Comment by zaptrem
6 days ago
Even on stuff it has no chance of doing on its own, I find it useful to basically git reset repeatedly and start with more and more specific instructions. At the very least it helps me think through my plan better.
6 days ago
Even on stuff it has no chance of doing on its own, I find it useful to basically git reset repeatedly and start with more and more specific instructions. At the very least it helps me think through my plan better.
Yeah...I've toyed with that, but there's still a productivity maximum where throwing it all away and starting from scratch is a worse idea, probabilistically, than just fixing whatever thing is clearly wrong.
Just to make it concrete, today I spent a few hours going through a bunch of HTML + embedded styles and removing gobs and gobs of random styles the LLMs glommed on that "worked", but was brittle and failed completely as soon as I wanted to do something slightly different than the original spec. The cycle I described above led to a lot of completely unnecessary markup, paired with unnecessary styles to compensate for the crappiness of the original DOM. I was able to refactor to a much saner overall structure, but it took some time and thinking. Was I net ahead? I don't really know.
Given that LLMs almost always write this kind of "assembled from StackOverflow" code, I have precisely 0% confidence that I'd end up in a better place if I just reset the working branch and started from scratch.
It kind of reminds me of human biology -- given billions of years of random evolution you can end up with incredible sophistication, but the end result will be incomprehensible and nearly impossible to alter.