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Comment by kylecazar | Hacker News Reader

Now do a study that specifically gauges how useful an LLM (including smart tab completion) is for a frontend dev working in react/next/tailwind on everyday Jira tickets.

These were maintainers of large open source projects. It's all relative. It's clearly providing massive gains for some and not as much for others. It should follow that it's benefit to you depends on who you are and what you are working on.

It isn't black and white.

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It's a very well controlled study about... what the study claims to do. Yes, they didn't study a different thing, for _many_ reasons. Yes, we shouldn't haphazardly extrapolate to other parts of Engineering. But it looks like it's a good study nonetheless.

There are some very good findings though, like how the devs thought they were sped up but they were actually slowed down.

Agreed. My comment was anticipating the extrapolation part :)

React and tailwind already made lot of tradeoffs to make it more ergonomic for developers. One would expect that LLMs could unlock lean and faster stack instead.

As a backend dev who owns a few internal crappy frontends, LLMs have been the best thing ever. Code quality isn't the top priority, I just need to plumb some data to an internal page at BigCorp.

Could you share more about your process and how they specifically help you with your internal frontends? Any details would be great! Thanks!

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