alt Hacker NewsI do this. But the killer usecase for me is writing all boilerplate and implementing some half-working stuff keeps my attention on the issue which makes me able to complete more complex things.
A recent example is when I implemented a (Kubernetes) CSI driver that makes /nix available in a container so you can run an empty image and skip a lot of infra to manage.
I talked to it a bit and eventually it wrote a Nix derivation that runs the CSI codegen for Python and packages it so I could import it. Then I asked it to implement the gRPC interface it had generated and managed to get a "Hello World' when mounting this volume (just an empty dir). I also asked it to generate the YAML for the StorageClass, CSIDriver, Deployment and DaemonSet.
So LLM left me with a CSI driver that does nothing in Python (rather than Go which is what everything Kubernetes is implemented in) that I could then rewrite to run a Nix build and copy storepaths into a folder that's mounted into the container.
Sure implementing a gRPC interface might not be the hardest thing in hindsight, but I've never done it before and it's now a fully functional(ish) implementation of what i described.
It even managed to switch gRPC implementations because the Python one was funky with protoc versions in Nix(Python bundles the grpc codegen it's so stupid) so i asked it to do the same thing for grpclib instead which worked.
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i’ve stopped writing “real” code for the most part, i just bang out some pseudo code like:
read all files in directory ending in .tmpl
render these as go templates
if any with kind: deployment
add annotation blah: bar
publish to local kubeapi using sa account foo
so i control the logic, it handles the syntax.
asking it to solve problems for you never seems to really work, but it remembers syntax and if i need some kinda reader interface over another or whatever.
can’t help me with code reviews tho, so i spent most of my time reading code instead of remembering syntax. i’m ok with it.
I hear a lot of people talk about LLMs writing the "boilerplate" and wonder why they haven't abstracted that away in the first place.
Maybe my brain has been permanently altered by hacking Lisp.