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After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

albertofortin.com

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Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#51

Post by maccard »

mritchie712 wrote: post #37
jclardy wrote: post #8

I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-…

How useful the various tools will be depends on the person and the problem. Take two hypothetical people working on different problems and consider if, for example, Cursor would be useful. IF you're a: * 10 year python dev * work almost entirely on a very large, complex python code base * have a pycharm IDE fine tuned over many years to work perfectly on that code base * have very low tolerance for bugs (stable produ…

I’ve found the biggest thing LLMs and agents let me do are build the things that I really suck at to a prototype level. I’m not a frontend engineer, and pitching feature prototypes without a fronted is tough.

But with aider/claude/bolt/whatever your tool of choice is, I can give it a handful of instructions and get a working page to demo my feature. It’s the difference between me pitching the feature or not, as opposed to pitching it with or without the frontend.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#52

Post by StefanBatory »

emseetech wrote: post #49
mritchie712 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How useful the various tools will be depends on the person and the problem. Take two hypothetical people working on different problems and consider if, for example, Cursor would be useful. IF you're a: * 10 year python dev * work almost entirely on a very large, complex python code base * have a pycharm IDE fine tuned over many years to work perfectly on that code base * have very low tolerance for bugs (stable produ…

Agreed but the 1 year JS dev should know they're making a deal with the devil in terms of building their skillset long term.

From workplace perspective, they don't have a reason to care. What they'll care about is that you're productive right now - if you won't become better dev in the future? Your issue.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#53

Post by stevepotter »

jclardy wrote: post #8

I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-…

I do a variety of things, including iOS and web. Like you mentioned, LLM results between the two are very different. I can't trust LLM output to even compile, much less work. Just last night, it told me to use an API called `CMVideoFormatDescriptionGetCameraIntrinsicMatrix`. That API is very interesting because it doesn't exist. It also did a great job of digging some deep holes when dealing with some tricky Swift 6 concurrency stuff. Meanwhile it generated an entire nextjs app that worked great on the first shot. It's all about that training data baby

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#55

Post by whiplash451 »

emseetech wrote: post #49
mritchie712 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How useful the various tools will be depends on the person and the problem. Take two hypothetical people working on different problems and consider if, for example, Cursor would be useful. IF you're a: * 10 year python dev * work almost entirely on a very large, complex python code base * have a pycharm IDE fine tuned over many years to work perfectly on that code base * have very low tolerance for bugs (stable produ…

Agreed but the 1 year JS dev should know they're making a deal with the devil in terms of building their skillset long term.

The jury is still out on that one.

Having a tool that’s embedded into your workflow and shows you how things can be done based on tons of example codebases could help a junior dev quite a lot to learn, not just to produce.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#56

Post by [deleted] »

emseetech wrote: post #49
mritchie712 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How useful the various tools will be depends on the person and the problem. Take two hypothetical people working on different problems and consider if, for example, Cursor would be useful. IF you're a: * 10 year python dev * work almost entirely on a very large, complex python code base * have a pycharm IDE fine tuned over many years to work perfectly on that code base * have very low tolerance for bugs (stable produ…

Agreed but the 1 year JS dev should know they're making a deal with the devil in terms of building their skillset long term.

[deleted]

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#57

Post by geraneum »

VMG wrote: post #11

I get it and I see the same problems as the author. I'm working on a few toy projects and I am using LLM for 90% of it. The result is 10x faster than if I coded it "by hand", but the architecture is worse and somewhat alien. I'm still keeping at it, because I'm convinced that LLM driven code is where things are headed, inevitably. These tools are just crazy powerful, but we will have to learn how to use them in a way…

> Writing down the architecture and guidelines more explicitly?

Yes, very explicit like “if (condition) do (action)” and get more explicit when… oh wait!

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#58

Post by ekianjo »

mritchie712 wrote: post #37
jclardy wrote: post #8

I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-…

How useful the various tools will be depends on the person and the problem. Take two hypothetical people working on different problems and consider if, for example, Cursor would be useful. IF you're a: * 10 year python dev * work almost entirely on a very large, complex python code base * have a pycharm IDE fine tuned over many years to work perfectly on that code base * have very low tolerance for bugs (stable produ…

> THEN: LLMs will to 10x you. An IDE like Cursor will immediately make you way faster.

they will make you clueless about what the code does and your code will be unmaintanable.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#59

Post by diggan »

mritchie712 wrote: post #37
jclardy wrote: post #8

I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-…

How useful the various tools will be depends on the person and the problem. Take two hypothetical people working on different problems and consider if, for example, Cursor would be useful. IF you're a: * 10 year python dev * work almost entirely on a very large, complex python code base * have a pycharm IDE fine tuned over many years to work perfectly on that code base * have very low tolerance for bugs (stable produ…

Taking your "to 10x you" as hyperbole and to actually mean "more productive", if you replace "Python" with "Programming" and "IDE" with Neovim, that's basically me. And I'm way more productive with LLMs than without them. Granted, I stay far away from "vibe coding", only use LLMs for some parts and don't use "agentic LLMs" or whatever, just my own programmed "Human creates issue on GitHub, receive N PRs back with implementations" bot.

Basically, use LLMs as a tool for specific things, don't let them do whatever and everything.

Re: After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

#60

Post by jfim »

VMG wrote: post #11

I get it and I see the same problems as the author. I'm working on a few toy projects and I am using LLM for 90% of it. The result is 10x faster than if I coded it "by hand", but the architecture is worse and somewhat alien. I'm still keeping at it, because I'm convinced that LLM driven code is where things are headed, inevitably. These tools are just crazy powerful, but we will have to learn how to use them in a way…

One thing you can do is to define the classes and methods that you want to have, and have the LLM implement them. For tricky things, you can leave additional notes in the empty method body as to how things should be implemented.

This way you're doing the big picture thinking while having the LLM do what's it's good at, generating code within the limits of its context window and ability to reason about larger software design.

I mostly treat the LLM as an overly eager to please junior engineer that types very quickly, who can read the documentation really quickly, but also tends to write too much code and implement features that weren't asked for.

One of the good things is that the code that's generated is so low effort to generate that you can afford to throw away large chunks of it and regenerate it. With LLM assistance, I wrote some code to process a dataset, and when it was too screwy, I just deleted all of it and rewrote it a few times using different approaches until I got something that worked and was performant enough. If I had to type all of that I would've been disappointed at having to start over, and probably more hesitant to do so even if it's the right thing to do.

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