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Comment by Snuggly73 | Hacker News Reader

I had the weirdest experience the other day. I wanted to write an Expo React Native application - something I have zero experience with (I’ve been writing code non-stop since I was a kid, starting with 6502 assembly). I’ve leaned heavily on Sonnet 3.7 and off we went.

By the end of the day (10-ish hours) all I got to show was about 3 screens with few buttons each… Something a normal React developer probably would’ve spat out in about a hour. On top of that, I can’t remember shit about the application itself - and I can practically recite most of the codebases that I’ve spent time on.

And here I read about people casually generating and erasing 20k lines of code. I dunno, I guess I am either holding it wrong, or most of the time developing software isn’t spent vomiting code.

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Interesting. I had the exact opposite experience recently.

I've also been writing code for a long time, did the 6502 assembly thing way back when, and lots since then. For this current project I wanted to build a web app with a frontend in Angular and a backend in Java 21 relying on javalin.io for the services layer. It had a few other integrations as well - into a remote service requiring OAuth and also into subtlecrypto. After less than 10 hours I had a fully functioning MVP that was far superior to anything I could have created without an assistant. It gave me build files, even a test skeleton. Restyling the UI or reflowing the UX to include confirmations, additional steps, modals, ... was really easy. I just had to type it, and those changes would get made. It felt like I was "director of development" for a day.

I used Aider, plugged into Gemini 2.5.

Well... In my case the scaffolding was done by the Expo template, used Expo libraries for social login and I wrote the Expo API backend functions.

Was it productivity boost for me - yeah, cause I know mostly shit about React. But as an end result it just felt very underwhelming. Discussing it today with my brother (who lives and breathes FE) it apparently was.

I guess I was just expecting... I dunno... more - people are claiming nX productivity boosts, and considering how the UI is mostly boilerplate...

Just to continue my train of thought, because I keep coming back to this.

I think I was expecting that it will turn me into a FE developer and it will feel as natural and smooth as usual when I am in my element.

It didn’t. And the results weren’t what you would get from a real FE dev. And it felt unsatisfactory, stressful and ultimately hollow.

I guess _for me_ it would be fine for a throw away MVP - something that I don’t want to put my heart into.

I think your intuition about this all is right. Maybe we’re holding it wrong, maybe it’s plateaued and won’t get better, or maybe it will get massively better. Whatever happens, I think it’s the right call to hold a sober opinion— LLMs are just another dumb, expendable tool.

If a tool does not consistently produce results, you HAVE to take that at face value. You can’t just remove the numbers bringing down the average and say you have reached 95% success. When you see polar opposite experiences from so many people, the only reasonable takeaway is “so it’s unpredictable, very hard to use, or both.”

For me it’s too easy to go too fast with an LLM helping you. You got to rein it in and do actual PR reviews so you can keep up with what the LLM is doing. That way when you inevitably need to dive down and handle the code, you’re ready to do so.

yesterday I've had a numpy+matplotlib prototype spat out by gemini pro, had sonnet 3.7 convert it to a react component and did some final tweaks in chatgpt. took a couple hours of back and forth iteration from idea to a working tool.

of course not everything is how i'd truly like it, but it's 80% there.

before LLMs I wouldn't have bothered with starting. I knew exactly what I want to do, but it'd take me a couple days to proof the idea in Python and then translating it to web ui in TS? forget it

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