Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> AI is a very strange thing where 2 seemingly smart coders use it and one comes out thinking it's obviously revolutionary and the other one thinking it's a waste of time

My take on this is that those 2 developers are often working on very different tasks.

If you're a very smart coder working in a large codebase with tons of domain knowledge you'll find it's useless.

If you're a very smart coder working in a consultancy and your end result looks like a few thousand lines of glue code, then you're probably going to get a lot out of LLMs.

It's a bit like "software engineering" vs "coding". Current iterations of LLMs is good for "coding" but crap at "software engineering".



there's probably truth to that, but I find it's useful at a more micro-level. I don't tell the llm to write an architecture or a big piece. It's more like, I have this data in this shape, I want a function that gives data out that shape and it will spit something pretty good and idiomatic. I read it, understand it and implement it. Need to be careful with blind copy-paste, there are sometimes subtle bugs in the code.

It's specially useful when learning new frameworks, languages, etc. To me this is all applicable regardless of domain as the micro-level patterns tend to be variations of things that have been seen. I suspect if you try to load it with a lot of very specific high level domain logic, there are more chances of taking the llm out of its comfort zone.


Yep, that's exactly what I mean by "coding" as opposed to "engineering".


Totally agree with that. It's an aid to lay bricks, doesn't do your job for you.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: