I think people are largely split on LLMs based on whether they've reached a point of mastery where they can work close to as fast as they think and the tech would therefore slow them down rather than accelerate them.
Like the initial plan always sounds great and looks great. Then it goes to actually do the changes and proclaims victory after I left it alone doing other stuff, because it takes a while. Then I review what it did and what it didn't do and I inevitably find that it only did half of what it said it would do and did half of what it did do incorrectly despite what it told me what it would do.
The use case here is a large code base that needs changes. Not new feature development on a green field (or a green corner of an established product). And it's just so unbearably frustrating. It's like giving the task to a Junior on probation. I tell them something, they go off for 10 minutes and tell me they're done and I look and find seven holes I need to tell them to fix. But they aren't the Junior that picks up stuff and gets better and needs less supervision. Instead it seems like the context gets more and more polluted and the Junior gets closer and closer to failing his probation.
Many grey hairs added recently, because yeah, we also "have to be faster by using AI" now ...
That’s what slows me down with AI tools and why I ended up sticking with GitHub Copilot, which does not do any of that unless I prompt it to
Like, I gave it access to our code base, wanted to try a very simple bug fix. I only told it to look at one service I knew needed changes, because it says it works better in smaller code bases. It wanted to send so many tokens to sonnet that I hit the limits before it even started actually doing any coding.
Instant fail.
Then I just ran Claude Code, gave it the same instructions and I had a mostly working fix in a few minutes (never mind the other fails with Claude I've had - see other comment), but Aider was a huge disappointment for me.
It would be good to define what's "smaller code bases". Here is what I am working one: 10 years old project full of legacy consisting of about 10 services and 10 front-end projects. As well tried it on project similar to MUI or Mantine UI. Naturally on many smaller projects. As well tried it on TypeScript codebase where it has failed for me (but it is hard to judge from one attempt). Lastly I am using it on smaller projects. Overall question is more about task than about code base size. If the task does not involve loading too much context when code base size might be irrelevant.
Monorepo.
And that was me already knowing what I wanted and just telling it to do it. I never added any files but the one service but it knows the entire repo.
Claude code on the other I tell "I need to do X thing across the code base" and it just goes and does it (sometimes badly of course) but it has no issue just "doing its agent thing" on it.
Aider wouldn't even be able to do both code and tests in one go? Like the whole idea of "only add the files you need" makes no sense to me for agentic use.