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vrightertoday at 4:55 PM2 repliesview on HN

"But building the same functionality has undoubtedly become simpler."

I disagree with this statement. It has become simpler, provided you don't care about it actually being correct, and you don't care about whether you really have tests that test what you think you asked for, you don't care about security, and other things.

Building the same thing involves doing the things that LLMs have proved time and again that they cannot do. But instead of writing it properly in the first place, you now need to look for the needle in the haystack that is the subtle bug that invariable get inserted by llms every single time I tried to use them. Which requires you to deeply understand the code anyway. Which you would have gotten automatically (and easier) if you were the one writing the code in the first place. developing the same thing at the same level of quality is harder with an LLM.

And the "table stakes" stuff is exactly the thing I would not trust an LLM with for sure, because the risk of getting it wrong could potentially be fatal (to the company, not the dev. Depends on his boss' temperament) with those.


Replies

peabtoday at 7:53 PM

I think either you haven't used LLMs for coding in a while, or you're working on things where they might still be limited on.

I've been able to use LLMs to build things in a weekend that I would not have been able to do in the past, without putting in months of serious effort.

I recently rewrote from scratch in a weekend a project that i had made a couple years ago. In a single weekend i now have a better product than I did at the time, when I spent maybe 20x the amount of time on it.

raw_anon_1111today at 5:01 PM

And subtle bugs don’t get inserted by humans? Did security flaws in software just start happening after LLMs were introduced?

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