I doubt there is much art to getting LLM work for you, despite all the hoopla. Any competent engineer can figure that much out.

The real dichotomy is this. If you are aware of the tools/APIs and the Domain, you are better off writing the code on your own, except may be shallow changes like refactorings. OTOH, if you are not familiar with the domain/tools, using a LLM gives you a huge legup by preventing you from getting stuck and providing intial momentum.

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jama211 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I dunno, first time I tried an LLM I was getting so annoyed because I just wanted it to go through a css file and replace all colours with variables defined in root, and it kept missing stuff and spinning and I was getting so frustrated. Then a friend told me I should instead just ask it to write a script which accomplishes that goal, and it did it perfectly in one prompt, then ran it for me, and also wrote another script to check it hadn’t missed any and ran that.

At no point when it was getting f stuck initially did it suggest another approach, or complain that it was outside its context window even though it was.

This is a perfect example of “knowing how to use an LLM” taking it from useless to useful.

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abc_lisper 3 days ago | parent [-]

Which one did you use and when was this? I mean, no body gets anything working right the first time. You got to spend a few days atleast trying to understand the tool

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jama211 a day ago | parent [-]

It’s just a simple example of how knowing how to use a tool can make all the difference, and that can be improved upon with time. I’m not sure why you’re taking umbrage with that idea.

I know this style of arguing you’re going for. If I answer your questions, you’ll attack the specific model or use case I was in, or claim it was too simple/basic a use case, or some other nitpick about the specifics instead of in good faith attempting to take my point as stated. I won’t allow you to force control of the frame of the conversation by answering your questions, also because the answers wouldn’t do anything to change the spirit of my main point.

	▲	jama211 a day ago \| parent [-]
		(Inb4 “you won’t tell me because it’s a crap model or some other petty excuse” - FYI, it wasn’t)

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badlucklottery 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is my experience as well.

LLM currently produce pretty mediocre code. A lot of that is a "garbage in, garbage out" issue but it's just the current state of things.

If the alternative is noob code or just not doing a task at all, then mediocre is great.

But 90% of the time I'm working in a familiar language/domain so I can grind out better code relatively quickly and do so in a way that's cohesive with nearby code in the codebase. The main use-case I have for AI in that case is writing the trivial unit tests for me.

So it's another "No Silver Bullet" technology where the problem it's fixing isn't the essential problem software engineers are facing.

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brulard 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I believe there IS much art in LLMs and Agents especially. Maybe you can get like 20% boost quite quickly, but there is so much room to grow it to maybe 500% long term.