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After 18+ months of this, LLMs are incredible for getting rid of the work I hated most: Updating JIRA tickets, tedious little cleanup jobs, refactoring, etc. They are great at finding infosec issues.

They are also GREAT at writing code based on standards and patterns established by an actual human engineers. They are STILL trash at anything meaningfully complex from the ground up. I will go through hours of planning where I have to kick the hell out of its plans in ways that I don't think someone without a ton of real world experience could do. Even in the fancy new Fable models that remains true. They are not creative and any engineering worth doing requires creativity.

> I have to kick the hell out of its plans in ways that I don't think someone without a ton of real world experience could do

I think that’s the real point the article’s making. Unless you already know the ropes, you can’t tell if a plan is actually any good. I use LLMs all the time for work, but only because I get the system well enough to spot the nonsense or catch when a plan duplicates something that already exists. They really do keep rewriting the same functions over and over in the code.

Some things to consider:

1: The quality of code varies widely from model to model. In Visual Studio Copilot, I get so-so code from GPT, great code from Claude 4.x, lousy results from Claude 5.x

2: "Novel work" is harder to get from an LLM than when it's following an example. For example, I can get great Blazor / HTML / css from an LLM (and then spend time iterating making small adjustments,) but if I'm writing a complicated DB query or implementing a novel algorithm, it's best to do by hand.

3: But, in the case of a novel algorithm or query, I get great results saying "please write unit tests for XXX". That alone makes me develop code twice as fast!

You're moving too slow.

Over the last four days I've few shotted a 1:1 clone (and improvement) of Fal, OpenRouter, and Replicate in Rust. It's going to be open source.

I've lined up $300k of monthly commitments for it that land at launch. Might apply to YC with it.

Moving "organic" is too slow for the world today.

Should have get some AI for bait posts :D

Oh cool, you're remaking things that already exist. You know why you can few shot those things? Because they already exist.

Everything already exists. We only have incremental changes. The average moves over time.

The ball is moving towards open source and this will include fine tunes and LoRAs, and even more fertile growth after that. There's an abundant future market in that direction.

Several billion dollar businesses started as open source clones of existing things. Some found unique business lines, others simply did a better job.

Everything already exists

Then why are you trying to make something?

Why make new music or new movies? The same things have been said by every previous generation. Just listen to your parents' music, right? Use the same technology, the same fashion, everything.

Why?

Because it's incremental improvement.

Because it's making a dent in the world.

Because creation feels better than consumption.

Because we're maybe 10-20 iterations away (250 years, tops?) from brain uploads and everlasting life harvesting the energy of distant stars. Or at least our descendants are. And that's pretty cool.

Because we're maybe 10-20 iterations away (250 years, tops?) from brain uploads and everlasting life harvesting the energy of distant stars. Or at least our descendants are.

You can predict 250 years in the future now and when 'brain uploads' will happen and when everlasting life will happen and when the harvesting of distant stars will happen?

That's impressive because you've made predictions a year into the future and they never came true.

Depending on what you're working on, moving slowly and thoughtfully might be a feature. Just saying

We've had 50+ years of that. While you're undoubtedly correct, the bulk of the opportunity is in the massive disruptionary forces this creates.

Would you believe me if I told you you’re only the second biggest AI maximalist on this forum? Despite the extraordinary claims I keep reading from you. Gotta work harder at it mate.

I can generate LLM code and it will be very stable long term, but you must be QA minded and non-stop testing, ask and make sure it generate maintainable code, watch for code smell etc. Maybe it won't match a very seasoned dev, but LLM's generate sht code because the dev allows it at the review stage.

One thing that I find frustrating/disturbing about LLM generated code is that wrong stuff doesn't usually look wrong, so you almost have to review it even closer than what you'd review from a person. Like in the past when a developer was being sloppy, usually you could kind of tell superficially, but with LLM code it's usually well documented and superficially well structured, all while doing batshit insane things. Like today I noticed some code that it had written was just silently returning on errors without logging a warning or returning an error code. It "worked" but it was a major foot-gun!

double edge sword of LLM code generation, you cannot catch 100%, nor do you want to always ready every single word. Gotta develop a feel.

Engineering by feels...

Is this what we've come to?

Yes, feel, not your type of feel, my type where you can scan a section and know it's this architecture, compartmentized, know the general performance impact. Yes.

Too true. I realized that the only way to do an actual review is to have wrote it yourself in the first place. The relatively slow speed of writing code reflects the amount of subtleties and effort to think through all of them. Only when LLMs are used as hint givers, are they actually doing an essential speedup. This goes to show how shallow programming and code review had always been. The right impression is that of studying real analysis.