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Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

> Tbh the reason I don't use LLM assistants is because they suck at the "low level". They are okay at mid level and better at high level. I find it's actual coding very mediocre and fraught with errors.

That's interesting. I found assistants like Copilot fairly good at low level code, assuming you direct it well.

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I have a response to a sibling comment showing where GPT 4o and o1-preview do not yield good results.

  > assuming you direct it well.

But hey, I admit I might not be good at this. But honestly, I've found greater value in my time reading the docs than spending trying to prompt engineer my way through. And I've given a fair amount of time to trying to get good at prompting. I just can't get it to work.

I do think that when I'm coding with an LLM it _feels_ faster, but when I've timed myself, it doesn't seem that way. It just seems to be less effort (I don't mind the effort, especially because the compounding rewards).

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