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by avastmick 464 days ago
I’m a solo founder/developer (https://kayshun.co) my relationship/usage of LLMs for codegen has been complicated.

At first I was all in with Copilot and various similar plugins for neovim. It helped me get going but did produce the worst code in the application. Also I found (personal preference) that the autocomplete function actually slowed me down; it made me pause or even prevented me from seeing what I was doing rather than just typing out what I needed to. I stopped using any codegen for about four months at the end of 2024; I felt it was not making me more productive.

This year it’s back on the table with avante[0] and cursor (the latter back off the table due to the huge memory requirements). Then recently Claude Code dropped and I am currently feeling like I have productivity super powers. I’ve set it up in a pair programming style (old XP coder) where I write careful specs (prompts) and tests (which I code); it writes code; I review run the tests and commit. I work with it. I do not just let it just run as I have found I waste more time unwinding its output than watching each step.

From being pretty disillusioned six months ago I can now see it as a powerful tool.

Can it replace devs? In my opinion, some. Like all things it’s garbage in garbage out. So the idea a non-technical product manager can produce quality outputs seems unlikely to me.

0: https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim
1 comments
simonbarker87 464 days ago
Similar to me with CoPilot, I found it made it harder for me to spin up my brain to full power to tackle a genuinely tricky problem because I was letting it solve the simple ones for me. I stopped using it after about 3 months and had a total pause from CodeGen tools. Now I use Claude like a very documentation-knowledgeable junior developer who can write code very quickly. I guide it on the architecture and approach and sanity check what it does but let it save me a tonne of typing. I don’t use it for everything but as a CTO for an early stage startup that needs to turn somethings around quickly it’s incredibly useful.
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