311–320 of 388 posts
I actually made a Ask HN about it just today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45091607 but for some reason the HN algorithm never even showed it on the Ask page :/
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I hate to play the "you're holding it wrong" card, but when I started, I had more or less the same experience. Eventually you start to learn how to better talk to it in order to get better results. Something I've found useful with Claude Code is that it works a lot better if I give it many small tasks to perform to eventually get the big thing done, rather than just dumping the big thing in its lap. You can do this i…
While this matches my experience, it's worth mentioning thar the act of breaking a task up into the correct chunk size and describing it in English is itself a non trivial task which can be more time consuming than simply writing the actual code. The fact that it works is amazing, but I'm less convinced that it's enhancing my productivity. (I think they real productivity boost for me is if I still write the code and…
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Yeah, I'm not putting stock in this at all. The methodology of this survey seems dubious.
30% of the articles on this forum are covert LLM advertising
I guess it's not a massive surprise given it's an HN forum and a reasonable percentage of HN candidates are doing LLM/AI stuff in recent cohorts, but it still means I have to apply a very big filter every time I open an article and people wax lyrical about how amazing Claude-GPT-super-codez is and how it has made them twice the engineer they were yesterday at the bargain price of $200 a month...
May it all die in a fire very soon. Butlerian jihad now.
The article claims, that senior developers with over 10 years of experience are more than twice as likely to heavily rely on AI tools compared to their junior counterparts. No p-values or statistical significance tests are reported in either The Register article or Fastly's original blog post. I have over 30 years of experience and recently used Claude Opus 4.1 (via browser and claude.ai) to generate an ECMA-335 and…
Imho your post summarizes 90% of the posts I see about AI coding on HN: not understanding the tools, not understanding their strenghts and weaknesses, not being good at prompting or context management yet forming strong(ish) opinions. If you don't know what they are good at and how to use them of course you may end up with mixed results and yes, you may waste time. That's a criticism I have also towards AI super enth…
Even if you know better than themselves how musch they know, isn't the tool inadequate just yet for power use then when it is sooo easy to misuse?
Too much tweeking and adapting users to the needs of the tool (vs. the other way around) and there is little point using those (which is a bit of the sickness of modern day computing: 'with computers you can solve problems lightning fast that you wouldn't have without them')
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Yeah I’m still not more productive. Maybe 10% more. But it alleviates a lot of mental energy, which is very nice at the age of 40.
For all the folks on the "reduce mental burden", "reduce cognitive load" train, are you all aware that this basically means you are exercising less your brain day in and day out, and in the end you will forget how to do things? You will learn how to guide an AI agent, but until the day an AI agent is perfect (and we don't know if we will ever see that day), you are just losing inch by inch your ability to actually un…
If you don't wanna use AI, that's entirely up to you, but "you're gonna forget how to program if you use AI and then whatever are you going to do if the AI is down" reeks of motivated reasoning.
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I use Claude Code with the Max plan, and the experience isn't far off from what you describe. You still need to understand the system and review the implementation, because it makes many mistakes. That's not the part it saves me time in, it saves me time in looking up the documentation. Other than that, it might be slower, because the larger the code change is, the more time I need to spend reviewing, and past a poin…
So, I am paying $20, for a glorified code generator, that may or may not be correct, to write a small function that I can do for free, and be confident about the correctness, if I have not been lazy to implement a test for it. If you point out, with test it's also the same with any AI tool available, but to come to that result, I have to continuously prompt it till it gives me the desired output, while I may be able…
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I use Claude Code with the Max plan, and the experience isn't far off from what you describe. You still need to understand the system and review the implementation, because it makes many mistakes. That's not the part it saves me time in, it saves me time in looking up the documentation. Other than that, it might be slower, because the larger the code change is, the more time I need to spend reviewing, and past a poin…
> it saves me time in looking up the documentation I have a Perplexity subscription which I heavily use for such purpose, just asking how something works or should be used, with a response just on the point and with examples. Very useful indeed. Perplexity gives me access to Claude Sonnet 4 w/o Thinking which I consider great models, and it can also generate decent code. My intention was to find out how good the rece…
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> No, I'm challenging the metaphor. Working the trades isn't exercise - it's a grind that wears people out. If your job is just grinding out code in a stressful and soul-crushing manner, the issue lies elsewhere. You will be soon either grinding out prompts to create software you don't even understand anymore or you will be replaced by an agent. And by no way I'm implying you are part of the issue.
But LLMs can make the soul crushing part so much easier. I need to add a FooController to an existing application, to store FooModels to the database. The controller needs the basic CRUD endpoints, etc. I can spend a day doing it (crushing my soul) or I can just tell any Agentic LLM to do it and no something that doesn't crush my soul, like talk with the customer about how the FooModels will be used after storing. "B…
I can’t write this without feeling preachy, and I apologize for that. But I keep reading a profound lack of agency in comments like these.
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30% of the articles on this forum are covert LLM advertising
Good, it's not just me. I guess it's not a massive surprise given it's an HN forum and a reasonable percentage of HN candidates are doing LLM/AI stuff in recent cohorts, but it still means I have to apply a very big filter every time I open an article and people wax lyrical about how amazing Claude-GPT-super-codez is and how it has made them twice the engineer they were yesterday at the bargain price of $200 a month.…
To anyone reading, if you work on LLM software, I hope that your business fails.
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Imho your post summarizes 90% of the posts I see about AI coding on HN: not understanding the tools, not understanding their strenghts and weaknesses, not being good at prompting or context management yet forming strong(ish) opinions. If you don't know what they are good at and how to use them of course you may end up with mixed results and yes, you may waste time. That's a criticism I have also towards AI super enth…
I'm pretty good at prompting and I successfully use Perplexity (mostly with Claude Sonnet 4) to develop concepts, sometimes with the same session expanded over several days. I think the user interface is much superior over Claude.ai. My hope was that the newer Claude Opus 4.1 would be much better in solving complicated coding tasks, which doesn't seem to be the case. For this I had to subscribe to claude.ai. Actually…
1) Your original post asks a lot if not too much out the LLM, the expectation you have is too big, to the point that to get anywhere near decent results you need a super detailed prompt (if not several spec documents) and your conclusion stands true: it might be faster to just do it manually. That's the state of LLMs as of today. Your post neither hints at such detailed and laborious prompting nor seem to recognize you've asked it too much, displaying that you are not very comfortable with the limitations of the tool. You're still exploring what it can and what it can't do. But that also implies you're yet not an expert.
2) The second takeaway that you're not yet as comfortable with the tools as you think you are is clearly context management. 2/3k locs of code are way too much. It's a massive amount of output to hope for good results (this also ties with the quality of the prompt, with the guidelines and code practices provided, etc, etc).
3) Neither 1 or 2 are criticisms of your conclusions or opinions, if anything, they are confirmations of your point that LLMs are not there. But what I disagree with is the rush into concluding that AI coding provides net 0 benefits out of your experience. That I don't share. Instead of settling on what it could do (help with planning, writing a spec file, writing unit tests, providing the more boilerplate-y part of the code) and use the LLM to reduce the friction (and thus provide a net benefit), you essentially asked it to replace you and found out the obvious: that LLMs cannot take care of non-trivial business logic yet, and even when they can the results are nowhere near being satisfactory. But that doesn't mean that AI-assisted coding is useless and the net benefit is 0, or negative, it only becomes so as the expectations on the tool are too big and the amount of information provided is either too small to return consistent results or too large for the context to be an issue.