4 ms·

Well, you must have some low fkn standards.

by dakolli 20d ago

eloisant 20d ago
If you truly think LLM are not useful tools for programming, you haven't tried the right tools.
- jeltz 20d ago
  That is not the same topic. LLMs are useful tools, and that is despite them producing fucking awful code.
  - Gigachad 20d ago
    I would have agreed with you 6 months ago but things have changed rapidly.
    - wizzwizz4 20d ago
      People say this every 6 months. I've stopped even paying attention to it, because (A) the code quality remains below the floor, and (B) the people saying it continue to ignore all the other issues with LLM code generation.
      - Zambyte 20d ago
        Up until the last couple of months, I have treated LLMs as a supercharged stackoverflow. I would ask it questions on how to do something in a general sense, and then adapt the answer to my use case. Now, my entire programming flow does not even include an editor. The tools I use are: pi.dev to write and implement openspec specifications, herdr to manage many pi instances, and ollama to run qwen 3.8 27b on my single 7900 XTX. Writing good specifications is the key detail here. I will often iterate on a spec for hours until I am happy with it all of the details. Once I am happy with the spec, I can be quite confident that when I tell pi to apply the spec, the changes that I want will be done, and done how I want them, when I come back to check when it reports itself as done. The landscale is fundamentally different from what it was. Feel free to ignore it, but you can absolutely generate high quality code if you know what you're doing.
        panny 20d ago
        >ollama to run qwen 3.8 27b Installed this recently to try it out. >pi.dev to write and implement openspec specifications, herdr to manage many pi instances Thanks for mentioning the tools you're using successfully. It seems like most people using LLMs are keen to keep their cards close to their chest.
        Zambyte 19d ago
        No problem. I think it's less of people withholding information to have an advantage, and more people still not having settled on a workflow they like. Herdr is the most recent addition in my workflow as of only a few days ago, but it directly solves problems I have been having (juggling tons of terminals, even with my tiling wm has been a little unwieldy). The rest I've pretty much settled into for a while now.
        Zambyte 19d ago
        The other tool I wanted to throw out there is voxtype (plus wtype). I've been looking for a good, global, local dictation solution for wayland for a while now, and finally landed on this one. It's great for rambling details that pi+qwen can then convert into concrete openspec specifications.
      - kuboble 20d ago
        N=1 and might be a raw skill issue on my end. But I all but stopped writing code 13 months ago. At the beginning the code was often bad. In the last 6 months alone I had received more praise from my customers for excellent work than ever before.
    - jeltz 20d ago
      Not sure what I can say but the LLMs simply do not write good code without tons of handholding. As a C developer most LLMed patches I have seen the last couple of months have been awful and the few good ones I know from the author themselves that they did a ton of iteration and/or manual cleanup. Maybe they are less bad at writing other languages.
      - Gigachad 20d ago
        At least what I have seen in Ruby and Typescript, they are excellent at doing what you asked for. But if what you asked for is stupid they will happily make it happen. They don’t make normal mistakes like typos and they aren’t lazy so things like tests and checking error cases is usually done.
- roblabla 20d ago
  I tried a lot of tools. Claude code, deepseek with kilocode and OMP, codex... I still use claude quite a bit. But frankly, all of them produce some absolutely godawful code. Review load went way up with AI, and it's not just the volume that caused it, but also the quality. It's extremely verbose, hard to read, often repeats code instead of factoring it into reusable components. And yes, sometimes it's also buggy. Except now, you have to debug a problem that's in code you didn't write yourself, and is awful to read. LLM is incredibly valuable for debugging complex problems, codebase exploration, and planning large changes. But the writing code part itself, I find, LLMs are just not very good at it yet.
  - api 20d ago
    I’ve had some luck prompting them to be concise, both in writing and in code, and with code doing an approach where they get it working, write tons of tests, and then refactor for conciseness and readability. All the tests prevent regressions doing this. Without such prompting and a conciseness and clarity pass you get a slop grenade. They overall work better with tests, and Rust is a great language for them. Overall they do better with lots of walls and alarms that go off if they mess up. I don’t need nearly as much of this, can mentally simulate it, which is a good “are we superintelligence yet” reality check. Still not even as good as my wet meat brain. But impressive given what was possible even two years ago! The result is still not as clean as a good programmer but it’s better than the slop grenade you get first pass.
  - user43928 20d ago
    I don't have to debug anything. Vaguely telling the agent what the issue is and what behavior I expect solves the issue with a fraction of the effort. Some claim that the tech debt only keeps increasing and that the result will be unmaintainable. This is not my experience, and I don't think it is theirs either. These claims are often entirely speculative.
    - RHSeeger 20d ago
      I, and I think most experienced developers, can recognize the type of code that incurs a maintenance cost down the line; that will make adding new code take longer. And AI writes such code "relatively" frequently. I love having the AI to write code, but I find it extremely important to review it - to make sure that it's correct, understandable, and not going to be a problem later.
psychoslave 20d ago
What is fkn?
- LatencyKills 20d ago
  It's short for "fucking".
  - psychoslave 20d ago
    That’s fn lazy.
    - bpev 20d ago
      TIL what `fn()` actually means.
LatencyKills 20d ago
I spent 22 years as an engineer split between MS and Apple. SOTA LLMs can write code just as good as most human engineers. I expect to see the "LLMs are just next token predictors!" crap on Reddit... not HN.
- jeltz 20d ago
  LLMs produce pretty crappy code but they are very useful tools for protyping, code search and finding bugs. Maybe LLMs in the future will be able to write good code but they are very far from that right now.
  - basilikum 20d ago
    Perhaps it would be useful if both of you could provide examples of supposedly good and bad code – the latter being the result of a genuine effort to produce good code with state of the art models. Just asserting that LLM code is good or bad ends in a yes - no - yes - no back and forth circle immediately.
    - LatencyKills 20d ago
      I just used an LLM (along with my decades of operating system development experience) to create a macOS tool [0] that lets me see through windows, instead of having to continually command+tab between windows. The solution required reverse engineering and internals knowledge that most human engineers don't even have. The question is no longer "Can an LLM write code?". It can. The problem is that certain humans refuse to put in the effort required to properly utilize these tools. [0] https://imgur.com/a/2CUEjmA https://imgur.com/a/2CUEjmA
      - pessimizer 20d ago
        LLMs have been good at knowing what's in the manual from v1.0. Super good at that. Pretty good translators. Pretty good at doing things that have been done a million times before, like your CRUD app. Super mediocre at everything else. LLMs as things that know what's in the manual are AAA+. Extremely helpful. Very good at making a rough draft of something filled with a lot of stupid mistakes and no new abstractions. That's what your transparent window thing is. Something that you could never ship, is probably too big and doing senseless things for no intelligible reason, and definitely has bizarre bugs.
xandrius 20d ago
I'm pretty sure you used chat gpt when it came out and literally stopped looking then. GPT 5.6 sol and Astra can now one shot incredible stuff.
ModernMech 20d ago
This kind of shaming is getting tired. At the end of the day, the people claiming their code quality is better without ai, while everyone else has low standards, aren’t providing any evidence of their supposed superiority.
- rossy 20d ago
  I think the burden of proof is on the new technology. It's been almost a year since the supposed death of manual coding, depending on how you count, but I haven't seen the efficiency benefits of AI trickle down to the programs I'm an end-user of. I _have_ seen the bugs, however (rsync 3.4.3 for example.)
  - ModernMech 20d ago
    Depends what you mean by end-user. Power users of AI aren't using these things to build applications for users, they're using them to do all the things they couldn't do as mere mortal programmers. Like the other poster detailing how they got a game running in web assembly. That's not for end-users, and even if it was they wouldn't be able to look at that and say "Wow, this is an example of AI benefitting me as an end-user" they'd just say "Wow cool, a game".

Well, you must have some low fkn standards.

by dakolli 20d ago

Well, you must have some low fkn standards.

eloisant 20d ago

If you truly think LLM are not useful tools for programming, you haven't tried the right tools.

jeltz 20d ago
That is not the same topic. LLMs are useful tools, and that is despite them producing fucking awful code.
- Gigachad 20d ago
  I would have agreed with you 6 months ago but things have changed rapidly.
  - wizzwizz4 20d ago
    People say this every 6 months. I've stopped even paying attention to it, because (A) the code quality remains below the floor, and (B) the people saying it continue to ignore all the other issues with LLM code generation.
    - Zambyte 20d ago
      Up until the last couple of months, I have treated LLMs as a supercharged stackoverflow. I would ask it questions on how to do something in a general sense, and then adapt the answer to my use case. Now, my entire programming flow does not even include an editor. The tools I use are: pi.dev to write and implement openspec specifications, herdr to manage many pi instances, and ollama to run qwen 3.8 27b on my single 7900 XTX. Writing good specifications is the key detail here. I will often iterate on a spec for hours until I am happy with it all of the details. Once I am happy with the spec, I can be quite confident that when I tell pi to apply the spec, the changes that I want will be done, and done how I want them, when I come back to check when it reports itself as done. The landscale is fundamentally different from what it was. Feel free to ignore it, but you can absolutely generate high quality code if you know what you're doing.
      - panny 20d ago
        >ollama to run qwen 3.8 27b Installed this recently to try it out. >pi.dev to write and implement openspec specifications, herdr to manage many pi instances Thanks for mentioning the tools you're using successfully. It seems like most people using LLMs are keen to keep their cards close to their chest.
        Zambyte 19d ago
        No problem. I think it's less of people withholding information to have an advantage, and more people still not having settled on a workflow they like. Herdr is the most recent addition in my workflow as of only a few days ago, but it directly solves problems I have been having (juggling tons of terminals, even with my tiling wm has been a little unwieldy). The rest I've pretty much settled into for a while now.
        Zambyte 19d ago
        The other tool I wanted to throw out there is voxtype (plus wtype). I've been looking for a good, global, local dictation solution for wayland for a while now, and finally landed on this one. It's great for rambling details that pi+qwen can then convert into concrete openspec specifications.
    - kuboble 20d ago
      N=1 and might be a raw skill issue on my end. But I all but stopped writing code 13 months ago. At the beginning the code was often bad. In the last 6 months alone I had received more praise from my customers for excellent work than ever before.
  - jeltz 20d ago
    Not sure what I can say but the LLMs simply do not write good code without tons of handholding. As a C developer most LLMed patches I have seen the last couple of months have been awful and the few good ones I know from the author themselves that they did a ton of iteration and/or manual cleanup. Maybe they are less bad at writing other languages.
    - Gigachad 20d ago
      At least what I have seen in Ruby and Typescript, they are excellent at doing what you asked for. But if what you asked for is stupid they will happily make it happen. They don’t make normal mistakes like typos and they aren’t lazy so things like tests and checking error cases is usually done.
roblabla 20d ago
I tried a lot of tools. Claude code, deepseek with kilocode and OMP, codex... I still use claude quite a bit. But frankly, all of them produce some absolutely godawful code. Review load went way up with AI, and it's not just the volume that caused it, but also the quality. It's extremely verbose, hard to read, often repeats code instead of factoring it into reusable components. And yes, sometimes it's also buggy. Except now, you have to debug a problem that's in code you didn't write yourself, and is awful to read. LLM is incredibly valuable for debugging complex problems, codebase exploration, and planning large changes. But the writing code part itself, I find, LLMs are just not very good at it yet.
- api 20d ago
  I’ve had some luck prompting them to be concise, both in writing and in code, and with code doing an approach where they get it working, write tons of tests, and then refactor for conciseness and readability. All the tests prevent regressions doing this. Without such prompting and a conciseness and clarity pass you get a slop grenade. They overall work better with tests, and Rust is a great language for them. Overall they do better with lots of walls and alarms that go off if they mess up. I don’t need nearly as much of this, can mentally simulate it, which is a good “are we superintelligence yet” reality check. Still not even as good as my wet meat brain. But impressive given what was possible even two years ago! The result is still not as clean as a good programmer but it’s better than the slop grenade you get first pass.
- user43928 20d ago
  I don't have to debug anything. Vaguely telling the agent what the issue is and what behavior I expect solves the issue with a fraction of the effort. Some claim that the tech debt only keeps increasing and that the result will be unmaintainable. This is not my experience, and I don't think it is theirs either. These claims are often entirely speculative.
  - RHSeeger 20d ago
    I, and I think most experienced developers, can recognize the type of code that incurs a maintenance cost down the line; that will make adding new code take longer. And AI writes such code "relatively" frequently. I love having the AI to write code, but I find it extremely important to review it - to make sure that it's correct, understandable, and not going to be a problem later.

psychoslave 20d ago

What is fkn?

LatencyKills 20d ago
It's short for "fucking".
- psychoslave 20d ago
  That’s fn lazy.
  - bpev 20d ago
    TIL what `fn()` actually means.

LatencyKills 20d ago

I spent 22 years as an engineer split between MS and Apple. SOTA LLMs can write code just as good as most human engineers. I expect to see the "LLMs are just next token predictors!" crap on Reddit... not HN.

jeltz 20d ago
LLMs produce pretty crappy code but they are very useful tools for protyping, code search and finding bugs. Maybe LLMs in the future will be able to write good code but they are very far from that right now.
- basilikum 20d ago
  Perhaps it would be useful if both of you could provide examples of supposedly good and bad code – the latter being the result of a genuine effort to produce good code with state of the art models. Just asserting that LLM code is good or bad ends in a yes - no - yes - no back and forth circle immediately.
  - LatencyKills 20d ago
    I just used an LLM (along with my decades of operating system development experience) to create a macOS tool [0] that lets me see through windows, instead of having to continually command+tab between windows. The solution required reverse engineering and internals knowledge that most human engineers don't even have. The question is no longer "Can an LLM write code?". It can. The problem is that certain humans refuse to put in the effort required to properly utilize these tools. [0] https://imgur.com/a/2CUEjmA https://imgur.com/a/2CUEjmA
    - pessimizer 20d ago
      LLMs have been good at knowing what's in the manual from v1.0. Super good at that. Pretty good translators. Pretty good at doing things that have been done a million times before, like your CRUD app. Super mediocre at everything else. LLMs as things that know what's in the manual are AAA+. Extremely helpful. Very good at making a rough draft of something filled with a lot of stupid mistakes and no new abstractions. That's what your transparent window thing is. Something that you could never ship, is probably too big and doing senseless things for no intelligible reason, and definitely has bizarre bugs.

xandrius 20d ago

I'm pretty sure you used chat gpt when it came out and literally stopped looking then. GPT 5.6 sol and Astra can now one shot incredible stuff.

ModernMech 20d ago

This kind of shaming is getting tired. At the end of the day, the people claiming their code quality is better without ai, while everyone else has low standards, aren’t providing any evidence of their supposed superiority.

rossy 20d ago
I think the burden of proof is on the new technology. It's been almost a year since the supposed death of manual coding, depending on how you count, but I haven't seen the efficiency benefits of AI trickle down to the programs I'm an end-user of. I _have_ seen the bugs, however (rsync 3.4.3 for example.)
- ModernMech 20d ago
  Depends what you mean by end-user. Power users of AI aren't using these things to build applications for users, they're using them to do all the things they couldn't do as mere mortal programmers. Like the other poster detailing how they got a game running in web assembly. That's not for end-users, and even if it was they wouldn't be able to look at that and say "Wow, this is an example of AI benefitting me as an end-user" they'd just say "Wow cool, a game".