[zahlman]

I feel like recently HN has been seeing more takes like this one and at least slightly less of the extremist clickbaity stuff. Maybe it's a sign of maturity. (Or maybe it's just fatigue with the cycle of hyping the absolute-latest model?)

[senko]

It takes time for people to go through these experiences (three months, in OP's case), and LLMs have only been reasonably good for a few months (since circa Nov'25).

Previously, takes were necessarily shallower or not as insightful ("worked with caveats for me, ymmv") - there just wasn't enough data - although a few have posted fairly balanced takes (@mitsuhiko for example).

I don't think we've seen the last of hypers and doomers though.

[deaux]

> LLMs have only been reasonably good for a few months (since circa Nov'25).

Ironically this itself is one of the hyper/doomer takes.

[senko]

But is it a hyper or a doomer take?

There seems to be a concencus among people I follow/read, that somewhere around that time was an inflexion point in coding LLMs, and this matches my personal experience.

(My comment was in the context of LLMs being used to generate non-throwaway code, not general GenAI use - apologies if that was unclear.)

[deaux]

> There seems to be a concencus among people I follow/read, that somewhere around that time was an inflexion point in coding LLMs, and this matches my personal experience.

LLMs have been a very useful tool to generate non-throwaway code for at least 2 years. It's a question of Overton Window, of mainstream acceptance, that has made you and the people you're talking about come to a "consensus" that there was an agentic LLM coding step change around that time. There was indeed an inflection point, but it was a social one: a window shift, where it became socially acceptable among mainstream SWEs to hold this sentiment. It had already been the case for a long time, but for those who understood this, expressing that was still not deemed acceptable. Doing so would brand one as a hyper, at least in the particular circles you were in.

You were in reality part of the doomers, just as much as the current doomers are still doomers.

[senko]

> LLMs have been a very useful tool to generate non-throwaway code for at least 2 years.

I was in YC W24 (exactly two years ago) with an AI coding startup ("agentic" and "vibe" buzzwords weren't invented yet). LLMs were useful as smarter autocomplete, but were struggling (and us with them!) on anything nontrivial.

Comparing that state to the past few months and saying it's just a social change is a bit of a stretch :)

[deaux]

Nope.

Source: Multiple successful prodiction applications with >90% LLM generated code already in Late 2024/Early 2025. Not slop, not note taking apps. Nothing ground-breaking but real-world valuable usecases. Both by myself and by others.

Aider came out May 2023. Augment Code (not very well known but best in class for a long time, hilariously poor at marketing/sales completely bungling this advantage) was April 2024.

[tipiirai]

Can you point to one other post like this? Curious. Thanks