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Comment by falcor84 | Hacker News Reader

From my experience, it is getting better over time, and I believe that there's still a lot of relatively low hanging fruit, particularly in terms of integrating the LLM with the language server protocol and other tooling. But having said that, at this point in time, it's just not good enough for independent work, so I would suggest using it only as you would pair-program with a mid-level human developer who doesn't have much context on the project, and has a short attention span. In particular, I generally only have the AI help me with one function/refactoring at a time, and in a way that is easy for me to test as we go, and am finding immense value.

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I think some of the consternation we see from the anti LLM crowd (of which I'm one) is this line of reasoning. These LLMs produce fine code when the code you are asking for is in its training set. So they can be better than a mid level dev and much faster in narrow, unknown contexts. But with no feedback to warn you, if you ask it for code that it has no or only a bit of data on, it is much worse than a rubber duck.

That and tech's status inflation means when we are talking about "mid level" engineers, really we are talking about engineers with a couple years of experience who have just graduated to the training wheels phase of producing production code. LLMs are still broadly aimed at removing the need for what I would just call junior engineers.

That and the fact that code does not live in a standalone bubble, but in a complex setup of OSes, APIs, middleware and other languages. My experience trying to use Claude to help me with that was disappointing.

Could you please give an example of what you wanted it to help you with, what you expected and what you got?

it's a tangent, but the title inflation and Years of Experience really are horrible metrics these days to judge engineers. Especially in an age where employers actively plan for 2-3 year churn instead of long term retention.

I have no clue how you get 5 years of experience in any meaningful way on any given tech. You sure won't get that only from the workplace's day to day activities. YoE is more a metric of how much of a glutton for punishment you have more than anything.

> better over time

The problem is all the most reliable code it can give you is stuff which ought to be (or already is) a documentation example or a reusable library, instead of "copy paste as a service".

If AI could generate better documentation for my domain tools, I'd take back maybe 75% of my criticisms for it.

But alas, this rush means they want to pitch to replace people like me, not actually make me more productive.

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