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Comment by manutreebot

3 days ago

I have been seeing this sort of mindset frequently in response to agentic / LLM coding. I believe it to be incorrect. Coding agents w Claude 4 Opus are far more useful and accurate than these comments suggest. I use LLMs everyday in my job as a performance engineer at a big company to write complex code. It helps a ton.

The caveat is that user approach makes all the difference. You can easily end up with these bad experiences if you use it incorrectly. You need to break down your task into manageable chunks of moderate size/complexity, and then specify all detail and context rigorously, almost to the level of pseudocode, and then re-prompt any misunderstandings (and fail fast and restart if LLM misunderstands). You get an intuition for how to best communite with the LLM. There’s a skill and learning curve to using LLMs for coding. It is a different type of workflow. It is unintuitive that this would be true, (that one would have to practice and get better at using them) and that’s why I think you see takes waving off LLMs so often.

I didn't wave off Claude code or LLMs at all here. In fact, I said they're an incredible speedup for certain types of problem. I am a happy paying customer of Claude code. Read the whole comment.

(I'm critical of LLMs but mean no harm with this question) Have you measured if this workflow is actually faster or better at all? I have tried the autocomplete stuff, chat interface (copy snippets + give context and then copy back to editor) and aider, but none of these have given me better speed than just a search engine and the occasional question to ChatGPT when it gets really cryptic.

  • I find it also really depends on how well you know the domain. I found it incredibly helpful for some Python/tensorflow stuff which I had no experience with. No idea what the API looks like, what functions exist/are built in, etc. Loosely describe what I want even if it ends up being just a few lines of code saves time shifting through cryptic documentation.

    For other stuff that I know like the back of my hand, not so much.

I agree. Sonnet 4 has been a breeze to work with. It makes mistakes, but few.

At least for the CRUDs that I make, I really don't think I need a better model. I just wanted it to get much cheaper.