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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

Never thought of it like this, that synthetic code doesn't need to get into a codebase for it to benefit from the discussion around what was encoded with LLM.

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Using LLMs to build dozens of prototypes and test them before committing to a direction is one of their great strengths.

You no longer have to guess which paths will pay off. Have the LLM test them all, then go back and write the best one how you wanted to.

Sucks when four out of twelve are flawed and you rule out the top 2 best solutions and 5 useful test cases you could learn from by just spray and praying... But at least it was fast!?

Yeah, that's not the way... It's synthesizing a single hypothesis at a time with attention to the emerging architecture, then decide to reimolement manually or reapply agents to refactor the code until it's reasonable.

The people I've seen do things like this blew through good ideas because the implementations were flawed and they couldn't be bothered to you know read the code because people ... Are told not to do that anymore. In some situations they are not even allowed to read or discuss code at work anymore. It's ridiculous...

Yes it's a pretty well thought out policy. It feels bad for someone to put in a month of work and have their code ultimately rejected, but if an llm does something sloppy with some light guidance in a few days, then great, experiment with some weird stuff and see what happens, then once you know it probably should work, go in for that month of work and make it happen.

This is why LLM generated PRs are great… they should just be opened as issues instead.

That's a good point. I've gotten a few PRs to a project I work on, where the general idea is good, bit the actual code has serious issues, so I end up just implementing the idea myself in a better way.

Exactly

It's a decent idea until 12000 bots start spamming a repo with janky code and poorly founded really complex suggestions for cs students to spray and pray resume padding.

A bit of KYC goes a long the way

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