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Man, I must really suck at this stuff. This is not at all my experience. Asking LLMs to refactor almost always results in hasty abstractions that I want to keep
by johnpaulkiser 1y ago
Man, I must really suck at this stuff. This is not at all my experience. Asking LLMs to refactor almost always results in hasty abstractions that I want to keep out of my codebases at all cost. Am I not letting go enough?
- phito 1y agoI really, really don't understand this either. Sometimes I feel like I must be using different LLMs than some HNers because my experience of them is the complete opposite of what they describe.
- mg 1y agoWhich LLMs have you tried?
- Volundr 1y agoNot who your replying too, but since I've expressed similar sentiment: Sonnet 3.7 with thinking is my go-to. Deepseek R1 Gemini 2.5 pro (I've heard it said Gemini is outperforming Sonnet, but I find Sonnet more consistent) O1-mini Depending on what I'm doing it's generally either via Cody or Aider.
- Volundr 1y agoFWIW this is my experience too. I use LLMs pretty regularly for coding but to get decent code you really have to supervise the hell out of them and often it's not worth the effort to push them into doing the right thing. Maybe I'm just bad at getting it to do things, but I think your question about "letting go" is the real story. I think there are a lot of people not paying close enough attention to what's coming out of the LLM, and the tech debt building up is going to come back to bite them when it builds to a point the LLM can no longer make progress and they have to untangle the mess.
- mg 1y agoThe way I "ask" is that I really ... ask! I ask the LLM "Can you find anything in this file(s) that can be made shorter or more logical?" And then as I said, I like less than 10% of the ideas the LLM comes up with. But it is so fast to read through 10 ideas (A minute or so) that it is well worth it.