Comment by unified101
5 hours ago
I'm afraid this is "cope".
There's hardly any work you can think of which can't be done faster / beter with ai assistance, when your role is of reviewing and directing. If you have an anti-example, would like to hear.
I really wish that LLMs could generate good quality code without repeated instructing.
Here's where I think the issue is; they are trained to solve a problem. Not how, just whether or not they did.
Example: I asked Luna to use parser combinators to parse an Excel sheet that was represented as sparse triples (row, column, data). It imported the library and wrote spaghetti if-statement soup to get it to work. I asked Astra to fix it and it just refined the spaghetti slightly. I was able to browbeat Astra into actually using the library to complete the task. Was it faster than me doing it by hand? Probably. Was it more frustrating? Way more.
And every time I review vibe code it's always the same. Bespoke functions everywhere, no greater themes or ideas. No bigger picture. Your code can't support much if it has no central themes. You can probably one-shot a three js game to post on r/singularity for updoots. Not real code though.
I feel like the optimal way to use an LLM is to code until you feel like the rest of a problem is trivial and then you hand it off. And sometimes they still erase my code and add their own style lol
Not OP but here's my take on it.
> There's hardly any work you can think of which can't be done faster / beter with ai assistance
True, and someone needs to be the creative brain behind the decisions. AI can help you implement. When I say help, I mean literally help because one-shotting and vague prompts can get you only so far, usually with a lackluster result. While AI is good at analyzing solutions, and finding out holes in one's thinking, ultimately, it is some creative actor that needs to understand the bigger picture to evaluate trade-offs, understand scope creeps, and spot overengineered implementations. For now that actor is a human.
> If you have an anti-example, would like to hear.
In my personal experience, especially with greenfield projects, smarter models tend to overengineer the solutions. However, I haven't used Fable and Astra models, maybe they are better at creative tasks without overengineering.
the trouble is if i have to review/direct the model, suddenly we go from a 10x increase in speed to a 1-3x increase in speed. sure it will be faster, but im still limited by my reviewing/directing speed, which is slower than usual because I didn't write the code