Comment by zer00eyz
18 hours ago
> For example, it helps... debug things... and write scripts to ask questions.
Im guessing this isnt code that needs to "scale", that needs to "be elegant", that you arent focused on maintainability for the next decade. That its built for purpose and left behind.
Its all the code that for a programer would normally be in this matrix https://xkcd.com/1205/ (is it worth your time) -
Yeah, for someone like me in a lot of ways it's a dream come true. I have domain expertise in my field, I have a ton of computer knowledge due to building HPC clusters and working in Linux every day for years, I have lots of problems computers can solve, but no formal programming expertise. Before, muddling through Python or fixing segfaults in academic software would have been days to weeks. Now it's minutes.
I think that (understandably) HN is full of professional programmers for whom code is the product, and so LLMs are often viewed through that lens. But for someone like me, a drug is the product, not code. One off vibe coded slop is both fine, and often an upgrade over the academic software I was using.
For instance, last week I took a piece of software that decompresses a TIFF file and multithreaded it for an almost 4x speedup. I'd always known it was single threaded and it irked me because I could see my pipelines waiting for it to catch up, but I never had the expertise in C++ to go fix it. Claude did it in 30 minutes and I didn't even have to go through the hassle of compiling it again - it did that too.
What I don't know is, if someone wasn't in the trenches for a decade learning how computers work, would the results be as good?
I don’t think the results would be as good if you just prompted “make this faster” as compared to “make this multithreaded”. You had high confidence in the cause of the slow down which a non-technical person might not have.