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I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and

• tmikaeld 1y ago
  I’m in the same position, but I use AI to get a second opinion. Try it by using the proper models, like Gemini 3 Pro that was just released and include grounding. Don’t use the free models, you’ll be surprised at how valuable it can be.
• sanmon3186 1y ago
  Why would you wait for dust to settle down? Just curious. Productivity gains are real in current form of LLMs. Guardrails and best practices can be learnt and self imposed.
  • bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > Productivity gains are real in current form of LLM I haven't found that to be true I'm of the opinion that anyone who is impressed by the code these things produce is a hack
    • lomase 1y ago
      I just started a project, they fired the previous team, I am possitive they used AI. The app is full of bugs and the client will never hire the old company again. Whoever says is time to move to LLMS is clueless.
      • lbreakjai 1y ago
        Humans are very capable of creating bugs. This in itself is not a tell.
      • stavros 1y ago
        "Because one team doesn't know how to use LLMs, I conclude that LLMs are useless."
        • lomase 1y ago
          Can you show any product created by a those imaginary teams using LLMS?
          • stavros 1y ago
            https://pine.town/ https://pine.town/
            • Yeask 1y ago
              You proved his point bro. That site does not even load.
              • stavros 1y ago
                Shrug, loads fine for me.
                • Yeask 1y ago
                  That site is in Cloudfare am I right? Cloudfare gets blocked in some parts of Europe on the weekend... Only the DNS, not really blocked. Football is more important.
                  • stavros 1y ago
                    I think there's an issue with IPv6 resolution, but I do think it's a Cloudflare issue, as they're the ones who insert that IPv6 hostname I can't resolve. This doesn't happen with any of my other sites, though, it's odd.
                    • Yeask 1y ago
  • Muromec 1y ago
    Whenever I hear about productivity gains, I mentally substitute it for "more time to play video games left in the day" to keep the conversation grounded. I would say I rather not.
    • blackbrokkoli 1y ago
      If you have two modes of spending your time, one being work that you only do because you are paid for it, and the other being feeding into an addiction, the conversations you should be having are not about where to use AI.
  • beepbooptheory 1y ago
    Your "productivity gains" is just equal to the hours others eventually have to spend cleaning up and fixing what you generated.
• noduerme 1y ago
  I'm a SWE and also an art director. I have tried these tools and, the way I've also tried Vue and React, I think they're good enough for simple minded applications. It's worth the penny to try them and look through the binoculars, if only to see how unoriginal and creatively limited what most people in your field are actually doing if they find this something that saves them time.
  • eclipxe 1y ago
    What a condescending take.
• perfmode 1y ago
  How could you not at least try?
• dcre 1y ago
  The tools have reached the point where no special knowledge is required to get started. You can get going in 5 minutes. Try Claude Code with an API key (no subscription required). Run it in the terminal in a repo and ask how something works. Then ask it to make a straightforward but tedious change. Etc.
  • sheepscreek 1y ago
    Just download Gemini (no API key) and use it.
• code51 1y ago
  I'm surprised these pockets of job security still exist. Know this: someone is coming after this already. One day someone from management will hear about a cost-saving story at a dinner table, the words GPT, Cursor, Antigravity, reasoning, AGI will cause a buzzing in her ear. Waking up with tinnitus the next morning, they'll instantly schedule a 1:1 to discuss "the degree of AI use and automation"
  • DaiPlusPlus 1y ago
    > Know this: someone is coming after this already. Yesterday, GitHub Copilot declared that my less-AI-weary friend’s new Laravel project was following all industry best-practices for database design as it storing entities as denormalized JSON blobs in a MySQL 8.x database with no FKs, indexes, constraints, all NULL columns (and using root@mysql as the login, of course); while all Laravel controller actions’ DB queries were RBAR loops that did loaded all rows into memory before doing JSON deserialisation in order to filter rows. I can’t reconcile your attitude with my own personal lived experience of LLMs being utterly wrong 40% of the time; while 50% of the time being no better or faster than if I did things myself; another 5% of the time it gets stuck in a loop debating the existence of the seahorse emoji; and the last 5% of the time genuinely utterly scaring me with a profoundly accurate answer or solution that it produced instantly. Also, LLMs have yet to demonstrate an ability to tackle other real-world DBA problems… like physically installing a new SSD into the SAN unit in the rack.
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  • lomase 1y ago
    Lowballing contracts is nothing new. It has never ever worked out. You can trow all AI you want, but at the end of the day you get what you pay for.
• 01100011 1y ago
  It's time to jump on the train. I'm a cranky, old, embedded SWE and claude 4.5 is changing how I work. Before that I laughed off LLMs. They were trash. Claude still has issues, but damn, I think if I don't integrate it into my workflow I'll be out of work or relegated to work in QA or devops(where I'd likely be forced to use it). No, it's not going to write all your code for you. Yes your skills are still needed to design, debug, perform teamwork(selling your designs, building consensus, etc), etc.. But it's time to get on the train.
  • rafaelmn 1y ago
    This was true since Claude Sonnet 3.5, so over a year now. I was early on the LLM train building RAG tools and prototypes in the company I was working at the time, but pre Claude 3.5 all the models were just a complete waste of time for coding, except the inline autocomplete models saved you some typing. Claude 3.5 was actually where it could generate simple stuff. Progress kind of tapered off since tho, Claude is still best but Sonnet 4.5 is disappointing in that it does't fundamentally bring me more than 3.5 did it's just a bit better at execution - but I still can't delegate higher level problems to it. Top tier models are sometimes surprisingly good but they take forever.
    • lomase 1y ago
      This was true since ChatGPT-1, and I mean the lies.
      • rafaelmn 1y ago
        Not really - 3.5 was the first model where I could actually use it to vibe through CRUD without it vasting more time than it saves, I actually used it to deliver a MVP on a side gig I was working on. GPT 4 was nowhere near as useful at the time. And Sonnet 3 was also considerably worse. And from reading through the forums and talking to co-workers this was a common experience.
    • 01100011 1y ago
      Up until using claude 4.5 I had very poor experiences with C/C++. Sure, bash and python worked ok, albeit the occasional hallucination. ChatGPT-5 did ok with C/C++ and fairly well with python(again having issues with omitting code during iterations, requiring me to yell at it a lot). Claude 4.5 just works and it's crazy good.
• Aeolun 1y ago
  You don’t have to jump on the hype train to get anything out of it. I started using claude code about 4 months back and I find it really hard to imagine developing without now. Sure I’m more of a manager, but the tedious busywork, the most annoying part of programming, is entirely gone. I love it.
  • oblio 1y ago
    > tedious busywork Can you give some examples, please?
• bostik 1y ago
  Right now I see "use AI" to be in the same phase as "add Radium" was shortly after Curie's discovery. A vial of magic pixie dust to sprinkle on things, laden with hidden dangers very few yet understand. But I also keep in mind that radioactivity truly transformed some very unexpected fields.[ß] AI and LLMs are tools. The best tools tend to be highly focused in their application. I expect AI to eventually find its way to various specific tool uses, but I have no crystal ball to predict what those tools might be or where they will surface. Although I have to say that I have seen, earlier this week, the first genuinely interesting use-case for AI-powered code generation. A very senior engineer (think: ~40 years of hands-on experience) had joined a company and was frustrated by lack of integration tests. Unit tests, yes. E2E test suite, yes. Nothing in between. So he wrote a piece of machinery to automatically test integration between a selected number of interacting components, and eventually was happy with the result. But since that was only a small portion of the stack, he would have had to then replicate that body of work for a whole lot of other pieces - and thought "I could make AI repeat this chore". The end result is a set of very specific prompts, constraints, requirements, instructions, and sequences of logical steps that tell one advanced model what to do. One of the instructions is along the lines of "use this body of work I wrote $OVER_THERE as a reference". That the model is building iteratively a set of tests that self-validate the progress certainly helps. The curious insight in the workflow is that once the model has finished, he then points the generated body of work to another advanced model from a different vendor, and has that do an automated code review, again using his original work as a reference material. And then feeds that back to the first model to fix things. That means that he still has to do the final review of the results, and tweak/polish parts where the two-headed AI went off the rails. But overall the approach saves quite a lot of time and actually scales pretty much linearly to the size of the codebase and stack depth. To quote his presentation note, "this way AI works as a highly productive junior that can follow good instructions, not as a misguided oracle that comes up with inventive reinterpretations." He made modern AI repeat his effort, but crucially he had had to do the work at least once to know precisely what constraints would apply. I suspect that eventually we'll be seeing more of these increasingly sophisticated but very narrowly tailored tooling use cases to pop up. The best tools are after all focused, even surgical. ß: Who could have predicted in 1900 that radioactive compounds would change fields ranging from medicine to food storage?
• alfiedotwtf 1y ago
  > I'm not using LLMs at all You’re deliberately disadvantaging yourself by a mile. Give it a go … the first one’s free ;)
• reactordev 1y ago
  >I really haven’t tried them. You are doing yourself a huge disservice.
• devjam 1y ago
  Nothing is in its "final form" today. I'm a long time SWE and in the last week, I've made and shipped production changes across around 6 different repos/monorepos, ranging from Python to Golang, to Kotlin to TS to Java. I'd consider myself "expert" in maybe one or two of those codebases and only having a passing knowledge of the others. I'm using AI, not to fire-and-forget changes, but to explain and document where I can find certain functionality, generate snippets and boilerplate, and produce test cases for the changes I need. I read, review and consider that every line of code I commit has my name against it, and treat it as such. Without these tools I'd estimate being around 25% as effective when it comes to getting up to speed on unfamiliar code and service. For that alone, AI tooling is utterly invaluable.
• gherkinnn 1y ago
  No harm in running them in isolated instances and see what happens. Feed an LLM stack traces or ask it to ask you questions about a topic you're unfamiliar about. Give it a rough hypothesis and demand it poke holes in it. These things it does well. I use Kagi's auto summariser to distil search results in to a hand full of paragraphs and then read through the citations it gives me. Know that LLMs will suck up to you and confirm your ideas and make up bonkers things a third of the time.
• jatora 1y ago
  I hope I am never this slow to adapt to new technologies.
• mrweasel 1y ago
  I work as an SRE, I have tried LLMs, they barely work. You're not missing out. Or, more correctly, they don't work well for my problems or usage. They can at best answer basic questions, stuff you could lookup using a search engine, if you knew what to look for. They can also generate code for inspiration, but you'll end up rewriting all of it before you're done. What they can't do it solve your problem start to end. They really do need a RTFM mode, where they will just insult you if you're approach or design is plain wrong or at least just let you know that it will now stop helping as you're clearly of the rails. We need to bubble to pop, it'll be a year or two, the finance bros aren't done extracting value from the stonks. Once it does, we can focus on what's working and what isn't and refine the good stuff. Right now the LLMs are the product, and they can't be, it makes no sense. They need to be embedded within product, either as a built in feature, e.g. CoPilot in Visual Studio, or as plugins, like LSPs. Clearly others are having more luck with LLMs than I do, and do amazing projects, but that sort of illustrates the point, their aren't ready and we don't have a solution for them to be universally useful (and here I'm even restricting myself to thinking about coding).