I am so tired of this style of "don't believe your lying eyes" conjecture.

I'm a career coder and I used LLMs primarily to rapidly produce code for domains that I don't have deep experience in. Instead of spending days or weeks getting up to speed on an SDK I might need once, I have a pair programmer that doesn't check their phone or need to pick up their kids at 4:30pm.

If you don't want to use LLMs, nobody is forcing you. Burning energy trying to convince people to whom the benefits of LLMs are self-evident many times over that they are imagining things is insulting the intelligence of everyone in the conversation.

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vlovich123 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Correct. In areas you yourself are a junior engineer, you’ll be more effective with an LLM at tackling that area maybe. It’s also surprisingly effective at executing refactors.

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peteforde 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not sure which one of us is ultimately more hung up on titles in this context, but I would push back and say that when someone with 30+ years experience tackling software problems delegates navigating the details of an API to an LLM, that is roughly the most "senior developer" moment of the day.

Conflating experience and instinct with knowing everything isn't just false equivalency, it's backwards.

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vlovich123 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

I really don’t know what I said that was such an emotional trigger for you. All I said is that it’s an accelerant for you when you leave your domain. Like for example I’m a systems engineer. I hate coding UIs but with the LLM I can pump out a UI quickly and this was true both for web code and a GUI I built with dioxus. The UI code was also cleaner because I had some sense of how it should be structured and asked the AI to cleanup that structure. But ultimately it did most of the work in response to high level prompts and I picked and chose what to review line by line vs vibe coding.

That’s what I mean - by myself it would have taken me easily 10x longer if not worse because UI coding for me is a slog + there’s nuances about reactive coding + getting started is also a hurdle. The output of the code was still high quality because I knew when the LLM wasn’t making the choices I wanted it to make.

	▲	peteforde 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I can tell you exactly: it's your framing of relying on an LLM (or any outside assistance, including humans) as temporarily becoming "junior". I feel strongly that delegation to strengths is one of the most obvious signs of experience. Apologies for getting hung up on what might seem like trivial details, but when discussing on a text forum, word choices matter.

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sndisjh 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> used LLMs primarily to rapidly produce code for domains that I don't have deep experience in

You’re either trusting the LLM or you still have to pay the cost of getting the experience you don’t have. So in either case you’re not going too much faster - the formers cost not being apparent until it’s much more expensive later on.

Edit: assuming you don’t struggle with typing speed, basic syntax, APIs etc. These are not significant cost reductions for experts, though they are for juniors.

	▲	3 hours ago \| parent [-]
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kaydub 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> If you don't want to use LLMs, nobody is forcing you. Burning energy trying to convince people to whom the benefits of LLMs are self-evident many times over that they are imagining things is insulting the intelligence of everyone in the conversation.

Hey man, I don't bother trying to convince them because it's just going to increase my job security.

Refusing to use LLMs or thinking they're bad is just FUD and it's the same as people that prefer to use nano/vim over an IDE or it's the same as people that say "hur dur cloud is just somebody else's computer"

It's best to ignore and just leave them in the dust.