alt Hacker NewsBut in the past, you knew the codebase very well, and it was trivial to implement a fix and upgrade the software. Can the same be done with LLMs ? Well from what I see, it depends on your luck. But if the LLMs can't help you, then you gotta read the whole codebase that you've never read before and you quickly lose the initial benefits. I don't doubt someday we'll get there though.
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jazzyjackson • last Monday at 10:21 PM
If I haven't looked at my own code in 6 months it might as well have been written by someone else.
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emodendroket • last Monday at 10:16 PM
They're better than one might expect at diagnosing issues from the error output or even just screenshots.
I've hit this in little bursts, but one thing I've found is that LLMs are really good at reasoning about their own code and helping me understand how to diagnose and make fixes.
I recently found some assembly source for some old C64 games and used an LLM to walk me through it (purely recreational). It was so good at it. If I was teaching a software engineering class, I'd have students use LLMs to do analysis of large code bases. One of the things we did in grad school was to go through gcc and contribute something to it. Man, that code was so complex and compilers are one of my specialties (at the time). I think having an LLM with me would have made the task 100x easier.