alt Hacker NewsIsn't that what the author means?
"it still requires genuine expertise to spot the hallucinations"
"works very well if you do know what you are doing"
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But it can work well even if you don't know what you are doing (or don't look at the impl).
For example, build a TUI or GUI with Claude Code while only giving it feedback on the UX/QA side. I've done it many times despite 20 years of software experience. -- Some stuff just doesn't justify me spending my time credentializing in the impl.
Hallucinations that lead to code that doesn't work just get fixed. Most code I write isn't like "now write an accurate technical essay about hamsters" where hallucinations can sneak through lest I scrutinize it; rather the code would just fail to work and trigger the LLM's feedback loop to fix it when it tries to run/lint/compile/typecheck it.
But the idea that you can only build with LLMs if you have a software engineer copilot isn't true and inches further away from true every month, so it kinda sounds like a convenient lie we tell ourselves as engineers (and understandably so: it's scary).
The author headline starts with "LLMs are a failure", hard to take author seriously with such a hyperbole even if second part of headline ("A new AI winter is coming") might be right.