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Comment by XCSme

6 days ago

> Still saves a lot of time vs typing everything from scratch.

In my experience, it takes longer to debug/instruct the LLM than to write it from scratch.

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XCSme

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Culonavirus  6 days ago

Depends on what you're doing. For example when you're writing something like React components and using something like Tailwind for styling, I find the speedup is close to 10X.

  • XCSme  5 days ago

    Scaffolding works fine, for things that are common, and you already have 100x examples on the web. Once you need something more specific, it falls apart and leads to hours of prompting and debugging for something that takes 30 minutes to write from scratch.

    Some basic things it fails at:

      * Upgrading the React code-base from Material-UI V4 → V5
  * Implementing a simple header navigation dropdown in HTML/CSS that looks decent and is usable (it kept having bugs with hovering, wrong sizes, padding, responsiveness, duplicated code etc.)
  * Changing anything. About half of the time, it keeps saying "I made those changes", but no changes were made (it happens with all of them, Windsurf, Copilot, etc.).

  • ksenzee  6 days ago

    This can’t be stressed enough: it depends on what you’re doing. Developers talking about whether LLMs are useful are just talking past each other unless they say “useful for React” or “useful for Rust.” I mostly write Drupal code, and the JetBrains LLM autocomplete saves me a few keystrokes, maybe. It’s not amazing. My theory is that there just isn’t much boilerplate Drupal code out there to train on: everything possible gets pushed out of code and into configuration + UI. If I were writing React components I’d be having an entirely different experience.

  • nijave  6 days ago

    Isn't there some way to speed up with codegen besides using LLMs?

    • frank_nitti  6 days ago

      Some may have a better answer, but I often compare with tools like OpenAPI and AsyncAPI generators where HTTP/AMQP/etc code can be generated for servers, clients and extended documentation viewers.

      The trade off here would be that you must create the spec file (and customize the template files where needed) which drives the codegen, in exchange for explicit control over deterministic output. So there’s more typing but potentially less cognitive overhead with reviewing a bunch of LLM output.

      For this use case I find the explicit codegen UX preferable to inspecting what the LLM decided to do with my human-language prompt, if attempting to have the LLM directly code the library/executable source (as opposed to asking it to create the generator, template or API spec).

  • azemetre  6 days ago

    Isn’t this because the LLMs had like a million+ react tutorials/articles/books/repos to train on?

    I mean I try to use them for svelte or vue and it still recommends react snippets sometimes.

    • Culonavirus  6 days ago

      Generally speaking, "LLMs" that I use are always the latest thinking versions of the flagship models (Grok 3/Gemini 2.5/...). GPT4o (and equivalent) are a mess.

      But you're correct, when you use more exotic and/or quite new libraries, the outputs can be of mixed quality. For my current stack (Typescript, Node, Express, React 19, React Router 7, Drizzle and Tailwind 4) both Grok 3 (the paid one with 100k+ context) and Gemini 2.5 are pretty damn good. But I use them for prototyping, i.e. quickly putting together new stuff, for types, refactorings... I would never trust their output verbatim. (YET.) "Build an app that ..." would be a nightmare, but React-like UI code at sufficiently granular level is pretty much the best case scenario for LLMs as your components should be relatively isolated from the rest of the app and not too big anyways.

    • lenglain  5 days ago

      I have had no issues with LLMs trying to force a language on me. I tried the whole snake game test with ChatGPT but Instead of using Python I asked it to use the nodejs bindings for raylib, which is rather unusual.

      It did it in no time and no complaints.

      1 reply →

    • lovich  6 days ago

      I use https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/ for my IDE which learns on your codebase, so it does end up saving me a ton of time after its learned my patterns and starts suggesting entire classes hooked up to the correct properties in my EF models.

      It lets me still have my own style preferences with the benefit of AI code generation. Bridged the barrier I had with code coming from Claude/ChatGPT/etc where its style preferences were based on the wider internets standards. This is probably a preference on the level of tabs vs spaces, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯