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I'm increasingly convinced that most of the people still complaining about hallucinations with regard to programming just haven't actually used any of the tools in more than a year or two. Or they ran into a bias-confirming speedbump and gave up. Agents obviously hallucinate, because their default and only mode is hallucination, but seeing people insist that they do it too much to be useful just feels like I'm reading an archive of HN from 2022.

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Personally I think they are useful, but in a much narrow way than they are often sold as. For things I'm very familiar with, they seem to reduce my productivity by a good chunk. For things I don't want to do like writing some kinds of tests it's probably about the same, but then I don't have to do it, which is a win. For things I'm not very familiar with it probably is at least 2x faster to do with LLM, but that tends to diminish quickly. For example, I recently vibe coded a website using NextJS without knowing almost anything about it. Incredibly fast to get started by applying my existing knowledge of other systems/concepts and using the LLM to extend it to a new space. A week or so of full time work on it later I'm at the point where I know I can get most things done faster by hand, with the occasional LLM detour for things I haven't touched before

It depends on the model knowledge base and what you are trying to do. Something modern with the Buffalo framework in golang many hallucinations. A php blog written in 2005 no hallucinations.

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