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Comment by OakNinja | Hacker News Reader

To me, LLM's free up time for me so that I can spend time on the fun parts of coding. Less boilerplate, more focus on the interesting problems. This is no different from using high level languages. The problem domain is less around memory management and garbage collection and closer to the problem you're actually trying to solve.

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But we’ve had tools to automate out the boilerplate for years. We don’t need ai for that. It’s seriously like we all forgot we could run one command and scaffold a project. AI isn’t even that great at it. Last I tried a month ago it used a really out of date version of nextjs and picked all sorts of random deps that weren’t in the plan.

I could have just used the next project scaffold tool and been on my way before the ai even started returning output.

Or copy paste another file and edit the 10 lines that are actually different. The nice thing is that when you have an epiphany that you’ve already done this twice and that it’s for the same purpose, so you abstract the code and remove 100 lines from the project.

You have no idea how many times I’ve asked “why are we not using the project generator” or “why did you write 200 lines to parse a csv? Here’s a library and five lines to get it done” in the last year. Its easily up 20x compared to pre ai, and getting worse.

I agree with this. I feel like there’s a false dichotomy right now in a lot of these discussions where one can only vibe code or only code by hand. It is possible to do both…

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