Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcelerier | Hacker News Reader

> The people saying LLMs can code are hard for me to understand. They are good for simple bash scripts and complex refactoring and drafting basic code idioms and that's about it

that's like, 90% of the code people are writing

View on HN

But not 90% of the work people do. It’s solved a task, not a problem.

It's what takes time though. When you need to make a wrapper for some API for example LLMs are incredible. You give it a template, the payload format and the possible methods and it just spits out a 500-1000 line class in 15 seconds. Do it for 20 classes, that's work for a week 'done' in 30 mins. Realistically 2 days since you still have to fix and test a lot but still..

Or write a lisp macro in one hour and be done. Or install an opengenerator and be done in 10 minutes, 9 of which is configuring the generator.

If you can get the specific documentation for it. Sadly many companies don't want you using the API so they just give you a generic payload and the methods and leave you to it. LLMs are good in the sense that they can tell what type StartDate, EndDate is (str MSDate), maybe it also somehow catches on that ActualDuration is an int.. It also manages to guess correctly a lot of the fields in that payload that are not necessary for the particular call/get overridden anyway.

Can a Lisp macro automatically search for, and find, the API documentation and apply it to the output?

I've implemented connections to (public) APIs of different services multiple times using LLMs without even looking up the APIs myself.

I just say "Enrich the data about this game from Steam's API" and that's about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com