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Comment by chamomeal | Hacker News Reader

I also am enjoying LLMs, but I get no joy out of just prompting them again and again. I get so incredibly bored, with a little side of anxiety that I don’t really know how my program works.

I’ll probably get over it, but I’ve been realizing how much fun I get out building something as opposed to just having be built. I used to think all I cared about was results, and now I know that’s not true, so that’s fun!

Of course for the monotonous stuff that I’ve done before or don’t care a lick about, hell yeah I let em run wild. Boilerplate, crud, shell scripts, CSS. Had claude make me a terminal based version of snake. So sick

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This is interesting. Maybe slow it down a bit? What I've found is I really need to be extremely involved. I approve every change (claude-code). I'm basically micromanaging an AI developer. I'm constantly reading and correcting. Sometimes I tell it to wait while I help it make some change it's hung up on.

There's no way I could hire someone who'd want me hovering over their shoulder like this.

This sounds tedious I guess, but it's actually quite zen, and faster than solo coding most of the time. It gives me a ton of confidence to try new things and new libraries, because I can ask it to explain why it's suggesting the changes or for an overview of an approach. At no point am I not aware of what it's doing. This isn't even close to what people think of as vibe coding. It's very involved.

I'm really looking forward to increasing context sizes. Sometimes it can spin it's wheels during a refactor and want to start undoing changes it made earlier in the process, and I have to hard correct it. Even twice the context size will be a game changer for me.

I've always felt building something was close to artistry. You create something out of your thoughts, you shape it how you want and you understand how it works to the most minute detail. The amount of times I've shown something seemingly simple to someone and went "but wait this is what is actually happening in the background!" and started explaining something I thought was cool or clever are great memories to me. AI is turning renaissance paintings into mass-market printing. There's no pride, no joy, just productivity. It's precisely those repetitive, annoying tasks that lead you to create a faster alternative, or to think outside the box and find different ways. I just don't get the hype.

> There's no pride, no joy, just productivity.

This is exactly what bothers me about the present moment. Not that the pride of craftsmanship is everything, but dialing it down to zero with extreme pressure to stay that way is a bit sad.

But we’ve clearly gone through this with other mediums before, perhaps someday people will appreciate hand written code the way we appreciate hand carved wood. Or perhaps we were all wasting time in this weird middle ground in the march of progress. I guess we’ll find out in 5-15 years.

I think the audience who can appreciate handcrafted code will be vastly smaller than the audience who appreciates hand carved wood.

What about the audience which appreciates software that actually works without one billion subtle bugs and devastating security issues, and which also can be built upon and extended?

Maybe not possible with today's SOTA AI but I have no doubt it's within reach.

> There's no pride, no joy, just productivity.

I think it’s more nuanced than that.

Not every project one does will be or should be considered art or a source of joy and pride.

The boring CRUD apps that put the “bread on the table” are just that, a means to an end, they will not be your main source of pride or fulfillment. But somewhere in between there will be projects where you can put all your heart in and turn off that LLM.

Think of the countless boring weddings playlists a DJ has to do or the boring “give me the cheapest” single family homes an architect has to design.

Well, that's a good example. Why would you get a DJ when you can say "Siri, play Weddings Classics"? There's no humanity involved, no skills to read the room or cater to audiences. So you get a DJ; what if your DJ thinks his job or your event is boring and generates the same playlist you could have done yourself? You need passion, you need interest, you need to be involved. Otherwise every job becomes tedious, and humanity dies.

One thing that differentiates a (good) DJ from a playlist is that a DJ will react to the crowd. That'll influence song selection, mixing, live looping, and so on.

Which means clearly we need to feed video of the dancefloor to a vision model and output MIDI tokens!

My biggest problem with working LLMs is that they don't understand negatives and they also fail to remember their previous instructions somehow.

For example:

If I tell it to not use X, it will do X.

When I point it out, it fixes it.

Then a few prompts later, it will use X again.

Another issue is the hallucinations. Even if you provide it the entire schema (I did this for a toy app I was working with), it kept on making up "columns" that don't exist. My Invoice model has no STATUS column, why do you keep assuming it's there in the code?

I found them useful for generating the initial version of a new simple feature, but they are not very good for making changes to an existing ones.

I've tried many models, Sonnet is the better one at coding, 3.7 at least, I am not impressed with 4.

I've tried many models, Sonnet is the better one at coding, 3.7 at least, I am not impressed with 4.

If Sonnet 3.7 is the best you've found, then no, you haven't tried many models. At least not lately.

For coding, I'd suggest Gemini 2.5 Pro, o3-mini-high, or Opus 4. I've heard good things about Grok 4 as well, so if you're OK with that whole scene and the guy who runs it, maybe give it a shot.

If you have already done so and still think Sonnet 3.7 is better than any of them, then the most likely explanation is that you got incredibly lucky with Claude and incredibly unlucky with the others. LLMs aren't parrots, but they are definitely stochastic.

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