Feels like this is a byproduct of a poor work-life balance more than an intrinsic issue with programming itself. I also can't really relate since I've always enjoyed discussing challenging problems with colleagues.
I'm assuming by "die" you mean some future where autonomous agentic models handle all the work. In this world, where you can delete your entire programming staff and have a single PM who tells the models what features to implement next, where do you imagine you fit in?
I just hope for your sake that you have a fallback set of viable skills to survive in this theoretical future.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here. Just like every other subscription model, including the one in the Black Mirror episode, Common People. The value is too good to be true for the price at the beginning. But you become their prisoner in the long run, with increasing prices and degrading quality.
Can you expand on your argument?
Netflix/Hulu were "losing money on streaming"-level cheap.
Uber was "losing money on rides"-level cheap.
WeWork was "losing money on real-estate" level cheap.
Until someone releases wildly profitable LLM company financials it's reasonable to expect prices to go up in the future.
Course, advances in compute are much more reasonable to expect than advances in cheap media production, taxi driver availability, or office space. So there's a possibility it could be different. But that might require capabilities to hit a hard plateau so that the compute can keep up. And that might make it hard to justify the valuations some of these companies have... which could also lead to price hikes.
But I'm not as worried as others. None of these have lock-in. If the prices go up, I'm happy to cancel or stop using it.
For a current student or new grad who has only ever used the LLM tools, this could be a rougher transition...
Another thing that would change the calculation is if it becomes impossible to maintain large production-level systems competitively without these tools. That's presumably one of the things the companies are betting on. We'll see if they get there. At that point many of us probably have far bigger things to worry about.
> Gemini 2.5 PRO | Claude Opus 4 Whether it's vibe coding, agentic coding, or copy pasting from the web interface to your editor, it's still sad to see the normalization of private (i.e., paid) LLM models. I like the progress that LLMs introduce and I see them as a powerful tool, but I cannot understand how programmers (whether complete nobodies or popular figures) dont mind adding a strong dependency on a third part…
That's why I drink the whole tools kool-aid. From TFA:
> In this historical moment, LLMs are good amplifiers and bad one-man-band workers.
That's how I use them: write a function here, explain an error message there. I'm still in control.
I don't depend on LLMs: they just amplify.
I can pull the plug immediately and I'm still able to code, as I was two years ago.
Shall DeepSeek release a free SOTA model? I'll then use that model locally.
It's not because I use LLMs that I have a strong dependency on them.
Just like I was already using JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA back when many here were still kids (and, yup, it was lightyears better than NetBeans and Eclipse) didn't make me have a strong dependency on JetBrains tools.
I'm back to Emacs and life is good: JetBrains IDEs didn't make me forget how to code, just as LLMs won't.
They're just throwaway tools and are to be regarded as such.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm certain these are advertorials masquerading as personal opinions. These people are being paid to promote the product, either through outright cash, credits on their platform or just swag.
I recommend readjusting your advertorial-detecting radar. antirez isn't taking kickbacks from anyone. I added a "disclosures" section to my own site recently, in case you're interested: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The AI tooling churn is so fast that by the time a study comes out people will be able to say "well they were using an older tool" no matter what tool that the study used .
Not really. Chatting with a llm was cutting edge for 3 years it’s only within the last 8-10 months with Claude code and Gemini cli do we have the next big change in how we interact with llms
> Gemini 2.5 PRO | Claude Opus 4 Whether it's vibe coding, agentic coding, or copy pasting from the web interface to your editor, it's still sad to see the normalization of private (i.e., paid) LLM models. I like the progress that LLMs introduce and I see them as a powerful tool, but I cannot understand how programmers (whether complete nobodies or popular figures) dont mind adding a strong dependency on a third part…
Yeah, coding (and to a lesser extent IT in general) at one point was a real meritocracy, where skill mattered more than expensive/unnecessary academic pedigree. Not perfect of course, but real nevertheless. And coders were the first engineers who really said "I won't be renting a suit for an interview, I think an old t-shirt is fine" and we normalized that. Part of this was just uncompromisingly practical.. like you can either do the work or not, and fuck the rest of that noise. But there was also a pretty punk aspect to this for many people in the industry.. some recognition that needing to have money to make money was a bullshit relic of closeted classism.
But we're fast approaching a time where both the old metrics (how much quality code are you writing how fast and what's your personal open source portfolio like?) and the new metrics (are you writing a blog post every week about your experience with the new models, is your personal computer fast enough to even try to run crappy local models?) are both going to favor those with plenty of money to experiment.
It's not hard to see how this will make inequality worse and disadvantage junior devs, or just talented people that didn't plan other life-events around purchasing API credits/GPUs. A pay-to-play kind of world was ugly enough in politics and business so it sucks a lot to see it creeping into engineering disciplines but it seems inevitable. If paying for tokens/GPU ever allows you to purchase work or promotion by proxy, we're right back to this type of thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...