[haburka]

It’s not just you, I think some engineers benefit a lot from AI and some don’t. It’s probably a combination of factors including: AI skepticism, mental rigidity, how popular the tech stack is, and type of engineering. Some problems are going to be very straightforward.

I also think it’s that people don’t know how to use the tool very well. In my experience I don’t guide it to do any kind of software pattern or ideology. I think that just confuses the tool. I give it very little detail and have it do tasks that are evident from the code base.

Sometimes I ask it to do rather large tasks and occasionally the output is like 80% of the way there and I can fix it up until it’s useful.

[mlyle]

Yah. Latest thing I wrote was

* Code using sympy to generate math problems testing different skills for students, with difficulty values affecting what kinds of things are selected, and various transforms to problems possible (e.g. having to solve for z+4 of 4a+b instead of x) to test different subskills

(On this part, the LLM did pretty well. The code was correct after a couple of quick iterations, and the base classes and end-use interfaces are correct. There's a few things in the middle that are unnecessarily "superstitious" and check for conditions that can't happen, and so I need to work with the LLM to clean it up.

* Code to use IRT to estimate the probability that students have each skill and to request problems with appropriate combinations of skills and difficulties for each student.

(This was somewhat garbage. Good database & backend, but the interface to use it was not nice and it kind of contaminated things).

* Code to recognize QR codes in the corners of worksheet, find answer boxes, and feed the image to ChatGPT to determine whether the scribble in the box is the answer in the correct form.

(This was 100%, first time. I adjusted the prompt it chose to better clarify my intent in borderline cases).

The output was, overall, pretty similar to what I'd get from a junior engineer under my supervision-- a bit wacky in places that aren't quite worth fixing, a little bit of technical debt, a couple of things more clever that I didn't expect myself, etc. But I did all of this in three hours and $12 expended.

The total time supervising it was probably similar to the amount of time spent supervising the junior engineer... but the LLM turns things around quick enough that I don't need to context switch.

[novembermike]

I think it's fair to call code LLM's similar to fairly bad but very fast juniors that don't get bored. That's a serious drawback but it does give you something to work with. What scares me is non-technical people just vibe coding because it's like a PM driving the same juniors with no one to give sanity checks.

[AlexCoventry]

> I also think it’s that people don’t know how to use the tool very well.

I think this is very important. You have to look at what it suggests critically, and take what makes sense. The original comment was absolutely correct that AI-generated code is way too verbose and disconnected from the realities of the application and large-scale software design, but there can be kernels of good ideas in its output.

[oooyay]

I think a lot of it is tool familiarity. I can do a lot with Cursor but frankly I find out about "big" new stuff every day like agents.md. If I wasn't paying attention or also able to use Cursor at home then I'd probably learn more inefficiently. Learning how to use rule globs versus project instructions was a big learning moment. As I did more LLM work on our internal tools that was also a big lesson in prompting and compaction.

Certain parts of HN and Reddit I think are very invested in nay-saying because it threatens their livelihoods or sense of self. A lot of these folks have identities that are very tied up in being craftful coders rather than business problem solvers.

[abullinan]

Junior engineers see better results than senior engineers for obvious reasons.

[sumeno]

Junior engineers think they see better results than senior engineers for obvious reasons