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You dont understand how powerful LLMs are. Go use claude sonnet 3.5. Paste in 1000 lines of code, and describe a code change you want to make. Iterate on the so
by codingwagie 2y ago
You dont understand how powerful LLMs are. Go use claude sonnet 3.5. Paste in 1000 lines of code, and describe a code change you want to make. Iterate on the solution it gives. Do this for a week.
- righthand 2y agoIf I did that I would waste so much time. I know what code is in my codebase. Maybe if I was a novice this would be effective to help me learn it. Is the point of the exercise to wow myself for a week that an LLM can spit out solutions?
- codingwagie 2y agoNo its that it will code a days worth of work in a few minutes
- righthand 2y agoWow!
- threecheese 2y ago10x LoC is going to require more automation, to manage the sheer mass of it, which is more tools/money/layers of abstraction. AI coders need AI testers and AI peer reviewers, and need to iterate over and over to compensate for incorrectness to produce a working feature. That sounds hellishly inefficient. (but all it has to be is cheaper i suppose)
- Kiro 2y agoYou're speaking theoretically but we're already using it like this and it's not hellish or inefficient, or I wouldn't use it. Granted, it fits certain tasks better than others but when it does it's a massive relief and I can't imagine going back.
- righthand 2y agoI don’t get the exercise here though. If I have a 10K LOC then why would I iterate over the file to make changes? It’s a bad code base. Why wouldn’t I have my LLM break down the file into smaller components so it’s not so daunting every time I need to make a change and require an LLM to save a days worth of work time. Let’s say there is a reason to keep this 10K LOC together in a single file. I have never had work in SWE that involved making minor iterations to a file over a week where the work took a whole day to complete. I can see how that could happen but requiring a day to change code seems like there are bigger issues than a 10K LOC file. Unless I’m a complete amateur that thinks they’ve always been not an amateur, and needs an LLM to make a minor change. I just don’t see the point a lot of the times. What do I do with all this extra time I’m saving? Retire early because I’m getting paid more for doing less right (and I saved all that time)? How about when the LLM doesnt work right? If I’m a junior engineer that lets a computer write everything for me; How much time do I spend hacking at a prompt to get what I want vs just writing the damn code?