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Comment by 1718627440 | Hacker News Reader

I think you missed the point. It takes more time to write English prose than to open a file and just fix it, so unless the time the LLM needs is somehow negative, it's not going to be faster.

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I didn't miss the point, it just feels like the people saying that really aren't using these tools as it just is not my experience at all. I've been a Vim user for multi decades now. There's just no way, it's far easier to type a prompt except maybe if you know exactly what file and exactly where in the file, you might be able to do it as fast as telling the AI to do it. It's not hard to get a minor fix done with a prompt and doesn't take too much English in my experience.

Maybe it’s hormones, but time flies when you do edit with Vim or Emacs. It’s like playing on a piano. But using AI is like listening critically to someone playing trying to find mistakes. And that’s boring as hell.

If you ask to do a fix you need to read/verify what is done. If you are confident with your editor you go through long amounts of actions knowing your error rate is low enough to use less visual feedback loops.

I'd be curious how one gets to the error rate where they don't think they need feedback loops. Anyone can learn to touch type because the physics are deterministic and can expand from that to touch edit in something that isn't hopelessly WYSIWYG only.

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