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I agree that AI powered programming can give you a boost, and the points made in the post I would agree with if they were not made about Claude Code or other "a

I agree that AI powered programming can give you a boost, and the points made in the post I would agree with if they were not made about Claude Code or other "agentic" coding tools. The human-LLM boosting interaction exists particularly when you use the LLM in its chat form, where you inspect and reshape with both editing the code and explaining with words what the LLM produced, and where (this is my golden rule) you can only move code from the LLM environment to your environment after inspecting and manually cut & pasting stuff. Claude Code and other similar systems have a different goal: to allow somebody to create a project without much coding at all, and the direction is to mostly observe more the result itself of the code, that how it is written and the design decisions. This is fine with me, I don't tell people what to do, and many people can't code, and with systems like that they can build a certain degree of systems. But: I believe that tody, 21 April 2025 (tomorrow it may change) the human+LLM strict collaboration on the code, where the LLM is mostly a tool, is what produces the best results possible, assuming the human is a good coder. So I would say there are three categories of programmers: 1. Programmers that just want to prompt, using AI agents to write the code. 2. Programmers, like me, that use LLM as tools, writing code by hand, letting the LLM write some code too, inspecting it, incorporating what makes sense, using the LLM to explore the frontier of programming and math topics that are relevant to the task at hand, to write better code. 3. Programmers that refuse to use AI. I believe that today category "2" is what has a real advantage over the other two. If you are interested in this perspective, a longer form of this comment is contained in this video in my YouTube channel. Enable the English subtitles if you can't understand Italian. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5pX2T72-hM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5pX2T72-hM

Hyperlisk 1y ago
This is my experience as well. I've been skeptical for a long time, but recent releases have changed my mind (it's important to try new things even if skeptical). Large context windows are game-changers. I can't copy/paste fast enough. The future is coming, but you still need fundamentals to make sure the generated code has been properly setup for growth. That means you need to know what you expect your codebase to look like before or during your prompting so you can promote the right design patterns and direct the generation towards the proper architecture. So software design is not going away. Or it shouldn't for software that expects to grow.
noisy_boy 1y ago
> The human-LLM boosting interaction exists particularly when you use the LLM in its chat form I feel reassured to see that I'm not the only one who feels this way. With all the talk about in-IDE direct code editing, I was thinking that I was being somewhat of a luddite who feels like the chat form is the best balance between getting help from the AI and understanding/deciding how things are actually structured/working.
Snuggly73 1y ago
2. is mostly what works for me. Usually when I am in the flow of writing code, I can think, write, tab away and review without breaking it. If I need a smallish (up to 100-ish lines) piece of code that I know the shape of - I would use the chat to generate it and merge it back after review. Letting the agent rip always has led to more pain and suffering down the line :(
aerhardt 1y ago
I've also settled on a copy-paste LLM workflow. I can see the usefulness of agents however for (a) some tedious refactorings where the IDE features might not reach and (b) occasionally writing a first pass of a low-value module when I am low on energy. For the rest of stuff I feel very happy with copy-paste.
matthewsinclair 1y ago
What you describe as #2 is more or less what I do, and I use CC to do that. I also have both GPT and the Claude UI open and I will often flick out to one or the other (Claude seems to be a lot better at Elixir code for me than GPT) and go into “discussion” mode if I want to open the aperture on a topic. I’m certainly never letting (not at anymore, at least) it go and wrote swathes of raw code on its own. I learned that lesson the hard way. It generates absolute nonsense if left to its own devices.

Hyperlisk 1y ago

This is my experience as well. I've been skeptical for a long time, but recent releases have changed my mind (it's important to try new things even if skeptical). Large context windows are game-changers. I can't copy/paste fast enough. The future is coming, but you still need fundamentals to make sure the generated code has been properly setup for growth. That means you need to know what you expect your codebase to look like before or during your prompting so you can promote the right design patterns and direct the generation towards the proper architecture. So software design is not going away. Or it shouldn't for software that expects to grow.

noisy_boy 1y ago

> The human-LLM boosting interaction exists particularly when you use the LLM in its chat form I feel reassured to see that I'm not the only one who feels this way. With all the talk about in-IDE direct code editing, I was thinking that I was being somewhat of a luddite who feels like the chat form is the best balance between getting help from the AI and understanding/deciding how things are actually structured/working.

Snuggly73 1y ago

2. is mostly what works for me. Usually when I am in the flow of writing code, I can think, write, tab away and review without breaking it. If I need a smallish (up to 100-ish lines) piece of code that I know the shape of - I would use the chat to generate it and merge it back after review. Letting the agent rip always has led to more pain and suffering down the line :(

aerhardt 1y ago

I've also settled on a copy-paste LLM workflow. I can see the usefulness of agents however for (a) some tedious refactorings where the IDE features might not reach and (b) occasionally writing a first pass of a low-value module when I am low on energy. For the rest of stuff I feel very happy with copy-paste.

matthewsinclair 1y ago

What you describe as #2 is more or less what I do, and I use CC to do that. I also have both GPT and the Claude UI open and I will often flick out to one or the other (Claude seems to be a lot better at Elixir code for me than GPT) and go into “discussion” mode if I want to open the aperture on a topic. I’m certainly never letting (not at anymore, at least) it go and wrote swathes of raw code on its own. I learned that lesson the hard way. It generates absolute nonsense if left to its own devices.