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Comment by kaffekaka | Hacker News Reader

Is this seriously so? Have you never seen anything helpful from an LLM? That seems such a black and white statement that I get confused.

I am conservative regarding AI driven coding but I still see tremendous value.

It makes me want to ask you: do you ever see helpful things from your colleagues at all?

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> Is this seriously so? Have you never seen anything helpful from an LLM?

No, not at all. I may be using it wrong.

I put in "write me a library that decodes network packets in <format I'm working with>" and it had no idea where to start.

What part of it is it supposed to do? I don't want to do any more typing than I have to.

You're right, you are using it wrong. An LLM can read code faster than you can, write code faster than you can, and knows more things than you do. By "you" I mean you, me, and anyone with a biological brain.

Where LLMs are behind humans is depth of insight. Doing anything non-trivial requires insight.

The key to effectively using LLMs is to provide the insight yourself, then let the LLM do the grunt work. Kind of like paint by numbers. In your case, I would recommend some combination of defining the API of the library you want yourself manually, thinking through how you would implement it and writing down the broad strokes of the process for the LLM, and collecting reference materials like a format spec, any docs, the code that's creating these packets, and so on.

> An LLM can read code faster than you can, write code faster than you can, and knows more things than you do.

I don't agree. It can't write code at all, it can only copy things it's already seen. But, if that is true, why can't it solve my problem?

> The key to effectively using LLMs is to provide the insight yourself, then let the LLM do the grunt work

Okay, so how do I do that? Remember, I want to do ZERO TYPING. I do not want to type a single character that is not code. I already know what I want the code to do, I just want it typed in.

I just don't think AI can ever solve a problem I have.

No such thing as a free lunch. Zero typing is an unrealistic and unachievable goal

Well, if you ask it to write a library at the start, it's likely it will not do that well. Start small, spoon feed some examples.

If you have to put in this much effort, why not just write it yourself?

When you write a library the first step is always designing it. LLMs dont get rid of that step, they get rid of the next step where you implement your design.

They also added an additional step where you have to explain your design using vague natural language.

Is this really "additional"? do you not do design docs/adrs/rfcs etc and talk about them with your team? do you take any notes or write out your design/plan in some way even for yourself?

Why can't you just pass any of those to an AI?

If I'm writing a library to work with a binary format, there is very little English in my head required, let alone written English.

That is a heavily symbolic exercise. I will "read" the spec, but I will not pronounce it in literal audible English in my head (I'm a better reader than that.)

I write Haskell tho so maybe I'm biased. I do not have an inner narrative when programming ever.

I’m not part of any team, I work on my projects alone. I rarely write long-form design documents; usually I either just start coding or write very vague notes that only make sense when combined with what’s in my head.

some people suck ass at programming so they'd rather use English

So I have to do a lot of typing? Because the typing is the bit I don't want to do.

Actually writing code is the fun and easy bit.

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