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Comment by dybber | Hacker News Reader

I think it depends on what you find enjoyable. I think people who like the tinkering and the actual act of coding, debugging, etc. will find it less and less fun to be in this area, but people who like to look at the big picture, and solve problems, will see that they will now be better at both getting overview of larger and larger codebases and that technical debt that was never attainable to solve before can now be “outsourced” to LLM’s.

I find that fun. I work in a 50 year old IT company, with lots of legacy code and technical debt which we have never been able to address - suddenly it’s within reach to really get us to a better place.

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The best way to have a big picture view of a project is to build a mental model of that project in your head. Coding with LLMs removes that ability, and replaces it with an illusion.

Does the thing work like I want it in the end? Is it fast, reliable, enjoyable to use, maintainable, cheap, efficient, resilient, etc?

If so, I don't care if I wrote it by hand or with an LLM. People who think that building something with an LLM somehow dooms the something to mediocrity are engaging in magical thinking. I can simply use as much or as little LLM as will allow me to meet my quality criteria.

You forgot maintainable.

Added a few more adjectives and an "etc", to cover all pedantic bases that don't matter to my argument.

You listed "maintainable", but how do you know your project is maintainable, if you yourself have no understanding of the code base? Presumably the reason is that the AI has managed to maintain the project so far, so it follows that it will be able to do so in the future. But that's not a given. It's more of a prayer.

Well if you have experience reviewing other people’s code, it is not that different than finding an idea, asking copilot to do it, and then review just as if you had a ton of junior engineers to write code for you, which also can go too far in one direction before asking for feedback.

So it really depends on your reviewing ability how maintainable code you will get. It is a bit of effort to review something “you have done” as thoroughly as something a colleague have done. Somehow I still feel sense of ownership even though the LLM did it.

I like reviewing using GitHub’s interface, so I often do a thorough review in that familiar interface while the PR is still draft, and before I have invited others to review. If I review my own code directly in my editor when the agent is done, my brain isn’t in the right context and can get distracted or skip over something.

> "I think it depends on what you find enjoyable"

Exactly this. I use agents every day to either produce tests for code I've written according to the guidelines I set out for it, or to produce the boilerplate code (which is seldom enjoyable) before I get to add the cool stuff.

Furthermore, when I inevitably get stuck on a thornier section of new code, or revisiting a codebase which I've not investigated for some time, I can use the agent to provide ideas and suggestions of where/how to start/get unstuck.

Like any tool - it's how you apply it to the job in hand (and ensuring the job is relevant) that counts.

That, and never 100% trusting the output.

One way of framing this is that people that prefer to solve problems are actually bad at tinkering and writing good code. Hence the existence of terrible codebases written by devs thet “liked to solve problems for the customers”. It is not that clear cut that problem-solvers have that in addition to the tinkering part nor it is guaranteed that tinkerers don’t like to solve problems. Two independent axis!

This is a false dichotomy. There are people who prefer solving problems and are very good at coding, because they've been solving problems with code.

I'm as nerdy as they come (my current project is the fourth compiler I've worked on), and I absolutely love this new way of working. There's a lot more time spent in discussion with the agent (an extremely frustrating discussion, to be fair). All of a sudden, there's an extremely high payoff to investing in good fundamentals (namely, clarity of requirements, good tools, etc.), which are the things I want to invest in anyway! If you get these fundamentals right, you can let the agent rip and produce hundreds of PRs that are correct, or create workflows that are actually not slop or ship code that is, while not yet as high quality as if you wrote it manually, quite close, at easily five times the speed.

And throughout this, if I'm ever curious about how the ideas relate to some other topic, I can just ask the agent, "Are we designing XYZ right now? Categorically, is it this?" Lots of really cool discussions to be had.

I might be less enthusiastic if I was just shipping CSS changes and the like.

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