alt Hacker News> "This writes better code than I do!" and miss the irony of: "yes, yes it does"
I guess it depends on what you consider "better". I've tried using LLMs to write code over the past couple of weeks with extremely mixed results.
The LLM certainly writes more interesting code! They like their cute ASCII/unicode animations, don't they?
It definitely writes a lot more code, none of it actually correct but some of it functionally similar to correct code.
If you like lots of code then I guess that's better. I like less code.
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> They like their cute ASCII/unicode animations, don't they?
One of the few global Cluade directives I have setup is to never use emojis - and it never has, either in chat output or in code. Don't blame the tool when you don't spend 30 seconds configuring it. It's even easier with AI since you don't have to go digging for some obscure .vimrc snippet - it's literally just plain English.
Yes I basically meant those folks weren't very good developers to begin with and now extrapolating to: "wow this is better than all devs!", when it's more like "it's you, dude"
I find it can often write correct code but not maintainable, performant, or reviewable code without additional human guidance. The "solution" frequently given is that humans don't need to maintain it anymore so its not actually a problem. But the agent can't be accountable for mistakes, so unless that changes or the risk of a defect is close to zero, one still has to put forth effort to keep the code maintainable.
To be fair, there are plenty of situations where throwaway code is perfectly fine and/or defect risks are low enough to make the trade-off worth it. I don't think a lot of developers are thinking about it in that context, though.
(No unit tests aren't enough)