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Comment by ekropotin | Hacker News Reader

>LLMs are really quite bad at designing anything interesting

Let’s be honest, how many devs are actually creating something interesting/unique at their work?

Most of the time, our job is just picking the right combination of well-known patterns to make the best possible trade-offs while fulfilling the requirements.

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> Most of the time, our job is just picking the right combination of well-known patterns to make the best possible trade-offs while fulfilling the requirements.

Right. I don't trust LLM's to pick the right pattern. It will pick _a_ pattern and it will mostly sorta fulfill the requirements.

Today I asked an LLM (Codex whatever-the-default-is) to implement something straightforward, and it cheerfully implemented it twice, right next to each other, in the same file, and then wrote the actual code that used it and open-coded a stupendously crappy implementation of the same thing right there. The amazing thing is that the whole mess kind of worked.

Right. Kind of works is their MO at the moment. I do try to keep in mind that just because something sucks at the moment, that doesn't mean that it will always suck (especially when you pour _trillions_ of dollars into it)

The problem is that OpenAI and Claude don’t care if their tools produce good code, as long as people pay for them.

Just pick patterns yourself and let LLM fill them in with colours :)

(Author here) I found that over time I spend more time striping someone's badly designed abstractions to get to the real functionality. LLMs are surprisingly good at figuring it out, plowing through the code and documentation and finding out that a 100MB library is in reality a HTTP client for 7 REST endpoints, or something like this.

Unless you work for a consulting firm, you should be working on something new/unique.

It’s a winner-takes-all market. There are no buyers for off brand Salesforce or Uber.

That feels a bit rigid.

Many people are in position where they can’t afford risking their financial future by going all-in on startup. They just want to do honest work in exchange on paycheck and enjoy time with family after 5pm and on weekends.

There are not? So Lyft and bolt do not exists?

Same with Salesforce, there are a few hundred alternatives

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