“You're holding it wrong.” is the most common response I get, when I talk about problems I had with LLM-assisted coding.

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leptons 3 days ago | parent [-]

You aren't holding it wrong, the truth is AI is a mixed bag, leaning towards a liability.

If people really counted all the time they spend coddling the AI, trying again, then trying again and again and again to get a useful output, then having to clean up that output, they would see that the supposed efficiency gains are near zero if not negative. The only people it really helps are people who were not good at coding to begin with, and they will be the ones producing the absolute worst slop because they don't know the difference between good and bad code. AI is constantly trying to introduce bugs into my codebase, and I see it happening in real-time with AI code completion. So, no you aren't "holding it wrong", the other people are no different than the crypto-bro's who were pushing blockchain into everything and hoping it would stick.

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sarchertech 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Imagine you are a JS dev and github comes out with a new search feature that's really good. it lets you use natural language to find open source projects really easily. So whenever you have a new project you check to see if something similar exists. And instead of starting from scratch you start from that and tweak it to fit what you want to do.

If you were the type of person who makes tiny toy apps, or you worked on lots of small already been done stuff, you'd love doing this. It would speed you up so much.

But if you worked on a big application with millions of users that had evolved into it's own snowflake through time and use, you'd get very little from it.

I think I probably could benefit from looking at existing open source solutions and modifying them a lot of the time, and I kinda started out doing that at first. But eventually you realize that even though starting with something can save you time, it can also cost you a ton of time so it's frequently a wash or a net negative.

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leptons 2 days ago | parent [-]

Nothing you described in this comment is only achievable with "AI". I've been able to search for and find open source projects since forever, and fork them and extend them, long before an LLM was a glimmer in Sam Altman's beady eye.

	▲	sarchertech 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		No it’s not at all. AI just makes finding it faster. But that’s my point AI isn’t that different from what you could already do before. Most of us didn’t do things that way before, so maybe programming like that is just a bad idea.

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laserlight 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> If people really counted [...]

Exactly. I counted and reported my results in a previous thread [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272913

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leptons 2 days ago | parent [-]

I've started "racing" Claude when I have a somewhat simple task that I think it should be able to handle. I spend a few minutes writing out detailed instructions, which I already knew because I had to do initial discovery around the problem domain to understand what the goal was supposed to be. It took a while to be thorough enough writing it down for Claude, which is time I did not need to spend if I had just started writing the code myself - I'm sure the AI-bro's aren't considering the time it takes just to write down instructions to Claude vs just start coding.

So then Claude starts discecting the instructions. I start writing some code.

After a while Claude is done, and I've written about two or three dozen lines of code. Claude is way off, so I have to think about why and then write more instructions for it to follow. Then I continue coding.

After a while Claude is done, and I've written about three dozen more lines of code. Claude is closer this time, but still not right. Round 3 of thinking about how Claude got it wrong and what to tell it to do now. Then I continue coding.

After a while Claude is done (yet again), and I've written a lot more code and tested it and it's working as needed. The output Claude came up with is just a little bit off, so I have it rework the output a little bit and tell it to run again.

I downloaded the resulting code Claude wrote and compared it to my solution, and I will take my solution every single time. Claude wrote a bloated monstrosity.

This is my experience with "AI", and I'm honestly not loving it.

It does sometimes save me time converting code from one language to another (when it works), or implementing simple things based on existing code (when it works), and a few other tasks (when it works), but overall I end up asking myself over and over "Is this really how developers want the future to be?"

I'm skeptical that these LLM-based coding tools will ever get good enough to not make me feel ill about wasting my time typing instructions to them to produce code that is bloated and mostly not reusable.

	▲	whateveracct 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've done the racing thing too. Or I just reject its suggestions, do it better, and have it review and tell me why I did better. And writing those instructions when I race it..it's more cognitive effort for me than coding!
	▲	oro44 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Interesting stuff. Thx for sharing!