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The problems with your take (and others like it) are manyfold. First, there are some "smells" that I noticed. You say that LLMs hallucinate APIs and in another comment (brief skim of your history to make sure it's worth replying) you say something about chatting with an LLM. If you're "using" them in a chat interface, that's already 1+year old tech, and you should know that noone here talks about that. We're talking about LLM assisted coding using harnesses that make it possible and worth your time. Another smell is that you assert that LLMs only work for languages that are popular. While it's true they work best in those cases, as of ~1 y ago, it's also true that they can work even on invented languages. So I take every "i work in this very niche field" with a grain of salt nowadays. Second, the overall problem with "it doesn't work for me" is that it's an useless signal. Both in general and in particular. If I see a "positive post", I can immediately test it. If it works, great, I can include it in my toolbox. If it doesn't work, I can skip it. But with posts like yours, I can't do anything. You haven't provided any details, and even if you did, it would still be so dependant on your particular problem, with language, env, etc. that it would make the signal very weak for anyone else that doesn't have your particular problem. I am actually curious, if you can share, what's your setup. And perhaps an example of things you couldn't do. Perhaps we can help. The third problem that I see is that you are "fighting" other deamons, instead of working with people that want to contribute. You bring up hypebots, you bring up AGI, unkept promises and so on. But we, the people here, haven't promised you anything. We're not the ones hyping up agi asi mgi and so on. If you want to learn something, it would be more productive to keep those discussions separate. If your fight is with the hyperbots, fight them on those topics, not here. Or, honestly, don't waste your time. But you do you. Having said that, here's my take: With small provisions made for extreme niche fields (so extreme that it would place you in 0.0x% of coders, making the overall point moot anyway) I think people reporting 0 success are either wrong or using it wrong. It's impossible for me to believe that everything that I can achieve is so out of phase with whatever you are trying to achieve as to you getting literally 0 success. And I'm sick and tired of hearing this "oh it works for trivial tasks". No. It works reliably and unattended mostly for trivial tasks, but it can also work in very advanced niches. And there's plenty of public examples already for this - things like kernel optimisation, tensor libraries, cuda code, and so on. These are not "amateur" topics by any stretch of the word. And no, juniors can't one shot this either. I say this after 25+years doing this: there are plenty of times where I'm dumbstruck by something working first try. And I can't believe I'm the only one. |
> The third problem that I see is that you are "fighting" other deamons, instead of working with people that want to contribute. You bring up hypebots, you bring up AGI, unkept promises and so on. But we, the people here, haven't promised you anything. We're not the ones hyping up agi asi mgi and so on. If you want to learn something, it would be more productive to keep those discussions separate. If your fight is with the hyperbots, fight them on those topics, not here. Or, honestly, don't waste your time. But you do you.
This very thread is about hype. The post I originally replied to suggests that developers are in stages of grief about LLMs. That we are traversing denial, anger, and depression, before our inevitable acceptance. It is utterly tiring to be subjected to this day in, day out, in every avenue of public discourse about the field. Of course I have grievances with the hype. Of course I don't appreciate being told I'm in denial and that everything has changed. The only thing that has changed is that LLM-generated articles are all over HN and ShowHN is polluted with a very high quantity of very low quality content.
> Second, the overall problem with "it doesn't work for me" is that it's an useless signal.
The signal is not for the true believers. People who have not succumbed to the hype may find value in knowing that they are not alone. If one person can't make use of LLMs, while everyone around them is hyping them up, it may make that person feel like they are being doing something wrong and being left behind. But if people push back against the hype, they will know that they are not alone, and that maybe it isn't actually worth investing entire workdays into trying to find the magical configuration of .md files that turns Claude Code from 0.5x productivity to 10x productivity.
To be clear, I'm not really in the market for advice on "holding it right". If I find myself being left behind in reality, I will continue giving the tooling another shot until I get it right. I spend most of my life coding, and have so many ambitious projects I wish to bring into the world and not enough time to do them all; I will relentlessly pursue a productivity increase if and when it becomes available. As it is, though, I have seen zero evidence that I am actually being left behind, and am not currently interested in trying again at the present time.