That's beside my point. You are trading off the LoC for quality of code. You're not onto some big secret here - I've also built complete fullstack web applications with LLMs, complete with ORM data models and payment integrations. With the issue being....the LLMs will often produce the laziest code possible, such as putting the stripe secret directly into the frontend for anyone with two neurons in their brain to see.... or mixing up TS and JS code...or suggesting an outdated library version.... or for the thousandth time not using the auth functions in the backend we already implemented, and instead adding again session authentication in the expressjs handlers...etc etc. etc. We all know how to "knock out" major applications with them. Again you are not sitting on a big secret that the rest of us have yet to find out. "Knocking out" an application with an LLM most of us have done several times over the last few years, most of them not being toy examples like yours. The issue is the quality of the code and the question whether the effort we have to put into controlling the slot machine is worth the effort.
simonw|4 days ago
> Again you are not sitting on a big secret that the rest of us have yet to find out. "Knocking out" an application with an LLM most of us have done several times over the last few years, most of them not being toy examples like yours.
That's still a very tiny portion of the software developer population. I know that because I talk to people - there is a desperate need for grounded, hype-free guidance to help the rest of our industry navigate this stuff and that's what I intend to provide.
The hardest part is exactly what you're describing here: figuring out how to get great results despite the models often using outdated libraries, writing lazy code, leaking API tokens, messing up details etc.
hansmayer|4 days ago
So you see, after so much hype and hard and soft promotion efforts ( I count your writing in the latter category), you'd think it should not be "us" figuring it out - should it not be the people who are shoving this crap down our throats?
> That's still a very tiny portion of the software developer population. I know that because I talk to people - there is a desperate need for grounded, hype-free guidance to help the rest of our industry navigate this stuff and that's what I intend to provide.
That's a very arrogant position to assume - on the one hand there is no big secret to using these tools provided you can express yourself at all in written language. However some people for various reasons, I suspect mostly those who wandered into this profession as "coders" in the last years from other, less-paid disciplines, and lacking in basic understanding of computers, plus being motivated purely extrinsically - by money - I suspect those people may treat these tools as wonder oracles and may be stupid enough to think the problem is their "prompting" and not inherent un-reliability of LLMs. But everyone else, that is those of us who understand computers at a bit deeper level, do not want to fix Sams and Darios shit LLMs. These folks promised us no less than superintelligent systems, doing this, doing that, curing cancer, writing all the code in 6 months (or is it now 5 months already), creating a society where "work is optional" etc. So again - where TF is all of this shit promised by people sponsoring your soft promotion of LLMs? Why should we develop dependence on tools built by people who obviously dont know WTF they are talking about and who have been fundamentally wrong on several ocassions over the past few years. Whatever you are trying to do, whether you honestly believe in it or not I am afraid is a fool's errand at best.