I dont really understand how this is possible. I've built some very large applications, and even a full LLM data curation,tokenizer, pretrain, posttrain SFT/DPO pipeline with LLM's and it most certainly took far less time than if i had done it manually. Sure it isnt all optimal...but it most certainly isnt subpar, and it is fully functional

That is what's hard about transitioning from coder to lead. A good coder makes full use of a single thread of execution. A good lead effectively handles the coordination of multiple threads. Different skills.

An LLM coding assistant today is an erratic junior team member, but its destructive potential is nowhere near some of the junior human engineers I've worked with. So it's worth building the skills and processes to work with them productively. Today, Claude is a singular thing. In six months or a year, it'll be ten or a hundred threads working concurrently on dozens of parts of your project. Either you'll be comfortable coordinating them, or you'll nope out of there and remain an effective but solitary human coder.

Are you giving it huge todos in one prompt or working modularly?

Claude set up account creation / login with SSO login, OTP and email notifications in like 5 mins and told me exactly what to do on the provider side. Theres no way that wouldn't have taken me few hours to figure out

There is no way its not faster at a large breadth of the work, unless youre maybe a fanatic with reviewing and nitpicking every line of code to the extreme

> I would have finished the project in the same amount of time

Probably less time, because you understood the details better.

> if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better.

I believe the argument from the other camp is that you don't need to understand the code anymore, just like you don't need to understand the assembly language.

Have you added agents.md files?

You have to do more than prompts to get the more impressive results

skill issue.

sorry for being blunt, but if you have tried once, twice and came to this conclusion, it is definitely a skill issue, I never got comfortable by writing 3 lines of Java, Python or Go or any other language, it took me hundreds of hours spent doing non-sense, failing miserably and finding out that I was building things which already exists in std lib.

What I never understand is that people seem to think the conception of the idea and the syntactical nitty gritty of the code are completely independent domains. When I think about “how software works” I am at some level thinking about how the code works too, not just high level architecture. So if I no longer concern myself with the code, I really lose a lot of understanding about how the software works too.

Writing the code is where I discover the complexity I missed while planning. I don't truly understand my creation until I've gone through a few iterations of this. Maybe I'm just bad at planning.

At first I thought you were referring to the debates over using vim or using emacs, but I think you mean to refer to the discussions about learning to use/switching to powerful editors like vim or emacs. If you learn and use a sharp, powerful editor and learn to type fast, the "burden" of editing and typing goes away.

What you’ve described is very much not writing code though. It’s the tedious and unpleasant outcome of having a flaky or under resourced CI setup or pulling in a misbehaving dependency. Neither of those is typing code per se. I don’t think it’s fair to conflate that kind of problem with the creative work involved in implementation itself.

“Writing code is boring and tedious” says more about the speaker than it does about programming.

> I point Claude Code at it and 90% of the time I have the solution a couple of minutes later.

Same experience, I don't know why people keep saying code was easy part, sure, only when you are writing a boilerplate which is easy and expectations are clear.

I agree code is easier than some other parts, but not the easiest, industry employed millions of us, to write that easy thing.

When working on large codebases or building something in the flow, I just don't want to read all the OAuth2 scopes Google requires me to obtain, my experience was never: "now I will integrate Gmail, let me do gmail.FetchEmails(), cool it works, on to the next thing"

You have a solution, I've seen them recommend some pretty terrible bug fixes, especially in the ci realm because they get rather clueless as the perspective gets higher or broader

Incidentally, I've been using AI to deal with the weird bugs, cryptic errors and generally horrendous complexities of a framework we've been using at work (Elixir's Ash). It's really nice to no longer have to read badly organized docs, search the Internet for similar problems and ask around in the developers' Slack/Discord.

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95% of the industry wasn't creating creative value, it was repetitive.

* auth + RBAC, known problem, just needs integration

* 3rd party integration, they have API, known problem, just needs integration

* make webpage responsive, millions of CSS lines

* even video gaming, most engines are already written, just add your character and call couple of APIs to move them in the 3D space

I tend to believe that, in all things, the quality of the output and how it is received is what matters and not the process that leads to producing the output.

If the ends justifies the means is a well-worn disagreement/debate, and I think the only solid conclusion we've come to as a society is that it depends.

If you're gonna take this track, at least be honest with yourself. Does your boss get more value out of you? You aren't going to get a kickback from being more productive, but your boss sure will.

I had this moment recently with implementing facebook oauth. I don’t need to spend mental cycles figuring that out, doing the back and forth with their API, pulling my hair out at their docs, etc. I just want it to work and build my app. AI just did that part for me and could move on.

I honestly think the stuff AI is really good at is the stuff around the programming that keeps you from the actual programming.

Take a tool like Gradle. Bigger pain in the ass using an actual cactus as a desk chair. It has a staggering rate of syntax and feature churn with every version upgrade, sprawling documentation that is clearly written by space aliens, every problem is completely ungoogleable as every single release does things differently and no advice stays valid for more than 25 minutes.

It's a comically torturous DevEx. You can literally spend days trying to get your code to compile again, and not a second of that time will be put toward anything productive. Sheer frustration. Just tears. Mad laughter. Rocking back and forth.

"Hey Claude, I've upgraded to this week's Gradle and now I'm getting this error I wasn't getting with last week's version, what could be going wrong?" makes all that go away in 10 minutes.

I think it's still an open question if it's actually a net savings of time.

If Tolkien had not lived an entire life, fought in a war, been buddies with other authors, and also been a decent writer, the story doesn’t exist. And an LLM won’t come up with it.

An LLM isn’t coming up with the eye of Sauron, or the entire backstory of the ring, or gollum, etc etc

The LLM can’t know Tolkien had a whole universe built in his head that he worked for decades to get on to paper.

I’m so tired of this whole “an LLM just does what humans already do!” And then conflating that with “fuck all this LLM slop!”

I really struggle to understand how people can find coding more tedious than prompting. To each their own I guess.

I think my take on the matter comes from being a games developer. I work on a lot of code for which agentic programming is less than ideal - code which solves novel problems and sometimes requires a lot of precise performance tuning, and/or often has other architectural constraints.

I don't see agentic programming coming to take my lunch any time soon.

What I do see it threatening is repetitive quasi carbon copy development work of the kind you've mentioned - like building web applications.

Nothing wrong with using these tools to deal with that, but I do think that a lot of the folks from those domains lack experience with heavier work, and falsely extrapolate the impact it's having within their domain to be applicable across the board.

> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation.

> The future is exciting.

Not the GP, but I honestly wanted to be excited about LLMs. And they do have good uses. But you quickly start to see the cracks in them, and they just aren't nearly as exciting as I thought they'd be. And a lot of the coding workflows people are using just don't seem that productive or valuable to me. AI just isn't solving the hard problems in software development. Maybe it will some day.

> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation [...] There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code [...] I've had my excitement

I don't read the OP as saying that: to me they're saying you're still going to have plumbing and bullshit, it's just your plumbing and bullshit is now going to be in prompt engineering and/or specifications, rather than the code itself.

> I want to be able to make art and music and movies and games.

Then make them. What's stopping you?

Burn the planet to the ground because your life is boring. Extremely mature stance you've got there

> If you've ever enjoyed the sci-fi genre, do you think the people in those stories are writing C and JavaScript?

To go off the deep end… I actually think this LLM assistant stuff is a precondition to space exploration. I can see the need for a offline compressed corpus of all human knowledge that can do tasks and augment the humans aboard the ship. You’ll need it because the latency back to earth is a killer even for a “simple” interplanetary trip to mars—that is 4 to 24 minutes round trip! Hell even the moon has enough latency to be annoying.

Granted right now the hardware requirements and rapid evolution make it infeasible to really “install it” on some beefcake system but I’m almost positive the general form of moores law will kick in and we’ll have SOTA models on our phones in no time. These things will be pervasive and we will rely on them heavily while out in space and on other planets for every conceivable random task.

They’ll have to function reliably offline (no web search) which means they probably need to be absolutely massive models. We’ll have to find ways to selectively compress knowledge. For example we might allocate more of the model weights to STEM topics and perhaps less to, I dunno, the fall of the Roman Empire, Greek gods or the career trajectory of Pauly Shore. the career trajectory of Pauly Shore. But perhaps not, because who knows—-maybe a deep familiarity with Bio-Dome is what saves the colony on Kepler-452b

Oh, no, you're imagining the wrong subgenre of sci-fi. These robots are actually owned and operated by billionaires.

Claude already knows who the characters Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are, what their respective character traits are, and how they interacted with each other. This isn't the same as writing something new.

Do you find this interesting to make and read?