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Comment by ErroneousBosh | Hacker News Reader

> "This writes better code than I do!" and miss the irony of: "yes, yes it does"

I guess it depends on what you consider "better". I've tried using LLMs to write code over the past couple of weeks with extremely mixed results.

The LLM certainly writes more interesting code! They like their cute ASCII/unicode animations, don't they?

It definitely writes a lot more code, none of it actually correct but some of it functionally similar to correct code.

If you like lots of code then I guess that's better. I like less code.

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I find it can often write correct code but not maintainable, performant, or reviewable code without additional human guidance. The "solution" frequently given is that humans don't need to maintain it anymore so its not actually a problem. But the agent can't be accountable for mistakes, so unless that changes or the risk of a defect is close to zero, one still has to put forth effort to keep the code maintainable.

To be fair, there are plenty of situations where throwaway code is perfectly fine and/or defect risks are low enough to make the trade-off worth it. I don't think a lot of developers are thinking about it in that context, though.

(No unit tests aren't enough)

> They like their cute ASCII/unicode animations, don't they?

One of the few global Cluade directives I have setup is to never use emojis - and it never has, either in chat output or in code. Don't blame the tool when you don't spend 30 seconds configuring it. It's even easier with AI since you don't have to go digging for some obscure .vimrc snippet - it's literally just plain English.

It can write correct code, but it's still really not good at that, at least without lots of prompting. In my experience, that prompting is usually just doing the design/planning work I'd do with or without AI.

I've said this before on here, to much derision as it turns out, but I write my best code in the car. Nowhere near a computer, no distractions, just point the car along the grey stuff and away from the green stuff and think about what I want to write.

Then when I get home, it's just a case of typing it in, which is the bit I'd love to automate away.

My experience with LLMs has been a bit like rubberducking code with someone who's *really* fast at looking stuff up on StackOverflow.

Yes I basically meant those folks weren't very good developers to begin with and now extrapolating to: "wow this is better than all devs!", when it's more like "it's you, dude"

This sounds awfully like the people who think that self-driving cars and even auto-braking systems will eliminate all accidents, because everyone else is as bad a driver as they are.

Someone pointed out[1] a while ago that LLMs look good at things you are bad at. Which is I think one of the best explanations of why so many people disagree about how good they are at programming. There are a lot of people really bad at programming, and they will look at the output if an LLM and say “Wow, it’s so much better than my code!”

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315309

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