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Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

Any change that I’ve done which resulted in more than a a 10 lines diff are done with tools (copy-paste, vim-fu, refactor tools or script, snippets, code generators,…) Why would I spend time babysitting an LLM when I could have just done it myself? The purpose of automation is to lighten my workload, not to add to it.

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>> Why would I spend time babysitting an LLM when I could have just done it myself

Exactly this. From what I understand an LLM has a limited context and will get that context wrong anyway and that context is on the edge of a knife and can easily be lost.

I'd rather mentor developers and build a team of living, breathing, thinking, compassionate humans who then in turn can mentor other living, breathing, thinking, compassionate humans.

If we're honest - you are not being stopped from mentoring developers. You're saying you'd want to do it on time paid for by others, and competing with teams not doing that.

So the actual pain point is compensation, and IMO we should directly call that out and address it.

An LLM is also a code generator. There is a scale of changes where using one is just not worthwhile (quite possibly around the 10 lines mark, as you said) but other than that, why would you want to write code yourself line-by-line that you could just generate?

Who even write their code line by line?

Snippets and other code generation tool has been here for decades. If you’re writing Java in IDEA, it’s basically a tab-fest with completion. And if you’re fluent in your editor, you do much more complex than editing lines.

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