alt Hacker NewsI think where LLMs truly shine is personal greenfield projects, maybe start a side project
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sick_of_slop • today at 12:16 AM
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llama_drama • yesterday at 11:44 PM
There's this joke like "I used to have 5 unfinished side projects, but AI changed everything. Now I have 30 unfinished side projects". And in my case it's not even a joke
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jopsen • yesterday at 11:18 PM
Yeah, when there is no code review requirements and no pesky production database you can't just yolo :)
At work, they mostly let me increase quality, because it's easy to say find all parsers in my code base and fuzz them.
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Completely agree. LLMs are amazing for side projects.
The other place they are amazing is in working with legacy code bases. I mean, the kind the dev team always wants to throw away. First, even if you do want to throw it away, you can first find out what it does and realize it does more than you think it does. You can also create integrations to more modern components which can be used to extend it. You can also create a pretty decent test suite if you do not have one. And, once the behaviour has good test coverage, you can re-write it into something more modern. You can even completely change the architecture while ensuring compatible external behaviour. Remember, this is all in place of “throw it away and start over from scratch, only to discover that the scope is much larger than expected”.