[robhlt]

It's nice that AI can fix bugs fast, but it's better to not even have bugs in the first place. By using someone else's battle tested code (like a framework) you can at least avoid the bugs they've already encountered and fixed.

[scoofy]

I spent Dry January working on a new coding project and since all my nerd friends have been telling me to try to code with LLM's I gave it a shot and signed up to Google Gemini...

All I can say is "holy shit, I'm a believer." I've probably got close to a year's worth of coding done in a month and a half.

Busy work that would have taken me a day to look up, figure out, and write -- boring shit like matplotlib illustrations -- they are trivial now.

Things that are ideas that I'm not sure how to implement "what are some different ways to do this weird thing" that I would have spend a week on trying to figure out a reasonable approach, no, it's basically got two or three decent ideas right away, even if they're not perfect. There was one vectorization approach I would have never thought of that I'm now using.

Is the LLM wrong? Yes, all the damn time! Do I need to, you know, actually do a code review then I'm implementing ideas? Very much yes! Do I get into a back and forth battle with the LLM when it gets starts spitting out nonsense, shut the chat down, and start over with a newly primed window? Yes, about once every couple of days.

It's still absolutely incredible. I've been a skeptic for a very long time. I studied philosophy, and the conceptions people have of language and Truth get completely garbled by an LLM that isn't really a mind that can think in the way we do. That said, holy shit it can do an absolute ton of busy work.

[poulsbohemian]

What kind of project / prompts - what’s working for you? /I spent a good 20 years in the software world but have been away doing other things professionally for couple years. Recently was in the same place as you, with a new project and wanting to try it out. So I start with a generic Django project in VSCode, use the agent mode, and… what a waste of time. The auto-complete suggestions it makes are frequently wrong, the actions it takes in response to my prompts tend to make a mess on the order of a junior developer. I keep trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong, as I’m prompting pretty simple concepts at it - if you know Django, imagine concepts like “add the foo module to settings.py” or “Run the check command and diagnose why the foo app isn’t registered correctly” Before you know it, it’s spiraling out of control with changes it thinks it is making, all of which are hallucinations.

[robhlt]

I'm (mostly) a believer too, and I think AI makes using and improving these existing frameworks and libraries even easier.

You mentioned matplotlib, why does it make sense to pay for a bunch of AI agents to re-invent what matplotlib does and fix bugs that matplotlib has already fixed, instead of just having AI agents write code that uses it.

[james_marks]

Because frameworks don’t have bugs? Or unpredictable dependency interactions?

This is generous, to the say the least.

[camdenreslink]

Well maintained, popular frameworks have github issues that frequently get resolved with newly patched versions of the framework. Sometimes bugs get fixed that you didn't even run into yet so everybody benefits.

Will your bespoke LLM code have that? Every issue will actually be an issue in production experienced by your customers, that will have to be identified (better have good logging and instrumentation), and fixed in your codebase.

[g947o]

Frameworks that are (relatively) buggy and slow to address bugs lose popularity, to the point that people will spontaneously create alternatives. This happened too many times.

[fullstackchris]

> better to not have bugs in the first place

you must have never worked on any software project ever

[Balinares]

Have you? Then you know that the amount of defects scales linearly with the amount of code. As things stand models write a lot more code than a skilled human for a given requirement.

[MrDarcy]

In practice using someone else’s framework means you’re accepting the risk of the thousands of bugs in the framework that have no relevance to your business use case and will never be fixed.

[g947o]

Yet people still use frameworks, before and after the age of LLMs. Frameworks must have done something right, I guess. Otherwise everyone will vibe their own little React in the codebase.