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I'm not sure AI Agents can already beat the average VIM user. I use VIM and I get some inspiration from LLMs sometimes, but me and other developers always afte

I'm not sure AI Agents can already beat the average VIM user. I use VIM and I get some inspiration from LLMs sometimes, but me and other developers always after some time give up and just quickly do it manually. AI Agents will just full the code with maaaassive swaths of texts it will just make a project unusable. We even get paid to turn client's AI LLM Claude sketches into real programs.

keithnz 7mo ago
This is not my experience at all, the AI agents are many many many times faster than what I can do. What anyone can do. It's crazy how quick I can create stuff these days.
- bandrami 7mo ago
  You're forgetting to count the time you spend deleting the excess stuff
  - keithnz 7mo ago
    no... I'm not.
    - bandrami 7mo ago
      Then you're forgetting the time your sysadmin spends doing that
- gdorsi 7mo ago
  It really depends on what kind and of job you do. If it's not something very common LLMs could end up generating random code. Also if you work on something performance critical, you can get inspiration from LLMs, but they often don't write fast code.
  - keithnz 7mo ago
    not my experience, they write fast code, and if you ask them to optimize, can pull all kinds of tricks out of the bag. Even with some of the niche stuff I work on, they seem really good.
    - mchaver 7mo ago
      Without telling us what kind of code you are talking about it is hard to compare. I would say that is true for CRUD web code because there is so much out there that the LLMs can reference.
      - keithnz 7mo ago
        I work on all sorts as we have an IoT product offering.... embedded bare metal systems, web, backend IoT servers, Gateways, APIs, Import/Export Systems, Integrations with Manufacturing systems, accounting systems, Automatic Test Equipment. I've been coding for nearly 50 years now, so pretty experienced. What peoples comments seem to imply to me is that they haven't really gone full agentic coding, where you hone your context, your tools, and how you iterate and test with an AI agent. Where any mistakes an AI makes you make sure it can't do it again, you have it setup so your AI code reviews are honed to focus on the things you care about etc.
        hubertdinsk 7mo ago
        so not niche at all. You described a bit of everything. Niche is more like "ISO26262 compliant, response time under 50ms, measured with a oscilloscope with at least 40MHz bandwidth, failure rate less than 10^-7, proven with maths and soak tests". It gets more niche the closer you get to hardware. Next word prediction will get you laughed out of the room.
        gdorsi 7mo ago
        Software development is a quite vast discipline. In my experience performance of LLMs can be surprisingly good on things that are not mainstream, like database engineering, and surprisingly bad at mainstream categories approached in an unconventional way. That said, I'm amazed that you have 50 years of experience and still able to have the mental flexibility to adapt to new development paradigms. As you imply, this stuff isn't simple to pick up, and is completely different on how we have done our job without AI.
- armchairhacker 7mo ago
  AI can generate code much much faster. But do you never need a specific change (e.g. bugfix), that even describing in English is slower than just doing it? Especially in vim where editor movements are fast.
  - zhann_dc 7mo ago
    I'd argue you should be working towards no longer having to do these because agentic systems in place will do it in your stead. All you need to do now, is sign off the code and adjust the agent so it would do these as you would.
  - keithnz 7mo ago
    possibly there's cases where maybe you want to change some text or something, but I don't think its faster in vim given you likely don't have that file open, and by the time you get to the file, and location, you could have fixed it with your agent, not only that, you could have generated the test case and then fixed in your agent
    - 1718627440 7mo ago
      I think you missed the point. It takes more time to write English prose than to open a file and just fix it, so unless the time the LLM needs is somehow negative, it's not going to be faster.
      - keithnz 7mo ago
        I didn't miss the point, it just feels like the people saying that really aren't using these tools as it just is not my experience at all. I've been a Vim user for multi decades now. There's just no way, it's far easier to type a prompt except maybe if you know exactly what file and exactly where in the file, you might be able to do it as fast as telling the AI to do it. It's not hard to get a minor fix done with a prompt and doesn't take too much English in my experience.
        7mo ago
- otabdeveloper4 7mo ago
  Note you're replying to a guy who never said anything at all about being "faster". P.S. Software developers aren't being paid to be "fast". In fact, being "fast" is called "technical debt" and you're usually punished for it as a software developer.
mvanbaak 7mo ago
I'm a vim user. for decades. Your post does not align at all with my experience. If you prompt and hand-hold the LLM it is a big help. Things like boilerplate, basic crud etc etc is something I dont have to worry about anymore. And if I am looking at an unknown codebase or area, the llm can explain things to me, it's the rubber duck that talks back. I'm not using vim plugins (yet) for LLM, tmux and a couple of panes etc is all I need at the moment.
cholantesh 7mo ago
The only thing that I find AI is consistently excellent at is giving me a snippet to do something particularly esoteric in my shell and parsing out errors from a massive logfile that I would probably have taken an order of magnitude longer to find myself.

keithnz 7mo ago

This is not my experience at all, the AI agents are many many many times faster than what I can do. What anyone can do. It's crazy how quick I can create stuff these days.

bandrami 7mo ago
You're forgetting to count the time you spend deleting the excess stuff
- keithnz 7mo ago
  no... I'm not.
  - bandrami 7mo ago
    Then you're forgetting the time your sysadmin spends doing that
gdorsi 7mo ago
It really depends on what kind and of job you do. If it's not something very common LLMs could end up generating random code. Also if you work on something performance critical, you can get inspiration from LLMs, but they often don't write fast code.
- keithnz 7mo ago
  not my experience, they write fast code, and if you ask them to optimize, can pull all kinds of tricks out of the bag. Even with some of the niche stuff I work on, they seem really good.
  - mchaver 7mo ago
    Without telling us what kind of code you are talking about it is hard to compare. I would say that is true for CRUD web code because there is so much out there that the LLMs can reference.
    - keithnz 7mo ago
      I work on all sorts as we have an IoT product offering.... embedded bare metal systems, web, backend IoT servers, Gateways, APIs, Import/Export Systems, Integrations with Manufacturing systems, accounting systems, Automatic Test Equipment. I've been coding for nearly 50 years now, so pretty experienced. What peoples comments seem to imply to me is that they haven't really gone full agentic coding, where you hone your context, your tools, and how you iterate and test with an AI agent. Where any mistakes an AI makes you make sure it can't do it again, you have it setup so your AI code reviews are honed to focus on the things you care about etc.
      - hubertdinsk 7mo ago
        so not niche at all. You described a bit of everything. Niche is more like "ISO26262 compliant, response time under 50ms, measured with a oscilloscope with at least 40MHz bandwidth, failure rate less than 10^-7, proven with maths and soak tests". It gets more niche the closer you get to hardware. Next word prediction will get you laughed out of the room.
      - gdorsi 7mo ago
        Software development is a quite vast discipline. In my experience performance of LLMs can be surprisingly good on things that are not mainstream, like database engineering, and surprisingly bad at mainstream categories approached in an unconventional way. That said, I'm amazed that you have 50 years of experience and still able to have the mental flexibility to adapt to new development paradigms. As you imply, this stuff isn't simple to pick up, and is completely different on how we have done our job without AI.
armchairhacker 7mo ago
AI can generate code much much faster. But do you never need a specific change (e.g. bugfix), that even describing in English is slower than just doing it? Especially in vim where editor movements are fast.
- zhann_dc 7mo ago
  I'd argue you should be working towards no longer having to do these because agentic systems in place will do it in your stead. All you need to do now, is sign off the code and adjust the agent so it would do these as you would.
- keithnz 7mo ago
  possibly there's cases where maybe you want to change some text or something, but I don't think its faster in vim given you likely don't have that file open, and by the time you get to the file, and location, you could have fixed it with your agent, not only that, you could have generated the test case and then fixed in your agent
  - 1718627440 7mo ago
    I think you missed the point. It takes more time to write English prose than to open a file and just fix it, so unless the time the LLM needs is somehow negative, it's not going to be faster.
    - keithnz 7mo ago
      I didn't miss the point, it just feels like the people saying that really aren't using these tools as it just is not my experience at all. I've been a Vim user for multi decades now. There's just no way, it's far easier to type a prompt except maybe if you know exactly what file and exactly where in the file, you might be able to do it as fast as telling the AI to do it. It's not hard to get a minor fix done with a prompt and doesn't take too much English in my experience.
      - 7mo ago
otabdeveloper4 7mo ago
Note you're replying to a guy who never said anything at all about being "faster". P.S. Software developers aren't being paid to be "fast". In fact, being "fast" is called "technical debt" and you're usually punished for it as a software developer.

mvanbaak 7mo ago

I'm a vim user. for decades. Your post does not align at all with my experience. If you prompt and hand-hold the LLM it is a big help. Things like boilerplate, basic crud etc etc is something I dont have to worry about anymore. And if I am looking at an unknown codebase or area, the llm can explain things to me, it's the rubber duck that talks back. I'm not using vim plugins (yet) for LLM, tmux and a couple of panes etc is all I need at the moment.

cholantesh 7mo ago

The only thing that I find AI is consistently excellent at is giving me a snippet to do something particularly esoteric in my shell and parsing out errors from a massive logfile that I would probably have taken an order of magnitude longer to find myself.