[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?

[smoe]

In this case, handling all the edge cases and variants, and testing a codemod, would have taken significantly more of my time, which costs quite a bit more than the LLM.

Obviously, a deterministic tool is preferable in general, but it is not always worth bothering with for a one off task.

[beepbooptheory]

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

[eru]

Your time to create that macro ain't free.