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Comment by MrDarcy | Hacker News Reader

So much this. The act of having the agent create a research report first, a detailed plan second, then maybe implement it is itself fun and enjoyable. The implementation is the tedious part these days, the pie in the sky research and planning is the fun part and the agent is a font of knowledge especially when it comes to integrating 3 or 4 languages together.

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This goes further into LLM usage than I prefer to go. I learn so much better when I do the research and make the plan myself that I wouldn’t let an LLM do that part even if I trusted the LLM to do a good job.

I basically don’t outsource stuff to an LLM unless I know roughly what to expect the LLM output to look like and I’m just saving myself a bunch of typing.

“Could you make me a Go module with an API similar to archive/tar.Writer that produces a CPIO archive in the newcx format?” was an example from this project.

I get this and operated this way for most of 2025. In Q4 I paired up with peer who has similar experience level to me. They specialize in TypeScript, I specialize in Go, we're both ops / platform grey beards.

This pattern of LLM usage has been great for leaning the other's skill set so we can more effectively review each other's code. I can spend a week planning and iterating with Claud on TypeScript, then have my peer review and correct both the implemented outcome _and_ the plan that produced it, allowing me to learn how to drive the LLM more effectively in my non-preferred language. The same is true of him, he's able to autonomously learn and iterate on Go in a way that's efficient and respectful of my time.

More anecdotal evidence supporting the concept these tools are a super-power for experienced engineers, especially when you have a small group of them working together in multiple languages.

Yeah, this is a lot of what I'm doing with LLM code generation these days: I've been there, I've done that, I vaguely know what the right code would look like when I see it. Rather than spend 30-60 minutes refreshing myself to swap the context back into my head, I prompt Claude to generate a thing that I know can be done.

Much of the time, it generates basically what I would have written, but faster. Sometimes, better, because it has no concept of boredom or impatience while it produces exhaustive tests or fixes style problems. I review, test, demand refinements, and tweak a few things myself. By the end, I have a working thing and I've gotten a refresher on things anyway.

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