Comment by rcarmo
21 hours ago
4 lines of JS. A screenful of “reasoning”. Not much I can agree with.
Meanwhile I just asked Gemini in VS Code Agent Mode to build an HTTP-like router using a trie and then refactor it as a Python decorator, and other than a somewhat dumb corner case it failed at, it generated a pretty useful piece of code that saved me a couple of hours (I had actually done this before a few years ago, so I knew exactly what I wanted).
Replace programmers? No. Well, except front-end (that kind of code is just too formulaic, transactional and often boring to do), and my experiments with React and Vue were pretty much “just add CSS”.
Add value? Heck yes - although I am still very wary of letting LLM-written code into production without a thorough review.
Not even front end, unless it literally is a dumb thin wrapper around a back end. If you are processing anything on that front end, AI is likely to fall flat as quickly as it would on the backend.
based on what?
My own experience writing a web-based, SVG-based 3D modeler. No traditional back end, but when working on the underlying 3D engine it shits the bed from all the broken assumptions and uncommon conventions used there. And in the UI, the case I have in mind involved pointer capture and event handling, it chases down phantoms declaring it's working around behavior that isn't in the spec. I bring it the spec, I bring it minimal examples producing the desired behavior, and it still can't produce working code. It still tries to critique existing details that aren't part of the problem, as evidenced by the fact it took me 5 minutes to debug and fix myself when I got tired of pruning context. At one point it highlighted a line of code and suggested the problem could be a particular function getting called after that line. That function was called 10 lines above the highlighted line, in a section it re-output in a quote block.
So yes, it's bad for front end work too if your front end isn't just shoveling data into your back end.
AI's fine for well-trodden roads. It's awful if you're beating your own path, and especially bad at treading a new path just alongside a superhighway in the training data.
3 replies →
> I had actually done this before a few years ago, so I knew exactly what I wanted
Oh :) LLMs do work sometimes when you already know what you want them to write.
> that kind of code is just too formulaic, transactional and often boring to do
No offense, but that sounds like every programmer that hasn't done front-end development to me. Maybe for some class of front-ends (the same stuff that Ruby on Rails could generate), but past that things tend to get not boring real fast.
I do a fair amount of dashboards and data handling stuff. I don’t really want to deal with React/Vue at all, and AÍ takes most of the annoyance away.
> I had actually done this before a few years ago, so I knew exactly what I wanted
Why not just use the one you already wrote?
> Why not just use the one you already wrote?
Might be owned by a previous employer.