4 ms·

the list of people who write code, use high quality LLM agents (not chatbots) like Claude, and report not just having success with the tools but watching the to

by zzzeek 11mo ago

the list of people who write code, use high quality LLM agents (not chatbots) like Claude, and report not just having success with the tools but watching the tools change how they think about programming, continues to grow. The sudden appearance of LLMs has had a really destabilizing effect on everything, and a vast portion of what LLMs can do and/or are being used for runs from intellectually stifling (using LLMs to write your term papers) to revolting (all kinds of non-artists/writers/musicians using LLM to suddenly think they are "creators" and displacing real artists, writers, and musicians) to utterly degenerate (political / sexual deepfakes of real people, generation of antivax propaganda, etc). Put on top of that the way corporate America is absolutely doing the very familiar "blockchain" dance on this and insisting everyone has to do AI all the time everywhere is a huge problem that hopefully will shake out some in the coming years. But despite all that, for writing, refactoring, and debugging computer code, LLM agents are still completely game changing. All of these things are true at the same time. There's no way someone that works with real code all day could spent an honest few weeks with a tool like Claude and come away calling it "hype". someone might still not prefer it, or it's not for them, but to claim it's "hype", that's not possible.

senordevnyc 11mo ago
The last few years has revealed the extent to which HN is packed with middle-aged, conservative engineers who are letting their fear and anxiety drive their engineering decisions. It’s sad, I always thought of my fellow engineers as more open-minded.
- blibble 11mo ago
  > The last few years has revealed the extent to which HN is packed with middle-aged, conservative engineers who are letting their fear and anxiety drive their engineering decisions. so, people with experience?
  - zzzeek 11mo ago
    ive been programming for more than 40 years
  - senordevnyc 11mo ago
    Obviously. Turns out experience can be self-limiting in the face of paradigm-shifting innovation. In hindsight it makes sense, I’m sure every major shift has played out the same way.
    - bigstrat2003 11mo ago
      > Turns out experience can be self-limiting in the face of paradigm-shifting innovation. It also turns out that experience can be what enables you to not waste time on trendy stuff which will never deliver on its promises. You are simply assuming that AI is a paradigm shift rather than a waste of time. Fine, but at least have the humility to acknowledge that reasonable people can disagree on this point instead of labeling everyone who disagrees with you as some out of touch fuddy-duddy.
      - senordevnyc 11mo ago
        I'm not assuming anything, I'm relying on my own experience of being an engineer for two decades and building stuff for all kinds of organizations in all kinds of stacks and languages. AI has radically increased my velocity and quality, though it's got a steep learning curve of its own, and many frustrations to deal with. But it's pretty obviously a paradigm shift, and not "trendy stuff which will never deliver on its promises". Even if the current LLMs never improve at all from here, they're still incredibly useful tools.
- nutjob2 11mo ago
  Do you mean people who have been through several hype cycles and know their nature and how new novel tech, no matter how useful, takes time to be integrated and understood? Get over yourself, and try to tone down the bigotry and stereotyping.
59nadir 11mo ago
> There's no way someone that works with real code all day could spent an honest few weeks with a tool like Claude and come away calling it "hype". someone might still not prefer it, or it's not for them, but to claim it's "hype", that's not possible. I've tried implementing features with Claude Code Max and if I had let that go on for a week instead of just a couple of days I would've lost a week's worth of work (it was pretty immediately obvious that it was too slow at doing pretty much everything, and even the slightest interaction with the LLM caused very long round-trips that would add additional time, over and over and over again). It's possible people simply don't do the kind of things I do. On the extreme end of that, had I spent my days making CRUD apps I probably would've thought it was magic and a "game changer"... But I don't. I actually don't have a problem believing that there are people who basically only need to write 25% of their code now; if all you're doing for work is gluing together libraries and writing boilerplate then of course an LLM is going to help with that, you're probably the 1000th person that day to ask for the same thing. The one part I would say LLMs seem to help me with is medium-depth questions about DirectX12. Not really how to use it, but parts of the API itself. MSDN is good for learning about it, but I would concede that LLMs have been useful for just getting more composite knowledge of DX12. P.S.: I have found that very short completions, 1-3 lines, is a lot more productive for me personally than any kind of "generate this feature", or even function-sized generation. The reason is likely that LLMs just suck at the things I do, but they can figure out that a pattern exists in the pretty immediate context and just spit out that pattern with some context clues nearby. That remains my best experience with any and all LLM-assisted coding. I don't use it often because we don't allow LLMs for work, but I have a keybind for querying for a completion when I do side projects.
- zzzeek 11mo ago
  my current job /role combinations has me working in a variety of projects which feature tasks to be done in: Python/SQLAlchemy (which I maintain), Go, k8s, Ansible, Bash, Groovy, Java, Typescript, javascript, etc. If I'm doing an architecture-intensive thing in SQLAlchemy, obviously I'm not going to say "Claude here go do this feature for me". I will have it do things like write change notes (where I'll write out the changelog in the convoluted and overly technical way I can do in 10 seconds, and it produces something presentable and readable from it), set up test cases, and sometimes I will give it very specific instructions for a large refactoring that has a predictable pattern (basically, instead of me figuring out a complex search and replace or doing it manually). For stuff I do in Ansible and especially Groovy (a horrible language which heavily resists being lintable), these are very simple declarative playbooks or Jenkins pipeline jobs, I use Claude heavily to write out directives and such because it will do so without syntax errors and without me having to google every individual pattern or directive; it's much easier to check what it writes and debug from there. But I'm also not putting Claude in charge in these places, it's doing the boring stuff for me and doing it a lot faster and without my having to spend cognitive overhead (which is at a premium when you're in your late 50s like me). > The one part I would say LLMs seem to help me with is medium-depth questions about DirectX12. Not really how to use it, but parts of the API itself. MSDN is good for learning about it, but I would concede that LLMs have been useful for just getting more composite knowledge of DX12. see there you go, I have things like this I have to figure out many times per week. so many of them are one-off things I really dont need to learn deeply at the moment (like TypeScript). It's also very helpful to bounce off ideas, like when I need to achieve something in the Go/k8s realm, it can sanity check how I'm approaching a problem and often suggest other ways that I would not have considered (which it knows because it's been trained on millions of tech blogs).
sensanaty 11mo ago
> the list of people who write code, use high quality LLM agents (not chatbots) like Claude, and report not just having success with the tools but watching the tools change how they think about programming, continues to grow. My company is basically writing blank cheques for "AI" (aka LLM, I hate the way we've poisoned AI as a term))tooling so that people can use any and all tooling they want and see what works and doesn't. This is a company with ~1500ish engineers, ranging from hardware engineers building POS devices to the junior frontenders building out our simplest UIs. There's also a whole lot more people who aren't technical, and they're also encouraged to use any and all AI tooling they can. Despite the entire company trying to figure out how to use these effectively precisely because we're trying to look at things objectively and separate out the hype from the reality, the only people I've seen with any kind of praise so far (and this has been going on since the early ChatGPT days) have been people in Marketing and Sales, because for them it doesn't matter if the AI hallucinates some pure bullshit since that's 90% of their job anyway. We have spent god knows how much time and resources trying to get these tools doing anything more useful than simple demos that get thrown out immediately, and it's just not there. No one is pushing 100x the code or features they were before, projects aren't finishing any faster than they were before, and nobody even bothers turning on the meeting transcription tools either anymore because more often than not it'll interpret things said in the meeting just plain wrong or even make up entire discussion points that were never had. Just recently, like last week recently, we had some idiotic PR review bot from coderabbit or some other such company be activated. I've never seen so many people complain all at once on Slack, there was a thread with hundreds of individuals all saying how garbage it was and how much it was distracting from reviews. I didn't see a single person say they liked the tool, not 1 single person had anything good to say about it. So as far as I'm concerned, it's just a MASSIVE fucking hype bubble that will ultimately spawn some tooling that is sorta useful for generating unimportant scripts, but little else.
- zzzeek 11mo ago
  never give an LLM to your junior engineers. The LLM itself is mostly like a junior engineer and will make a complete mess of things if not guided by someone with a lot of experience. Basically if people are producing code or documentation that looks like an LLM wrote it, that's not really what I see as the model that makes these tools useful.

by zzzeek 11mo ago

senordevnyc 11mo ago

The last few years has revealed the extent to which HN is packed with middle-aged, conservative engineers who are letting their fear and anxiety drive their engineering decisions. It’s sad, I always thought of my fellow engineers as more open-minded.

blibble 11mo ago
> The last few years has revealed the extent to which HN is packed with middle-aged, conservative engineers who are letting their fear and anxiety drive their engineering decisions. so, people with experience?
- zzzeek 11mo ago
  ive been programming for more than 40 years
- senordevnyc 11mo ago
  Obviously. Turns out experience can be self-limiting in the face of paradigm-shifting innovation. In hindsight it makes sense, I’m sure every major shift has played out the same way.
  - bigstrat2003 11mo ago
    > Turns out experience can be self-limiting in the face of paradigm-shifting innovation. It also turns out that experience can be what enables you to not waste time on trendy stuff which will never deliver on its promises. You are simply assuming that AI is a paradigm shift rather than a waste of time. Fine, but at least have the humility to acknowledge that reasonable people can disagree on this point instead of labeling everyone who disagrees with you as some out of touch fuddy-duddy.
    - senordevnyc 11mo ago
      I'm not assuming anything, I'm relying on my own experience of being an engineer for two decades and building stuff for all kinds of organizations in all kinds of stacks and languages. AI has radically increased my velocity and quality, though it's got a steep learning curve of its own, and many frustrations to deal with. But it's pretty obviously a paradigm shift, and not "trendy stuff which will never deliver on its promises". Even if the current LLMs never improve at all from here, they're still incredibly useful tools.
nutjob2 11mo ago
Do you mean people who have been through several hype cycles and know their nature and how new novel tech, no matter how useful, takes time to be integrated and understood? Get over yourself, and try to tone down the bigotry and stereotyping.

59nadir 11mo ago

> There's no way someone that works with real code all day could spent an honest few weeks with a tool like Claude and come away calling it "hype". someone might still not prefer it, or it's not for them, but to claim it's "hype", that's not possible. I've tried implementing features with Claude Code Max and if I had let that go on for a week instead of just a couple of days I would've lost a week's worth of work (it was pretty immediately obvious that it was too slow at doing pretty much everything, and even the slightest interaction with the LLM caused very long round-trips that would add additional time, over and over and over again). It's possible people simply don't do the kind of things I do. On the extreme end of that, had I spent my days making CRUD apps I probably would've thought it was magic and a "game changer"... But I don't. I actually don't have a problem believing that there are people who basically only need to write 25% of their code now; if all you're doing for work is gluing together libraries and writing boilerplate then of course an LLM is going to help with that, you're probably the 1000th person that day to ask for the same thing. The one part I would say LLMs seem to help me with is medium-depth questions about DirectX12. Not really how to use it, but parts of the API itself. MSDN is good for learning about it, but I would concede that LLMs have been useful for just getting more composite knowledge of DX12. P.S.: I have found that very short completions, 1-3 lines, is a lot more productive for me personally than any kind of "generate this feature", or even function-sized generation. The reason is likely that LLMs just suck at the things I do, but they can figure out that a pattern exists in the pretty immediate context and just spit out that pattern with some context clues nearby. That remains my best experience with any and all LLM-assisted coding. I don't use it often because we don't allow LLMs for work, but I have a keybind for querying for a completion when I do side projects.

zzzeek 11mo ago
my current job /role combinations has me working in a variety of projects which feature tasks to be done in: Python/SQLAlchemy (which I maintain), Go, k8s, Ansible, Bash, Groovy, Java, Typescript, javascript, etc. If I'm doing an architecture-intensive thing in SQLAlchemy, obviously I'm not going to say "Claude here go do this feature for me". I will have it do things like write change notes (where I'll write out the changelog in the convoluted and overly technical way I can do in 10 seconds, and it produces something presentable and readable from it), set up test cases, and sometimes I will give it very specific instructions for a large refactoring that has a predictable pattern (basically, instead of me figuring out a complex search and replace or doing it manually). For stuff I do in Ansible and especially Groovy (a horrible language which heavily resists being lintable), these are very simple declarative playbooks or Jenkins pipeline jobs, I use Claude heavily to write out directives and such because it will do so without syntax errors and without me having to google every individual pattern or directive; it's much easier to check what it writes and debug from there. But I'm also not putting Claude in charge in these places, it's doing the boring stuff for me and doing it a lot faster and without my having to spend cognitive overhead (which is at a premium when you're in your late 50s like me). > The one part I would say LLMs seem to help me with is medium-depth questions about DirectX12. Not really how to use it, but parts of the API itself. MSDN is good for learning about it, but I would concede that LLMs have been useful for just getting more composite knowledge of DX12. see there you go, I have things like this I have to figure out many times per week. so many of them are one-off things I really dont need to learn deeply at the moment (like TypeScript). It's also very helpful to bounce off ideas, like when I need to achieve something in the Go/k8s realm, it can sanity check how I'm approaching a problem and often suggest other ways that I would not have considered (which it knows because it's been trained on millions of tech blogs).

sensanaty 11mo ago

> the list of people who write code, use high quality LLM agents (not chatbots) like Claude, and report not just having success with the tools but watching the tools change how they think about programming, continues to grow. My company is basically writing blank cheques for "AI" (aka LLM, I hate the way we've poisoned AI as a term))tooling so that people can use any and all tooling they want and see what works and doesn't. This is a company with ~1500ish engineers, ranging from hardware engineers building POS devices to the junior frontenders building out our simplest UIs. There's also a whole lot more people who aren't technical, and they're also encouraged to use any and all AI tooling they can. Despite the entire company trying to figure out how to use these effectively precisely because we're trying to look at things objectively and separate out the hype from the reality, the only people I've seen with any kind of praise so far (and this has been going on since the early ChatGPT days) have been people in Marketing and Sales, because for them it doesn't matter if the AI hallucinates some pure bullshit since that's 90% of their job anyway. We have spent god knows how much time and resources trying to get these tools doing anything more useful than simple demos that get thrown out immediately, and it's just not there. No one is pushing 100x the code or features they were before, projects aren't finishing any faster than they were before, and nobody even bothers turning on the meeting transcription tools either anymore because more often than not it'll interpret things said in the meeting just plain wrong or even make up entire discussion points that were never had. Just recently, like last week recently, we had some idiotic PR review bot from coderabbit or some other such company be activated. I've never seen so many people complain all at once on Slack, there was a thread with hundreds of individuals all saying how garbage it was and how much it was distracting from reviews. I didn't see a single person say they liked the tool, not 1 single person had anything good to say about it. So as far as I'm concerned, it's just a MASSIVE fucking hype bubble that will ultimately spawn some tooling that is sorta useful for generating unimportant scripts, but little else.

zzzeek 11mo ago
never give an LLM to your junior engineers. The LLM itself is mostly like a junior engineer and will make a complete mess of things if not guided by someone with a lot of experience. Basically if people are producing code or documentation that looks like an LLM wrote it, that's not really what I see as the model that makes these tools useful.