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chadcmulligan 19 hours ago

Any code thats easy to define and tedious I just get AI's to do it now, and its awesome. Saves me so much work, though you have to read the code, it still puts in odd stuff sometimes.

cmdli 19 hours ago | parent [-]

How much of the code you are writing is tedious? If its a significant amount, the framework you are using could use some improvement.

TeMPOraL 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe? But it doesn't change the fact that most code written is tedious and repetitive and not particularly novel, except as part of one's own personal journey as a programmer.

I wrote my own frameworks as a kid, and I found that exciting. It helped me understand and accept frameworks written by others, and with actual adoption. Doesn't change the fact that none of that code is particularly original or insightful. It's mundane and done to death - like almost all almost every software company does.

Not seeing the tedium may be a sign of working on really interesting problems, or using excellent frameworks and support tooling - but I'd wager it's mostly a sign of inexperience.

wisty 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sometimes frameworks are a little too magic. Think raw sql vs a magic orm. No I'm not saying don't use an orm, but when everything ends up as magic meta configuration it's sometimes too much. Sometimes making things a little explicit can make it more flexible going forward.

Even if the framework is good, an llm can read the docs faster than you. Probably it's important to understand things in a lot of cases, but sometimes you just need to get it working without really reading the framework source or docs.

elric 13 hours ago | parent [-]

> Sometimes frameworks are a little too magic.

And your proposed solution is using an LLM? Because that's less magical than a framework?

chadcmulligan 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah its not a huge amount, but its a start. eg - just got it to make me a class in Lua with names for all the colours. It went and named all the colors and did a very nice job (Claude) - it would have taken me ages to go and find the names, sort them out etc, and I was avoiding the work, cause its tedious. I've got it to make me windows controls and data structures, parsers all well defined stuff.

I think the problem comes about when it doesn't know the context you're in - give me a list of colour names is well defined, and I assume the LLM's would have read a million pages with this done, so its easy for it to do this. Doing something more exotic that it hasn't seen a lot, then you'll get weird results.

otabdeveloper4 13 hours ago | parent [-]

> it would have taken me ages

Probably not literally "ages", more like 30 minutes actually.

chadcmulligan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You underestimate my ability to procrastinate :-)

tonyedgecombe 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have a suspicion that the majority of code is rather mundane. After all the community did create the term CRUD to describe typical corporate work.

aksosoakbab 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The number of people I’ve seen use the term CRUD while simultaneously not knowing what isolation levels are is deeply concerning. Unsurprisingly, every crud job I’ve worked has had many race conditions / data consistency issues.

You could basically categorize all programming as CRUD (you’re just reading and updating some bits).

lucianbr 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I hope nobody categorizes LLMs, compilers and interpreters, optimization problems, games, simulations and many other things as CRUD. Neah, you basically could not.

danparsonson 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In my experience your suspicion is well-founded. Most commercial software is written to solve some business problem or another, and the novelty mainly comes from the specifics of the domain rather than the software itself, as most businesses have broadly the same problems.

The average non-software business likely doesn't need to innovate in the software space but rather automate as much as possible so they can innovate elsewhere.

agos 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

CRUD has a different origin, but it became synonymous with a certain style of... uninspired web development

Karrot_Kream 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe?

In some cases, definitely. Then good luck making the business case to improve the framework or swap and refactor around a different framework. (Or you can do what I do during the more motivated/less busy times in my life: find undisturbed unpaid time to do it for your team.)

In other cases improving the framework comes at the cost of some magic that may obscure the intent of the code.

The nice thing about LLM code is that it's code. You're not monkey patching a method. You're not subtly changing the behavior of a built-in. You're not adding a build step (though one can argue that LLM generated code is akin to a separate build step.) You're just checking in code. Other contributors can just read the code.

elric 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Raising the level of abstraction can greatly reduce tedium, and can make code a lot easier to grok.

Introducing LLM generated code doesn't do that in my experience.

danenania 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Raising the level of abstraction has significant costs though. Anyone who has built a large or complex enough system becomes very wary of abstraction.

I think this is one of the major benefits of LLMs. It's far less tedious to repeat yourself and write boilerplate when doing so is a better engineering decision than adding more layers of abstraction.