Comment by nucleardog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nucleardog | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm in the same boat. I've tried a few of these tools and the output's generally been terrible to useless big and small. It's made up plausible-sounding but non-existent methods on the popular framework we use, something which it should have plenty of context and examples on.

Dealing with the output is about the same as dealing with a code review for an extremely junior employee... who didn't even run and verify their code was functional before sending it for a code review.

Except here's the problem. Even for intermediate developers, I'm essentially always in a situation where the process of explaining the problem, providing feedback on a potential solution, answering questions, reviewing code and providing feedback, etc takes more time out of my day than it would for me to just _write the damn code myself_.

And it's much more difficult for me to explain the solution in English than in code--I basically already have the code in my head, now I'm going through a translation step to turn it into English.

All adding AI has done is taking the part of my job that is "think about problem, come up with solution, type code in" and make it into something with way more steps, all of which are lossy as far as translating my original intent to working code.

I get we all have different experiences and all that, but as I said... same boat. From _my_ experiences this is so far from useful that hearing people rant and rave about the productivity gains makes me feel like an insane person. I can't even _fathom_ how this would be helpful. How can I not be seeing it?

The biggest lie in all of LLMs is that they’ll work out of the box and you don’t need to take time to learn them.

I find Copilot autocomplete invaluable as a productivity boost, but that’s because I’ve now spent over two years learning how to best use it!

“And it's much more difficult for me to explain the solution in English than in code--I basically already have the code in my head, now I'm going through a translation step to turn it into English.”

If that’s the case, don’t prompt them in English. Prompt them in code (or pseudo-code) and get them to turn that into code that’s more likely to be finished and working.

I do that all the time: many of my LLM prompts are the signature of a function or a half-written piece of code where I add “finish this” at the end.

Here’s an example, where I had started manually writing a bunch of code and suddenly realized that it was probably enough context for the LLM to finish the job… which it did: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Apr/8/files-to-prompt/#buildi...

You bring up a good point! These tools are useless if you can't prompt them effectively.

I am decent at explaining what I want in English. I have coded and managed developers for long enough to include tips on how I want something implemented. So far, I am nothing short of amazed. The tools are nowhere near perfect, but they do provide a non-trivial boost in my productivity. I feel like I did when I first used an IDE.

> Except here's the problem. Even for intermediate developers, I'm essentially always in a situation where the process of explaining the problem, providing feedback on a potential solution, answering questions, reviewing code and providing feedback, etc takes more time out of my day than it would for me to just _write the damn code myself_.

Exactly. And I’ve been telling myself „keep doing that, it lets them teach, otherwise they will never level up and be able to comfortably and reliably work on this codebase without much hand holding. This will pay off”. Which I still think is true to a degree, although less so with every year.

At least with the humans I work with it’s _possible_ and I can occasionally find some evidence that it _could_ be true to hang on to. I’m expending extra effort, but I’m helping another human being and _maybe_ eventually making my own life easier.

What’s the payoff for doing this with an LLM? Even if it can learn, why not let someone else do it and try again next year and see if it’s leveled up yet?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com