Hacker News Reader

Comment by hansmayer | Hacker News Reader

Mate, that's literally what you implied, innit? You probably "can" do it yourself, but you choose not to - I wonder why? Also the point of sarcasm is to communicate it in such way that it is obvious, without using the "/s" signifier. You know like, telling a joke at a party that you don't have to explain.

View on HN

> I wonder why?

Because I like to save time?

...which means you depend on the LLMs? Of course strictly "to save time". It's not like you are slowly forgetting how to start a project in the first palce or implement that db integration, right?

LOL why would I ever forget how to start a project or how to connect to a DB or make migrations and whatnot, brother generating a web form for creating and updating models is not that big of a deal. A LLM can do this while providing a11y attributes and proper styling in like 10 minutes. This includes creating a migration which I take a look at and correct if needed, creating the model, creating required policies, creating the controller endpoints which i correct in case its needed, creating a template file for the crud operations with search and pagination and whatnot while making it somewhat look good.

I can do all of this myself, but why would I waste 1-2 hours (per model) on doing all that myself if I can just instruct some stupid LLM to do it for me? It's repetitive boilerplate.

> how to start a project

This is a weird thing to point out. I've always had to look up how to start a project even before LLMs, even with years of experience. With React there's vite, React router, nextjs, tanstack. With nodejs there's Koa, hapi, express, and tons others.

Most fullstack engineers are likely not starting a lot of new projects at work, and may only be doing it a few times for side projects, LLM or no.

Avoiding abstractions "because I like to save time" doesn't sound like something a professional software engineer should ever say

Yea because having 200 different abstractions and DSLs makes stuff easier for sure! Why not use all the stuff that was popular 6 years ago like Prisma, GraphQL and Redux, whoops suddenly you need a whole team of devs knowing all kinds of unecessary abstractions.

Based on the examples you provided, I think the term you're looking for is "external dependencies" not "abstractions"

Edit: Incidentally, I tend to treat "code made by an LLM" and "external dependencies" pretty much the same. Pretty low trust, with a strong interface between it and any code that matters

Having a JSON file handle a form schema I provide abstracts away directly building the form myself with actual tech supported by most browsers, hence why I call it abstraction.

I usually only use stuff that either is raw Js, HTML, CSS or whatever builds on top of it. Never something that introduces some DSL and generates files for said environments.

> Prisma, GraphQL and Redux, whoops suddenly you need a whole team of devs knowing all kinds of unecessary abstractions.

Ah, let me guess / you're one of those non-technical PMs who can finally shove it to the devs - by spitting out unreadable HTML storing all it's data in a flat file? Oh boy, do I have news for you...

I am actually a full stack dev working with Vue and Laravel a lot atm. Also have quite some experience with Golang. I like lightweight frameworks and simple stuff, and yes, I avoid solutions by people trying to be smart over being simple.

Isn't that the whole concept of "technical debt" though? This has been how software has been developed for quite a while, even pre-LLM. Sometimes your boss puts a thousand things on your plate and you take shortcuts on less important things to save time, and sometimes it works out well and sometimes it doesn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com