Comment by bawolff
2 days ago
> What I "fear" from LLMs-in-coding is that they will provide an unlimited flow of "mess around until it works" drudgery tasks with none of the upside.
I feel like its very true to the hacker spirit to spend more time customizing your text editor than actually programming, so i guess this is just the natural extension.
Even when 100% issue-oriented (that is, spending no time on editor-customizatons or developing other skill and toolkits) consider the difference between:
1. This thing at work broke. Understand why it broke, and fix it in a way which stays and has preventative power. In the rare case where the cause is extremely shallow, like a typo, at least the fix is still reliable.
2. This thing at work broke. The LLM zigged when it should have zagged for no obvious reason. There is plausible-looking code that is wrong in a way that doesn't map to any human (mis-)understanding. Tweak it and hope for the best.