alt Hacker NewsReminds me of a post I read a few days ago of someone crowing about an LLM writing for them an email format validator. They did not have the LLM code up an accompanying send-an-email-validation loop, and were blithely kept uninformed by the LLM of the scar tissue built up by experience in the industry on how curiously a deep rabbit hole email validation becomes.
If you’ve been around the block and are judicious how you use them, LLM’s are a really amazing productivity boost. For those without that judgement and taste, I’m seeing footguns proliferate and the LLM’s are not warning them when someone steps on the pressure plate that’s about to blow off their foot. I’m hopeful we will this year create better context window-based or recursive guardrails for the coding agents to solve for this.
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This is a typical problem you see in autodidacts. They will recreate solutions to solved problems, trip over issues that could have been avoided, and generally do all of things you would expect someone to do if they are working with skill but no experience.
LLMs accelerate this and make it more visible, but they are not the cause. It is almost always a person trying to solve a problem and just not knowing what they don't know because they are learning as they go.
Yeah I love working with Claude Code, I agree that the new models are amazing, but I spend a decent amount of time saying "wait, why are we writing that from scratch, haven't we written a library for that, or don't we have examples of using a third party library for it?".
There is probably some effective way to put this direction into the claude.md, but so far it still seems to do unnecessary reimplementation quite a lot.