[jimsimmons]

[flagged]

[dang]

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[allisdust]

I pity comments like this. Instead of trying to up skill to use the newest programming tools, you are setting yourself for failure.

Sonnet 3.5 digests close to 400k bytes of text and produces coherent code that works on the first try. If someone says its not working and they are a professional programmer, get ready to feel like you are hit by ton of bricks next year. The productivity boost is only going to accelerate and those who can't adopt will be left behind.

[threeseed]

a) There is no up-skilling needed to use LLMs. They are very basic to use.

b) Many of us have used them for a while now and can speak from experience that they aren't providing a meaningful productivity boost. Simply because they don't work well enough to provide a positive ROI. And no amount of prompting expertise can change that.

c) For me it is junior developers who love these tools because they think it's a shortcut to becoming experienced. But it's akin to cheating. You're not actually learning why and how things are supposed to work. And that will hurt you in professional environments where you often need to explain why you wrote that code and introduced that bug.

[foobarqux]

Why isn't there a single screencast (un-edited, un-cherry-picked) of anyone showing off their 10x productivity boost in a full "typical" coding session?

[Smaug123]

I'd love to see this operationalised as concrete predictions, as one might find on a prediction market! Do you have any specific predictions about programming next year?

I ask (for example) because I suspect shitting out CRUD apps is cheaper via LLM than via human now, and I guess probably most programming work is of that nature, but there are programmers out there whose job is not shitting out CRUD apps, and it's not clear from your statement whether you intend the sentiment to cover those programmers too.

[tom_]

Let's cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we. Meanwhile, you should be glad we are refusing to use it. If it works as well as you claim, this situation is to your advantage.

[jimsimmons]

I've been waiting since 2021 when I saw demos of GitHub copilot

[specialist]

I'd like to see that. Link(s)?

I've been on the sidelines, waiting for the dust to settle. Kind of like waiting a few months before applying the latest major OS updates.

[neta1337]

Ah yes, just like stocks can only go up. No one will feel like hit by a ton of bricks.

[nyrulez]

Curious to know why you think it's vaporware. Are the latest LLMs like 3.5 Sonnet bad at original programming based on your experience? It hasn't been the case for me when using it for real world projects lately.

[jimsimmons]

I wrote a cycle detecting reference counting system and asked Sonnet 3.5 to fix it and it failed.

I hand held it, gave it tests, called out flaws in reasoning.. etc., and it still didn't fix.

The longer the chat the more likely it was Sonnet forgot a clarification I provided.

Overall huge waste of time, lost my train of thought and I was helping an LLM rubber duck and fail repeatedly

[devbent]

I had an XML file format from one app I needed converted to a json file format for another app.

I threw both schemas at Claude and asked for it to write converter code.

Writing mocks, Claude saves an hour+ when mocking out complex classes.

I've never written graphics code before, I had a png animation film strip, Claude wrote code to load, parse, and animate it.

[marviel]

"vaporware"?

You may not like cursor, but they have a product that I -- as a professional -- use every day.

Vaporware isn't the word you're looking for

[jimsimmons]

This whole "I became 10x better" is vaporware.

It can kinda sorta maybe help sometimes a little bit is not vaporware

[avmich]

This day it's usually not a good professional at all if he thinks he's writing something novel.

[jimsimmons]

Yeah if you're getting paid $50K outside the bay maybe.

If you want big bucks you are writing original code, no two ways about it

[treme]

"Andrej Karpathy (born 23 October 1986[2]) is a Slovak-Canadian computer scientist who served as the director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla. He co-founded and formerly worked at OpenAI"

I think he should get some cred with such track record.

[loandbehold]

You didn't learn how to use these tools properly. If you did you wouldn't have that opinion. Karpathy doesn't just write code snippets for educational purposes. Most of the code he writes is for real world systems and it's not publicly available.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

What do you mean by professional that doesn't include Karpathy?

[Kiro]

I'm trying to understand how you can so easily dismiss all the professionals thinking it's useful. A more charitable explanation could be that it's useless for you but not others.