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The current state of LLM-driven development

blog.tolki.dev

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Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#231

Post by gkuhl21 »

The following is half serious. Please enjoy.

Some comments here are reminiscent of antiquated discourse: "how many angels dance on the head of a pin?"

We somehow are trying to agree on some factual ramp-up time required for a dev to become competent coding with LLM's. This is inherently subjective! Why bother?

Perhaps certain LLMs are blessed with disproportionately more angels (nee "bugs") in the machines.

I enjoyed reading the article:

"The model looks good, but Google’s enshittification has won and it looks like no competent software developers are left. I would know, many of my friends work there."

Yikes!

Credit to the author for having the courage to post publically.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#232

Post by hislaziness »

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…

Would it be more appropriate to compare LLMs to Autotunes rather than pianos?

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#233

Post by theshrike79 »

uvdn7 wrote: post #55
SkyPuncher wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's a wild statement. I'm now extremely productive with LLMs in my core codebases, but it took a lot of practice to get it right and repeatable. There's a lot of little contextual details you need to learn how to control so the LLM makes the right choice…

Is the non-trivial amount of time significantly less than you trying to ramp up yourself? I am still hesitant using AI for solving problems for me. Either it hallucinates and misleads me. Or it does a great job and I worry that my ability of reasoning through complex problems with rigor will degenerate. When my ability of solving complex problems degenerated, patience diminished, attention span destroyed, I will beco…

Don't use it as a solution machine.

You use it when you know how to do something and know exactly what the solution looks like, but can't be arsed to do it. Like most UI work where you just want something in there with the basic framework to update content etc. There's nothing challenging in doing it, you know what has to be done, but figuring out the weird-ass React footguns takes time. Most LLMs can one-shot it with enough information.

You can also use it as a rubber duck, ask it to analyse some code, read and see if you agree. Ask for improvements or modifications, read and see if you agree.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#234

Post by credit_guy »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #215
credit_guy wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But it happens that I have 20 years of experience, and I know quite well how to code. Everything the LLM does for me I can do myself. But the LLM does that 100 times faster than me. Most of the days nowadays I push thousands of lines of code. And it's not garbage code, the LLMs write quite high quality code. Of course, I still have to go through the code and make sure it all makes sense. So I am still the bottl…

If you have 20 years of experience, then you know that number of lines of codes is always inversely proportional to code quality. > ...thousands of lines of code ... quite high quality A contradiction in terms.

Here’s an experiment for the two of us: we should both bookmark this page and revisit it one year from now. It is likely that at least one of us will see the world in a different way, or even both.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#235

Post by Our_Benefactors »

physPop wrote: post #107
credit_guy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. It takes months to learn how to use LLMs properly. There is an initial honeymoon where the LLMs blow your mind out. Then you get some disappointments. But then you start realizing that there are some things that LLMs are good at and some that they are bad at. You start creating a feel for what you can expect them to do. And more importantly, you get into the habit of splitting problems into smaller probl…

it really doesn't take that long. Maybe if you're super junior and never coded before? In that case I'm glad its helping you get into the field. Also, if its taking you months there are whole new models that will get released and you need to learn those quirks again.

How very condescending of you.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#236

Post by kiitos »

simonw wrote: post #103
hitarpetar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a problem, that is the argument. People are bad at measuring their own productivity. Just because you feel more productive with an LLM does not mean you are. We need more studies and less anecdata

I'm afraid all you're going to get from me is anecdata, but I find a lot of it very compelling. I talk to extremely experienced programmers whose opinions I have valued for many years before the current LLM boom who are now flying with LLMs - I trust their aggregate judgement. Meanwhile my own https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon collection has grown to over 120 in just a year and a half, most of which I wouldn't…

Every time you post about this stuff you get at least as much pushback as you get affirmation, and yet when you discuss anything related to peer responses, you never seem to mention or include any of that negative feedback, only the positive...

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#237

Post by simonw »

kiitos wrote: post #236
simonw wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid all you're going to get from me is anecdata, but I find a lot of it very compelling. I talk to extremely experienced programmers whose opinions I have valued for many years before the current LLM boom who are now flying with LLMs - I trust their aggregate judgement. Meanwhile my own https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon collection has grown to over 120 in just a year and a half, most of which I wouldn't…

Every time you post about this stuff you get at least as much pushback as you get affirmation, and yet when you discuss anything related to peer responses, you never seem to mention or include any of that negative feedback, only the positive...

I don't get it, what are you asking me to do here?

You want me to say "this stuff is really useful, here's why I think that. But lots of people on the internet have disagreed with me, here's links to their comments"?

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#238

Post by nvbalaji »

gexla wrote: post #197
credit_guy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. It takes months to learn how to use LLMs properly. There is an initial honeymoon where the LLMs blow your mind out. Then you get some disappointments. But then you start realizing that there are some things that LLMs are good at and some that they are bad at. You start creating a feel for what you can expect them to do. And more importantly, you get into the habit of splitting problems into smaller probl…

Love this, and it's so true. A lot of people don't get this, because it's so nuanced. It's not something that's slowing you down. It's not learning a technical skill. Rather, it's building an intuition. I find it funny when people ask me if it's true that they can build an app using an LLM without knowing how to code. I think of this... that it took me months before I started feeling like I "got it" with fitting LLMs…

Spot on. I code for last 25+ years. It took me a while (say about a week) to start using it meaningfully. I would not still claim I am using it efficiently or have the most productive work flow, which I think is because of the fact I keep figuring out new techniques almost on a daily basis.

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#239

Post by nvbalaji »

>>You can safely ignore them if they don’t fit your workflows at the moment

I would rather qualify this statement a bit more - I would say "you can safely ignore if you are not building anything green field or build tools for self". In my experiments in the last one month or so, it is very efficient for building new components (small & medium). Making it efficient for the existing code base is a bit more tricky - you need to make sure it adheres to the way things are coded already, not to leak .env contents to LLMs, building a context from the existing components so that it does not read code every time (leading to cost and time escalations) and so on.

My main issue so far has been understanding the code that is generated. As of now that is the biggest bottleneck in increasing the productivity - i.e it takes a long time to review the code and push. In usual workflow of building, normally by the time the code complexity has increased in the system I would have sufficient mental construction to handle that complexity. I would know the inner workings of code. However if AI generates large piece of code getting into that code is taking a long time

Re: The current state of LLM-driven development

#240

Post by kiitos »

simonw wrote: post #237
kiitos wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time you post about this stuff you get at least as much pushback as you get affirmation, and yet when you discuss anything related to peer responses, you never seem to mention or include any of that negative feedback, only the positive...

I don't get it, what are you asking me to do here? You want me to say "this stuff is really useful, here's why I think that. But lots of people on the internet have disagreed with me, here's links to their comments"?

you said

    I talk to extremely experienced programmers whose opinions I have valued for many years before the current LLM boom who are now flying with LLMs - I trust their aggregate judgement.
but every time i've seen you comment on this website or other similar websites on the topic of using LLMs for coding, at least half of the responses you get express precisely the opposite perspective -- that they are not flying with LLMs at all

so i think it is disingenuous to make claims like that without at least acknowledging the differences in experience which are pretty clearly demonstrated

this wouldn't be particularly worth mentioning, if it weren't for the fact that you comment extensively, prolifically, on agentic coding topics, on this website and many others, and your comments are generally effusively and uncritically positive, no matter what responses you get, over time, from anyone

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