201–210 of 252 posts
A chainsaw and chisel do different things and are made for different situations. It’s great to have chainsaws, no longer must we chop down a giant tree with a chisel.
On the other hand there’s plenty of room in the trade for handcraft. You still need to use that chisel to smooth off the fine edges of your chainsaw work, so your teammates don’t get splinters.
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…
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It's worth noting this is the exact argument people used against adopting electric calculators.
Calculators are a very narrow form of intelligence as compared to the general-purpose intelligence that LLMs are. The muscle/steroid analogy from this same discussion thread is apt here. Calculators enhanced and replaced just one 'muscle', so the argument against them would be like "ya but do we really need this one muscle anymore?", whereas with LLMs the argument is "do we really even need a body at all anymore?" (i…
Tools that do many things and tools that do a small number of things are still tools.
> "do we really even need a body at all anymore?"
It's a legitimate question. What's so special about the body and why do we need to have one? Would life be better or worse without bodies?
Deep down I think everyone's answer has more to do with spirituality than anything else. There isn't a single objectively correct response.
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…
Of course it's the main topic because it's an existential question for almost all our careers.
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 don't see why any of this should be surprising. I think it just reflects a lot of developers using this technology and having experiences that fall neatly into one of these two camps. I can imagine a lot of factors that might pull an individual developer in one direction or the other; most of them probably correlate, and people in the middle might not feel like they have anything interesting to say.
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I'm compelled to make sure any comment mentioning Conway's Law has a reply linking the following video (and perhaps I should create a bot to do this): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IUj1EZwpJY This analysis of the real-world effects of Conway's Law seems deeply horrifying, because the implication seems to be that there's nothing you can do to keep communication efficiency and design quality high while also growing…
I think you better link to a good article instead. Good grief, what a horror . A talking head rambling on for 60 minutes. --- disclaimer: if low information density is your thing, then your mileage may vary. Video's are for documentaries, not for reading out an article in the camera.
This is pretty much the conclusion I've come to as well. It's not good at being an autocomplete for entire chunks of your codebase. You lose the mental model of what is doing what, and exactly where. I prefer to use it as a personalized, faster-iterating StackOverflow. I'll ask it to give me a rundown of a concept I'm not familiar with, or for a general direction to point me in if I'm uncertain of what a good solutio…
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What's it called when you choose a task because it's easy, even if it's not what you need to do at all? I think that's what LLMs have activated in a lot of us: writing code used to be kinda hard, but now it's super easy, so let's just write more code. The hard parts of engineering have always been decision making, socializing, and validating ideas against cold hard reality. But writing code just got easier so let's d…
I'm not sure if there's a name for that specifically, but it seems strongly related to the streetlight effect. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
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I've been saying this for a while. The issue is if you don't intimately know your code, you can't truly maintain it. What happens when the LLM can't figure out some obscure but that's costing you $$$,$$$ per minute? You think being unable to have the AI figure it out is an acceptable answer? Of course not. LLMs are good for figuring out bugs and paths forward, but don't bet your entire infrastructure on it. Use it as…
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian Kernighan So if there's a bug in code that an LLM wrote, simply wait 6 months until the LLMs are twice as smart?
> simply wait [about a quarter of a million minutes] until the LLMs are twice as smart?
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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…
People will always blame someone or something else for laziness.