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

I'm dialing back my LLM usage

zed.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 252 posts

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#211

Post by eikenberry »

generalizations wrote: post #179
eikenberry wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last bracket is basically the same as the tech based start-up story. You build the projects fast, but you build a ton of tech debt into it that you'll be forced to deal with unless it is a short lived project. Not that this is 100% bad, but something to know going in.

Depends. I think that becomes a question of the quality of the programmer - if they were doing it all themselves, the code quality of the (necessarily much smaller) projects would still vary between programmers. Now that variation is magnified, but if you're very good at what you do, I suspect it is still possible to create those projects without the tech debt. Though at the lower end of that bracket, I'd agree you t…

When you play architect and delegate all the work to junior developers it won't matter how good you are, you will incur a lot of tech debt. You simply cannot teach/guide every junior into writing good code as that would take more time than writing it yourself. This fact is baked into the juniors analogy.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#212

Post by lowbloodsugar »

x187463 wrote: post #11

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 work in a team of 8. So previously I wrote 1/8th of the code. Now I write 1/16th with the other 1/16th being written by an LLM. Figuring out how to work effectively together as a team requires solving the same problem you describe. For me, an LLM is like having another junior developer on the team.

How you get good results as a team is to develop a shared mental model, and that typically needs to exist in design docs. I find that without design docs, we all agree verbally, and then are shocked at what everyone else thought we'd agreed on. Write it down.

LLMs, like junior devs, do much better with design docs. You can even let the junior dev try writing some design docs.

So if you're a solo developer, I can see this would be a big change for you. Anyone working on a team has already had to solve this problem.

On the subject of ownership: if I commit it, I own it. If the internet "goes down" and the commit has got my name on it, "but AI" isn't going to cut it.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#213

Post by meistertigran »

jm4 wrote: post #120
x187463 wrote: post #11

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 think you described it much more succinctly than most people do. It's been my exact experience as well. The LLM can develop much faster than I can build a mental model. It's very easy to get to a point where you don't know what's going on, a bunch of bugs have been introduced and you can't easily fix them or refactor because you're essentially the new guy on your own project. I find myself adjusting by committing c…

I have found that you can't let the LLM do the thinking part. It's really fast at writing, but only writes acceptable code, if the thinking has been done for it.

In some cases, this approach might even be slower than writing the code.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#214

Post by brulard »

sunrunner wrote: post #176
exceptione wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay, so you didn't even bother to take a few seconds to step through the video to see if there was anything other than the talking head (I'll help you out a bit, there is). Either way, it's a step-by-step walk through of the ideas of the original article that introduced Conway's Law and a deeper inspection into ideas about _why_ it might be that way. If that's not enough then my apologies but I haven't yet found an…

Man, I don't know what kind of world you live in, but an hour long video is a little too much to swallow when reading HN comments. I even gave it a chance, but had to close the tab after the guy just prepared you for something and then steered away to explain "what is a law". That's absurd.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#215

Post by generalizations »

eikenberry wrote: post #211
generalizations wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. I think that becomes a question of the quality of the programmer - if they were doing it all themselves, the code quality of the (necessarily much smaller) projects would still vary between programmers. Now that variation is magnified, but if you're very good at what you do, I suspect it is still possible to create those projects without the tech debt. Though at the lower end of that bracket, I'd agree you t…

When you play architect and delegate all the work to junior developers it won't matter how good you are, you will incur a lot of tech debt. You simply cannot teach/guide every junior into writing good code as that would take more time than writing it yourself. This fact is baked into the juniors analogy.

IMHO it depends on how good you are at being a senior programmer / architect. Put the juniors where they can't do harm, and orchestrate them appropriately. The whole point of employing juniors is that you don't assign a senior to rewrite everything they do.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#216

Post by jemiluv8 »

When I first came across the idea of vibe coding, my first reaction was that this was taking things too far. Isn't it enough that your LLM can help you do - autocomplete - suggest possible solutions to a problem you've taken the time to understand - helps you spend less time reading documentation and instead help guide your approach and sometimes even helps you identify obscure apis that could help you get shit done - help you review your code - come up with multiple designs for a solutions - evaluate multiple designs you come up with for trade-offs - help you understand your problem better and the available apis - write a prototype of some piece of code

I feel like LLMs are already doing quite a lot. I spend less time rummaging through documentation or trying to remember obscure api's or other pieces of code in a software project. All I need is a strong mental model about the project and how things are done.

There is a lot of obvious heavy lifting that LLMs are doing that I for one am not able to take for granted.

For people facing constraints similar to those in a resource constrained economic environment, the benefits of any technology that helps them spend less time doing work that doesn't deliver value is immediately visible/obvious/apparent.

It is no longer an argument about whether it is a hype or something, it is more about how best to use it to achieve your goals. Forget the hype. Forget the marketing of AI companies - they have to do that to sell their products - nothing wrong with that. Don't let companies or bloggers set your own expectations of what could or should be done with this piece of tech. Just get on the bandwagon and experiment and find out what is too much. In the end I feel we will all come from these experiments knowing that LLMs are already doing quite a lot.

TRIVIA I even came by this article https://www.greptile.com/blog/ai-code-reviews-conflict. That clearly pointed out how LLM reliance can bring both the 10x dev and 1x dev closer to a median of "goodness". So the 10x dev is probably worse and the 1x dev ends up getting better - I'm probably that guy because I tend to mis subtle things in code and copilot review has had my ass for a while now - I haven't had defects like that in a while.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#217

Post by ghurtado »

reachableceo wrote: post #161
jm4 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you described it much more succinctly than most people do. It's been my exact experience as well. The LLM can develop much faster than I can build a mental model. It's very easy to get to a point where you don't know what's going on, a bunch of bugs have been introduced and you can't easily fix them or refactor because you're essentially the new guy on your own project. I find myself adjusting by committing c…

“ I'm finding that developing prompts, managing context, controlling pace, staying organized and being able to effectively review the LLM's work are required skills for LLM-assisted coding “ Did you not need all these skills / approaches / frameworks for yourself / coding with a team? This is , I think, the key difference in those (such as myself) who find LLMs to massively increase velocity / quality / quantity of o…

> I was already highly..

I stopped reading right here. Presumably other people did too. I don't think you're aware of the caliber of your hubris. About howitzer sized.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#218

Post by JSR_FDED »

reachableceo wrote: post #161
jm4 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you described it much more succinctly than most people do. It's been my exact experience as well. The LLM can develop much faster than I can build a mental model. It's very easy to get to a point where you don't know what's going on, a bunch of bugs have been introduced and you can't easily fix them or refactor because you're essentially the new guy on your own project. I find myself adjusting by committing c…

“ I'm finding that developing prompts, managing context, controlling pace, staying organized and being able to effectively review the LLM's work are required skills for LLM-assisted coding “ Did you not need all these skills / approaches / frameworks for yourself / coding with a team? This is , I think, the key difference in those (such as myself) who find LLMs to massively increase velocity / quality / quantity of o…

Needs/more/slashes.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#220

Post by conception »

smeeth wrote: post #117
criddell wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your steroids comparison made me think of Cal Newport's recent blog post[1] where he argues that AI is making us lazy. He quotes some researchers who hooked people up to EEG machines then had them work. The people working without AI assistance incurred more brain "strain" and that's probably a good thing. But even he doesn't think AI shouldn't be used. Go ahead and use it for stuff like email but don't use it for you…

It's worth noting this is the exact argument people used against adopting electric calculators.

They weren’t wrong. There are lots of cognitive and conceptual benefits to slide rules.
Post reply on HN