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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I often wonder if people who report that LLMs are useless for code haven't cracked the fact that you need to to have a conversation with it - expecting a perfect result after your first prompt is setting it up for failure, the real test is if you can get to a working solution after iterating with it for a few rounds.

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As someone who has finally found a way to increase productivity by adding some AI, my lesson has sort of been the opposite. If the initial response after you've provided the relevant context isn't obviously useful: give up. Maybe start over with slightly different context. A conversation after a bad result won't provide any signal you can do anything with, there is no understanding you can help improve.

It will happily spin forever responding in whatever tone is most directly relevant to your last message: provide an error and it will suggest you change something (it may even be correct every once in a while!), suggest a change and it'll tell you you're obviously right, suggest the opposite and you will be right again, ask if you've hit a dead end and yeah, here's why. You will not learn anything or get anywhere.

A conversation will only be useful if the response you got just needs tweaks. If you can't tell what it needs feel free to let it spin a few times, but expect to be disappointed. Use it for code you can fully test without much effort, actual test code often works well. Then a brief conversation will be useful.

Why would I do this, when I can just write it from scratch in less time than it takes you to have this conversation with the LLM?

Because once you get good at using LLMs you can write it with 5 rounds with an LLM in way less time than it would have taken you to type out the whole thing yourself, even if you got it exactly right first time coding it by hand.

So the main advantage is that LLMs can type faster than you?

Yes, exactly.

Burning down the rainforests so I don’t have to wait for my fingers.

If you do a basic query to GPT-4o every ten seconds it uses a blistering... hundred watts or so. More for long inputs, less when you're not using it that rapidly.

The environmental impact of running prompts through (most) of these models is massively over-stated.

(I say "most" because GPT-4.5 is 1000x the price of GPT-4o-mini, which implies to me that it burns a whole lot more energy.)

This is honestly really unimpressive

Typing speed is not usually the constraint for programming, for a programmer that knows what they are doing

Creating the solution is the hard work, typing it out is just a small portion of it

I know. That's why I've consistently said that LLMs give me a 2-5x productivity boost on the portion of my job which involves typing code into a computer... which is only about 10% of what I do. (One recent example: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/10/software-misadventures... )

(I get boosts from LLMs to a bunch of activities too, like researching and planning, but those are less obvious than the coding acceleration.)

> That's why I've consistently said that LLMs give me a 2-5x productivity boost on the portion of my job which involves typing code into a computer... which is only about 10% of what I do

This explains it then. You aren't a software developer

You get a productivity boost from LLMs when writing code because it's not something you actually do very much

That makes sense

I write code for probably between 50-80% of any given week, which is pretty typical for any software dev I've ever worked with at any company I've ever worked at

So we're not really the same. It's no wonder LLMs help you, you code so little that you're constantly rusty

I'm a software developer: https://github.com/simonw

I very much doubt you spend 80% of your working time actively typing code into a computer.

My other activities include:

- Researching code. This is a LOT of my time - reading my own code, reading other code, reading through documentation, searching for useful libraries to use, evaluating if those libraries are any good.

- Exploratory coding in things like Jupyter notebooks, Firefox developer tools etc. I guess you could call this "coding time", but I don't consider it part of that 10% I mentioned earlier.

- Talking to people about the code I'm about to write (or the code I've just written).

- Filing issues, or updating issues with comments.

- Writing documentation for my code.

- Straight up thinking about code. I do a lot of that while walking the dog.

- Staying up-to-date on what's new in my industry.

- Arguing with people about whether or not LLMs are useful on Hacker News.

"typing code is a small portion of programming"

"I agree, only 10% of what I do is typing code"

"that explains it, you aren't a software developer"

What the hell?

You should check out Simon’s wikipedia and github pages, when you have time between your coding sprints.

I suspect this is only true if you are lousy at writing code or have a very slow typing speed

I suspect the opposite is only true if you haven't taken the time to learn how to productively use LLMs for coding.

(I've written a fair bit about this: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/ and https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/ and 80+ examples of tools I've built mostly with LLMs on https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon )

Maybe I've missed it, but what did you use to perform the actual code changes on the repo?

You mean for https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon ?

I've used a whole bunch of techniques.

Most of the code in there is directly copied and pasted in from https://claude.ai or https://chatgpt.com - often using Claude Artifacts to try it out first.

Some changes are made in VS Code using GitHub Copilot

I've used Claude Code for a few of them https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/claude-c...

Some were my own https://llm.datasette.io tool - I can run a prompt through that and save the result straight to a file

The commit messages usually link to either a "share" transcript or my own Gist showing the prompts that I used to build the tool in question.

You must not be learning very many new things then if you can't see a benefit to using an LLM. Sure, for the normal crud day-to-day type stuff, there is no need for an LLM. But when you are thrown into a new project, with new tools, new code, maybe a new language, new libraries, etc., then having an LLM is a huge benefit. In this situation, there is no way that you are going to be faster than an LLM.

Sure, it often spits out incomplete, non-ideal, or plain wrong answers, but that's where having SWE experience comes in to play to recognize it

> But when you are thrown into a new project, with new tools, new code, maybe a new language, new libraries, etc., then having an LLM is a huge benefit. In this situation, there is no way that you are going to be faster than an LLM.

In the middle of this thought, you changed the context from "learning new things" to "not being faster than an LLM"

It's easy to guess why. When you use the LLM you may be productive quicker, but I don't think you can argue that you are really learning anything

But yes, you're right. I don't learn new things from scratch very often, because I'm not changing contexts that frequently.

I want to be someone who had 10 years of experience in my domain, not 1 year of experience repeated 10 times, which means I cannot be starting over with new frameworks, new languages and such over and over

"When you use the LLM you may be productive quicker, but I don't think you can argue that you are really learning anything"

Here's some code I threw together without even looking at yesterday: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/incomplete-json-pr... (notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/28/incomplete-json-pretty... )

Reading it now, here are the things it can teach me:

    :root {
      --primary-color: #3498db;
      --secondary-color: #2980b9;
      --background-color: #f9f9f9;
      --card-background: #ffffff;
      --text-color: #333333;
      --border-color: #e0e0e0;
    }
    body {
      font-family: 'Segoe UI', Tahoma, Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif;
      line-height: 1.6;
      color: var(--text-color);
      background-color: var(--background-color);
      padding: 20px;

That's a very clean example of CSS variables, which I've not used before in my own projects. I'll probably use that pattern myself in the future.

    textarea:focus {
      outline: none;
      border-color: var(--primary-color);
      box-shadow: 0 0 0 2px rgba(52, 152, 219, 0.2);
    }

Really nice focus box shadow effect there, another one for me to tuck away for later.

        <button id="clearButton">
          <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="16" height="16" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round">
            <rect x="3" y="3" width="18" height="18" rx="2" ry="2"></rect>
            <line x1="9" y1="9" x2="15" y2="15"></line>
            <line x1="15" y1="9" x2="9" y2="15"></line>
          </svg>
          Clear
        </button>

It honestly wouldn't have crossed my mind that embedding a tiny SVG inline inside a button could work that well for simple icons.

      // Copy to clipboard functionality
      copyButton.addEventListener('click', function() {
        const textToCopy = outputJson.textContent;
        
        navigator.clipboard.writeText(textToCopy).then(function() {
          // Success feedback
          copyButton.classList.add('copy-success');
          copyButton.textContent = ' Copied!';
          
          setTimeout(function() {
            copyButton.classList.remove('copy-success');
            copyButton.innerHTML = '<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="14" height="14" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round"><rect x="9" y="9" width="13" height="13" rx="2" ry="2"></rect><path d="M5 15H4a2 2 0 0 1-2-2V4a2 2 0 0 1 2-2h9a2 2 0 0 1 2 2v1"></path></svg> Copy to Clipboard';
          }, 2000);
        });
      });

Very clean example of clipboard interaction using navigator.clipboard.writeText

And the final chunk of code on the page is a very pleasing implementation of a simple character-by-character non-validating JSON parser which indents as it goes: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/1b9ce52d23c1335777cfedf...

That's half a dozen little tricks I've learned from just one tiny LLM project which I only spent a few minutes on.

My point here is that if you actively want to learn things, LLMs are an extraordinary gift.

Exactly! I learn all kinds of things besides coding-related things, so I don't see how it's any different. ChatGPT 4o does an especially good job of walking thru the generated code to explain what it is doing. And, you can always ask for further clarification. If a coder is generating code but not learning anything, they are either doing something very mundane or they are being lazy and just copy/pasting without any thought--which is also a little dangerous, honestly.

It really depends on what you're trying to achieve.

I was trying to prototype a system and created a one-pager describing the main features, objectives, and restrictions. This took me about 45 minutes.

Then I feed it into Claude and asked to develop said system. It spent the next 15 minutes outputting file after file.

Then I ran "npm install" followed by "npm run" and got a "fully" (API was mocked) functional, mobile-friendly, and well documented system in just an hour of my time.

It'd have taken me an entire day of work to reach the same point.

Yeah nah. The endless loop of useless suggestions or ”solutions” is very easily achiavable and common, at least on my use cases, not matter how much you iterate with it. Iterating gets counter-productive pretty fast, imo. (Using 4o).

When I use Claude to iterate/troubleshoot I do it in a project and in multiple chats. So if I test something and it throws and error or gives an unexpected result I’ll start a new chat to deal with that problem, correct the code, update that in the project, then go back to my main thread and say “I’ve update this” and provide it the file, “now let’s do this”. When I started doing this it massively reduced the LLM getting lost or going off on weird quests. Iteration in side chats, regroup in the main thread. And then possibly another overarching “this is what I want to achieve” thread where I update it on the progress and ask what we should do next.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently. I have a colleague who simply can’t use LLMs for this reason - he expects them to work like a logical and precise machine, and finds interacting with them frustrating, weird and uncomfortable.

However, he has a very black and white approach to things and he also finds interacting with a lot of humans frustrating, weird and uncomfortable.

The more conversations I see about LLMs the more I’m beginning to feel that “LLM-whispering” is a soft skill that some people find very natural and can excel at, while others find it completely foreign, confusing and frustrating.

It really requires self-discipline to ignore the enthusiasm of the LLM as a signal for whether you are moving in the direction of a solution. I blame myself for lazy prompting, but have a hard time not just jumping in with a quick project, hoping the LLM can get somewhere with it, and not attempt things that are impossible, etc.

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