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After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

albertofortin.com

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Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#21

Post by rco8786 »

jclardy wrote: post #8

I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-…

There's a whole section in the doc called "A happy medium"

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#22

Post by a7fort »

jclardy wrote: post #8

I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-…

I think you're doing it right, it's just hard to resist the temptation to use AI for everything, when you're getting decent results for small things.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#23

Post by maerch »

jclardy wrote: post #8

I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-…

Exactly my thoughts. It seems there’s a lot of all-or-nothing thinking around this. What makes it valuable to me is its ability to simplify and automate mundane, repetitive tasks. Things like implementing small functions and interfaces I’ve designed, or even building something like a linting tool to keep docs and tests up to date. All of this has saved me countless hours and a good deal of sanity.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#24

Post by jacob019 »

It's very fustrating when you end up spending more time tracking down bugs and cleaning up inconsistent code then it would have taken to do it right yourself in the first place. It's an important lesson. That said, there are still massive productivity gains available. If you let the model mess with your existing code base, or if it get's past a small size, it will shit all over it. The LLM needs limited scope. I find it's great for frontend work, which is what I hate doing myself. I've been having it build webcomponents, paired with targeted backend functions that wrap internal libraries that I wrote for db and API calls. Then I compose things. Careful instructions, internal documentaion for the model and well contained isolated tasks are best. The models get confused and distracted by existing code, it's ofen better to document function interfaces and use rather than showing it the source. If the code is going into production you have to read it line by line and clean it up. I've been using Aider, mostly.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#25

Post by mg »

What I witness is that many people pick a random model and expect a prompt they wrote in 10 seconds to replace an hour of coding. And then are disappointed and go back to coding manually.

For me, the magic of LLMs is that I already get an hour of coding via 30 minutes of prompting and finetuning the generated code. And I know that the ratio will constantly improve as LLMs become better and as I finetune my prompts to define the code style I prefer. I have been coding for pretty much all my life and I never felt more excited about it than I do now.

It would be cool if people shared their prompts and the resuling commits. If someone here is disappointed by the commits LLMs make, I would love to see the prompt, the commit, and which model made it.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#26

Post by dev_l1x_be »

I think LLMs are great for generating the structure of your code. The only issue is that these models are amazing when you are navigating in very well documented, talked about, etc. subjects, and start to go off the rail when you are using somewhat esoteric things. The speed boost I get by generating Terraform and HTML, CSS, JS with Deepseek and Grok (sometimes asking one to review the others code) is pretty significant. My biggest disappointment is Claude. I have purchased a subscription from them but I need to cancel it. The usual ouput from 3.7 is horrenndous. I am not even sure why. The same prompt works very well with Deepseek and fails miserably with Claude.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#27

Post by qwertox »

Go to AI Studio, select Gemini Pro, give it your code, or describe a problem you want to solve, and then tell it that you want to --> discuss This is the best way to get Gemini to be a really good assistant, unless you want to add System Instructions which precisely describe how it should behave.

Because if you just say it should solve some problem for you, it eagerly will generate a lot of code for you, or add a lot of code to the clean code which you provided.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#28

Post by a7fort »

VMG wrote: post #11

I get it and I see the same problems as the author. I'm working on a few toy projects and I am using LLM for 90% of it. The result is 10x faster than if I coded it "by hand", but the architecture is worse and somewhat alien. I'm still keeping at it, because I'm convinced that LLM driven code is where things are headed, inevitably. These tools are just crazy powerful, but we will have to learn how to use them in a way…

I hope we get to that "10x better" point. I think the problem right now is people advertising LLMs as if we're there already. And it's not just the providers, it's also the enthusiasts on X/Reddit/etc that think they have found the perfect workflow or prompt.

Just like you're mentioning "maybe better prompt engineering", I feel like we're being conditioned to think "I'm just not using it right" where maybe the tool is just not that good yet.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#29

Post by jeremyjh »

This tracks for me. Its tempting to see LLMs as a superpower that makes it possible to use any programming language or platform, but I have much better results in platforms I know intimately...and I think this is largely because I'm using them in much more limited ways. When I've tried to pick up new tools and frameworks and heavily use LLMs to do early scaffolding, I have experiences similar to the author.

So someone could come along and say "well don't do that then, duh". But actually a lot of people are doing this, and many of them have far fewer fucks to give than the author and I, and I don't want to inherit their shitty slop in the future.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#30

Post by skdotdan »

Personally, I use LLMs to write code that I would have never bothered writing in the first place. For example, I hate web front-end development. I'm not a web dev, but sometimes it's cool to show visual demos or websites. Without LLMs, I wouldn't have bothered creating those, because I wouldn't have had the time anyway, so in that case, it's a net positive.

I don't use LLMs for my main pieces of work exactly due to the issues described by the author of the blogpost.

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