[johnpaulkiser]

Man, I must really suck at this stuff. This is not at all my experience. Asking LLMs to refactor almost always results in hasty abstractions that I want to keep out of my codebases at all cost. Am I not letting go enough?

[Volundr]

FWIW this is my experience too. I use LLMs pretty regularly for coding but to get decent code you really have to supervise the hell out of them and often it's not worth the effort to push them into doing the right thing.

Maybe I'm just bad at getting it to do things, but I think your question about "letting go" is the real story. I think there are a lot of people not paying close enough attention to what's coming out of the LLM, and the tech debt building up is going to come back to bite them when it builds to a point the LLM can no longer make progress and they have to untangle the mess.

[mg]

The way I "ask" is that I really ... ask!

I ask the LLM "Can you find anything in this file(s) that can be made shorter or more logical?"

And then as I said, I like less than 10% of the ideas the LLM comes up with. But it is so fast to read through 10 ideas (A minute or so) that it is well worth it.

[phito]

I really, really don't understand this either. Sometimes I feel like I must be using different LLMs than some HNers because my experience of them is the complete opposite of what they describe.

[mg]

Which LLMs have you tried?

[Volundr]

Not who your replying too, but since I've expressed similar sentiment:

Sonnet 3.7 with thinking is my go-to.

Deepseek R1

Gemini 2.5 pro (I've heard it said Gemini is outperforming Sonnet, but I find Sonnet more consistent)

O1-mini

Depending on what I'm doing it's generally either via Cody or Aider.