4 ms·

> Still saves a lot of time vs typing everything from scratch No it doesn't. Typing speed is never the bottleneck for an expert. As an offline database of Goo

> Still saves a lot of time vs typing everything from scratch No it doesn't. Typing speed is never the bottleneck for an expert. As an offline database of Google-tier knowledge, LLM's are useful. Though current LLM tech is half-baked, we need: a) Cheap commodity hardware for running your own models locally. (And by "locally" I mean separate dedicated devices, not something that fights over your desktop's or laptop's resources.) b) Standard bulletproof ways to fine-tune models on your own data. (Inference is already there mostly with things like llama.cpp, finetuning isn't.)

boruto 1y ago
I realize I procrastinate less when using LLM to write code which I know I could write.
- kentonv 1y ago
  I've noticed this too. I remember hearing somewhere that humans have a limited capacity in terms of number of decisions made in a day, and it seems to fit here: If I'm writing the code myself, I have to make several decisions on every line of code, and that's mentally tiring, so I tend to stop and procrastinate frequently. If an LLM is handling a lot of the details, then I'm just making higher-level decisions, allowing me to make more progress. Of course this is totally speculation and theories like this tend to be wrong, but it is at least consistent with how I feel.
  - autoexec 1y ago
    I have a feeling that it's something that might help today but also something you might pay for later. When you have to maintain or bug fix that same code down the line the fact that you were the one making all those higher-level decisions and thinking through the details gives you an advantage. Just having everything structured and named in ways that make the most sense to you seems like it'd be helpful the next time you have to deal with the code. While it's often a luxury, I'd much rather work on code I wrote than code somebody else wrote.
- nipah 1y ago
  Amazing, because I realized I procrastinate MORE when using LLM to write code which I know I could write. And not only that, I feel I'm losing the ability to do the coding myself and solve the problems myself when delegating this to the AI. Which is why no one should base their own decisions for life, like using or not using an LLM, on some random story from the internet.
brailsafe 1y ago
> No it doesn't. Typing speed is never the bottleneck for an expert How could that possibly be true!? Seems like it'd be the same as suggesting being constrained to analog writing utensils wouldn't bottleneck the process of publishing a book or research paper. At the very least such a statement implies that people with ADHD can't be experts.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  > How could that possibly be true!? (I'll assume you're not joking, because your post is ridiculous enough to look like sarcasm.) The answer is because programmers read code 10 times more (and think about code 100 times more) than they write it.
  - thisissomething 1y ago
    Yeah, but how fast can you write compared to how fast you think? How many times have you read a story card and by the time you finished reading it you thought "It's an easy task, should take me 1 hour of work to write the code and tests"? In my experience, in most of those cases the AI can do the same amount of code writing in under 10 minutes, leaving me the other 50 minutes to review the code, make/ask for any necessary adjustments, and move on to another task.
    - dns_snek 1y ago
      I don't know anyone who can think faster than they can type (on average), they would have to have an IQ over 150 or something. For mere mortals like myself, reasoning through edge cases and failure conditions and error handling and state invariants takes time. Time that I spend looking at a blinking cursor while the gears spin, or reading code. I've never finished a day where I thought to myself "gosh darn, if only I could type faster this would be done already".
      - skydhash 1y ago
        You could be fast if you were coding only the happy path, like a lot of juniors do. Instead of thinking about trivial things like malformed input, library semantics, framework gotchas and what not.
victorbjorklund 1y ago
Maybe you type faster than me then :) I for sure type slower than Claude code. :)

boruto 1y ago

I realize I procrastinate less when using LLM to write code which I know I could write.

kentonv 1y ago
I've noticed this too. I remember hearing somewhere that humans have a limited capacity in terms of number of decisions made in a day, and it seems to fit here: If I'm writing the code myself, I have to make several decisions on every line of code, and that's mentally tiring, so I tend to stop and procrastinate frequently. If an LLM is handling a lot of the details, then I'm just making higher-level decisions, allowing me to make more progress. Of course this is totally speculation and theories like this tend to be wrong, but it is at least consistent with how I feel.
- autoexec 1y ago
  I have a feeling that it's something that might help today but also something you might pay for later. When you have to maintain or bug fix that same code down the line the fact that you were the one making all those higher-level decisions and thinking through the details gives you an advantage. Just having everything structured and named in ways that make the most sense to you seems like it'd be helpful the next time you have to deal with the code. While it's often a luxury, I'd much rather work on code I wrote than code somebody else wrote.
nipah 1y ago
Amazing, because I realized I procrastinate MORE when using LLM to write code which I know I could write. And not only that, I feel I'm losing the ability to do the coding myself and solve the problems myself when delegating this to the AI. Which is why no one should base their own decisions for life, like using or not using an LLM, on some random story from the internet.

brailsafe 1y ago

> No it doesn't. Typing speed is never the bottleneck for an expert How could that possibly be true!? Seems like it'd be the same as suggesting being constrained to analog writing utensils wouldn't bottleneck the process of publishing a book or research paper. At the very least such a statement implies that people with ADHD can't be experts.

otabdeveloper4 1y ago
> How could that possibly be true!? (I'll assume you're not joking, because your post is ridiculous enough to look like sarcasm.) The answer is because programmers read code 10 times more (and think about code 100 times more) than they write it.
- thisissomething 1y ago
  Yeah, but how fast can you write compared to how fast you think? How many times have you read a story card and by the time you finished reading it you thought "It's an easy task, should take me 1 hour of work to write the code and tests"? In my experience, in most of those cases the AI can do the same amount of code writing in under 10 minutes, leaving me the other 50 minutes to review the code, make/ask for any necessary adjustments, and move on to another task.
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    I don't know anyone who can think faster than they can type (on average), they would have to have an IQ over 150 or something. For mere mortals like myself, reasoning through edge cases and failure conditions and error handling and state invariants takes time. Time that I spend looking at a blinking cursor while the gears spin, or reading code. I've never finished a day where I thought to myself "gosh darn, if only I could type faster this would be done already".
    - skydhash 1y ago
      You could be fast if you were coding only the happy path, like a lot of juniors do. Instead of thinking about trivial things like malformed input, library semantics, framework gotchas and what not.

victorbjorklund 1y ago

Maybe you type faster than me then :) I for sure type slower than Claude code. :)