But that's boring nerd shit and LLMs didn't change who thinks boring nerd shit is boring or cool.
But that's boring nerd shit and LLMs didn't change who thinks boring nerd shit is boring or cool.
Some people do find it unfun, saying it deprives them of the happy "flow" of banging out code. Reaching "flow" when prompting LLMs arguably requires a somewhat deeper understanding of them as a proper technical tool, as opposed to a complete black box, or worse, a crystal ball.
I use LLMs in my every day work. I’m also a strong critic of LLMs and absolutely loathe the hype cycle around them.
I have done some really cool things with copilot and Claude and I keep sharing them to within my working circle because I simply don’t want to interact that much with people who aren’t grounded on the subject.
I started using Copilot at work because that's what the company policy was. It's a pretty strict environment, but it's perfectly serviceable and gets a lot of fresh, vetted updates. IDE integration with vs code was a huge plus for me.
Claude code is definitely a messier, buggier frontend for the LLM. It's clunkier to navigate and it has much more primitive context management tools. IDE integration is clunky with vs code, too.
However, if you want to take advantage of the Anthropic subscription services, I've found Claude Code is the way to go... Simply because Anthropic works hard to lock you into their ecosystem if you want the sweet discounts. I'm greedy, so I bit the bullet for all of the LLM coding stuff I do in my personal life.
I have found in general that for the type of work I do (senior to staff level engineering, 90-10 research to programming) that Claude Opus is the only model really worth my time - but I just really like the Copilot CLI tooling.
I do use LLMs to learn about new subjects but we already only bill 10% for "coding" and that's inflating it to cover other parts.
I can't imagine that slopping it up would be a great decision. Having alien code that no one ever understood between a bug report and a solution. Anthropic isn't going to give us money for our lost contracts, is it?
> I can't imagine that slopping it up would be a great decision. Having alien code that no one ever understood between a bug report and a solution. Anthropic isn't going to give us money for our lost contracts, is it?
Absolutely, that's a real concern. The only time I will let it loose on something is a throwaway project to test something, or a small tool that I know I can write deterministic tests for.
On codebases of any significant size, I'm using it more like a custom domain Stackoverflow search engine.
SWEs spend 20% of the time writing code for exactly the same reason brick-layers spend 20% of their time laying bricks
- A lot of research. Libraries documentation, best practice, sample solutions, code history,... That could be easily 60% of the time. Even when you're familiar with the project, you're always checking other parts of the codebase and your notes.
- Communication. Most projects involve a team and there's a dependency graph between your work. There may be also a project manager dictating things and support that wants your input on some cases.
- Thinking. Code is just the written version of a solution. The latter needs to exists first. So you spend a lot of time wrangling with the problem and trying to balance tradeoffs. It also involves a lot of the other points.
Coding is a breeze compared to the others. And if you have setup a good environment, it's even enjoyable.
I kinda like how you can just use it for anything you like. I have bazillion personal projects, I can now get help with, polish up, simplify, or build UI for, and it's nice. Anything from reverse engineering, to data extraction, to playing with FPGAs, is just so much less tedious and I can focus on the fun parts.