541–550 of 800 posts
These only really happen in mature codebases tied up in complex business requirements.
The last few times I’ve tried LLMs with this codebase it has not been fruitful.
Weird because it’s impressive in other areas, especially tech with no real users lmao
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I had an heavy ai user on my team say that “those who learn how ti use the tools wont get fired, those who dont are gone”. I used it to generate a bunch of cfn and it worked fine from an example and a couple line prompt, doesnt seem that hard to learn to me. Now reviewing the 1k lines it generated and making sure its secure, thats going to take me longer than writing it by hand.
Yeah, I think this is it. If you don't learn to use them, you'll be much slower than people who do, but also they're not really that hard to learn, so it's not super urgent.
For example, in one of the projects I'm working on, I'm using the VSA pattern. I have the list of 50 to 75 features I need to implement and what "categories" they slot into, I have all of the frameworks and libraries picked out, and I have built out "feature templates" with all of the boilerplate setup (I'm reusing these over multiple projects going forward). for each of the features all I need to do is
'ftr new {FEATURE_TYPE} {FEATURE_NAME} {OUTPUT_FOLDER}'
and then plug int the domain specific business logic.
I'll most likely use Claude/Codex/Whatever to write out some of my tests, but the majority of the 'boilerplate' is already done and I'm just sorting out the pieces that matter / can't be automated.
Am I missing something huge with these tools?
Don't get me wrong, for doing reverse engineering they're great helpers and I've made a tonne of progress on projects that had been languishing.
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What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors…
It's really insane what is happening. My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year. And, she's scrambling trying to figure out if any of the tools actually work and annoying her team because she keeps pushing AI on them. Unsurprisingly it's only slowed things down and put her in a terrible position.
> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…
But it's so easy to try something like Claude Code. It's not like you need to get up to speed. There is no learning curve*, that's the nature of AI. Just start using it and you'll see why it has attracted so much hype. *I should qualify that "using" CC in the strict sense has no learning curve, but really getting the most out of it may take some time as you see its limitations. But it's not learning tech in the tradi…
I use LLMs pretty regularly, so I'm familiar with the kinds of tasks they work well on and where they fall flat. I'm sure I could get at least some utility from Claude Code if I had an unlimited budget, but the voracious appetite for tokens even on a trivially small project -- combined with a worse answer than a curated-context chatbot prompt -- makes its value proposition very dubious. For now, at least.
* I considered trying Opus, but the fundamental issue of it eating through tokens meant, for me, that even if it worked much better, the cost would dramatically outweigh the benefit.
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This is the funniest possible answer to "Sounds like you've never changed a tire. Or at least not outside of a very controlled environment." "Oh, you think I've never changed a tire? Well here is my abstract high level understanding of the steps to changing a tire! And have you considered the quintessential controlled environment for putting tires onto cars?"
We all change tires with a jack and a spare? It's like a simple skill? I don't get the point your making then?
> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…
But it's so easy to try something like Claude Code. It's not like you need to get up to speed. There is no learning curve*, that's the nature of AI. Just start using it and you'll see why it has attracted so much hype. *I should qualify that "using" CC in the strict sense has no learning curve, but really getting the most out of it may take some time as you see its limitations. But it's not learning tech in the tradi…
> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…
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Is this seriously so? Have you never seen anything helpful from an LLM? That seems such a black and white statement that I get confused. I am conservative regarding AI driven coding but I still see tremendous value. It makes me want to ask you: do you ever see helpful things from your colleagues at all?
> Is this seriously so? Have you never seen anything helpful from an LLM? No, not at all. I may be using it wrong. I put in "write me a library that decodes network packets in " and it had no idea where to start. What part of it is it supposed to do? I don't want to do any more typing than I have to.
Where LLMs are behind humans is depth of insight. Doing anything non-trivial requires insight.
The key to effectively using LLMs is to provide the insight yourself, then let the LLM do the grunt work. Kind of like paint by numbers. In your case, I would recommend some combination of defining the API of the library you want yourself manually, thinking through how you would implement it and writing down the broad strokes of the process for the LLM, and collecting reference materials like a format spec, any docs, the code that's creating these packets, and so on.
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> Hope you don't get there too late. Too late for what ? Could no one start a viable internet business in 2005, or were they all taken in 1998? Is it impossible to learn machine learning today, if you weren't jumping into Tensorflow in 2015? Do you think it's impossible to learn OpenClaw today, if you weren't playing with it six months ago, and do you think there might not be a successor that "wins" and is easier to…
In 1998 or 2005 two persons could single-handedly start a Google or a Facebook. Not possible anymore today in Internet. But in AI a single person created OpenClaw. It's called low-hanging fruits.
Do you think no one can create anything alone ever again? Or can they only do it by adopting the bleeding edge?
> It's called low-hanging fruits.
1 in a million ideas are 1 in a million, and they don't require being a bleeding edge adopter of anything. Do you think no one can create a better version of a first-try service? Is the agentic world now closed because someone built a mediocre version of it?
For a start-up based board, this point-of-view just feels so sad and myopic.
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I'm definitely having a blast, but I agree with the author. You're not going to get left behind, the "getting left behind" rhetoric was just cryptocurrency pump-and-dumpers. It's fine to wait and not engage if you don't want to.
I agree with you, which is why I think it's a straw man. How many real devs are actually banging the "you're getting left behind!" drums?