Why I will not be using LLMs in my coding

Posted by Risse 5 hours ago

Why I will not be using LLMs in my coding(www.polso.info)

90 points | 184 commentspage 3

rowanseymour 4 hours ago|

I see LLM usage as more of a spectrum than a binary decision. For the most critical parts of my day job, I still don't commit anything from an LLM that I haven't checked myself. My brain has never felt busier and more engaged on that stuff. But then I also produce absolute mountains of code (side projects, internal tooling) that I don't have time to review and frankly it doesn't really matter what the code looks like. You can choose how much to engage your brain. Every project is different.

softwaredoug 4 hours ago||

I see AI coding as instant legacy code.

The brittle slop happens when you tack feature on top of feature because it’s fast and easy now.

The higher quality stuff happens when you dive into the details of what you/the agent implemented (looking at code, with agent, or not) trying to make the current feature set work better.

IMO there will be outsized competitive advantage to the latter. Features are now cheap. But quality remains rare.

sgt 4 hours ago||

> I feel that LLMs and their overtly verbose output trick less knowledgeable programmers of the quality of their output. When Claude spits out refactored code with tons of comments, documenting each method and variable, and tests for everything as well, it looks impressive, at a first glance. But if you dig deeper, it's sometimes just complete bullshit.

This is pretty spot on. But it's important to note that the resulting code, is still often significantly better than what those developers used to produce. Especially under tight deadlines and pressure to complete CRUD like interfaces. We simply can't afford spending a whole day tweaking a sortable table on the web anymore.

mortalapeman 4 hours ago|

I agree that it produces code that is better than many of my colleagues. I have spent the last 14 years honing my ability to build code in a scalable way that works for basically any domain. I still produce better output than the LLM. But the incentive to encourage my colleagues to reach that kind of level is just gone, and that's what frustrates me. As humans, we could have been so much more efficient, but instead LLMs came in and are steering us towards the median of slop code. Slop by my standards anyways.

sgt 3 hours ago||

Exactly! It's a bit of a tragedy.

But then again, LLMs do offer benefits that are impossible not to want to harness.

sreekanth850 4 hours ago||

I guess nobody cares about, if some one use LLM or hand written code. They all care if you are hired and deliver the output comparable to others with all their requirement fulfilled. I still remember how wordpress developers were against elementor during its early days and look how pagebuilders became default choice now for wordpress.

springtimesun 3 hours ago||

It is perhaps confirmation bias, but I feel like I see fewer and fewer of these posts on HN. All respect to the author, life is too short to force yourself to do something you don’t like. But, these post seem more like a goodbye to the train that has already pulled out of the station.

The quibble I would make is with the “code is not that good” and the implication that they are so much better at coding while those who have adopted AI are “mediocre”. It’s certainly possible this is right. I would be the first to call myself a middling programmer. I am still waiting to be inducted into the Real Developer (TM) society. (Is it a card? Or does someone teach you a handshake?). But my question is, why, if you’re an ace programmer, can you not get good results out of an LLM? These things are endlessly configurable. They are begging to be tested and, dare I say, engineered to your system and way of doing things. So, why are your results still bad?

The author's not wrong that left completely to their own devices, and especially if your working on something that's not well represented in their training data, LLMs will make a mess of things. But a Real Programmer (TM) isn't doing that. (Or so I assume. like I said, I haven't gotten the pin. Or is it a medal? A certificate perhaps?).

archagon 2 hours ago|

One reason is that there is zero point in posting this type of article to HN anymore. The replies are always the same and nothing is gained.

Rest assured, though, that the sentiment grows ever stronger.

springtimesun 52 minutes ago||

Not to be a jerk, but what if I told you there was a raging debate about widgets vs wodgets in the last 6 months and, although it seems pretty clear that widgets were being adopted across the industry at large, there was an ever growing sentiment that wodgets were actually preferred and the market was going to reverse itself, any day now?

I can’t really point to any evidence of this because the wodget people have stopped posting about it and every month the cost of widgets keeps going down while they simultaneously get better and there’s so much capital and talent being thrown at widgets that it’s impossible to think a wholesale reversal could even be possible. Would you tell me that, “trust me, bro” is not really an argument?

archagon 15 minutes ago||

Who said anything about a wholesale reversal?

All these things can be true simultaneously:

* AI has wholly taken over the corporate world

* Programmers can now generate massive amounts of code

* This massive productivity boost is, oddly enough, not reflected in consumer products at all

* In fact, most of this newfound productivity seems to be aimed at making AI widgets or infrastructure for maintaining AI widgets

* LLM use hampers software development at its current level of complexity (because AI is incapable of independent abstraction and simplification)

* Programmers are deskilling en masse and turning into managers (without admitting it to themselves)

* The externalities of LLM use remain the same (and, to an extent, can’t actually be fixed)

* There will always be programmers who code by hand, even in a professional capacity — and it’s quite likely they’ll be the ones dragging the industry forward (up the ladder of abstraction)

armanckeser 4 hours ago||

Yeah... This is about to age really badly, not to say that the principles in the post are incorrect, but this person doesn't seem to realize that they are in a free market and that each model improves on the last on almost every aspect. We will see what they'll think about this choice when all their competitors do 100s of peoples worth of work just with a few people

springtimesun 2 hours ago|

I agree with you, but also it won’t matter at that point because the job market for coding will have contracted to the point where practically no one is hiring.

“You’re not breaking up with me. I’m breaking up with you.”

laserDinosaur 3 hours ago||

For me, I don't mind if people want code written by LLMS. What I DO have a problem with is people handing over their problem solving to LLMS.

If someone uses Resharper to make some ugly code pretty, fine, I don't mind - as long as they can understand and explain the result. My issue I'm running into daily which drives me nuts is stopping people in their PR's and asking "Why did you do it this way? This seems like an odd approach" and get "Oh I dunno, Claude wrote it". Then what the hell are you checking it in for?

Between SO, Resharper + Fancy IDE tools, and the mountain of plug-and-play cloud services we have, I think the era of 'writing everything yourself' was already dwindling. But at least if someone chose one framework or library or SO post over another, they could explain why they chose it later on. Some sort of domain knowledge was being built up and transferred between devs over time (and I'm not talking about documentation). What I see more and more is systems being checked into production where the 'author' doesn't fully understand what it's doing, then it breaks in a way they don't expect, and then I see a team of clowns all with their claude terminals open desperately typing "WHAT DOES THIS ERROR MEAN" because nobody understands why it was built that way in the first place.

Fine get LLMS to help write your code, but do your job and handle the problem solving part. What are you being paid for otherwise?

docheinestages 4 hours ago||

Reminds me of Oscar, the accountant from The Office who would refuse using a calculator.

duendefm 4 hours ago||

That's kind of audacious, for a php programmer

hoppp 4 hours ago||

Yeah, when I saw PHP it made me question everything.

It's the language I hate to write the most.

phoronixrly 4 hours ago||

I can say the same about any opinion of an LLM 'programmer'

Someone1234 4 hours ago|

This is a roundabout way of saying you're leaving the profession.

We now have people commonly running multiple concurrent programming tasks, while automatically and interactively testing them, reviewing them, and validating them. They're then handed for human review, where little is found because the quality regime is now set so high. We're talking weeks of development + testing/validating time brought down into the realm of days.

So this is pure "my horse & cart are just as good as the motorcar"-levels of argument. If I bury my head in the sand long enough, and deep enough, this will all just blow over, and we'll go back to doing stuff significantly slower/worse any day now...

The quality of stuff I am shipping today is the highest it has ever been, and tested/validated significantly more comprehensively. Why? Because time/resources was the limitation, not willingness or skill. I always wanted to test for every single possible edge case/scenario, but it wasn't in the time-budget (and diminish returns). Now I don't need to make that trade-off.

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