Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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When used that way they also regularly get into loops where they lose track of what they were supposed to do.

The last time I set Cursor on something without watching it very very closely it spun for a while fixing tests and when it finally stopped and I looked what it had done it had coded special cases in to pass the specific failing tests in a way that didn't generalize at all to the actual problem. Another recent time I had to pull the plug on it installing a bunch of brand new dependencies that it decided would somehow fix the failing tests. It had some kind of complete rewrite planned.

Claude Code is even worse when it gets into this mode because it'll do something totally absurd like that and then at the end you have to `git reset` and you're also on the hook for the $5 of tokens that it managed to spend in 5 minutes.

I still find them useful, but it takes a lot of practice to figure out when they'll be useful and when they'll be a total waste of time.

It happens to me every once in awhile, but I'm not sure why I would care. I usually set it off on some question and go tab away to something else while it flails. When I come back, I have a better-than-average shot at a workable solution, which is a science fiction result.

When I first began programming as a teenager, one of the mental hurdles I had to get over was asking the computer to "too much"; like, I would feel bad writing a nested loop --- that can't possibly be the right answer! What a chore for the computer! It didn't take me too long to figure out that was the whole point of computers. To me, it's the same thing with LLMs spinning on something. Who gives a shit? It's not me wasting that time.

I’m now at the point where I tell it to do something _and then drive to Wisconsin_ giving feedback at the Marz cheese castle and continuing my trip.

I feel like you might know where I'm coming from being confused at people's reaction to this stuff. This is science fiction. I think it's just not sinking in with people. If I could bet on this, I would bet everything I could on "skill with LLMs" being the high order bit of being an effective software developer 5 years from now.

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I don't deny that, under the right circumstances, these tools can produce results that feel indistinguishable from magic, or like science fiction as you put it. But I don't think it's worth the costs. To me, the two most concerning costs are the unreliability, and the massive amounts of stolen training data and underpaid labor (the RLHF process) required for these models. I'm not comfortable relying on a tool built on such foundations.

My bet, and I realize this might just be wishful thinking, is that the high order bit for being an effective software developer in the near future will be skill at using more reliable and non-exploitative automation tools, such as programming languages with powerful macro systems and other high-level abstractions, to stay competitive with developers who sling LLM-generated code. So I'd better get started developing that skill myself.

I could not possibly have any less sympathy for an argument than I do about the "stolen IPR" implications of coding LLMs.

It can be a science fiction result and still not actually result in time saved for the human operator on the whole. For me the jury is definitely still out on whether it results in net time saved and it's not for lack of trying.

Whether it ends up getting good enough in the near future that it does become a net positive both isn't the question being discussed and still remains to be seen.

Have you tried an asynchronous agent coding flow? They were relatively rare until last week. But it took that for me to see the value. Now I happily queue up 4 or 5 tasks in the morning, come back at lunch to check in/feedback or merge at lunch, rinse and repeat.

It doesn’t replace the hard tasks (yet) and you do need to think about the tasks and the tooling but it’s a game changer.

I wasn’t kidding in a peer comment (except about the mars cheese castle). I started an agent task before leaving on a trip and gave it feedback from my iPad when I stopped. I have a real business problem solved now.

To be fair, TDD has three steps: Red, Green, Refactor. Sounds like you got to Green. /s

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