Comment by analog_daddy

I think I have some tendencies to do so as well. More specifically, I have the itch to just spend some time, knowing or understanding the tools I use better. It Has paid dividends for me, since the tools we typically use for $work are super buggy yet powerful and like any good proprietary tool, abstracted behind an obscure shitty API. Experimenting with crazy things just allows me to run into bugs early on when, I have the patience to solve them.

But, it’s the first time in my short career, i have shied away from being on bleeding edge of tooling. Specifically, LLM tooling. Firstly, since LLM’s are not yet needed or good in my field of $work, but; even in my programming hobby, whenever I venture out to explore, it all feels too snake oil to me. And do I even need to begin why the f*k people curl | bash??

I dunno maybe its just old habits, but I can’t bring myself to download a skill or whatever without going through its contents.

And then it just is too much to keep up.

For instance, for a period of time, everyone on hn were glazing claude and then after having a great UI experience on their ios app, i got a simple one month subscription, but by that time, hn already was making friends with codex and pi. My searches for blog posts written by ‘AI/LLM’ normies using it for reasonable tasks, has been disappointing, and just too polluted with people completely vibing and not reviewing any code. And then you have power users whose entire purpose is to try out new stuff, rather than stay consistent on one toolchain and maybe also share a perspective of if the tool is degrading or not.

Sadly, amongst all the agentic hype, the autocompletion mode seems to have fallen behind which I enjoy a lot more since it allows me to architect things in a particular fashion without bugging myself with nitty gritty details.

Hopefully, as these things start costing more money, things will get streamlined to the point where few camps will emerge similar to how the text editors work. I am looking for an update to ‘what the vim of llm tooling look like’ blog post any day now.