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Comment by threemux | Hacker News Reader

In a professional setting, I agree 100%, no notes. Where LLMs have helped me the most are actually side projects. There, writing the code is absolutely the bottleneck - I literally can't (or perhaps won't is more truthful) allocate enough time to write code for the little apps I've thought of to solve some small problem.

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Agreed fully, if I have 1-2 hours a day with Claude code I end up the week with a personal project I can actually use. Or spend like half a weekend day to see if an idea makes sense.

But I think that makes them invaluable in professional contexts. There is so much tooling we never have the time to write to improve stuff. Spend 1-2h with Claude code and you can have an admin dashboard, or some automation for something that was done manually before.

A coworker comes to me with a question about our DB content, Claude gives me a SQL query for what they need, review, copy paste to Metabase or Retool, they now don’t have to be blocked by engineering anymore. That type of things has been my motivation for mcp-front[0], I wanted my non-engs coworkers to be able to do that whole loop by themselves.

[0] https://github.com/dgellow/mcp-front

we specialize in "don't ask engineering for SQL" at https://www.definite.app/.

we spin up a data lake, load all your data and educate an agent on your data.

Obligatory xkcd

https://xkcd.com/1205

LLMs help me at work writing one-off scripts where I can verify they're behaving correctly. Or I'll give it a few lines of code where I don't like how they read and ask it if there's a cleaner way to write it, i.e. if there's maybe an API or method on a class that I'm forgetting/didn't know about, and I can understand its suggestion for a rewrite.

But getting it to spit out hundreds or even thousands of lines of code and then just happy path testing and shipping is insane.

I'm really concerned about software quality heading into the future.

This is where LLMs agents work well. Micro-micro-services.

A fair point; at this point in my career, I can't just spend weeks on something, plus I know all of the non-functionals and longer-term things I should keep in mind. Even when skipping things like tests, things just cost more work.

LLMs have made me enjoy side projects again. It's just so easy to make things now.

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