Comment by locknitpicker

25 days ago

> Yeah, I keep hearing people say how LLMs write amazing code now…

You keep hearing people saying AI coding assistants and coding agents can easily output working code. With enough work they can easily output that follows your own coding style and restrictions.

If you prompt a coding agent to write code following your personal choices and recommendations and it outputs less than amazing code... What does it tell you?

> Personally I have not seen this amazing code.

You get out of it exactly what you put into it. Garbage in, garbage out. I mean, one of the prompt styles they support is literally "implement this following the style used in this component". And people complain the code generated from your prompts and with your own code as a reference turns out to be crap? Strange. Moreover, code assistants excel at refactoring work.

Nah.

The model is trained on a ginormous corpus of code. The problem is, most code is shitty. My code isn't.

Using a model means constantly fighting mediocrity, to the point where the trying to prompt it into shape often becomes more work than just writing the goddamn thing myself.

Yes, I can prompt. But I can't prompt understanding into the pattern matching machine. It will always revert to the undesirable mean.

> You keep hearing people saying AI coding assistants and coding agents can easily output working code.

No, I meant what I wrote. I keep hearing people say how LLMs write amazing code now.