logoalt Hacker News

lambdatoday at 5:51 AM1 replyview on HN

Please relearn to use your brain.

I cannot imagine how you can properly supervise an LLM agent if you can't effectively do the work yourself, maybe slightly slower. If the agent is going a significant amount faster than you could do it, you're probably not actually supervising it, and all kinds of weird crap could sneak in.

Like, I can see how it can be a bit quicker for generating some boilerplate, or iterating on some uninteresting API weirdness that's tedious to do by hand. But if you're fundamentally going so much faster with the agent than by hand, you're not properly supervising it.

So yeah, just go back to coding by hand. You should be doing tha probably ~20% of the time anyhow just to keep in practice.


Replies

winwangtoday at 9:21 AM

Kind of agreed. I like vibe coding as "just" another tool. It's nice to review code in IDE (well, VSCode), make changes without fully refactoring, and have the AI "autocomplete". Interesting, sometimes way faster + easier to refactor by hand because of IDE tooling.

The ways that agents actually make me "faster" are typically: 1. more fun to slog through tedious/annoying parts 2. fast code review iterations 3. parallel agents

show 1 reply