I think the upper limit is your ability to decide what to build among infinite possibilities. How should it work, what should it be like to use it, what makes the most sense, etc.

The code part is trivial and a waste of time in some ways compared to time spent making decisions about what to build. And sometimes even a procrastination to avoid thinking about what to build, like how people who polish their game engine (easy) to avoid putting in the work to plan a fun game (hard).

The more clarity you have about what you’re building, then the larger blocks of work you can delegate / outsource.

So I think one overwhelming part of LLMs is that you don’t get the downtime of working on implementation since that’s now trivial; you are stuck doing the hard part of steering and planning. But that’s also a good thing.

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SchemaLoad 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've found writing the code massively helps your understanding of the problem and what you actually need or want. Most times I go into a task with a certain idea of how it should work, and then reevaluate having started. While an LLM will just do what you ask without questing, leaving you with none of the learnings you would have gained having done it. The LLM certainly didn't learn or remember anything from it.

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jeremyjh 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In some cases, yes. But I’ve been doing this awhile now and there is a lot of code that has to be written that I will not learn anything from. And now, I have a choice to not write it.

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orbisvicis 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Ehh, I find that the most tedious code is also the most sensitive to errors, stuff that blurs the divide between code and data.

	▲	jeremyjh 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I doubt if we're talking about the same sort of things at all. I'm talking about stuff like generic web crud. Too custom to be generated deterministically but recent models crush it and make fewer errors than I do. But that is not even all they can do. But yes, once you get into a large complicated code base its not always worth it, but even there one benefit is it to develop more test cases - and more complicated ones - than I would realistically bother with.

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stavros 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It depends on how you use them. In my workflow, I work with the LLM to get the desired result, and I'm familiar with the system architecture without writing any of the code.

I've written it up here, including the transcript of an actual real session:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/

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jeremyjh 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks for writing this up.

I just woke up recently myself and found out these tools were actually becoming really, really good. I use a similar prompt system, but not as much focus on review - I've found the review bots to be really good already but it is more efficient to work locally.

One question I have since you mention using lots of different models - is do you ever have to tweak prompts for a specific model, or are these things pretty universal?

	▲	stavros 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't tweak prompts, no. I find that there's not much need to, the models understand my instructions well enough. I think we're way past the prompt engineering days, all models are very good at following instructions nowadays.

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galaxyLogic 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Right when you're coding with LLM it's not you asking the LLM questions, it's LLM asking you questions, about what to build, how should it work exactly, should it do this or that under what conditions. Because the LLM does the coding, it's you have to do more thinking. :-)

And when you make the decisions it is you who is responsible for them. Whereas if you just do the coding the decisions about the code are left largely to you nobody much sees them, only how they affect the outcome. Whereas now the LLM is in that role, responsible only for what the code does not how it does it.

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eucyclos 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Hehe, speak for yourself- as a 1x coder on a good day, having a nonjudgmental partner who can explain stuff to me is one of the best parts of writing with an llm :)

	▲	galaxyLogic 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I like that aspect of it too. LLM never seems to get offended even when I tell it its wrong. Just trying to understand why some people say it can feel exhausting. Instead of focusing on narrowly defined coding tasks, the work has changed and you are responsible for a much larger area of work, and expectations are similarly higher. You're supposed to produce 10x code now.

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clickety_clack 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’d love to see what you’ve built. Can you share?

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grey-area 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maintenance is the hard part, not writing new code or steering and planning.

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ipaddr 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can outsource that to another llm