Comment by sksishbs
4 days ago
It’s kind of funny - there’s another thread up where a dev claimed a 20-50x speed up. To their credit they posted videos and links to the repo of their work.
And when you check the work, a large portion of it was hand rolling an ORM (via an LLM). Relatively solved problem that an LLM would excel at, but also not meaningfully moving the needle when you could use an existing library. And likely just creating more debt down the road.
Reminds me of a post I read a few days ago of someone crowing about an LLM writing for them an email format validator. They did not have the LLM code up an accompanying send-an-email-validation loop, and were blithely kept uninformed by the LLM of the scar tissue built up by experience in the industry on how curiously a deep rabbit hole email validation becomes.
If you’ve been around the block and are judicious how you use them, LLM’s are a really amazing productivity boost. For those without that judgement and taste, I’m seeing footguns proliferate and the LLM’s are not warning them when someone steps on the pressure plate that’s about to blow off their foot. I’m hopeful we will this year create better context window-based or recursive guardrails for the coding agents to solve for this.
Yeah I love working with Claude Code, I agree that the new models are amazing, but I spend a decent amount of time saying "wait, why are we writing that from scratch, haven't we written a library for that, or don't we have examples of using a third party library for it?".
There is probably some effective way to put this direction into the claude.md, but so far it still seems to do unnecessary reimplementation quite a lot.
This is a typical problem you see in autodidacts. They will recreate solutions to solved problems, trip over issues that could have been avoided, and generally do all of things you would expect someone to do if they are working with skill but no experience.
LLMs accelerate this and make it more visible, but they are not the cause. It is almost always a person trying to solve a problem and just not knowing what they don't know because they are learning as they go.
I am hopeful autodidacts will leverage an LLM world like they did with an Internet search world from a library world from a printed word world. Each stage in that progression compressed the time it took for them to encompass a span of comprehension of a new body of understanding before applying to practice, expanded how much they applied the new understanding to, and deepened their adoption scope of best practices instead of reinventing the wheel.
In this regard, I see LLM's as a way for us to way more efficiently encode, compress, convey and enable operational practice our combined learned experiences. What will be really exciting is watching what happens as LLM's simultaneously draw from and contribute to those learned experiences as we do; we don't need full AGI to sharply realize massive benefits from just rapidly, recursively enabling a new highly dynamic form of our knowledge sphere that drastically shortens the distance from knowledge to deeply-nuanced praxis.
> [The cause] is almost always a person trying to solve a problem and just not knowing what they don't know because they are learning as they go.
Isn't that what "using an LLM" is supposed to solve in the first place?
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My impression is that LLM users are the kind of people that HATED that their questions on StackOverflow got closed because it was duplicated.
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I've hand-rolled my own ultra-light ORM because the off-the-shelf ones always do 100 things you don't need.*
And of course the open source ones get abandoned pretty regularly. Type ORM, which a 3rd party vendor used on an app we farmed out to them, mutates/garbles your input array on a multi-line insert. That was a fun one to debug. The issue has been open forever and no one cares. https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm/issues/9058
So yeah, if I ever need an ORM again, I'm probably rolling my own.
*(I know you weren't complaining about the idea of rolling your own ORM, I just wanted to vent about Type ORM. Thanks for listening.)
This is the thing that will be changing the open source and small/medium SaaS world a lot.
Why use a 3rd party dependency that might have features you don't need when you can write a hyper-specific solution in a day with an LLM and then you control the full codebase.
Or why pay €€€ for a SaaS every month when you can replicate the relevant bits yourself?
It seems to me these days, any code I want to write tries to solve problems that LLMs already excel at. Thankfully my job is perhaps just 10% about coding, and I hope people like you still have some coding tasks that cannot be easily solved by LLMs.
We should not exeggarate the capabilities of LLMs, sure, but let's also not play "don't look up".
"And likely just creating more debt down the road"
In the most inflationary era of capabilities we've seen yet, it could be the right move. What's debt when in a matter of months you'll be able to clear it in one shot?