Comment by Hammershaft

6 days ago

I'd like to see any actual case studies. So far I have only heard vague hype.

Software engineering is always light on case studies though, for instance test driven development, or static vs. dynamic typing, people have been debating these for quite a long time.

i mean i can state that i built a company wihtin the last year where id say 95% of my code involved using an LLM. I am an experienced dev so yes it makes mistakes and it requires my expertise to be sure the code works and to fix subtle bugs; however, i built this company me and 2 others in about 7 months for what wouldve easily taken me 3 years without the aid of LLMs. Is that an indictment of my ability? maybe, but we are doing quite well for ourselves at 3M arr already on only 200k expense.

  • That’s genuinely far more interesting and exciting to me (and I’m sure others too) than this sort of breathless provocation, esp if code and prompts etc are shared. Have you written about it?

    • i have not written about it due to me being a silent partner in the company and dont want my name publicly attatched to it, but the code and prompts is all more like talking to a buddy is how i use it, i ask it to build specific things then i look through and make changes. For instance a few examples i can give is there is a lot of graph traversal in my data i built, I'm not an expert on graph traversal, so I researched what would be a good algo for my type of data, and then utilized claude to implement the papers algorithm into my code and data structures. I dont have the llm in any steps that the customer interact with (there is some fuzzy stuff but nothing consistently run) but i would say an llm has touched over 90% of the code i wrote. its just an upgraded rubber ducky to me.

      If i wasn't experienced in computer science this would all fall apart however i do have to fix almost all the code, but spending 10 mins fixing something is better than 3 days figuring it out in the first place (again this might be more unique to my coding and learning style)