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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

Wow, reading these comments and I feel like I've entered a parallel reality. My job involves implementing research ML and I use it literally all the time, very fascinating to see how many have such strong negative reactions. As long as you are good at reviewing code, spec-ing carefully, and make atomic changes - why would you not be using this basically all the time?

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Because carefully spec-ing to the level an llm needs, and ultra carefully checking the output is easily slower and more tiring than just doing it yourself.

Kinda like having a child "help" you cook basically.

But for the child you do it because they actually learn. llms do not learn in that sense.

not at all true for the latest generation of models in my experience. they are overly verbose but except for the simplest simplest changes it is faster to ask first

For the simplest changes you have to first review the code fully, ask for the change, do a new full review and so on.

no, you just have to ask for the change - wait ~minute, review. and if it’s a small change, review goes fast. typically i’ll have a zellij/tmux with lazygit one pane, a cli agent (cursor-agent or codex) in the other, and a pop up vim pane. i can see the changes in lazygit as they’re made and review immediately and commit

It's one of the failure modes of online forums. Everyone piles on and you get an unrealistic opinion sample. I'm not exactly trying to shove AI into everything, I'm weary of over hyping and mostly conservative in my technology choices. Still, I get a lot out of LLMs and agents for coding tasks.

i have trouble understanding how a forum of supposedly serious coders can be so detached from reality, but I do know that this is one of HN’s pathologies

I think it's more of a thread-bound dynamic rather than HN as a whole. If the thread starts positive you get "AGI tomorrow", if the thread starts negative you get "stochastic parrot".

But I see what you mean, there have been at least a few insane comment sections for sure.

> As long as you are good at reviewing code, spec-ing carefully, and make atomic changes - why would you not be using this basically all the time?

This implies that you are an expert/seasoned programmer. And not everybody is an expert on this industry (especially the reviewing code part).

I thought this was a forum for seasoned engineers? But yes, I agree that this widens the skill gap and makes the on-ramp steeper.

What happens if you work in a team?

If a team has one senior/seasoned person and 3 juniors will adopting ai be a total positive move? Or the senior person will just become the bottleneck for the junior devs?

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