Hacker News Reader

Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

The denial on this topic is genuinely surreal. I've knocked out entire features in a single prompt that took me days in the past.

I guess I should be happy that so many of my colleagues are willing to remove themselves from the competitive job pool with these kinds of attitudes.

View on HN

I'm going to go ahead and assume that we don't do the same type of work, we aren't likely in the same pool anyway.

What kind of work do you do?

I make custom 3D engines and the things that run on them.

C, Swift, Typescript, audio dsp, robotics etc.

People always want to claim what they’re doing is so complex and esoteric that AI can’t touch it. This is dangerous hubris.

No, I wouldn't say it's super complex. I make custom 3D engines. It's just that you and I were probably never in any real competition anyway, because it's not super common to do what I do.

I will add that LLMs are very mediocre, bordering on bad, at any challenging or interesting 3D engine stuff. They're pretty decent at answering questions about surface API stuff (though, inexplicably, they're really shit at OpenGL which is odd because it has way more code out there written in it than any other API) and a bit about the APIs' structure, though.

I really don't know how effective LLMs are at that but also that puts you in an extremely narrow niche of development, so you should keep that in mind when making much more general claims about how useful they are.

My bigger point was that not everyone who is skeptical about supposed productivity gains and their veracity is in competition with you. I think any inference you made beyond that is a mistake on your part.

(I did do web development and distributed systems for quite some time, though, and I suspect while LLMs are probably good at tutorial-level stuff for those areas it falls apart quite fast once you leave the kiddy pool.)

P.S.:

I think it's very ironic that you say that you should be careful to not speak in general terms about things that might depend much more on context, when you clearly somehow were under the belief that all developers must see the same kind of (perceived) productivity gains you have.

You discount the value of being intimately familiar with each line of code, the design decisions and tradeoffs because one wrote the bloody thing.

It is negative value for me to have a mediocre machine do that job for me, that I will still have to maintain, yet I will have learned absolutely nothing from the experience of building it.

This to me seems like saying you can learn nothing from a book unless you yourself have written it. You can read the code the LLM writes the same as you can read the code your colleagues write. Moreover you have to pretty explicitly tell it what to write for it to be very useful. You're still designing what it's doing you just don't have to write every line.

Code review != code design.

Nor reading a book teaches you how to write a book.

"Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.” — Stephen King, On Writing

You need to design the code in order to tell the LLM how to write it. The LLM can help with this but generally it's better to have a full plan in place to give it beforehand. I've said it before elsewhere but I think this argument will eventually be similar to the people arguing you don't truly know how to code unless you're using assembly language for everything. I mean sure assembly code is better / more efficient in every way but who has the time to bother in a post-compiler world?

Good point! You should generate a website for them with "why ai is not good" articles. Have it explore all possible angles. Make it detective style story with appealing characters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com