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Comment by 2muchcoffeeman | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been trapped in a hole of “can I get the agent to do this?” And the change would have taken me 1/10th the time.

Choosing the battles to pick is part of the skill at the moment.

I use AI for a lot of boiler plate, tedious tasks I can’t quite do a vim recording for, small targeted scripts.

How many of these boilerplate do you actually have to do? Any script or complicated command that I had to write was worthy to be recorded in some bash alias or preserved somewhere. But they mostly live in my bash history or right next to the project.

The boilerplate argument is becoming quite old.

One recent example of boilerplate for me is I’ve been writing dbt models and I get it to write the schema.yml file for me based on the sql.

It’s basically just a translation, but with dozens of tables, each with dozens of columns it gets tedious pretty fast.

If given other files from the project as context it’s also pretty good at generating the table and column descriptions for documentation, which I would probably just not write at all if doing it by hand.

I’m doing a lot of upgrades to neglected projects at the moment and I often need to do the same config over and over to multiple projects. I guess I could write a script, or get AI to write a script, but there’s no standard between projects. So I need the same thing over and over but from slightly different starting points.

I think you need to imagine all the things you could be doing with LLMs.

For me the biggest thing is so many tedious things are now unlocked. Refactors that are just slightly beyond the IDE, checking your config (the number of typos it’s picked up that could take me hours because eyes can be stupid), data processing that’s similar to what you have done before but different enough to be annoying.

A similar, non-LLM battle, is a global find and replace, but _not quite identical_ everywhere. Do I just go through the 20 files and do it myself, or try to get clever with regex? Which is ultimately faster...

I’ve just had to do just this, a one line prompt and one example was the difference between mind numbing work and a comfortable cup of coffee away from the monitor.

In this case LLM is probably the answer. I’ve done this exact thing. No messing with regex or manual work. Type a sentence and examine the result in a diff.

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