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What programming language are you using and in which ways are LLMs helping you? How do you deal with subtle mistakes?

by MaKey 2y ago

roughly 2y ago
My personal experience has been that the “smarter autocomplete” in the IDE is the bulk of the value add for me. It handles a lot of the really rote stuff - “create a struct that matches this data structure”, “add an accessor for this property”, “make another unit test with a slight variation on this” and saves me an enormous amount of time typing. I’ve had basically no luck getting code from the chat-style interfaces, though. The bugs often aren’t even subtle, and it’ll either argue with me that there’s not a bug or apologize and produce exactly the same code again.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > saves me an enormous amount of time typing But typing is like less than 1% of the time spent programming, it doesn't take many seconds to type the things you mentioned and it takes significantly longer to figure out you want to make them.
  - jacobyoder 2y ago
    In the moment, having to type anything more than half a line is still a distraction, as you can still make typos, or start watching as the starts to highlight issues as you type (which may or may not be real issues). Reducing distractions in the moment still can help keep flow going for some people.
icelancer 2y ago
Python, not that it really matters. We had to develop something internally regarding genlock and a ring buffer that Python wasn't going to work, so an engineer at our company picked up C++. Mind you, he's never written a line of C++ in his life and has close to no experience with C-style languages at all. Within 2 days he had completed the prototype to synchronize multiple latency sensitive gear with leading/falling edge methods in C++. (On top of his other work.) 3 days prior to it he'd written no C++. When asked how he did it, he said: "Claude is the best translator out there." As for subtle mistakes, you still need to know how to code. Compilers make plenty of subtle inaccuracies and we still use them for most applications, don't we?
- MaKey 2y ago
  That's interesting! I wouldn't feel comfortable using a non memory safe programming language without any experience in it though. Claude could introduce memory handling bugs and I might not be able to spot them.

What programming language are you using and in which ways are LLMs helping you? How do you deal with subtle mistakes?

by MaKey 2y ago

What programming language are you using and in which ways are LLMs helping you? How do you deal with subtle mistakes?

My personal experience has been that the “smarter autocomplete” in the IDE is the bulk of the value add for me. It handles a lot of the really rote stuff - “create a struct that matches this data structure”, “add an accessor for this property”, “make another unit test with a slight variation on this” and saves me an enormous amount of time typing. I’ve had basically no luck getting code from the chat-style interfaces, though. The bugs often aren’t even subtle, and it’ll either argue with me that there’s not a bug or apologize and produce exactly the same code again.

Jensson 2y ago
> saves me an enormous amount of time typing But typing is like less than 1% of the time spent programming, it doesn't take many seconds to type the things you mentioned and it takes significantly longer to figure out you want to make them.
- jacobyoder 2y ago
  In the moment, having to type anything more than half a line is still a distraction, as you can still make typos, or start watching as the starts to highlight issues as you type (which may or may not be real issues). Reducing distractions in the moment still can help keep flow going for some people.

icelancer 2y ago

Python, not that it really matters. We had to develop something internally regarding genlock and a ring buffer that Python wasn't going to work, so an engineer at our company picked up C++. Mind you, he's never written a line of C++ in his life and has close to no experience with C-style languages at all. Within 2 days he had completed the prototype to synchronize multiple latency sensitive gear with leading/falling edge methods in C++. (On top of his other work.) 3 days prior to it he'd written no C++. When asked how he did it, he said: "Claude is the best translator out there." As for subtle mistakes, you still need to know how to code. Compilers make plenty of subtle inaccuracies and we still use them for most applications, don't we?

MaKey 2y ago
That's interesting! I wouldn't feel comfortable using a non memory safe programming language without any experience in it though. Claude could introduce memory handling bugs and I might not be able to spot them.