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Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

Is it. For small scripts like these you can get far with basic search and sources like docs/github/SO. Maybe cursor is more “fun”, “engaging”, and the like, but it’s not like it was a difficult job before.

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If you could throw your endless todo list of side projects at an LLM, and can see at least some of them implemented overnight effortlessly, why not? You can still take credit because you had the idea in the first place and went through the effort to write it down and describe it well enough to be achievable. It's definitely more fun especially if you have limited hobby coding time.

If you're fine with running them blindly and having one of those scripts recursively remove your home directory, then sure. Otherwise it's very much not a zero effort affair. More like overseeing an overconfident overenthusiastic amphetamine-doped junior developer (or running his output blindly and hoping for the best).

I really do feel like we're living in completely separate worlds, so many people are very enthusiastic about LLMs, and every time I try them, they leave me completely disappointed.

Biking isn’t difficult, but you’ll still travel more with a car.

Now imagine if your car didn’t have a steering wheel or pedals, but instead you had to explain to it where to go and it would misunderstand you 60% of the time.

I would say Claude misunderstands about 10% of the time once you know how to prompt it.

Only when the road permits it for that type of car. And if it’s a common road, it’s better economically to build a a train (framework, library) than to use a car (code generation). Then you could use a bycicle (short burst of code) for the parts that matter.

It is, takes much less energy.

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