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Comment by xandrius | Hacker News Reader

Why even come to this site if you're so anti-innovation?

Today with LLMs you can literally spend 5 minutes defining what you want to get, press send, go grab a coffee and come back to a working POC of something, in literally any programming language.

This is literally stuff of wonders and magic that redefines how we interface with computers and code. And the only thing you can think of is to ask if it can do something completely novel (that it's so hard to even quantity for humans that we don't have software patents mainly for that reason).

And the same model can also answer you if you ask it about maths, making you an itinerary or a recipe for lasagnas. C'mon now.

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Agree but you are talking about a POC, and he is talking about reliable, working software. this phase of LLM are perfect for POCs and there you can have 10x speedup, no question. But going from a POC to a working reliable software is where most of our time is spent anyway even without LLMS.

With LLMs this phase becomes worse. we speedup 10x the poc time, we slow down almost as much in the next phases, because now you have a poc of 10k lines that you are not familiar with at all, that have to pay way more attention at code review, that have to bolt on security as an afterthought (a major slowdown now, so much so that there are dedicated companies whose business model has become fixing Security problems caused by LLM POCs). Next phase, POCs are almost always 99% happy path. Bolt on edge case as another after thought and because you did not write any of those 10k lines how do you even know what edge cases might be neccesary to cover? maybe you guessed it rigth, spend even more time studing the unfamiliar code.

We use LLM extensivly now in our day to day, development has become somewhat more enjoyable but there is, at least as of now, no real increase in final delivry times, we have just redestributed where effort and time goes.

At our company we use AI extensively to see if we missed edge cases and it does a pretty good job in pointing us towards places which could be handled better.

I know we all think we are always so deep into absolutely novel territory, which only our beautiful mind can solve. But for the vast majority of work done in the world, that work is transformative. You take X + Y and you get Z. Even with brand new api, you can just slap in the documentation and navigate it in order of magnitude faster than without.

I started using it for embedded systems doing something which I could literally find nothing about in rust but plenty in arduino/C code. The LLM allowed me to make that process so much faster.

> no real increase in final delivry times

That’s not true though. The ability to de-risk concepts within a day instead of weeks will speed up the timeline tremendously.

I don't think that the user you are responding to is anti-innovation, but rather points out that the usefulness of AI is oversold.

I'm using Copilot for Visual Studio at work. It is useful for me to speed some typing up using the auto-complete. On the other hand in agentic mode it fails to follow simple basic orders, and needs hand-holding to run. This might not be the most bleeding-edge setup, but the discrepancy between how it's sold and how much it actually helps for me is very real.

I think copilot is widely considered to be fairly rubbish, your description of agentic coding was also my experience prior to ~Q3 2025, but things have shifted meaningfully since then

Copilot has access to the latest models like Opus 4.6 in agentic mode as well. It's got certain quirks and I prefer a TUI myself but it isn't radically different.

Even at Microsoft they're using Claude Code over Copilot, so I think it's different enough.

You are so behind the curve if you think copilot is mostly rubbish. That's a 4+ month old take.

I just don't use any Microsoft software anymore, thankfully

There are different kinds of innovation.

I want AI that cures cancer and solves climate change. Instead we got AI that lets you plagiarize GPL code, does your homework for you, and roleplay your antisocial horny waifu fantasies.

Hard problems take more time than easy problems

Of course, but at least DeepMind is taking a crack at the important problems

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