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Its all great until >> I thought I would see a pretty drastic change in terms of Pull Requests, Commits and Line of Code merged in the last 6 weeks. I don’t th
by risyachka 1y ago
Its all great until
>> I thought I would see a pretty drastic change in terms of Pull Requests, Commits and Line of Code merged in the last 6 weeks. I don’t think that holds water though
The chart basically shows same output with claude than before.
Which kinda represents what I felt when using LLMs.
You "feel" more productive and you definitely feel "better" because you don't do the work now, you babysit the model and feel productive.
But at the end of the day the output is the same because all advantages of LLMs is nerfed by time you have to review all that, fix it, re-prompt it etc.
And because you offload the "hard" part - and don't flex that thinking muscle - your skills decline pretty fast.
Try using Claude or another LLM for a month and then try doing a tiny little app without it. Its not only the code part that will seem hard - but the general architecture/structuring too.
And in the end the whole code base slowly (but not that slowly) degrades and in longer term results net negative. At least with current LLMs.
- holoduke 1y agoNot for me. I just reversed engineered a bluetooth protocol for a device which would taken me at least a few days capturing streams of data wireshark. Now i dumped entire dumps inside a llm and it gave me much more control finding the right offsets etc. It took me only a day.
- pinoy420 1y ago[dead]
- mattmanser 1y agoThat's not really coding though is it. No point comparing apples with oranges, most of us don't program by reverse engineering using wireshark.
- justlikereddit 1y agoI've been exploring vibe coding lately and by far the biggest benefit is the lack of mental strain. You don't have to try to remember your code as a conceptual whole, what your technical implementation of the next hour of code was going to be like at the same time as a stubborn bug is taunting you. You just ask Mr smartybots and it deliver anything between proofreading and documentation and whatnot, with some minor fuckups occasionally
- risyachka 1y ago"mental strain" in a way of remembering/thinking hard is like muscle strain. You need it to be in shape otherwise it starts atrophying.
- blackqueeriroh 1y agoMy friend, there’s no solid evidence that this is the case. So far, there are a bunch of studies, mostly preprints, that make vague implications, but none that can show clear causal links between a lack of mental strain and atrophying brain function from LLMs.
- jononor 1y agoWe know that learning and building mental capabilities require effort over time. We know that when people have not been applying/practicing programming for years, their skills have atrophied. I think a good default expectation is that unused skills will go away over time. Of course the questions are, is the engagement we have with LLMs enough to sustain the majority of the skills? Or is there new skills one builds that can compensate foe those lost (even when the LLM is no longer used)? How quickly do the changes happen? Are there wider effects, positive and/or negative?
- dbalatero 1y agoYou're right, we only have centuries of humans doing hard things that require ongoing practice to stay sharp. Ask anyone who does something you can't fake, like playing the piano, what taking months off does to their abilities. To be fair, you can get them back much faster than someone that never had the skills to begin, but skills absolutely atrophy if you are not actively engaged with them.
- danielbln 1y agoMy assembly skills have atrophied terribly, and that's ok.