I'm dialing back my LLM usage

Posted by sagacity 7/2/2025

422 points | 239 commentspage 5

halis 7/3/2025|

It’s almost like the LLMs are simply a glorified autocomplete and have no actual understanding of anything they’re doing. Huh weird!

Gepsens 7/2/2025||

Llms are not a magic wand you can wave at anything and get your work cut out for you. What's new ?

piker 7/2/2025||

Credit to the Zed team here for publishing something somewhat against its book.

specproc 7/2/2025||

I spent today rewriting a cloud function I'd done with the "help" of an LLM.

Looked like dog shit, but worked fine till it hit some edge cases.

Had to break the whole thing down again and pretty much start from scratch.

Ultimately not a bad day's work, and I still had it on for autocomplete on doc-strings and such, but like fuck will I be letting an agent near code I do for money again in the near future.

chasing 7/2/2025||

LLMs save me a lot of time as a software engineer because they save me a ton of time doing either boilerplate work or mundane tasks that are relatively conceptually easy but annoying to actually have to do/type/whatever in an IDE.

But I still more-or-less have to think like a software engineer. That's not going to go away. I have to make sure the code remains clean and well-organized -- which, for example, LLMs can help with, but I have to make precision requests and (most importantly) know specifically what I mean by "clean and well-organized." And I always read through and review any generated code and often tweak the output because at the end of the day I am responsible for the code base and I need to verify quality and I need to be able to answer questions and do all of the usual soft-skill engineering stuff. Etc. Etc.

So do whatever fits your need. I think LLMs are a massive multiplier because I can focus on the actual engineering stuff and automate away a bunch of the boring shit.

But when I read stuff like:

"I lost all my trust in LLMs, so I wouldn't give them a big feature again. I'll do very small things like refactoring or a very small-scoped feature."

I feel like I'm hearing something like, "I decided to build a house! So I hired some house builders and told them to build me a house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms and they wound up building something that was not at all what I wanted! Why didn't they know I really liked high ceilings?"

patrickmay 7/2/2025||

> [LLMs] save me a ton of time doing either boilerplate work

I hear this frequently from LLM aficionados. I have a couple of questions about it:

1) If there is so much boilerplate that it takes a significant amount of coding time, why haven't you invested in abstracting it away?

2) The time spent actually writing code is not typically the bottleneck in implementing a system. How much do you really save over the development lifecycle when you have to review the LLM output in any case?

hedgehog 7/2/2025||

I don't know about the boilerplate part but when you are e.g. adding a new abstraction that will help simplify an existing pattern across the code base something like Copilot saves a ton of time. Write down what has to happen and why, then let the machine walk across the code base and make updates, update tests and docs, fix whatever ancillary breaks happen, etc. The real payoff is making it cheaper to do exploratory refactors and simple features so you can focus on making the code and overall design better.

patrickmay 7/2/2025||

That's an interesting approach. You still have to review all the changes to make sure they're correct and that the code is maintainable, though. I could see this being a net savings on a legacy code base or a brand new system still in the "sketching" phase.

hedgehog 7/2/2025||

Yes, one of the reasons I like Copilot over some of the terminal-based systems I've seen is the changes are all staged for review in VS Code so you have all the navigation etc tools and can do whatever needs to be done before committing. It saves a lot of time, even on new features. I think of it like a chainsaw, powerful but a little bit imprecise.

emilecantin 7/2/2025|||

I'm in a similar boat. I've only started using it more very recently, and it's really helping my "white-page syndrome" when I'm starting a new feature. I still have to fix a bunch of stuff, but I think it's easier for me to fix, tweak and refactor existing code than it is to write a new file from scratch.

Often times there's a lot of repetition in the app I'm working on, and there's a lot of it that's already been abstracted away, but we still have to import the component, its dependencies, and setup the whole thing which is indeed pretty boring. It really helps to tell the LLM to implement something and point it to an example of the style I want.

extr 7/2/2025|||

This is the killer app for LLMs for me. I used to get super bogged down in the details of what I was trying to do, I would go a whole afternoon and while I would have started on the feature - I wouldn't have much to show for it in terms of working functionality. LLMs just provide a direction to go in and "get something up" before having to think through every little edge case and abstraction. Later once I have a a better idea of what I want, I go in and refactor by hand. But at least "it works" temporarily, and I find refactoring more enjoyable than writing fresh code anyway, primarily due to that "white page" effect you mention.

patrickmay 7/2/2025|||

Maybe it's my Lisp background, where it's arguably easier, but I find myself immediately thinking "Eliminate that repetition."

jemiluv8 7/2/2025||

When I first came across the idea of vibe coding, my first reaction was that this was taking things too far. Isn't it enough that your LLM can help you do - autocomplete - suggest possible solutions to a problem you've taken the time to understand - helps you spend less time reading documentation and instead help guide your approach and sometimes even helps you identify obscure apis that could help you get shit done - help you review your code - come up with multiple designs for a solutions - evaluate multiple designs you come up with for trade-offs - help you understand your problem better and the available apis - write a prototype of some piece of code

I feel like LLMs are already doing quite a lot. I spend less time rummaging through documentation or trying to remember obscure api's or other pieces of code in a software project. All I need is a strong mental model about the project and how things are done.

There is a lot of obvious heavy lifting that LLMs are doing that I for one am not able to take for granted.

For people facing constraints similar to those in a resource constrained economic environment, the benefits of any technology that helps them spend less time doing work that doesn't deliver value is immediately visible/obvious/apparent.

It is no longer an argument about whether it is a hype or something, it is more about how best to use it to achieve your goals. Forget the hype. Forget the marketing of AI companies - they have to do that to sell their products - nothing wrong with that. Don't let companies or bloggers set your own expectations of what could or should be done with this piece of tech. Just get on the bandwagon and experiment and find out what is too much. In the end I feel we will all come from these experiments knowing that LLMs are already doing quite a lot.

TRIVIA I even came by this article https://www.greptile.com/blog/ai-code-reviews-conflict. That clearly pointed out how LLM reliance can bring both the 10x dev and 1x dev closer to a median of "goodness". So the 10x dev is probably worse and the 1x dev ends up getting better - I'm probably that guy because I tend to mis subtle things in code and copilot review has had my ass for a while now - I haven't had defects like that in a while.

thimkerbell 7/2/2025||

We need an app to rate posts on how clickbaity their titles are, and let you filter on this value.

turbofreak 7/2/2025||

Is this Zed Shaw’s blog?

gpm 7/2/2025|

Nah, it's the people/company behind the Zed editor, who are in part the people who were originally behind the Atom editor. https://zed.dev/team

i_love_retros 7/2/2025|

Uh oh, I think the bubble is bursting.

Personally the initial excitement has worn off for me and I am enjoying writing code myself and just using kagi assistant to ask the odd question, mostly research.

When a team mate who bangs on about how we should all be using ai tried to demo it and got things in a bit of a mess, I knew we had peaked.

And all that money invested into the hype!

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