Hacker News Reader

Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

LLMs haven't made me dumber, but they have made me lazier. I think about writing code by hand now and groan.

So how do you interact with your LLM? (by hand perhaps?)

I find prompt fettling a great way of getting to grips with a problem. If I can explain my problem effectively enough to get a reasonable start on an answer, then I likely thoroughly understand my problem.

An LLM is like a really fancy slide rule or calculator (I own both). It does have a habit of getting pissed and talking bollocks periodically. Mind you, so do I.

I voice chat with chatgpt to generate a very very detailed architecture document / spec / prd / whatever, in an implementation checklist order, then I take that and save it as a "VISION.md" file in the repo, and queue up a command for the agent to start working on the problem. I have detailed subagent and task forking logic in my claude setup, so I can get plans that involve 7-8 subagents (some being invoked by claude -p for parallel execution) and take a project from that spec to a very real project in ~6-8 hours, during which time my agents will typically phone home to see if they should continue maybe 2 or 3 times (I have anti stopping hooks but they're lazy SoBs).

thats kinda embarrassing

Would you groan if you had to take public transit while your car was broken down?

If you love to knit that's cool but don't get on me because I'd rather buy a factory sweater and get on with my day.

I love creating things, I love solving problems, I love designing elegant systems. I don't love mashing keys.

my public transport is faster and cheaper than driving...

I love how you immediately go for public transit as an analogy for something regrettable. Fits.

I put my time in on the city bus brother. In the time that I had the displeasure I had bodily fluids thrown on me and someone almost stabbed me. Maybe you have first class magic fairy busses with plush reclining seats and civil neighbors but that's not the norm.

I used to take BART into the city for years before I moved away from the bay. Yea, I'd sometimes see a rare scuffle and occasionally there would be someone who smelled like they had shat themselves 3 times living in one of the cars, but overall it was a positive experience. I've never been a more prolific reader than I was during those days. It still blows my mind that I had coworkers who would choose to drive over the bay bridge and get nothing done other than work on their road rage than to take BART.

Maybe it was worse where you were.

Try public transport in Korea or probably lots of other countries. There's your fairies.

  > I had bodily fluids thrown on me and someone almost stabbed me.

that sucks and i get it, but tbf that sounds like a local community problem not a public transport problem per se

public transit drives you places, it does the work for you, like the llm.

biking instead of driving would be a better analogy... which you might have caught if llms hadn't made you dumber.

I don’t get paid to “write code”. I use my 30 years of professional industry experience to either make the company money or to save the company money and in exchange for my labor, they put money in my account and formerly RSUs in my brokerage account.

It’s not about “passion”. It’s purely transactional and I will use any tool that is available to me to do it.

If an LLM can make me more efficient at that so be it. I’m also not spending months getting a server room built out to hold a SAN that can store a whopping 3TB of storage like in 2002. I write 4 lines of Yaml to provision an S3 bucket.

How much of your coding time do you spend writing mundane, repetitive code that should just instantly appear? I think there's a dual benefit of removing the drudgery of that but also gives you more time to write new, interesting code to achieve your goals and priorities sooner.

Wait until you hear how code used to be written, and how "lazy" you have it!

Everyone, even yourself, enjoys things being easier, when moving towards a solution. Programming is a means to an end, to solve an actual problem.

Why?

Or are you growing everything you need to eat by yourself?

Keep it to programming then, I'm sure you write all your own libraries right? In assembly, that is.

Everything about modern life, especially programming is about enabling more with less work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com