Comment by iLoveOncall
6 days ago
You're completely twisting what I said. I've never talked about people claiming it's not making developers obsolete. We are obviously extremely far from that. I'm talking about people who say it doesn't work to build basic features in their projects correctly.
Just take a look at this comment on a different topic, which lists all the pre-requisite for those AI models to work well, from the perspective of someone who has bought into the hype: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48157235
If this is everything needed for an LLM to generate acceptable code, what is even the point of them?
Maybe we come from different cultures and context is harder to grasp just in text so maybe for those reasons your response feels ruder than I hope it was intended to be.
I am sorry for not being clear in my response but I didn't intend to twist your words. I am not sure where I did so. My response was intended to be a more general remark on the kind of discourse on this topic I see and that I think both sides are right from the context they are looking in with and also why I think both sides come out of this discussion exhausted of the other. Not discounting presence of bad actors but generally I think there are most engaging in good faith like you are probably.
Coming specifically to respond your last response, I don't think one needs all of these prerequisites to get value out of LLMs. In fact LLMs have helped me untangle some very messy ball of muds on projects where we previously deemed it not worth the effort and basically carried some codebases as legacy. Now we can write enough tests to feel confidence and do a port against those tests all in a span of few days, which we found impressive.
Now having said all this, I think I understand your perspective a bit better on your original comment.
While it's a very versatile hammer, if it doesn't work for your use case that's all great. I just think that a bit more patience though with honing it maybe could help you find areas where it could work for you. If not, cheers!
That's a list of like 6 things. And each of those less complicated a question then the seven thousand questions people throw at you when you complain about something not working right on a Linux distro or about speeding up build times for a new tool or configuring webpack or like pretty much any software tool. What lint rules are you using are you using poetry or uv are you running on Mac windows linux or wsl how are your security groups configured in aws - some tools are more plug and play but it's quite the stretch to say that asking "how is your code organized, do you have your agents.md config file set up, do you have tests, and how large is the codebase" is some sort of unmanageable list of questions for a software engineer to think through when figuring out wtf is going on with some new tooling they're using