alt Hacker News> so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore.
I think it's the opposite. When I'm on the edges of Real Difficult Stuff (TM), then LLMs are less of help compared to when I just need basic web applications or similar "beginner stuff". If what you're working on doesn't exists in the training data at all, the LLMs can sometimes be more in the way than helpful, as they don't seem to even "grasp" the problems correctly.
I still get tons of productivity boosts from LLMs, don't get me wrong, and I wouldn't stop working with them even though they aren't perfect for everything, they do with a lot of monotonous tasks, like all the stuff you outlined. But the moments I'm working without LLMs, that's the time I'm working very much on "not beginner stuff".
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Think we’re saying the same thing.
I very actively work using LLMs (no “agentic” stuff) and agree with you - they are only really worth tasking out tedium to.
But a lot of - say a DM feature - is tedium. Something simple like adding reactions, adding read receipts. It’s not hard at all. The LLM easily excels at the task and yet I didn’t have to do it. There are 1000s of those tasks. Handling file uploads, filling out a W9 and emailing it to the user, cron jobs for digest emails. All very easy problems most LLMs can do. There are just countless tasks if you’re building a real SaaS and I don’t want to do them all.
The big problems LLMs can’t do are only as such because there’s no way to put it into a simple, linear instruction. Once you can though, it’s now an easy task (whether or not you use an LLM).
But yeah we’re saying the same thing - let the LLM do the 1000s of tedious tasks you normally wouldn’t be bothered to spend time on.
Build the entire SaaS (which is mostly that tedium) instead of just the MVP thing you need without any niceties. I find it opens up more opportunity, like for example, we are about to hire our first full-time employee because we’re taking on so much more business.
The critical IP that isn’t in the weights yet, is often a few hundred to a few thousand lines of code. All the rest, surrounding code, is infrastructure that is indeed in the weights.
yea so many times i have asked my self if i am actually saving time on the actual hard stuff.
What is this real difficult stuff you speak of that only you can do and LLMs can not?
This is my experience as well. It gets worse when the LLMs have strong priors in subject matter adjacent to your novel work. The generated output will incorrectly pull towards things the LLM has seen in it’s training data.