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I think this points to much of the disagreement over LLMs. They can be great at one-off scripts and other similar tasks like prototypes. Some folks who do a lot
by rurp 2y ago
I think this points to much of the disagreement over LLMs. They can be great at one-off scripts and other similar tasks like prototypes. Some folks who do a lot of that kind of work find the tools genuinely amazing. Other software engineers do almost none of that and instead spend their coding time immersed in large messy code bases, with convoluted business logic. Looping an LLM into that kind of work can easily be net negative.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoMaybe they are just lazy around tooling. Cursor with Claude works well for project sizes much larger than I expected but it takes a little set up. There is a chasm between engineers who use tools well and who do not.
- rurp 2y agoI don't really agree with framing it as lazy. Adding more tools and steps to your workflow isn't free, and the cost/benefit of each tool will be different for everyone. I've lost count of how many times someone has evangelized a software tool to me, LLM or not. Once in a while they turn out to be useful and I incorporate them into my regular workflow, but far more often I don't. This could be for any number of reasons like it does not fit with my workflow well, or I already have a better way of doing whatever it does, or the tool adds more friction than it remove. I'm sure spending more time fiddling with the setup of LLM tools can yield better results, but that doesn't mean that it will be worth it for everyone. In my experience LLMs fail often enough at modestly complex problems that they are more hassle than benefit for a lot of the work I do. I'll still use them for simple tasks, like if I need some standard code in a language I'm not too familiar with. At the same time, I'm not at all surprised that others have a different experience and find them useful for larger projects they work on.