alt Hacker NewsThe difference for me recently
Write a lambda that takes an S3 PUT event and inserts the rows of a comma separated file into a Postgres database.
Naive implementation: download the file from s3 and do a bulk insert - it would have taken 20 minutes and what Claude did at first.
I had to tell it to use the AWS sql extension to Postgres that will load a file directly from S3 into a table. It took 20 seconds.
I treat coding agents like junior developers.
Replies
Did you ask it to research best practices for this method, have an adversarial performance based agent review their approach or search for performant examples of the task first? Relying on training data only will always get your subpar results. Using “What is the most performant way to load a CSV from S3 into PostgreSQL on RDS? Compare all viable and research approaches before recommending one.” gave me the extension as the top option.
Unlike junior developers, llms can take detailed instructions and produce outstanding results at first shot a good number of times.