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How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs

352 points · 350 comments · signa11

  1. chicken-stew · · focus · HN ↗
    Not so long ago I read something on HN which resonated with me: we’re moving into the era that is comparable to car mechanics enthusiasts. You have a previous generation of cars where people just enjoy working on with hand tools, and there’s modern cars where people like to tune with software patches.

    From the very start of llms I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with code that was generated for me. Either it’s buggy, it works but I end up losing an evening on some obscure bug, or it’s full of red flags.

    My latest hobby project is just in a text editor with markup and that’s it. I’m also done with the augmented assistance in the IDE. I google things I forgot. I constantly read these amazing stories of people vibe-coding some firmware/driver that just works, and honestly I’m starting to question whether I’m reading the posts of some promotional bot.

    1. qudat · · focus · HN ↗
      I just recently replaced LSP with ctags. I am loving it. I plan to write a post about it but I’m leaning heavily into grep and search tools to navigate code. I do miss some autocomplete and auto import features but other than that I can actually navigate through code better with ctags instead of go to definition.

      For linting style errors I’m using entr in a separate terminal which is also awesome.

      1. doyougnu · · focus · HN ↗
        Please write this up! I’ve had similar ideas but haven’t tried going back to ctags yet. I’d love to read about your experience.
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