Comment by llm_nerd
2 days ago
"its building it the right way, in an easily understood way, in a way that's easily extensible"
I am in a unique situation where I work with a variety of codebases over the week. I have had no problem at all utilizing Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 and Gemini CLI w/ Gemini 3.0 Pro to make excellent code that is indisputably "the right way", in an extremely clear and understandable way, and that is maximally extensible. None of them are greenfield projects.
I feel like this is a bit of je ne sais quoi where people appeal to some indemonstrable essence that these tools just can't accomplish, and only the "non-technical" people are foolish enough to not realize it. I'm a pretty technical person (about 30 years of software development, up to staff engineer and then VP). I think they have reached a pretty high level of competence. I still audit the code and monitor their creations, but I don't think they're the oft claimed "junior developer" replacement, but instead do the work I would have gotten from a very experienced, expert-level developer, but instead of being an expert at a niche, they're experts at almost every niche.
Are they perfect? Far from it. It still requires a practitioner who knows what they're doing. But frequently on here I see people giving takes that sound like they last used some early variant of Copilot or something and think that remains state of the art. The rest of us are just accelerating our lives with these tools, knowing that pretending they suck online won't slow their ascent an iota.
>llm_nerd >created two years ago
You AI hype thots/bots are all the same. All these claims but never backed up with anything to look at. And also alway claiming “you’re holding it wrong”.
I don't see how "two years ago" is incongruous with having been using LLMs for coding, it's exactly the timeline I would expect. Yes, some people do just post "git gud" but there are many people ITT and most of the others on LLM coding articles who are trying to explain their process to anyone who will listen. I'm not sure if it is fully explainable in a single comment though, I'd have to write a multi-part tutorial to cover everything but it's almost entirely just applying the same project management principles that you would in a larger team of developers but customized to the current limitations of LLMs. If you want full tutorials with examples I'm sure they're out there but I'd also just recommend reviewing some project management material and then seeing how you can apply it to a coding agent. You'll only really learn by doing.
>You AI hype thots/bots are all the same
This isn't twitter, so save the garbage rhetoric. And if you must question my account, I create a new account whenever I setup a new main PC, and randomly pick a username that is top of mind at the moment. This isn't professionally or personally affiliated in any way so I'm not trying to build a thing. I mean, if I had a 10 year old account that only managed a few hundred upvotes despite prolific commenting, I'd probably delete it out of embarrassment though.
>All these claims but never backed up with anything to look at
Uh...install the tools? Use them? What does "to look at" even mean? Loads of people are using these tools to great effect, while some tiny minority tell us online that no way they don't work, etc. And at some point they'll pull their head out of the sand and write the followup "Wait, they actually do".
I also have >30 years and I've had the same experience. I noticed an immediate improvement with 4.5 and I've been getting great results in general.
And yes I do make sure it's not generating crazy architecture. It might do that.. if you let it. So don't let it.
HN has a subset of users -- they're a minority, but they hit threads like this super hard -- who really, truly think that if they say that AI tools suck and are only for nubs loud enough and frequently enough, downvoting anyone who finds them useful, all AI advancements will unwind and it'll be the "good old days" again. It's rather bizarre stuff, but that's what happens when people in denial feel threatened.