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Comment by nuz | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing about LLMs is that there's no rush in adopting them. They're semi useful but not really right now, but you're not gonna be 'left behind' if you don't make use of them. Everyone involved is working their hardest to make them more capable so when that day comes, you'll just use it to prompt what you want. But there's no rush to try to squeeze out anything out of the current generation which mostly lowers productivity rather than increases it.

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My thinking exactly! There's FOMO going on (and being fueled by people most of which seem to hope to somehow make money off it), but the barriers to entry for using LLMs are just not that high. When the tools are good enough, I'll happily use them. Today, for the work I do, I found that not to be the case yet. I wouldn't advocate for not trying them, but I see no reason to force yourself to use them.

Yea. TBH the tooling is the bigger issue for me, personally. I come across a ton of times where an LLM might work, or could - potentially. Usually refactors. But it requires access to basically all my files, both for context and to find where references to that class/struct/etc are.

Furthermore, i'd vastly prefer a workflow most of the time where i don't even have to ask. Or so i imagine. Ie i think i'd prefer a Clippy style "Want me to write a test for this? Want me to write some documentation for this?" etc helpers. I don't want to have to ask, i want it to intuit my needs - just like any programmer could if pair programming with you.

And most of all i want it to have access to all files. To know everything about the code possible. Don't just look at the func name in isolation, attempt to understand how it's used in the project.

If i have to baby sit an LLM for a simple function refactor to give it all files where the function is used or w/e, i'd rather do it myself with tools like AST Grep or even my LSP in many cases.

I'm very interested in LLMs for simple tasks today, but the tooling feels like my primary blocker. Also possibly context length, but i think there's lots of ways around that.

Just to throw my 2c here, since I also want the models to access the whole codebase of (at least) the current project.

I had great impression of sourcegraph’s cody. https://sourcegraph.com/cody few months ago.At least with the enterprise version of the sourcegraph that had indexed most of the orgs private repos.

The web ui (vscode extension was somehow worse, not sure why) was providing damn good responses, be it code generating or QA/explanation about code spanning through multiple repos. (e.g. terraform modules living in different repos)

Afaiu it was using the sourcegraph index under the hood. But I never really deep dived into the cody’s design internals (not even sure if they are actually public)

That being said, I’ve departed from the org months ago and haven’t used cody since then, so take this with a grain of salt, since the whole comment could be outdated a lot.

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