This x 10 . I don’t understand how people are saying you can’t use LLMs to get crazy productivity gains. If you can’t write quality code with LLMs at ludicrous speed, you’re holding it wrong. You will have occasional bad days and regressions. But overall you’re still going to be able to 4x your progress.

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cedws 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have plenty of experience with LLMs and use them daily but definitely wouldn't call generated code "quality code." Often looks like complete vomit.

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satvikpendem an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If you're an enterprise (including startups), you worry about customers, not code quality. There are famously many startups that gained traction despite shit code and then eventually got around to fixing it, to whatever extent was possible, like Facebook HHVM, Stripe's Sorbet, etc.

	▲	wonnage 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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NortySpock an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Ok, and? You can live with that if there are more important things to deal with.

I've stared at ugly LLM code, that I had just had generated, and worked well enough for my purposes. (generally, some quick recursion into a nested python dictionary in order to dig out some property -- especially for linting or quick data analysis).

And I wanted something better, sure, something a bit more readable ...but I just needed it to work well enough to recurse through a yaml file for config file linting, not be battle-hardened against every test case.

So to deal with the mess, I shoved it in a pure function, threw a few basic sanity unit tests around it, put a comment with a disclaimer of "#this is LLM generated code, it is lightly tested, do not use it for anything truly load-bearing without a lot more tests" and I moved on to something else.

Not everything has to be bulletproof.

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csallen an hour ago | parent [-]

You're on Hacker News. This is a site full of developers who are convinced that "proper software engineering" is 100% of what makes a business successful, and everything and everyone else is useless. You can't just waltz in here and point out that code in business is a means to an end and expect not to get downvoted.

	▲	echelon an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Every bit of code written in the last 50 years is going to be meaningless. People need to get to grips with that fast. Distribution, relationships, processes, mindshare, marketing, and politics matter. Code is just ephemeral glue and implementation detail.

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0xy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a small minority of people who are adamantly refusing to change, such as there are in every technological revolution. Ego prevents them from even wholeheartedly trying the tool, because it would be admission they were wrong.

The opportunities available for these people are rapidly, rapidly shrinking. I believe it's possible to be a developer today who's EXCEPTIONAL and never uses AI. Most opponents are not exceptional, though, and even these opportunities are shrinking.

Most exceptional developers in my org adopted AI in their workflows and went from 10x developers to 20x developers.

If you refuse to adapt, you're going to be out of a job complaining about the kids and their newfangled technology REAL quick. You have a few years remaining, maybe less.

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drdexebtjl an hour ago | parent [-]

I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because I have to ensure the two juniors in my team who are now creating 50x work won’t merge complete garbage, reviewed by another engineer that has already given up on caring.

I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because my Product Manager thinks changing fundamental premises of tasks I already spent two weeks on (mostly removing human blockers) is very simple. After all, when he asked Claude to update his prototype, it only took it 10 minutes.

I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because the company dedicated entire teams to write company-wide skills for everything. They suck, but if I don’t use them, I’m not following the new “golden path for engineering”, and I lose points in my performance review.

I can, however, turn 10x work into 20x work, or even much more than that, if AI actually did what it’s promising and eliminated most of my team, the product manager, and the middle managers. Or me. I could use a break.

	▲	dwaltrip an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Damn, that sounds quite rough.

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cjbgkagh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I wonder if the people getting 10x productivity gains are spending less time on HN and more time tending to their agents. Personally I now spend so much time productively arguing with agents that it feels like an utter waste of effort arguing with humans, if people can't see the value in LLMs by now I'm not sure what I could say to change their minds.

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vhantz an hour ago | parent | next [-]

We must then assume you're not getting those 10x gains

	▲	cjbgkagh an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Less time, not zero time. I still argue with humans for sentimental reasons.

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dboreham 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Definitely enjoying the lack of eye-rolling, being asked to explain obvious things multiple times, and stopping things being done for resume-stuffing reasons.