Detailed, technical articles appreciated. LLM prose, not.
446 karma · joined December 15, 2020
I loathe LLM prose, no matter who posts it. It earns a quick cmd+w.
My prizes for spending the internet points to say this are the joy of resisting normalization of illiteracy and a tacit camaraderie with the hundreds of others who agree but won't comment or upvote.
> Overtraining Syndrome is where a lack of recovery from training stress results in underperformance, often combined with Mood Disturbances such as reduced Motivation, depression and anxiety
> The LLMs says this, so it must be right.
> For your next ticket or feature, engage with your LLM as you normally would to produce a design and implementation plan, but with that plan in hand, make the mechanical edits yourself...You can expect this to improve your knowledge retention compared to merely reading a diff. You want to go slower now so that later you can go at all.
I appreciate the effort to quantify the benefit rather than pontificate. It's worth mentioning Martin Fowler wrote a whole book on refactoring [1], in which he states, "to refactor, the essential precondition is [...] solid tests", which I think is the real benefit here, AI or not. Good tests protect against regressions, whether human or robot. They also help encode the spec, which humans and robots can read.
[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/refactoring-improving-t...
The episode was worth my time.
https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-842-...
> using the word as a noun to describe works and communications through which people have expressed themselves adopts an attitude you might rather avoid: it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages all the works by subordinating them to the box that is full.
I worked for 10 years in medical devices. QMS was business as usual. I think large software projects with millions budgeted should have them. But the difference between a QMS and licensure is a person's signature and their personal commitment to a statement of ethics as well as their accountability and ability to appeal to a professional organization.
https://www.slater.dev/2025/09/its-time-to-license-software-...
> It was reasonable to be skeptical the first time
It's still reasonable to be skeptical. A few weeks ago a post was discussed here on HN [1] that asked:
> What would have to be true for us to ‘check English into the repository’ instead of code?
to which I replied:
> Code is already the cheapest path to working, correct software. LLMs do not change the calculus because figuring out what to make is the expensive part, not coding it up. Skipping code makes the specification of what to make even more expensive and throws away the tools that keep precision affordable. Programming in English would be more expensive than just using a programming language. [2]
[1] https://annievella.com/posts/finding-comfort-in-the-uncertai...
[2] https://www.slater.dev/2026/05/why-english-will-never-be-a-p...
> It's more expensive to fix code at runtime than at compile time and at compile time than at design time. Unfortunately, AI rushes people to runtime as fast as possible.
https://www.slater.dev/2025/09/about-that-gig-fixing-vibe-co...
I didn't just stop reading at this line, I slammed the back button like releasing an emergency exit door.
> When programming in C, to avoid unexpected pitfalls, one must be acutely aware of a whole slew of implicit behaviors (some of which are implementation-defined or even undefined).
Who recommends Chrome? I don't.