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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

I have had LLMs write entire codebases for me, so it's not like the hype is completely wrong. It's just that this only works if what you want is "boring", limited in scope and on a well-trodden path. You can have an LLM create a CRUD application in one go, or if you want to sort training data for image recognition you can have it generte a one-off image viewer with shortcuts tailored to your needs for this task. Those are powerful things and worthy of some hype. For anything more complex you very quickly run into limits and the time and effort to do it with an LLM quickly approaches the time and effort required to do it by hand.

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They're powerful, but my feeling is that largely you could do this pre-LLM by searching on Stack Overflow or copying and pasting from the browser and adapting those examples, if you knew what you were looking for. Where it adds power is adapting it to your particular use case + putting it in the IDE. It's a big leap but not as enormous a leap as some people are making out.

Of course, if you don't know what you are looking for, it can make that process much easier. I think this is why people at the junior end find it is making them (a claimed) 10x more productive. But people who have been around for a long time are more skeptical.

Doing it the old fashioned lazy way, copy-pasting snippets of code you search for on the internet and slightly modifying each one to fit with the rest of your code, would take me hours to achieve the kind of slop that claude code can one shot in five minutes.

Yeah yeah, call me junior or whatever, I have thick skin. I'm a lazy bastard and I no longer care about the art of the craft, I just want programs tailored to my tastes and agentic coding tools are by far the fastest way to get it. 10x doesn't even come close, it's more like 100x just on the basis of time alone. Effort? After the planning stage I kick back with video games while the tool works. Far better than 100x for effort.

> Where it adds power is adapting it to your particular use case + putting it in the IDE. It's a big leap but not as enormous a leap as some people are making out.

To be fair, this is super, super helpful.

I do find LLMs helpful for search and providing a bunch of different approaches for a new problem/area though. Like, nothing that couldn't be done before but a definite time saver.

Finally, they are pretty good at debugging, they've helped me think through a bunch of problems (this is mostly an extension of my point above).

Hilariously enough, they are really poor at building MCP like stuff, as this is too new for them to have many examples in the training data. Makes total sense, but still endlessly amusing to me.

Why bother searching yourself? This is pre-LLM: https://github.com/drathier/stack-overflow-import

> Of course, if you don't know what you are looking for, it can make that process much easier.

Yes. My experience is that LLMs are really, really good at understanding what you are trying to say and bringing up the relevant basic information. That's a task we call "search", but it is different from the focused search people do most of the time.

Anyway, by the nature of the problem, that's something that people should do only a few times for each subject. There is not a huge market opportunity there.

i have seen so many people say that, but the app stores/package managers aren't being flooded with thousands of vibe coded apps, meanwhile facebook is basically ai slop. can you share your github? or a gist of some of these "codebases"

You seem critical of people posting AI slop on Facebook (so am I) but also want people to publish more AI slop software?

The AI slop software I've been making with Claude is intended for my own personal use. I haven't read most of the code and certainly wouldn't want to publish it under my own name. But it does work, it scratches my itches, fills my needs. I'm not going to publish the whole thing because that's a whole can of worms, but to hopefully satisfy your curiosity, here is the main_window.py of my tag-based file manager. It's essentially a CRUD application built with sqlite and pyside6. It doesn't do anything terribly adventurous, the most exciting it gets is keeping track of tag co-occurances so it can use naive Bayesian classifiers to recommend tags for files, order files by how likely they are to have a tag, etc.

Please enjoy. I haven't actually read this myself, only verified the behavior: https://paste.debian.net/hidden/c6a85fac

> "the app stores/package managers aren't being flooded with thousands of vibe coded apps"

The state of claude code presently is definitely good enough to churn out low effort shovelware. Insofar as that isn't evidently happening, I can only speculate about the reasons. In no order, it may be one or several of these reasons: Lots of developers feel threatened by the technology and won't give it a serious whirl. Non-developers are still stuck in the mindset of writing software being something they can't do. The general public isn't as aware of the existence of agentic coding tools as we on HN are. The appstores are being flooded with slop, as they always have been, and some of that slop is now AI slop, but doesn't advertise this fact, and the appstore algorithms generally do some work to suppress the visibility of slop anyway. Most people don't have good ideas for new software and don't have the reflex to develop new software to scratch their itches, instead they are stuck in the mentality of software consumers. Just some ideas..

It’s hardly slop when you have over a 100 different sources referenced in a targeted paper.

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