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Comment by itishappy | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. But this terrifies me. The goal of reusable code (to my mind) is that with everybody building from the same foundations we can enable more functional and secure software. Library users contributing back (even just bug reports) is the whole point! With LLMs creating everything from scratch, I think we're setting ourselves on a path towards less secure and less maintainable software.

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I (20+ years experience programmer) find it leads to a much higher quality output as I can now afford to do all the mundane, time-consuming housekeeping (refactors, more tests, making things testable).

E.g. let's say I'm working on a production thing and features/bugfixes accumulate and some file in the codebase starts to resemble spaghetti. The LLM can help me unfuck that way faster and get to a state of very clean code, across many files at once.

What LLM do you use? I've not gotten a lot of use out of Copilot, except for filling in generic algorithms or setting up boilerplate. Sometimes I use it for documentation but it often overlooks important details, or provides a description so generic as to be pointless. I've heard about Cursor but haven't tried it yet.

Cursor is much better than Copilot. Also, change it to use Claude, and then use the Inspector with ctrl-I

This is the thing it works both ways, it's really good at interpreting existing codebases too.

Could potentially mean just a change in time allocation/priority. As it's easier and faster to locate and potentially resolve issues later, it is less important for code to be consistent and perfectly documented.

Not fool proof and who knows how that could evolve, but just an alternative view. One of these big names in the industry said we'll have AGI when it speaks it's own language. :P.

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