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Comment by dartos | Hacker News Reader

a little melodramatic at the end.

As with every openai release, I’d take it with try a grain of salt until it sees wide public usage.

So far every iteration of gpt since 4 has been pushed as a replacement for developers, but I have yet to feel that these tools are even consistently useful for my day to day.

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Lately copilot has been giving me outright u correct information and when you tell it, it’ll admit it lied and give another incorrect answer. Not even that obscure of a question either. I have zero trust in it being able to generate anything more than bare bones boiler plate (and even then).

I also feel they’ve made responses fairly wordy to make it appear to know stuff.

Can you ask for the prompt when chatting?

I think they definitely add some value. For example, I haven’t written complex sql queries since I was in school 20 years ago. Recently Claude helped me write a recursive database query which did an in-database graph traversal. It would have taken me way more time to relearn how to do that from scratch.

But I don’t think many people are that worried about gpt4. We’re worried about what it’ll look like with 5-10 more years of progress. O3 is apparently already better than 99% of competition programmers or something - it just costs thousands of dollars of compute per query. But give them a few short years.

Yes, I think this is the major factor to consider. If it’s only the cost that’s stopping it from replacing real people, then it’s a matter of a few to max several years to be more than cost effective.

Complex SQL and regex are pretty much my only current use cases for it. Saves tons of time doing things you don't do every day so rusty, but still can tell whether it's doing what you were asking for.

It's basically a replacement for Stack Overflow, made possible by scraping Stack Overflow.

I’ll believe what they say about O3 when it starts seeing use in the wild.

On the other hand one could argue that you should understand the code you write. A super complex in-database graph traversal should probably be properly understood in case performance problems pop up. Or the problem itself should be broken down differently.

Once Claude gave me the query, I read it, asked questions about how it works and asked about potential changes. “Why is this bit here? Couldn’t we do it like this instead?” And so on. We went through about 5 variants of the same query, Claude and I. They didn’t all work.

I’m still no expert. But I have a lot more confidence in that query & how it works than I would have from cobbling something together from stackoverflow.

I have needed 0 LLM tools to efficiently do my job since any release of any models. This predates OpenAI. The code suggestion/autocomplete has been sometimes nice but rarely is what I’m going to type out.

I don’t discourage use of LLMs but I don’t encourage it either. If you need to pay OpenAI to get your work done then that’s on you.

> but rarely is what I’m going to type out.

Just curious, does it matter? For some simple boilerplate code, simple test cases and simple skaffolding, which is needed in most applications, do you even care?

But simple scaffolding, test cases, boilerplate was around before LLMs via code generators/scaffolders, so yes, it’s revised history to pretend like an LLM invented those things. None of those things are complex ideas either.

I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking though.

While true, LLMs are just a more advanced version of it. Let's take Go as example as that is a very boilerplatey language; with claude, I only have to write the meat, for instance;

result, err:= doSomething()

and it'll generate the rest around it. Every time. Faster than I would type it and with more eye for detail (I am lazy, I will forget things as I did it now the 10004th time). So you can imagine some boilerplate scaffold thing that would do this err handling for you, but if you have a custom one, for 'old' tools you would have to tell the tool; now it just does it.

It especially becomes clear in frontend tasks: it just generates 100+ lines of react that work and look good; who likes writing they type of thing manually? I know 0 people who do: after that you will want to tweak it, but the 100k+ lines of react we generally have in a project are not something we would want to write these days from scratch. Which old school scaffold etc tool does that? So that it is 80-90% there for SaaS first shot? I know nothing (doesn't exist) without the lovely verboseness of having to type a million tags?

It saves us a lot of time we don't have to spend on boring stuff. We only have to write the actual business logic and data models; the rest drops out. And of course we only have to write that very loosely, not formally.

I love writing code, perhaps these software developers who do not will enjoy a different career once they LLM themselves out of this career. Writing 100k lines of code is a great achievement. Sorry to hear you’re so bored.

What is boring is the time I’ve wasted on a recent project fixing all of my coworkers LLM mistakes. I think I’ve nearly rewritten the entire php wordpress plugin. So his work really was a waste of time.

For golang I have never had a problem writing if err != nil. It takes a few seconds, paying some LLM company to write something I could write myself but I don’t want to because “I’m bored” is ludicrous use of time to me.

But it doesn't cost time is the point; it'll just fall out faster than you can type. Each their own; we save tons of time and errors with it; ymmv and that's fine.

Time spent writing code is IMO the smallest part of software engineering.

Optimizations give better results when care is taken first about the most costly parts.

That's the stuff I rather spend my time on when making money with software; all the other parts. One exists with the other.

> I only have to write the meat, for instance; result, err:= doSomething()

Ever heard of snippets? They do that too, but much more energy efficient and faster.

> Which old school scaffold etc tool does that?

create-react-app and yeoman

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