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Comment by SchemaLoad | Hacker News Reader

I've found writing the code massively helps your understanding of the problem and what you actually need or want. Most times I go into a task with a certain idea of how it should work, and then reevaluate having started. While an LLM will just do what you ask without questing, leaving you with none of the learnings you would have gained having done it. The LLM certainly didn't learn or remember anything from it.

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In some cases, yes. But I’ve been doing this awhile now and there is a lot of code that has to be written that I will not learn anything from. And now, I have a choice to not write it.

Ehh, I find that the most tedious code is also the most sensitive to errors, stuff that blurs the divide between code and data.

I doubt if we're talking about the same sort of things at all. I'm talking about stuff like generic web crud. Too custom to be generated deterministically but recent models crush it and make fewer errors than I do. But that is not even all they can do. But yes, once you get into a large complicated code base its not always worth it, but even there one benefit is it to develop more test cases - and more complicated ones - than I would realistically bother with.

I actually like writing the tedious code by hand.

The whole time I'm doing it, I'm trying to think of better ways. I'm thinking of libraries, utilities or even frameworks I could create to reduce the tedium.

This is actually one of the things I dislike the most about LLM coding: they have no problem with tedium and will happily generate tens of thousands of lines where a much better approach could exist.

I think it's an innovation killer. Would any of the ORMs or frameworks we have today exist if we'd had LLMs this whole time?

I doubt it.

It depends on how you use them. In my workflow, I work with the LLM to get the desired result, and I'm familiar with the system architecture without writing any of the code.

I've written it up here, including the transcript of an actual real session:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/

Thanks for writing this up.

I just woke up recently myself and found out these tools were actually becoming really, really good. I use a similar prompt system, but not as much focus on review - I've found the review bots to be really good already but it is more efficient to work locally.

One question I have since you mention using lots of different models - is do you ever have to tweak prompts for a specific model, or are these things pretty universal?

I don't tweak prompts, no. I find that there's not much need to, the models understand my instructions well enough. I think we're way past the prompt engineering days, all models are very good at following instructions nowadays.

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