[queuebert]

I don't understand how some of y'all use these things. I get garbage unless I give them very specific concrete tasks with as much context as possible. Anything that takes more than 30 min is usually a waste because the scope was too large.

[smoe]

I had good experiences doing multi-hour refactoring/housekeeping tasks that basically consisted of applying the same steps and rules n times.

Worth noting, a significant chunk of those runs involved the agent waiting for the compiler, linters, type checks, and test suites, as well as updating journals. It’s not the agent sputtering out code for eight hours straight.

And naturally I spend more time on manual verification in the end as much less of it is happening during the coding process.

[culi]

> that basically consisted of applying the same steps and rules n times.

Why use a non-deterministic, possibly hallucinatory, definitely expensive, LLM when it sounds like a codemod is the perfect solution for this?

[beepbooptheory]

The money people spend on things I could probably do with an emacs macro...

[whstl]

Different people just have different concepts of what's garbage and what's not.

There seems to be some kind of AI hysteria going on, with people becoming so enamoured with the AI that they accept anything it produces as if it's some gift from the gods, while others just reject it prima-facie.

For example, the worst design I have seen recently was from a designer who pivoted into "vibe coding influencer". The worst code is from developers who were heavily into Clean Code a couple years ago and now half their PRs is unused dead code.

[standardUser]

You have to build up a context, or otherwise seed the memory, to get anything useful out of these LLMs on a large or existing project.