alt Hacker NewsI really don't understand why there are so many comments like this.
Yesterday I had Claude write an audit logging feature to track all changes made to entities in my app. Yeah you get this for free with many frameworks, but my company's custom setup doesn't have it.
It took maybe 5-10 minutes of wall-time to come up with a good plan, and then ~20-30 min for Claude implement, test, etc.
That would've taken me at least a day, maybe two. I had 4-5 other tasks going on in other tabs while I waited the 20-30 min for Claude to generate the feature.
After Claude generated, I needed to manually test that it worked, and it did. I then needed to review the code before making a PR. In all, maybe 30-45 minutes of my actual time to add a small feature.
All I can really say is... are you sure you're using it right? Have you _really_ invested time into learning how to use AI tools?
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Trust me I'm very impressed at the progress AI has made, and maybe we'll get to the point where everything is 100% correct all the time and better than any human could write. I'm skeptical we can get there with the LLM approach though.
The problem is LLMs are great at simple implementation, even large amounts of simple implementation, but I've never seen it develop something more than trivial correctly. The larger problem is it's very often subtly but hugely wrong. It makes bad architecture decisions, it breaks things in pursuit of fixing or implementing other things. You can tell it has no concept of the "right" way to implement something. It very obviously lacks the "senior developer insight".
Maybe you can resolve some of these with large amounts of planning or specs, but that's the point of my original comment - at what point is it easier/faster/better to just write the code yourself? You don't get a prize for writing the least amount of code when you're just writing specs instead.
> Yesterday I had Claude write an audit logging feature to track all changes made to entities in my app. Yeah you get this for free with many frameworks, but my company's custom setup doesn't have it.
But did you truly think about such feature? Like guarantees that it should follow (like how do it should cope with entities migration like adding a new field) or what the cost of maintaining it further down the line. This looks suspiciously like drive-by PR made on open-source projects.
> That would've taken me at least a day, maybe two.
I think those two days would have been filled with research, comparing alternatives, questions like "can we extract this feature from framework X?", discussing ownership and sharing knowledge,.. Jumping on coding was done before LLMs, but it usually hurts the long term viability of the project.
Adding code to a project can be done quite fast (hackatons,...), ensuring quality is what slows things down in any any well functioning team.
I mean, all I can really say is... if writing some logging takes you one or two days, are you sure you _really_ know how to code?
Same here. I did bounce off these tools a year ago. They just didn't work for me 60% of the time. I learned a bit in that initial experience though and walked away with some tasks ChatGPT could replace in my workflow. Mainly replacing scripts and reviewing single files or functions.
Fast forward to today and I tried the tools again--specifically Claude Code--about a week ago. I'm blown away. I've reproduced some tools that took me weeks at full-time roles in a single day. This is while reviewing every line of code. The output is more or less what I'd be writing as a principal engineer.