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My CEO friends that overstate the efficacy of LLMs are all nuts.
(I say this as someone who has been working in "AI" as part of Digital transformation roadmaps for SEVEN years and as someone who has used LLM's daily in my workflow for 3 years).
Another day another post about AI by people whose job will be made redundant. Something fascinating about this HN crowd in particular is its lack of foresight. Companies producing medicine have to take into account longterm effects, yet people working in these “tech” companies push out AI after AI with not a single care in how it’s going to impact people.
Not because they aren't effective - they are - but because using them helps me appreciate how important my own skills and experience are for using them to effectively solve problems.
One thing that I find truly amazing is just the simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return. Like, as someone who grew up learning to code in the 90s it always seemed like science fiction that we'd get to a point where you could give a computer some vague human level instructions and get it more or less do what you want.
I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months. I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even…
- Split things into small files, today’s model harnesses struggle with massive files
- Write lots of tests. When the language model messes up the code (it will), it can use the tests to climb out. Tests are the best way to communicate behavior.
- Write guides and documentation for complex tasks in complex codebases. Use a language model for the first pass if you’re too lazy. Useful for both humans and LLMs
It’s really: make your codebase welcoming for junior engineers
> We’re not East Coast dockworkers; we won’t stop progress on our own. we could choose to be of course if you're a temporarily embarrassed billionaire like ptacek, you certainly don't want the workers doing this
I've been hired to a fully distributed team only to have the company decide to force everyone to "return" to the office within a couple years despite the team never having been in any office in the first place; I've had managers promise me raises that don't appear, only for me to find out later that they never actually talked to their superiors about it like they claimed; I've seen teammates get hired and laid off six months later the same week that we have someone else we just hired join the team. None of this stuff is reasonable, and for some reason we collectively just throw up our hands and say there's nothing we can do, and then apparently some of us scoff and look down at lower-paid workers banding together to try to get a semblance of the advantages we take for granted in our industry because they're "stopping progress"? Even if I did accept the premise that workers collectively organizing to win rights affected "progress", there's no reason to assume there's no middle ground between the extremes of "no progress" and "full-throttle progress without regard for consequences". It's farcical.
"Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up, free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted. Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged." I would jump off a bridge before I…
I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months. I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even…
The reason I remain in the "skeptical" camp is because I am experiencing the same thing you are - I keep oscillating between being impressed, then disappointed. Ultimately the thing that impresses me is that LLMs have replaced google search. The thing that disappoints me is that their code is often convincing but wrong. Coming from a hard-engineering background, anything that is unreliable is categorized as bad. If y…
> My AI skeptic friends are all nuts My CEO friends that overstate the efficacy of LLMs are all nuts. (I say this as someone who has been working in "AI" as part of Digital transformation roadmaps for SEVEN years and as someone who has used LLM's daily in my workflow for 3 years).
> Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. > Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive, be they fleshly or algebraic. Using agents well is both a both a skill and an engineering project all its own, of prompts, indices, and (especially) tooling. LLMs only produce shitty code if you let them. A junior developer often has negative value to a team, because they're…