Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The current state of LLM-driven development

blog.tolki.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 244 posts

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#21

Post by trenchpilgrim »

leptons wrote: post #15
mkozlows wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's no learning curve" just means this guy didn't get very far up, which is definitely backed up by thinking that Copilot and other tools are all basically the same.

Basically, they are the same, they are all LLMs. They all have similar limitations. They all produce "hallucinations". They can also sometimes be useful. And they are all way overhyped.

The amount of misconceptions in this comment are quite profound.

Copilot isn't an LLM, for a start. You _combine_ it wil a selection of LLMs. And it absolutely has severe limitations compared to something like Claude Code in how it can interact with the programming environment.

"Hallucinations" are far less of a problem with software that grounds the AI to the truth in your compiler, diagnostics, static analysis, a running copy of your project, runnning your tests, executing dev tools in your shell, etc.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#22

Post by spenrose »

So many articles should prepend “My experience with ...” to their title. Here is OP's first sentence: “I spent the past ~4 weeks trying out all the new and fancy AI tools for software development.” Dude, you have had some experiences and they are worth writing up and sharing. But your experiences are not a stand-in for "the current state." This point applies to a significant fraction of HN articles, to the point that I wish the headlines were flagged “blog”.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#23

Post by troupo »

tptacek wrote: post #8

Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial. There is no learning curve. You can safely ignore them if they don’t fit your workflows at the moment. I have never heard anybody successfully using LLMs say this before. Most of what I've learned from talking to people about their workflows is counterintuitive and subtle. It's a really weird way to open up an article concluding that LLMs make one a worse prog…

> I have never heard anybody successfully using LLMs say this before. Most of what I've learned from talking to people about their workflows is counterintuitive and subtle.

Because for all our posturing about being skeptical and data driven we all believe in magic.

Those "counterintuitive non-trivial workflows"? They work about as well as just prompting "implement X" with no rules, agents.md, careful lists etc.

Because 1) literally no one actually measures whether magical incarnations work and 2) it's impossible to make such measurements due to non-determinism

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#25

Post by troupo »

sudhirb wrote: post #11

I have a biased opinion since I work for a background agent startup currently - but there are more (and better!) out there than Jules and Copilot that might address some of the author's issues.

And those mythical better tools tools that you didn't even bother to mention are?

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#26

Post by kodisha »

LLM driven coding can yield awesome results, but you will be typing a lot and, as article states, requires already well structured codebase.

I recently started with fresh project, and until I got to the desired structure I only used AI to ask questions or suggestions. I organized and written most of the code.

Once it started to get into the shape that felt semi-permanent to me, I started a lot of queries like:

```

- Look at existing service X at folder services/x

- see how I deploy the service using k8s/services/x

- see how the docker file for service X looks like at services/x/Dockerfile

- now, I started service Y that does [this and that]

- create all that is needed for service Y to be skaffolded and deployed, follow the same pattern as service X

```

And it would go, read existing stuff for X, then generate all of the deployment/monitoring/readme/docker/k8s/helm/skaffold for Y

With zero to none mistakes. Both claude and gemini are more than capable to do such task. I had both of them generate 10-15 files with no errors, with code being able to be deployed right after (of course service will just answer and not do much more than that)

Then, I will take over again for a bit, do some business logic specific to Y, then again leverage AI to fill in missing bits, review, suggest stuff etc.

It might look slow, but it actually cuts most boring and most error prone steps when developing medium to large k8s backed project.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#27

Post by [deleted] »

danielbln wrote: post #10
WD-42 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s pretty common among people whose job it is to provide working, production software. If you go by MBA types on LinkedIn that aren’t really developers or haven’t been in a long time, now they can vibe out some react components or a python script so it’s a revolution.

Hi, my job is building working production software (these days heavily LLM assisted). The author of the article doesn't know what they're talking about.

[deleted]

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#29

Post by SadErn »

rustybolt wrote: post #19
mkozlows wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's no learning curve" just means this guy didn't get very far up, which is definitely backed up by thinking that Copilot and other tools are all basically the same.

> "There's no learning curve" just means this guy didn't get very far up Not everyone with a different opinion is dumber than you.

This is all just ignorance. We've all worked with LLMs and know that creating an effective workflow is not trivial and it varies based on the tool.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#30

Post by mettamage »

spenrose wrote: post #22

So many articles should prepend “My experience with ...” to their title. Here is OP's first sentence: “I spent the past ~4 weeks trying out all the new and fancy AI tools for software development.” Dude, you have had some experiences and they are worth writing up and sharing. But your experiences are not a stand-in for "the current state." This point applies to a significant fraction of HN articles, to the point that…

Clickbait gets more reach. It's an unfortunate thing. I remember Veritasium in a video even saying something along the lines of him feeling forced to do clickbaity YouTube because it works so well.

The reach is big enough to not care about our feelings. I wish it wasn't this way.

Post reply on HN