> Programming with AI is like tutoring a child. You teach the child, tell it where it made mistakes and you keep iterating and monitoring the child until it makes what you want.

Who are you people who spend so much time writing code that this is a significant productivity boost?

I'm imagining doing this with an actual child and how long it would take for me to get a real return on investment at my job. Nevermind that the limited amount of time I get to spend writing code is probably the highlight of my job and I'd be effectively replacing that with more code reviews.

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dimitri-vs 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A better way to put it is with this example: I put my symptoms into ChatGPT and it gives some generic info with a massive "not-medical-advice" boilerplate and refuses to give specific recommendations. My wife (an NP) puts in anonymous medical questions and gets highly specific med terminology heavy guidance.

That's all to say the learning curve with LLMs is how to say things a specific way to reliability get an outcome.

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

it's not just writing code.

And maybe child is too simplistic of an analogy. It's more like working with a savant.

The type of thing you can tell AI to do is like this: You tell it to code a website... it does it, but you don't like the pattern.

Say, "use functional programming", "use camel-case" don't use this pattern, don't use that. And then it does it. You can leave it in the agent file and those instructions become burned into it forever.

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boredtofears an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Here's an example:

I recently inherited an over decade old web project full of EOL'd libraries and OS packages that desperately needed to be modernized.

Within 3 hours I had a working test suite with 80% code coverage on core business functionality (~300 tests). Now - maybe the tests aren't the best designs given there is no way I could review that many tests in 3 hours, but I know empirically that they cover a majority of the code of the core logic. We can now incrementally upgrade the project and have at least some kind of basic check along the way.

There's no way I could have pieced together as large of a working test suite using tech of that era in even double that time.

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draebek an hour ago | parent [-]

You know they cause a majority of the code of the core logic to execute, right? Are you sure the tests actually check that those bits of logic are doing the right thing? I've had Claude et al. write me plenty of tests that exercise things and then explicitly swallow errors and pass.

	▲	boredtofears 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, the first hour or so was spent fidgeting with test creation. It started out doing it's usual whacky behavior like checking the existence of a method and calling that a "pass", creating a mock object that mocked the return result of the logic it was supposed to be testing, and (my favorite) copying the logic out of the code and putting it directly into the test. Lots of course correction, but once I had one well written test that I had fully proofed myself I just provided it that test as an example and it did a pretty good job following those patterns for the remainder. I still sniffed out all the output for LLM whackiness though. Using a code coverage tool also helps a lot.

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shimman 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

These people are just the same charlatans and scammers you saw in the web3 sphere. Invoking Ryan Dahl as some sort of authority figure and not a tragic figure that sold his soul to VC companies is even more pathetic.

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threethirtytwo 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Don't appreciate this comment. Calling me a charlatan is rude. He's not authority, but he has more credibility than you and most people on HN.

There is obvious division of ideas here. But calling one side stupid or referring to them as charlatans is outright wrong and biased.

	▲	shimman 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No one called YOU a charlatan, get thicker skin because you are going to run into more and more people that absolutely hate these tools. There is a reason why they struggle selling them and executives are force feeding them to their workers. Charlatan is the perfect term for those that stand to make money selling half baked goods and forcing more mass misery upon society.