I think where LLMs truly shine is personal greenfield projects, maybe start a side project

LeFantome 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Completely agree. LLMs are amazing for side projects.

The other place they are amazing is in working with legacy code bases. I mean, the kind the dev team always wants to throw away. First, even if you do want to throw it away, you can first find out what it does and realize it does more than you think it does. You can also create integrations to more modern components which can be used to extend it. You can also create a pretty decent test suite if you do not have one. And, once the behaviour has good test coverage, you can re-write it into something more modern. You can even completely change the architecture while ensuring compatible external behaviour. Remember, this is all in place of “throw it away and start over from scratch, only to discover that the scope is much larger than expected”.

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simonask an hour ago | parent [-]

You could already do all of that. Like, none of that is infeasible to achieve on a scale of weeks in most cases.

It’ll still take weeks with AI in the picture, but for some reason management is more willing to plan it when they also have the additional token bills to pay.

	▲	1123581321 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It was often not organizationally feasible because you needed permission to spend those weeks up front, instead of working on something else, just to get to where you knew enough to give approval to finish the work. Now, you can make enough progress with one developer’s quiet afternoon to be confident and finishing the work also takes less time. The technical grasp of the legacy codebase was a factor, but often not the largest.

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

[dead]

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llama_drama 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's this joke like "I used to have 5 unfinished side projects, but AI changed everything. Now I have 30 unfinished side projects". And in my case it's not even a joke

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jack_pp 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Can't really blame AI for that though.

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sodapopcan 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They aren't blaming AI, they are just backing up the "not much has changed" idea.

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furyofantares 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's always been easier to start a project than finish it, and LLMs make starting a project roughly free. I'm not sure they change how much work it is to finish it all that much.

I mean, I have finished more side projects than before. So they do change it. Just not as dramatically.

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anonymous908213 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course you can. LLMs take you from 0 to 80 instantly. They are then completely incapable of getting from 80 to 100 and making something worth shipping to production. They are the ultimate unfinished side project generator.

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StilesCrisis 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

Have you, uh, used them recently? LLMs absolutely get to 100 now.

	▲	anonymous908213 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		For a definition of 100 which includes nobody actually using any LLM-written software in production at scale, other than Codex and Claude Code, which are both horrifically buggy, bloated, insecure pieces of software that are only used for their association with another piece of software gated behind them and which nobody would choose to use if they were themselves third-party harnesses. If LLMs could get to 100, the promised software revolution I am told is here every day would actually be visible. We would be using LLM-generated compilers, an LLM-generated OS, an LLM-generated browser, LLM-generated databases, etc. etc. etc. etc, and not only are we not using all of those things, we're not using a single one of those things. Nobody is buying LLM-generated games, nobody is using LLM-generated consumer applications that replace Photoshop or Final Cut or Blender or Unity ("ArtCraft" is itself an admitted scam from its own prompter, who even admitted here that he lied about its capabilities on Reddit to build hype), nobody is accomplishing anything of economic value. LLMs are obviously hundreds of times more "productive" than humans, so the moment they can reach 100, all of these things would happen basically overnight, and yet none of them have happened. Curious, isn't it?

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erikus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So relatable. But I have some finished projects now and some of them I use daily.

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krapp an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Skill issue. I had 30 unfinished side projects even before AI. Just raw talent.

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jopsen 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, when there is no code review requirements and no pesky production database you can't just yolo :)

At work, they mostly let me increase quality, because it's easy to say find all parsers in my code base and fuzz them.

	▲	rajay99 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It is great. I just had claude yolo a human in the loop image segmentation pipeline last night. It cut weeks of work down to an evening like 4h. Segment Anything 3.1 + Napari final touch.
	▲	switchbak 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'd also say: when you really understand a domain well and you're a one-(wo)man show, you can just fly! Of course, you can make a giant pile of doggy-doo-doo, but that was always true, just you can now make an epic Giza-sized pile.