[Balgair]

Hey, I've been hearing about this issue that programmers have on HN a lot.

But I'm in the more 'bad programmer/hacker' camp and think that LLMs are amazing and really helpful.

I know that one can post a link to the chat history. Can you do that for an example that you are comfortable sharing? I know that it may not be possible though or very time consuming.

What I'm trying to get at is: I suck at programming, I know that. And you probably suck a lot less. And if you say that LLMs are garbage, and I say they are great, I want to know where I'm getting the disconnect.

I'm sincerely, not trying to be a troll here, and I really do want to learn more.

Others are welcome to post examples and walk through them too.

Thanks for any help here.

[vlod]

>and think that LLMs are amazing and really helpful

Respectively, are you understanding what it produces or do you think that's its amazing because it produces something, that 'maybe' works.

Here's an e.g. I was just futzing with. I did a refactor of my code (typescript) and my test code broke (vitest) and for some reason it said 'mockResolvedValue()' is not a function. I've done this a gazillion times.

I allowed it via 3-4 iterations to try and fix it (I was being lazy and wanted my error to go away) and the amount of crap (rewriting tests, referenced code) it was producing was beyond ridiculous. (I was using github co-pilot).

Eventually I said "f.that for a game of soldiers" and used by brain. I forgot to uncomment a vi.mock() during the refactor.

I DO use it to fix stupid typescript errors (the error blob it dumps on you can be a real pita to process) and appreciate it when gives me a simple solution.

So I agree with quite a few comments here. I'm not ready to bend the knee to our AI Overloads.

[Balgair]

Yeah, so I'm a 'hacker' (MIT definition here). I've only taken a single class in javascript with Sun based workstations about 20 years ago now (god, I'm old). I hated it.

All my work now is in python and SQL now and though I've watched a lot of youtube videos and plunked at StackOverFlow for ~15 years, I've never had formal education in either language. Like, it takes me about as long to set up the libraries and dependancies in python as it does to write my code. My formal job titles have never had 'programmer' in them.

My code, as such, is just to get something done. Mostly this is hardware interfacing stuff, but a little software too. I've had my code get passed up the chain and incorporated into codebases, but that's only happened a handful of times. The vast majority of the code I write is never seen by others. My code hasn't had to be maintainable as I've never really had to maintain it for more than 5 years max. I've used git on projects before, but I don't really see the need these days. The largest program I've written is ~1M lines of code. Most code is about 100 lines long now. I almost always know what 'working' means, in that I know the output that I want to see (again, mostly working in hardware). I almost never run tests of the code.

I've had the same issues you have had with LLMs, where they get stuck and I have to try to restart the process. Usually this happens to me in about 20 back and forths. I'm mostly just pasting relevant code snippets and the errors back into the LLM for a while until things work for me. Again, I know what 'working' looks like from the start.

Typically, I'll start the session with an LLM by telling it the problem I have, what I want the code skeleton to look like, and then what I want the output to look like. Then it will give the psuedo code, then I walk it through each portion of the psuedo code. Then I get to errors and debugging. Usually about half of this is just libraries and versions in python. Then, I get to the errors of the code itself. I can typically find what line of code is causing the error just from the terminal outputs. I'll talk with the LLM about that line of code, trying to understand it from the error. Then, on to the next error. Repeat that process until I get the working output I desire. I'm never expecting the right code out of the first LLM interaction, but I am expecting (and seeing) that the time it takes to get to working code is faster.

The time it would usually take me to get through all this before LLMs was about 2 weeks of work (~80 hours) per project. Now it takes me about half a day (~4 hours), and it's getting faster.

I'm not in the camp of thinking that AI is going to take my job. I am in the camp of thinking that AI is going to finally let me burn down the list of things that we really need to do around here.

Thank you for the reply!

[mns]

I can give you an example here. We had to do some basic local VAT validation for EU countries and as the API that you can use for that has some issues for some countries (as it checks this in the national databases) we wanted to also have a basic local one. So using Claude 3.7 I wanted to get some basic VAT validation, in general the answer and solution was good, you would be impressed, but here comes the fun part. The basic solution was just some regular expressions and then it went further on its own and created specific validations for certain countries. These validations were something like credit card number validations, sums, check digits, quite nice you would say. But the thing is in a lot of these countries these numbers are basically assigned randomly and have no algorithm, so it went on to hallucinate some validations that don't exist providing a solution that looks nice, but basically it doesn't work in most cases.

Then I went on github and found that it used some code written by someone in JS 7 years ago and just converted and extended it for my language, but that code was wrong and simply useless. We'll end up with people publishing exploits and various other security flaws in Github, these LLMs will get trained on that and people that have no clue what they are doing will push out code based on that. We're in for fun times ahead.

[alexkwood]

here is one solution i am helping out with which was very very easy to create using claude https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R72TvoXCimg&t=2s