4 ms·

I'm convinced the vast difference in outcome with LLM use is a product of the vast difference in jobs. For front end work it's just amazing. Spits out boilerpla

I'm convinced the vast difference in outcome with LLM use is a product of the vast difference in jobs. For front end work it's just amazing. Spits out boilerplate and makes alterations without any need of help. For domain specific backend, for example robotics, it's bad. Tries to puke bespoke a-star, or invents libraries and functions. I'm way better off hand coding these things. The problem is this is classic Gell Mann Amnesia. I can have it restyle my website with zero work, even adding StarCraft 2 or NBA Jam themes, but ask it to work in a planning or estimation problem and I'm annoyed by its quality. Its probably bad at both but I don't notice. If we have 10 specializations required on an app, I'm only mad about 10℅. If I want to make an app entirely outside my domain, yeah sure it's the best ever.

thrown-0825 1y ago
If there is an abundance of medium / stack overflow articles it does well.
DGCA 1y ago
Frontend dev for 13+ years here. In my experience it’s pretty bad at anything but basic frontend stuff. I’ve tried all the models, editors, Claude code etc. It’s constantly wrong about the simplest things. Just now it was hallucinating about CSS grid properties. I’m convinced that how good AI seems is inversely correlated to someone’s knowledge in that domain, as you also mentioned. Still super useful in my day to day but I have to hand hold and correct it constantly.
- anonzzzies 1y ago
  I am very bad at frontend and I know frontend peeps keep saying claude/llms are bad at it, but now, for the first time in my 40 year career, I deliver frontend that are looking better and functioning better than whatever I see in hip products people 'designed with love in blah'. And our clients agree. If the css is correct or not, I don't know as I never really found the energy to learn it and now I don't need to and can focus on the business logic. The endresults look and work phenomenal: not sure why I would care if the css is the best. Especially nice when I have been using something for a long time and some things I always found lacking: now I add them in in minutes: auto completion here, move creation inline there, add drag and drop: ah but on mobile make it like that. Everything just works and in hours vs days or weeks it was before.
  - mavamaarten 1y ago
    I agree to a point. But I also would like to point out how alarming your take is. I mean you can easily compare this to trades and construction. Would you want a house that's built in a week by cheap foreign workers that don't know what they're doing? The end result looks great on the outside, and you can always let some other cheap worker fix some issues you're having! The electricity works! Until it doesn't and a fire breaks out. I get it - the hype is based around the quick gains you can absolutely have. The gains are insane, I have been able to be more productive at boilerplate and repetitive tasks too. But just building software isn't hard. Building software that lasts, building software that is rock solid, efficient and maintainable, that's hard! It's sickening to me how quickly people want to throw that in the garbage. All because it saves a few $ in development time, quality is suddenly a metric that is completely ignored, rather than weighed in. It's going to bite people in the ass.
    - anonzzzies 1y ago
      Nah, I specifically said HTML/CSS; I don't think crap CSS (if it works and is fast) will make the world a worse place. I don't include any logic/code into this take, just design/layout/ux. And in my workplace that's also the markup stuff that gets rewritten the most, so it's throw-away anyway compared to the backend stuff (we have code running that's well over 20 years old on the backend; frontend is 1-3 years). I agree with you we should have quality standard, but I also think it's 100% inevitable that this will all go out the window, in most companies and if that happens, our asses will be bitten.
      - fwip 1y ago
        Design/layout/ux have value (and I don't think you're saying they don't!) - when it's done by somebody who knows what they're doing, the result is perceivably better than when it's done by somebody like me who learned HTML for her myspace blog. Stuff like accessibility, "responsive design," theming, and stuff I probably haven't even heard of, all make websites easier and more intuitive to use. As a silly example, an LLM will happily add all sorts of animated gifs to the screen for me, even if it makes the page take three times as long to load and more difficult to use. It's a shame to lose well-crafted experiences in favor of the lowest-common-denominator that LLMs put out, just because they're cheaper.
sponnath 1y ago
I don't think it's correct to generalize front-end work like this. I've found it very underwhelming for the kind of front-end stuff I do. It makes embarrassing mistakes. I've found it quite useful for a lot of the braindead code I need to write for CRUD backends though. It's good at stuff that most competent engineers can get right while also having the sort of knowledge breadth an average engineer would lack. You really need to be a domain expert to accurately judge its output in specific areas.
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  Well I wasn't intending to generalize front end work as "easy enough for LLM" what I meant to say was that, since I have no experience with it, its output good enough for me. Classic Gell-Mann amnesia
Derbasti 1y ago
This rings true to me, but I'm not a frontend dev. So I'm not a good judge if what makes good frontend code. Where I do know my stuff, I'm not at all impressed by LLM code. So perhaps LLMs are just entry level devs in general. Who can't learn. Who won't ever gain seniority. It would make sense, after all, they were trained on the Internet and Stack Overflow, which is mostly filled with entry level questions and answers.

thrown-0825 1y ago

If there is an abundance of medium / stack overflow articles it does well.

DGCA 1y ago

Frontend dev for 13+ years here. In my experience it’s pretty bad at anything but basic frontend stuff. I’ve tried all the models, editors, Claude code etc. It’s constantly wrong about the simplest things. Just now it was hallucinating about CSS grid properties. I’m convinced that how good AI seems is inversely correlated to someone’s knowledge in that domain, as you also mentioned. Still super useful in my day to day but I have to hand hold and correct it constantly.

anonzzzies 1y ago
I am very bad at frontend and I know frontend peeps keep saying claude/llms are bad at it, but now, for the first time in my 40 year career, I deliver frontend that are looking better and functioning better than whatever I see in hip products people 'designed with love in blah'. And our clients agree. If the css is correct or not, I don't know as I never really found the energy to learn it and now I don't need to and can focus on the business logic. The endresults look and work phenomenal: not sure why I would care if the css is the best. Especially nice when I have been using something for a long time and some things I always found lacking: now I add them in in minutes: auto completion here, move creation inline there, add drag and drop: ah but on mobile make it like that. Everything just works and in hours vs days or weeks it was before.
- mavamaarten 1y ago
  I agree to a point. But I also would like to point out how alarming your take is. I mean you can easily compare this to trades and construction. Would you want a house that's built in a week by cheap foreign workers that don't know what they're doing? The end result looks great on the outside, and you can always let some other cheap worker fix some issues you're having! The electricity works! Until it doesn't and a fire breaks out. I get it - the hype is based around the quick gains you can absolutely have. The gains are insane, I have been able to be more productive at boilerplate and repetitive tasks too. But just building software isn't hard. Building software that lasts, building software that is rock solid, efficient and maintainable, that's hard! It's sickening to me how quickly people want to throw that in the garbage. All because it saves a few $ in development time, quality is suddenly a metric that is completely ignored, rather than weighed in. It's going to bite people in the ass.
  - anonzzzies 1y ago
    Nah, I specifically said HTML/CSS; I don't think crap CSS (if it works and is fast) will make the world a worse place. I don't include any logic/code into this take, just design/layout/ux. And in my workplace that's also the markup stuff that gets rewritten the most, so it's throw-away anyway compared to the backend stuff (we have code running that's well over 20 years old on the backend; frontend is 1-3 years). I agree with you we should have quality standard, but I also think it's 100% inevitable that this will all go out the window, in most companies and if that happens, our asses will be bitten.
    - fwip 1y ago
      Design/layout/ux have value (and I don't think you're saying they don't!) - when it's done by somebody who knows what they're doing, the result is perceivably better than when it's done by somebody like me who learned HTML for her myspace blog. Stuff like accessibility, "responsive design," theming, and stuff I probably haven't even heard of, all make websites easier and more intuitive to use. As a silly example, an LLM will happily add all sorts of animated gifs to the screen for me, even if it makes the page take three times as long to load and more difficult to use. It's a shame to lose well-crafted experiences in favor of the lowest-common-denominator that LLMs put out, just because they're cheaper.

sponnath 1y ago

I don't think it's correct to generalize front-end work like this. I've found it very underwhelming for the kind of front-end stuff I do. It makes embarrassing mistakes. I've found it quite useful for a lot of the braindead code I need to write for CRUD backends though. It's good at stuff that most competent engineers can get right while also having the sort of knowledge breadth an average engineer would lack. You really need to be a domain expert to accurately judge its output in specific areas.

jvanderbot 1y ago
Well I wasn't intending to generalize front end work as "easy enough for LLM" what I meant to say was that, since I have no experience with it, its output good enough for me. Classic Gell-Mann amnesia

Derbasti 1y ago

This rings true to me, but I'm not a frontend dev. So I'm not a good judge if what makes good frontend code. Where I do know my stuff, I'm not at all impressed by LLM code. So perhaps LLMs are just entry level devs in general. Who can't learn. Who won't ever gain seniority. It would make sense, after all, they were trained on the Internet and Stack Overflow, which is mostly filled with entry level questions and answers.