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Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

> the cynicism isn't out of fear or panic, its disappointment over and over and over

Very much this. When you criticize LLM's marketing, people will say you're a ludite.

I'd bet that no one actually likes to write code, as in typing into an editor. We know how to do it, and it's easy enough to enter in a flow state while doing it. But everyone is trying to write less code by themselves with the proliferation of reusable code, libraries, framework, code generators, metaprogramming,...

I'd be glad if I could have a DAW or CAD like interface with very short feedback (the closest is live programming with Smalltalk). So that I don't have to keep visualizing the whole project (it's mentally taxing).

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> no one actually likes to write code

between this and..

> But everyone is trying to write less code by themselves with the proliferation of reusable code, libraries, framework, code generators, metaprogramming

.. this, is a massive gap. Personally speaking, I hate writing boilerplate code, y'know, old school Java with design patterns getter/setter, redundant multi-layer catch blocks, stateful for loops etc. That gets on my nerves, because it increases my work for little benefits. Cue modern coding practices and I'm almost exclusively thinking how to design solution to the problem at hand, and almost all the code is business logic exclusive.

This is where a lot of LLMs just fail. Handholding them all the way to correct solution feels like writing boilerplate again, except worse because I don't know when I'll be done. It doesn't help that most code available for LLMs is JS/TS/Java where boilerplate galore, but somehow I doubt giving them exclusively good codebases will help.

>I'd bet that no one actually likes to write code

And you'd be wrong. I, for one, enjoy the process of handcrafting the individual mechanisms of the systems I create.

Do you like writing all the if, def, public void, import keywords? That is what I’m talking about. I prefer IDE for java and other verbose languages because of the code generation. And I configure my editors for templates and snippets because I don’t like to waste time on entering every single character (and learned vim because I can act on bigger units; words, lines, whole blocks).

I like programming, I do not like coding.

I'm not bothered by if nor def. public void can be annoying but it's also fast to type and it doesn't bother me. For import I always try my best at having some kind of autoimport. I too use vim and use macros for many things.

To be honest I'm more annoyed by having to repeat three times parameters in class constructors (args, member declaration and assignment), and I have a macro for it.

The thing is, most of the time I know what I want to write before I start writing. At that point, writing the code is usually the fastest way to the result I want.

Using LLMs usually requires more writing and iterations; plus waiting for whatever it generates, reading it, understanding it and deciding if that's what I wanted; and then it suddenly goes crazy half way through a session and I have to start over...

I like writing code. It's a fun and creative endeavor to figure out how to write as little as possible.

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