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> Why am I doing this? Understanding the business problem and value > What do I need to do? Designing the solution conceptually > How am I going to do it? Act
by interpol_p 1y ago
> Why am I doing this? Understanding the business problem and value
> What do I need to do? Designing the solution conceptually
> How am I going to do it? Actually writing the code
This article claims that LLMs accelerate the last step in the above process, but that is not how I have been using them.
Writing the code is not a huge time sink — and sometimes LLMs write it. But in my experience, LLMs have assisted partially with all three areas of development outlined in the article.
For me, I often dump a lot of context into Claude or ChatGPT and ask "what are some potential refactorings of this codebase if I want to add feature X + here are the requirements."
This leads to a back-and-forth session where I get some inspiration about possible ways to implement a large scale change to introduce a feature that may be tricky to fit into an existing architecture. The LLM here serves as a notepad or sketchbook of ideas, one that can quickly read existing API that I may have written a decade ago.
I also often use LLMs at the very start to identify problems and come up with feature ideas. Something like "I would really like to do X in my product, but here's a screenshot of my UI and I'm at a bit of a loss for how to do this without redesigning from scratch. Can you think of intuitive ways to integrate this? Or are there other things I am not thinking of that may solve the same problem."
The times when I get LLMs to write code are the times when the problem is tightly defined and it is an insular component. When I let LLMs introduce changes into an existing, complex system, no matter how much context I give, I always end up having to go in and fix things by hand (with the risk that something I don't understand slips through).
- jes5199 1y agoyeah he's really underselling the recent models' ability to do the "Designing the solution conceptually" part. I still have to be in dialogue with the AI - I ask a lot of questions, we iterate towards something - but I cover conceptual ground much more quickly this way. and then I still have to be the glue between "design" and "writing" steps, and have to manage that carefully or I get slop. if you look at the change in capability over time, it looks like the AI are climbing this hierarchy. "Centaur" seems to already be giving way towards "research assistant". I hesitate to make predictions but I would not place money on things stabilizing here.
- throwawayb299 1y ago> I would not place money on things stabilizing here. Wise of you. If things don't stabilize we'll need our savings.