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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I used to get made up APIs in functions, now I get them in modules. I used to get confidently incorrect assertions in files now I get them across codebases.

Hell, I get poorly defined APIs across files and still get them between functions. LLMs aren't good at writing well defined APIs at any level of the stack. They can attempt it at levels of the stack they couldn't a year ago, but they're still terrible at it unless the problem is so well known enough that they can regurgitate well reviewed code.

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I still get made-up Python types all the time with Gemini. Really quite distracting when your codebase is massive and triggers a type error, and Gemini says

"To solve it you just need to use WrongType[ThisCannotBeUsedHere[Object]]"

and then I spend 15 minutes running in circles, because everything from there on is just a downward spiral, until I shut off the AI noise and just read the docs.

Gemini unfortunately sucks at calling tools, including ‘read the docs’ tool… it’s a great model otherwise. I’m sure Hassabis’ team is on it since it’s how the model can ground itself in non-coding contexts, too.

Yeah I've been trying Claude Code for a week (mostly Opus) and in a C++ Juce project it kept hallucinating functions for a simple task ("retrieve DAW track name if available") and actually never got it right.

It also failed a lot to modify a simple Caddyfile.

On the other hand it sometimes blows me away and offers to correct mistakes I coded myself. It's really good on web code I guess as that must be the most public code available (Vue3 and elixir in my case).

This is the right answer. Unless there is some equivalent of it on the open internet which their search engine can find you should not expect a good outcome.

"good outcome" is pretty subjective, I do get useful productivity gains from some LLM work, but the issues are the same as they always have been.

That's probably b/c you know how to write code & have enough of an understanding about the fundamentals to know when the LLM is bullshitting or when it is actually on the right track.

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