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Comment by ookblah | Hacker News Reader

honestly my theory is part of it is people who are very caught up in the "craft" part of it and now hate these LLMs for producing shit that pretty much works but isn't like this "perfect specimen" of coding architecture that they now have to pour over.

honestly, the vast majority of basically CRUD apps out there we are inflating our skills a bit too much here. even if the code is junk you can adapt your mindset to accept what LLMs produce, clean it up a bit, and come out with something maintainable.

like do these people ever have to review code from other people or juniors? the feedback loop here is tighter (although the drawback is your LLM doesn't "learn").

i wouldn't use it for anything super novel or cutting edge i guess, but i don't know, i guess everyone on HN might be coding some super secret advanced project that an LLM can't handle....?

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The fundamental limitation of LLMs writing code is that reading and understanding code is harder and slower than writing it. With other engineers that I work with there is an established level of trust where I do not need to deep dive into every PR. With LLMs it is like I am constantly doing code reviews for someone with whom I have zero trust. This is fundamentally a slow process, especially if you need to maintain this code in the long term and it is part of your 'core business code' that you work on 90% of the time. It also comes with all the downsides of no longer being an expert in your own codebase.

Ultimately I am responsible for any code I check in even if it was written by an LLM, so I need to perform these lengthy reviews. As others have said, if it is code that doesn't need to be maintained, then reviewing the code can be a much faster process. This is why it is so popular for hobby projects since you don't need to maintain the code if you don't want to, and it doesn't matter if you introduce subtle but catastrophic bugs.

Ultimately the tech feels like a net neutral. When you want to just throw the code away after it is very fast and good enough. If you are responsible for maintaining it, its slower than writing it yourself.

which is weird to me because i'm using in prod? literally if i care about style and structure i just say, look at these other few files and figure it out and it's fine.

if i need to work on something mission critical or new i do it by hand first. tests catch everything else. or you can just run it so that you review every change (like in claude code) as it comes in and can still grok the entire thing vs having to review multiple large files at the end.

thus i literally wonder what people are working on that requires this 100% focused mission critical style stuff at all times. i mean i don't think it's magic or AGI, but the general argument is always 1) works for hobby projects but not "production" 2) the LLM produces "messy code" which you have to review line by line as if you wrote it yourself which i've found to not be true at all.

Volume of PRs LLMs enable add to the burden.

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