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Comment by zeroonetwothree | Hacker News Reader

You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going.

Probably other people feel differently.

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I'm the same way. LLMs are still somewhat useful as a way to start a greenfield project, or as a very hyper-custom google search to have it explain something to me exactly how I'd like it explained, or generate examples hyper-tuned for the problem at hand, but that's hardly as transformative or revolutionary as everyone is making Claude Code out to be. I loathe the tone these things take with me and hate how much extra bullshit I didn't ask for they always add to the output.

When I do have it one-shot a complete problem, I never copy paste from it. I type it all out myself. I didn't pay hundreds of dollars for a mechanical keyboard, tuned to make every keypress a joy, to push code around with a fucking mouse.

I’m a “LLM believer” in a sense, and not someone who derives joy from actually typing out the tokens in my code, but I also agree with you about the hype surrounding Claude Code and “agentic” systems in general. I have found the three positive use cases you mentioned to be transformative to my workflow on its own. I’m grateful that they exist even if they never get better than they are today.

> and hate how much extra bullshit I didn't ask for they always add to the output.

I can recommend for that problem to make the "jumps" smaller, e.g. "Add a react component for the profile section, just put a placeholder for now" instead of "add a user profile".

With coding LLMs there's a bit of a hidden "zoom" functionality by doing that, which can help calibrating the speed/involvment/thinking you and the LLM does.

> I didn't pay hundreds of dollars for a mechanical keyboard, tuned to make every keypress a joy, to push code around with a fucking mouse

Can’t you use vim controls?

Having worked with a greenfield project that has significant amount of LLM output in it, I’m not sure if I agree. There’s all sorts of weird patterns, insufficient permission checking, weird tests that don’t actually test things, etc. It’s like building a house on sand.

I’ve used Claude to create copies of my tests, except instead of testing X feature, it tests Y feature. That has worked reasonably well, except that it has still copied tests from somewhere else too. But the general vibe I get is that it’s better at copying shit than creating it from scratch.

This is where we as software engineers need to be on the ball - just because an LLM wrote it doesn't mean it's right, doesn't mean we can let go of all the checks and balances and best practices we've developed over decades.

Set up tooling like tests and linters and the like. Set rules. Mandate code reviews. I've been using LLMs to write tests and frequently catch it writing tests that don't actually have any valuable assertions. It only takes a minute to fix these.

> Set up tooling like tests and linters and the like. Set rules. Mandate code reviews. I've been using LLMs to write tests and frequently catch it writing tests that don't actually have any valuable assertions. It only takes a minute to fix these.

You can do all that, but it still remains a case of "I'm only interested in the final result".

When I read LLM generated systems (not single functions), it looks very ... alien to me. Even juniors don't put together systems that have this uncanny valley feel to it.

I suppose the best way to describe it would be to say that everything lacks coherency, and if you are one of these logical-mind people who likes things that make sense, it's not fun wading through a field of Chesterton's Fences as your f/time job.

I noticed this too. Everything lacks consistency, wrapped in headings that are designed to make me feel good. It’s uncomfortable reading one thing that seems so right followed by code that feels wrong but my usual instincts about why help less because of how half right it is.

(But still, LLMs have helped me investigate and write code that is beyond me)

> (But still, LLMs have helped me investigate and write code that is beyond me)

They haven't done that yet[1], but they have sped up things via rubber-ducking, and for documentation (OpenSSL is documentation is very complete, very thorough, but also completely opaque).

------------------------------------

[1] I have a project in the far future where they will help me do that, though. It all depends on whether I can get additional financial security so I can dedicate some time to a new project :-(

That's why I never have it generate any significant amount of code for those. I get juuuuuust enough to start understanding the structure and procedure and which parts of the API docs I should even be looking at for the problem at hand, and start from there on my own. I need a lay of the land, not an entire architecture. I build that part.

Three things I can suggest to try, having struggled with something similiar:

1. Look at it as a completely different discipline, dont consider it leverage for coding - it's it's own thing.

2. Try using it on something you just want to exist, not something you want to build or are interested in understanding.

3. Make the "jumps" smaller. Don't oneshot the project. Do the thinking yourself, and treat it as a junior programmer: "Let's now add react components for the profile section and mount them. Dont wire them up yet" instead of "Build the profile section". This also helps finding the right speed so that you can keep up with what's happening in the codebase

I think the key thing here is in point 2.

I’ve wanted a good markdown editor with automatic synchronization. I used to used inkdrop. Which I stopped using when the developer/owner raised the price to $120/year.

In a couple hours with Claude code, I built a replacement that does everything I want, exactly the way I want. Plus, it integrates native AI chat to create/manage/refine notes and ideas, and it plugs into a knowledge RAG system that I also built using Claude code.

What more could I ask for? This is a tool I wanted for a long time but never wanted to spend the dozens of hours dealing with the various pieces of tech I simply don’t care about long-term.

This was my AI “enlightenment” moment.

Really interesting. How do you find the quality of the code and the final result to be? Do you maybe have this public, would love to check it out!

> Try using it on something you just want to exist, not something you want to build or are interested in understanding.

I don't get any enjoyment from "building something without understanding" — what would I learn from such a thing? How could I trust it to be secure or to not fall over when i enter a weird character? How can I trust something I do not understand or have not read the foundations of? Furthermore, why would I consider myself to have built it?

When I enter a building, I know that an engineer with a degree, or even a team of them, have meticulously built this building taking into account the material stresses of the ground, the fault lines, the stresses of the materials of construction, the wear amounts, etc.

When I make a program, I do the same thing. Either I make something for understanding, OR I make something robust to be used. I want to trust the software I'm using to not contain weird bugs that are difficult to find, as best as I can ensure that. I want to ensure that the code is clean, because code is communication, and communication is an art form — so my code should be clean, readable, and communicative about the concepts that I use to build the thing. LLMs do not assure me of any of this, and the actively hamstring the communication aspect.

Finally, as someone surrounded by artists, who has made art herself, the "doing of it" has been drilled into me as the "making". I don't get the enjoyment of making something, because I wouldn't have made it! You can commission a painting from an artist, but it is hubris to point at a painting you bought or commissioned and go "I made that". But somehow it is acceptable to do this for LLMs. That is a baffling mindset to me!

You seem to read a lot into what I wrote, so let me phrase it differently.

These are ways I'd suggest to approach working with LLMs if you enjoy building software, and are trying to find out how it can fit into your workflow.

If this isnt you, these suggestions probably wont work.

> I don't get any enjoyment from "building something without understanding".

That's not what I said. It's about your primary goal. Are you trying to learn technology xyz, and found a project so you can apply it vs you want a solution to your problem, and nothing exists, so you're building it.

What's really important is that wether you understand in the end what the LLM has written or not is 100% your decision.

You can be fully hands off, or you can be involved in every step.

I build a lot of custom tools, things with like a couple of users. I get a lot of personal satisfaction writing that code.

I think comments on YouTube like "anyone still here in $CURRENT_YEAR" are low effort noise, I don't care about learning how to write a web extension (web work is my day job) so I got Claude to write one for me. I don't care who wrote it, I just wanted it to exist.

Lately I've been interesting in biosignals, biofeedback and biosynchronization.

I've been really frustrated with the state of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) research and HRV apps, particularly those that claim to be "biofeedback" but are really just guided breathing exercises by people who seem to have the lights on and nobody home. [1]

I could have spent a lot of time reading the docs to understand the Web Bluetooth API and facing up to the stress that getting anything with Bluetooth working with a PC is super hit and miss so estimating the time I'd expect a high risk of spending hours rebooting my computer and otherwise futzing around to debug connection problems.

Although it's supposedly really easy to do this with the Web Bluetooth API I amazingly couldn't find any examples which made all the more apprehensive that there was some reason it doesn't work. [2]

As it was Junie coded me a simple webapp that pulled R-R intervals from my Polar H10 heart rate monitor in 20 minutes and it worked the first time. And in a few days, I've already got an HRV demo app that is superior to the commercial ones in numerous ways... And I understand how it works 100%.

I wouldn't call it vibe coding because I had my feet on the ground the whole time.

[1] for instance I am used to doing meditation practices with my eyes closed and not holding a 'freakin phone in my hand. why they expect me to look at a phone to pace my breathing when it could talk to be or beep at me is beyond me. for that matter why they try to estimate respiration by looking at my face when they could get if off the accelerometer if i put in on my chest when i am lying down is also beyond me.

[2] let's see, people don't think anything is meaningful if it doesn't involve an app, nobody's gotten a grant to do biofeedback research since 1979 so the last grad student to take a class on the subject is retiring right about now...

> You can commission a painting from an artist, but it is hubris to point at a painting you bought or commissioned and go "I made that". But somehow it is acceptable to do this for LLMs. That is a baffling mindset to me!

The majority of the work on a lot of famous masterpieces of art was done by apprentices. Under the instruction of a master, but still. No different than someone coming up with a composition, and having AI do a first pass, then going in with photoshop and manually painting over the inadequate parts. Yet people will knob gobble renaissance artists and talk about lynching AI artists.

I've heard this analogy regurgitated multiple times now, and I wish people would not.

It's true that many master artists had workshops with apprenticeships. Because they were a trade.

By the time you were helping to paint portraits, you'd spent maybe a decade learning techniques and skill and doing the unimportant parts and working your way up from there.

It wasn't a half-assed, slop some paint around and let the master come fix it later. The people doing things like portrait work or copies of works were highly skilled and experienced.

Typing "an army of Garfields storming the beach at Normandy" into a website is not the same.

That's a straw man and you know it.

Anti-AI art folks don't care if you photobashed bits of AI composition and then totally painted over it in your own hand, the fact that AI was involved makes it dirty, evil, nasty, sinful and bad. Full stop. Anti-AI writing agents don't care if every word in a manuscript was human written, if you asked AI a question while writing it suddenly you're darth fucking vader.

The correct comparison for some jackass who just prompts something, then runs around calling it art is to a pre-schooler that scribbles blobs of indistinct color on a page, then calls it art. Compare apples to apples.

That's not what a strawman is lol. Me saying the analogy sucks is just criticism.

If you feel judged about using AI, then your choices are (1) don't use it or (2) don't tell people you use it or (3) stop caring what other people think.

Have the courage of your own convictions and own your own actions.

>I don't get any enjoyment from "building something without understanding" — what would I learn from such a thing? How could I trust it to be secure or to not fall over when i enter a weird character? How can I trust something I do not understand or have not read the foundations of? Furthermore, why would I consider myself to have built it?

All of these questions are irrelevant if the objective is 'get this thing working'.

>When I enter a building, I know that an engineer with a degree, or even a team of them, have meticulously built this building taking into account the material stresses of the ground, the fault lines, the stresses of the materials of construction, the wear amounts, etc.

You can bet that "AI" is coming for this too. The lawsuits that will result when buildings crumble and kill people because an LLM "hallucinated" will be tragic, but maybe we'll learn from it. But we probably won't.

Have you heard of the Horizon IT Post Office Scandal[0]?

> Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data, with about 700 of these prosecutions carried out by the Post Office. Other subpostmasters were prosecuted but not convicted, forced to cover illusory shortfalls caused by Horizon with their own money, or had their contracts terminated. > > Although many subpostmasters had reported problems with the new software, and Fujitsu was aware that Horizon contained software bugs as early as 1999, the Post Office insisted that Horizon was robust and failed to disclose knowledge of the faults in the system during criminal and civil cases.

(content warning for the article about that for suicide)

Now think of places where LLMs are being deployed:

- accountancy[1][2]

- management systems similar to Horizon IT

- medical workers using it to pass their coursework (A friend of mine is doing a nursing degree in the USA and they are encouraged to use Gemini, and she's already seen someone on the same course use it to complete their medical ethics homework...)

- Ordinary people checking drug interactions[3], learning about pickling (and almost getting botulism), talking to LLMs and getting poisoned by bromide[4]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

[1]: https://www.leapfin.com/luca-ai

[2]: https://www.autoentry.com/integrations/sage

[3]: https://www.tumblr.com/pangur-and-grim/805013689696747520?so...

[4]: https://www.livescience.com/health/food-diet/man-sought-diet...

The incredible thing (to me) is that this isn’t even remotely a new thing: it’s reviewing pull requests vs writing your own code. We all know how different that feels!

Correct, provided you were the one who wrote an incredibly specific feature request that the pull request solved for you.

For me it feels like print statement debugging in a compiled language

This.

To me, using an LLMs is more like having a team of ghostwriters writing your novel. Sure, you "built" your novel but it feels entirely different to writing it yourself.

And if you write novels mostly because you enjoy watching them sell, as opposed to sharing ideas with people, you don't care.

To scientists, the purpose of science is to learn more about the world; to certain others, it's about making a number of dollars go up. Mathematicians famously enjoy creating math, and would have no use for a "create more math" button. Musicians enjoy creating music, which is very different from listening to it.

We're all drawn to different vocations, and it's perverse to accept that "maximize shareholder value" is the highest.

Wouldn't it be like having a team of software developers writing your code? The analogy doesn't need to be even as far as a different line of work. And for some this (writing to managing) is a natural career progression.

I have both; for embedded and backend I prefer entering code; once in the flow, I produce results faster and feel more confident everything is correct. for frontend (except games), i find everything annoying and a waste of time manually, as do all my colleagues. LLMs really made this excellent for our team and myself. I like doing UX, but I like drawing it with a pen and paper and then do experiments with controls/components until it works. This is now all super fast (I usually can just take photo of my drawings and claude makes it work) and we get excellent end results that clients love.

> For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”.

I would argue that it's the same question as whether it's possible to get into a flow state when being the "navigator" in a pair-programming session. I feel you and agree that it's not quite the same flow state as typing the code yourself, but when a session with a human programmer or Claude Code is going well for me, I am definitely in something quite close to flow myself, and I can spend hours in the back and forth. But as others in this thread said, it's about the size of the tasks you give it.

I can say I feel that flow state sometimes when it all works but I certainly don't when it doesn't work.

The other day I was making changes to some CSS that I partially understood.

Without an LLM I would looked at the 50+ CSS spec documents and the 97% wrong answers on Stack Overflow and all the splogs and would have bumbled around and tried a lot of things and gotten it to work in the end and not really understood why and experienced a lot of stress.

As it was I had a conversation with Junie about "I observe ... why does it work this way?", "Should I do A or do B?", "What if I did C?" and came to understand the situation 100% and wrote a few lines of code by hand that did the right thing. After that I could have switched it to Code mode and said "Make it so!" but it was easy when I understood it. And the experience was not stressful at all.

I could imagine a world where LLM coding was fun. It would sound like "imagine a game, like Galaxians but using tractor trailers, and as a first person shooter." And it pumps out a draft and you say, "No, let's try it again with an army of bagpipers."

In other words, getting to be the "ideas guy", but without sounding like a dipstick who can't do anything.

I don't think we're anywhere near that point yet. Instead we're at the same point where we are with self-driving: not doing anything but on constant alert.

For me the excitement is palpable when I've asked it to write a feature, then I go test it and it entirely works as expected. It's so cool.

Prompt one:

  imagine a game, like Galaxians but using tractor trailers,
  and as a first person shooter. Three.js in index.html

Result: https://gisthost.github.io/?771686585ef1c7299451d673543fbd5d

Prompt two:

  No, let's try it again with an army of bagpipers.

Result: https://gisthost.github.io/?60e18b32de6474fe192171bdef3e1d91

I'll be honest, the bagpiper 3D models were way better than I expected! That game's a bit too hard though, you have to run sideways pretty quickly to avoid being destroyed by incoming fire.

Here's the full transcript: https://gisthost.github.io/?73536b35206a1927f1df95b44f315d4c

There's a reason why bagpipes are banned under the Geneva convention!

> There's a reason why bagpipes are banned under the Geneva convention!

I know this is not Reddit, but when I see such a comment, I can't resist posting a video of "the internet's favorite song" on an electrical violin and bagpipes:

> Through the Fire and Flames (Official Video) - Mia x Ally

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVOBpboqCgQ

https://youtube.com/shorts/4RgVrYYBgwY

Tangential:

(As a FW-curious noob I wondered if Gemini understand, Why do foxes struggle, compared to wolves of all gender)

>Yes, many fox species, particularly the red fox, exhibit more neotenous (juvenile-like) traits compared to wolves, such as shorter muzzles, larger eyes relative to head size, and different skull development, reflecting a divergence in evolutionary paths within the canid family, with foxes often retaining softer, more generalized features compared to the larger, more specialized wolf. While wolves are highly SOCIAL pack animals with traits adapted for cooperative hunting, foxes are generally SOLITARY, and this difference in lifestyle and morphology highlights their distinct evolutionary strategies, with foxes leaning towards juvenile-like features in their adult forms.

Hows foxwork doin

Wolves work together to bring down large prey and with their large digestive tracts they "wolf it down".

Foxes have a small digestive tract (makes them lightweight so they can jump and pounce on prey) and can't even eat a whole rabbit so they eat a bit and bury the rest under a layer of dirt (to hide it from other animals) and leaf litter (to hide it from birds.) A fox will lose an occasional cache to another fox but will occasionally find a cache from another fox so it evens out. Foxes in a given territory usually have some family relationship so it works from a sociobiological level, it's their form of "social hunting".

For me this week it's been about practicing autonomic control, I've been building biofeedback systems and getting to the bottom of heart rate variability and working towards a biosynchronization demo. Also working to start an anime theme song cover band (Absolute Territory) where I am clearly the "kitsune" (AT-00) but more of a band manager than a mascot. I've got the all-purpose guitarist (AT-01) but I'm still casting AT-02, AT-03 and such.

... and boy do I have a technique now to find out people and places that are identity driven and those who are not.

Ha putting the zettai ryoiki back into Eva I see

Early request :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46606671

E: On the offchance of further participation, JD Vance (eg) has the look of a fox masquerading as a wolf :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611549

(Mamdani going for the same look, but its just more convincing somehow)

Places? As in workplaces? Or servers

Places.

One interesting discovery is that people are really dour about it at places that hire a lot of enby's [1] but overall enby people who are by themselves or working at places where 10% or fewer people are enby really dig somebody who represents "oceanic reservoir of calm" [2] with a kidult presentation of self.

[1] "non-binary"

[2] fox old enough to have earned nine tails

So these 10% enby presumably tend to be "silent enbys"?

Hmm. Gotta investigate whether HN (the HQ) has (or aims for) the magic ~10% enby. (I had suspected as such but you again voiced what was in my subconscious!!)

https://www.cs.utep.edu/vladik/2019/tr19-95.pdf

I'm guessing there's a parallel observation (or technique[0]) for people..

("[0]Places they have seen, people they have done")

A request for AT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbJrFALSVZ8 (did UY's "Rock the Planet" make any shout-outs to it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96mZc82fYGc )

E: Score! TIL about the UY remake, eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEVhv4eB8Q8

Can it make it work on mobile?

Yes, but I didn't bother here (not part of the original prompt).

You're welcome to drop the HTML into a coding agent and tell it to do that. In my experience you usually have to decide how you want that to work - I've had them build me on-screen D-Pad controls before but I've also tried things like getting touch-to-swipe plus an on-screen fire button.

YOUR EARS HAVE SURRENDERED lmao

QED

That is deeply impressive. The code is quite readable. I appreciate that it even got the "joke" with bagpipers. I know it's just recycling other people's jokes, but it's still quite the feat.

I have never used one of these. I'm going to have to try it.

There are multiple self driving car companies that are fully autonomous and operating in several cities in the US and China. Waymo has been operating for many years.

There are full self driving systems that have been in operation with human driver oversight from multiple companies.

And the capabilities of the LLMs in regards to your specific examples were demonstrated below.

The inability of the public to perceive or accept the actual state of technology due to bias or cognitive issues is holding back society.

It's a lot of mistrust and fear, too - a computer could never be as good at driving as a person!

And yet, over the years many things have just been accepted. Satnav for example, I grew up with my mom having the map in her lap, or my dad writing down directions. Later on we had a route planner on diskettes (I think) and a printout of the route. And my dad now has had a satnav in his car for near enough two decades. I'm sure they like everyone else ran into the quirks of satnav, but I don't think there was nearly as much "fear" and doubt for satnav as there is for self-driving cars and nowadays LLMs / coding agents. Or I'm misremembering it and have rose-tinted glasses, I also remember the brouhaha of people driving into canals because the satnav told them to turn left.

You're not alone. I definitely feel like this is / will be a major adaptation required for software engineers going forward. I don't have any solutions to offer you - but I will say that the state that's enabled by fast feedback loops wasn't always the case. For most of my career build times were much, much longer than they are today, as an example. We had to work around that to maintain flow, and we'll have to work around this, now.

You could try Cerebras. It's still vastly vastly vastly cheaper than what many people and all companies pay for Opus. And it's absurdly ridiculously stupendously fast. And GLM-4.7 is quite capable! https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/glm-4-7 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544047

You can definitely keep tweaking. It's also helpful just to ask it about what your possible concerns are and it will tell you and explain what it did.

I spent a good chunk of 2025 long time being super super careful & specific, using mostly very very cheap DeepSeek and just leading it by the leash at every moment and studying the output. It still felt like a huge win. But with more recent models, I have trust that they are doing ok, and I'm better at asking some questions once the code is written to hone my understanding. And mostly I just trust it now! I don't have to look carefully and tweak to exacting standards, because I've seen it do a ton of good work & am careful in what I ask.

There's other tactics that help. Rather than stare carefully at the code, making sure you and the AI are both running the program frequently, have a rig to test what's under development (ideally I'm an integration test type of way, which it can help set-up!). And then having what good programmers have long had, good observability tools at their back. Be that great logging or ideally sweet tracing. We have such better tools to see the high level behavior of systems now. AI with some prompts to go there can be extremely good about helping enhance that view.

It is going to feel different. But there's a lot you can do to get much better loops.

I feel the same way often but I find it to be very similar to coding. Whether coding or prompting when I’m doing rote, boring work I find it tedious. When I am solving a hard problem or designing something interesting I am engaged.

My app is fairly mature with well established patterns, etc. When I’m adding “just CRUD” as part of a feature it’s very tedious to prompt agents, reviewing code, rinse & repeat. Were I actually writing the code by hand I would probably be less productive and just as bored/unsatisfied.

I spent a decent amount of time today designing a very robust bulk upload API (compliance fintech, lots of considerations to be had) for customers who can’t do a batch job. When it was finished I was very pleased with the result and had performance tests and everything.

I gotta say, the "sitting around waiting" comment hits - I have the same with current-day merge request based development, a lot of time is fragmented because I'm waiting for the CI to finish. I've got seven open merge requests at the moment, some of which have been open since before the holidays. It's a lot of fragmented waiting, fixing, prodding people to review code, and shitposting on HN to pass the time. It's uh. Not healthy.

But this is my reality in my current line of work, a lot of relatively simple work but a lot of processes and checks to conform to rules (that I set myself lol) and not break existing functionality.

> no flow state possible with LLM “coding”

I've hit flow state setting it up to fly. When it flys is when the human gets out of the loop so the AI can look at the thing itself and figure out why centering the div isn't working to center the div, or why the kernel isn't booting. Like, getting to a point, pre-AI, where git bisect running in a loop is the flow state. Now, with ai, setting that up is the flow.

I feel differently! My background isn't programming, so I frequently feel inhibited by coding. I've used it for over a decade but always as a secondary tool. Its fun for me to have a line of reasoning, and be able to toy with and analyze a series of questions faster than I used to be able to.

Ditto. Coding isn't what i specifically do, but it's something i will choose to do when it's the most efficient solution to a problem. I have no problem describing what i need a program to do and how it should do so in a way that could be understandable even to a small child or clever golden retriever, but i'm not so great at the part where you pull out that syntactic sugar and get to turning people words into computer words. LLMs tend to do a pretty good job at translating languages regardless of whether i'm talking to a person or using a code editor, but i don't want them deciding what i wanted to say for me.

Why do you feel you need to "carefully look over and tweak" stuff?

Can you define code quality and the goal of the program in a deterministic way?

If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck and is a duck, does it matter if it's actually a raven inside?

Yes, if your goal is to build a duck, and to understand what goes into building a duck. A lot of people derive joy from learning how to do something, not merely seeing the end result.

Depends if you're an artesan or a craftsman.

Do you want to make one beautiful intricate table that will last ages. Or do you need a table ASAP because you have guests coming and your end-table can barely fit a pint and a bag of chips?

It's perfectly OK to want to craft something beautiful and understand every single line of code deeply. But it also takes more time than just solving the problem with sufficient quality.

I like writing. I hate editing.

Coding with an LLM seems like it’s often more editing in service of less writing.

I get this is a very simplistic way of looking at it and when done right it can produce solutions, even novel solutions, that maybe you wouldn’t have on your own. Or maybe it speeds up a part of the writing that is otherwise slow and painful. But I don’t know, as somebody who doesn’t really code every time I hear people talk about it that’s what it sounds like to me.

Yes this is exactly what I feel. I disconnect enough that if it’s really taking its time I will pull up Reddit and now that single prompt cost me half an hour.

Maybe this will interest you

https://x.com/Hesamation/status/2009707596954186168

>AI does coding for you, so now you have more downtime

>Instead of using downtime to read, draw, disconnect, uses AI to build extension to keep you addicted to scrolling social media while AI works

What a dumb fucking world we live in.

Well are you the super developer than never run into issues, challenges? For me and I think most developers, coding is like a continuous stream of problems you need to solve. For me a LLM is very useful, because I can now develop much faster. Don't have to think which sorting algoritm should be used or which trigonometric function I need for a specific case. My LLM buddy solves most of those issues.

When you don't know the answer to a question you ask an LLM, do you verify it or do you trust it?

Like, if it tells you merge sort is better on that particular problem, do you trust it or do you go through an analysis to confirm it really is?

I have a hard time trusting what I don't understand. And even more so if I realize later I've been fooled. Note that it's the same with human though. I think I only trust technical decision I don't understand when I deem the risk of being wrong low enough. Overwise I'll invest in learning and understanding enough to trust the answer.

For all these "open questions" you might have it is better to ask the LLM write a benchmark and actually see the numbers. Why rush, spend 10 minutes, you will have a decision backed by some real feedback from code execution.

But this is just a small part from a much grander testing activity that needs to wrap the LLM code. I think my main job moved to 1. architecting and 2. ensuring the tests are well done.

What you don't test is not reliable yet, looking at code is not testing, it's "vibe-testing" and should be an antipattern, no LGTM for AI code. We should rely on our intuition alone because it is not strict enough, and it makes everything slow - we should not "walk the motorcycle".

Ok. I also have the intuition that more tests and formal specifications can help there.

So far, my biggest issue is, when the code produced is incorrect, with a subtle bug, then I just feel I have wasted time to prompt for something I should have written because now I have to understand it deeply to debug it.

If the test infrastructure is sound, then maybe there is a gain after all even if the code is wrong.

I tell it to write a benchmark, and I learn from how it does that.

IME I don't learn by reading or watching, only by wrestling with a problem. ATM, I will only do it if the problem does not feel worth learning about (like jenkinsfile, gradle scripting).

But yes, the bench result will tell something true.

Often those kind of performance things just don't matter.

Like right now I am working on algorithms for computing heart rate variability and only looking at a 2 minute window with maybe 300 data points at most so whether it is N or N log N or N^2 is beside the point.

When I know I computing the right thing for my application and know I've coded it up correctly and I am feeling some pain about performance that's another story.

> I have a hard time trusting what I don't understand

Who doesn't? But we have to trust them anyway, otherwise everyone should get a PhD on everything.

Also for people who "has a hard time trusting", they might just give up when encountering things they don't understand. With AI at least there is a path for them to keep digging deeper and actually verify things to whatever level of satisfaction they want.

Sure, but then I rely on an actual expert.

My issue is, LLM fooled me more than a couple of times with stupid but difficult to notice bugs. At that point, I have hard time to trust them (but keep trying with some stuff).

If I asked someone for something and found out several time that the individual is failing, then I'll just stop working with them.

Edit: and to avoid with just anthropomorphizing LLM too much, the moment I notice a tool I use bug to point to losing data for example, I reconsider real hard before I use it again or not.

See, I’m with you, but in my day to day work I almost never could almost never get into a flow state while coding, because very little of my work involves creating things or solving real problems; it typically involves just trying to mentally untangle huge rat nests, Jenna-ing bug fixes and the occasional feature in, and then spending a bunch of time testing to make sure I didn’t break anything, no flow involved. I’ve been grudgingly using Cursor heavily for the past few weeks and it’s been helping make all of this significantly more bearable.

LLMs aren’t replacing the joy of coding for me, but they do seem to be helping me deal with the misery of being a professional coder.

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