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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I buy this for writing. There's a very limited set of things GPT is good at for improving my writing (basic sentence voice and structure stuff, overusing words), but mostly I find it makes my writing worse, and I don't trust any argument it makes because, as the post observes, I haven't thought them through and had the opportunity to second-guess them myself.

Also it has a high opinion of Bryan Ferry. Deeply untrustworthy.

But I don't buy this at all for software development. I find myself thinking more carefully and more expansively, at the same time, about solving programming problems when I'm assisted by an LLM agent, because there's minimal exertion to trying multiple paths out and seeing how they work out. Without an agent, every new function I write is a kind of bet on how the software is going to come out in the end, and like every human I'm loss-averse, so I'm not good at cutting my losses on the bad bets. Agents free me from that.

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That's wild. My experience has been vastly different. ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, Gemini, etc whatever it may be even the simplest scripts I've had them write usually come out with issues. As far as writing functions is concerned, it's way less risky for me to write functions based on my prior knowledge than to ask ChatGPT to write the entire thing for me and just paste it in and call it good.

I do use it for learning and to help me access new concepts I've never thought about but if you're not proving what it's writing yourself and understanding what its written yourself then I hope I never have to work on code you've written. If you are, then you are not doing what the article is talking about.

I don't know what you're having it write; I mostly have it write Go. When I ask it to write shell scripts, its shell scripts are better than what I would have written (my daily drivers are whatever Sketch.dev is using under the hood --- Claude, I assume --- and Gemini).

I've been writing Go since ~2012 and coding since ~1995. I read everything I merge to `main`. The code it produces is solid. I don't know that it one-shots stuff; I work iteratively and don't care enough to try to make it do that, I just care about the endpoint. The outcomes are very good.

I know I'm not alone in having this experience.

That makes sense! I frequently have it write python. I'll say though, working on Go for more than a decade and coding for more than a lot of people have been alive is likely proof you're not one of the people this article is talking about. I don't think I've been made stupider by LLMs either but, like someone else said, maybe a bit lazier about things. I am not the author so I should stop talking as if I know their thoughts but, at least in my opinion, this message is more important for the swathes of people who don't have 10-20 years of experience solving complex problems.

I'm not that old.

com'on

Whippersnapper

Are you older than Cobol?

> I find myself thinking more carefully and more expansively, at the same time, about solving programming problems when I'm assisted by an LLM agent

Every developer that uses LLMs believes this. And every time they are objectively measured, it is shown that they are wrong. Just look at the FOSS study from METR, or the cognitive bias study by Microsoft.

If you understand how this applies to writing can you not connect the dots and realize that it is giving you a false sense of productivity?

No, I believe my lying eyes.

So does everyone who thinks horse paste cures covid.

Does that seem like a compelling argument to you?

Yes. If you believe you are the exception in the face of overwhelming evidence, you are most likely wrong.

> Also it has a high opinion of Bryan Ferry. Deeply untrustworthy.

Whoa, whoa, are we talking Bryan Ferry as an artist, or Bryan Ferry as a guy? Because I love me some Roxy Music but have heard that Bryan is kind of a dick.

Remake/Remodel is an all time great! https://youtu.be/m-zSnO7sbXg?list=RDm-zSnO7sbXg

Try writing in Spanish and tell me if it helps you or not.

This is the reality of a lot of us, poor ESL plebs

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