[physicsguy]

They're powerful, but my feeling is that largely you could do this pre-LLM by searching on Stack Overflow or copying and pasting from the browser and adapting those examples, if you knew what you were looking for. Where it adds power is adapting it to your particular use case + putting it in the IDE. It's a big leap but not as enormous a leap as some people are making out.

Of course, if you don't know what you are looking for, it can make that process much easier. I think this is why people at the junior end find it is making them (a claimed) 10x more productive. But people who have been around for a long time are more skeptical.

[disgruntledphd2]

> Where it adds power is adapting it to your particular use case + putting it in the IDE. It's a big leap but not as enormous a leap as some people are making out.

To be fair, this is super, super helpful.

I do find LLMs helpful for search and providing a bunch of different approaches for a new problem/area though. Like, nothing that couldn't be done before but a definite time saver.

Finally, they are pretty good at debugging, they've helped me think through a bunch of problems (this is mostly an extension of my point above).

Hilariously enough, they are really poor at building MCP like stuff, as this is too new for them to have many examples in the training data. Makes total sense, but still endlessly amusing to me.

[Izkata]

Why bother searching yourself? This is pre-LLM: https://github.com/drathier/stack-overflow-import

[marcosdumay]

> Of course, if you don't know what you are looking for, it can make that process much easier.

Yes. My experience is that LLMs are really, really good at understanding what you are trying to say and bringing up the relevant basic information. That's a task we call "search", but it is different from the focused search people do most of the time.

Anyway, by the nature of the problem, that's something that people should do only a few times for each subject. There is not a huge market opportunity there.

[mikkupikku]

Doing it the old fashioned lazy way, copy-pasting snippets of code you search for on the internet and slightly modifying each one to fit with the rest of your code, would take me hours to achieve the kind of slop that claude code can one shot in five minutes.

Yeah yeah, call me junior or whatever, I have thick skin. I'm a lazy bastard and I no longer care about the art of the craft, I just want programs tailored to my tastes and agentic coding tools are by far the fastest way to get it. 10x doesn't even come close, it's more like 100x just on the basis of time alone. Effort? After the planning stage I kick back with video games while the tool works. Far better than 100x for effort.