I think this is illustrative of the kind of productive things you can do with an LLM if you know what you are doing. Is it perfect, no. Can they do useful things if you prompt correctly, absolutely. It helps knowing what you are doing and having enough skill to make good judgment calls yourself.

There are currently multiple posts per day on HN that escalate into debates on LLMs being useful or not. I think this is a clear example that it can be. And results count. Porting and modernizing some ancient driver is not that easy. There's all sorts of stuff that gets dropped from the kernel because it's just too old to bother maintaining it and when nobody does, deleting code becomes the only option. This is a good example. I imagine, there are enough crusty corners in the kernel that could benefit from a similar treatment.

I've had similar mixed results with agentic coding sometimes impressing me and other times disappointing me. But if you can adapt to some of these limitations it's alright. And this seems to be a bit of a moving goalpost thing as well. Things that were hard a few months ago are now more doable.

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mexicocitinluez 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

The more you use the tools, the more you're able to recognize the situations in which they're useful.

These studies keep popping up where they randomly decide whether someone will use AI to assist in a feature or not and it's hard for me to explain just how stupid that is. And how it's a fundamental misunderstanding of when and how you'd want to use these tools.

It's like being a person who hangs up drywall with screws and your boss going "Hey, I'm gonna flip a coin and if it's heads you'll have to use the hammer instead of a screwdriver" and that being the method in which the hammer is judged.

I don't wake and go "I'm going to use AI today". I don't use it to create entire features. I use it like a dumb assistant.

> I've had similar mixed results with agentic coding sometimes impressing me and other times disappointing me. But if you can adapt to some of these limitations it's alright. And this seems to be a bit of a moving goalpost thing as well. Things that were hard a few months ago are now more doable.

Exactly my experience too.

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jillesvangurp 5 days ago | parent [-]

> I don't use it to create entire features.

I actually do this now. That's one of those things that went from impossible to doable under some circumstances. Still a bit of a coin flip but it can work well in some code bases. I still have a mental block even asking for these things under the assumption it would not work anyway. But I've been pleasantly surprised a few times where this actually works.

	▲	mexicocitinluez 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I sorta mispoke. I use Bolt to create UI designs for entire features, but write the back-end code by hand (with Copilot as Autocomplete). Honestly amazed at how good it is getting something going. I always had issues extrapolating on existing designs, so the ability to get EXACT screens built without having a designer yell at me for being stupid has been a godsend.

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ASinclair 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> There are currently multiple posts per day on HN that escalate into debates on LLMs being useful or not.

My main worry is whether they will be useful when priced above actual cost. I worry about becoming depending on these tools only for them to get prohibitively expensive.