logoalt Hacker News

_0ffhtoday at 11:35 AM1 replyview on HN

Huh, that explains a lot about the F500, and their buzzword slogans like "culture of excellence".

LLM code is still mostly absurdly bad, unless you tell it in painstaking detail what to do and what to avoid, and never ask it to do a bigger job at a time than a single function or very small class.

Edit: I'll admit though that the detailed explanation is often still much less work than typing everything yourself. But it is a showstopper for autonomous "agentic coding".


Replies

jghntoday at 1:23 PM

> unless you tell it in painstaking detail what to do and what to avoid, and never ask it to do a bigger job at a time than a single function or very small class.

This is hyperbolic, but the general sentiment is accurate enough, at least for now. I've noticed a bimodal distribution of quality when using these tools. The people who approach the LLM from the lens of a combo architect & PM, do all the leg work, set up the guard rails, define the acceptance criteria, these are the people who get great results. The people who walk up and say "sudo make me a sandwich" do not.

Also the latter group complains that they don't see the point of the first group. Why would they put in all the work when they could just code? But what they don't see is that *someone* was always doing that work, it just wasn't them in the past. We're moving to a world where the mechanical part of grinding the code is not worth much, people who defined their existence as avoiding all the legwork will be left in the cold.

show 1 reply