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Comment by lupire | Hacker News Reader

That's fine for your quick hack that is probably a reimplementation of an existing program you can't find.

But it's not a production quality implementation of new need.

I am of the strong opinion most problems were solved 20-40 years ago and that most code written today is reimplementation using different languages.

I have shipped production code using LLMs in languages I did not study approved by seasoned SWE's is evidence that an acceleration is happening.

It's a knowledge base that can explain the knowledge it returns when you ask, how is that not useful in a professional environment for production code?

I mean if you assume all devs are script kiddies who simply copy paste what they find on google (or ChatGPT without asking for explanations) then yeah it's never gonna be useful in a prod setting.

Also you're very wrong to believe every technical need or combination of libraries has already been implemented in open source before.

True, but hey, even if it's not production code, it may be an ad-hoc thing that never gets push to production, it may be code reviewed by C++ experts and improved to production quality. At very least, someone saved four days with it, and could use the time for something, maybe something they are expert at. Isn't that still good?

Most of the time saving time is just an illusion. When that code will needed to be changed, people will spend more than 4 days debugging and understanding it. The mental model of it was written by AI. It can make sense or not at all. You’ll figure it out after 4 days.

The code is 2 files of 80 lines each and is very clear. There's no way any software developer needs 4 days to understand what it does.

Moreover Claude can explain the functions used very clearly (if you're too lazy to jump to definition in your editor)

LLMs are becoming actually useful to developers new to a language. Just as Google was 20 years ago.

People talk about completey different things. The article was about Google using LLM-s to generate code, not people making 80 lines with them at home. There is a huge difference. I don’t see any problem with the latter, but with the former there are many problems.

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