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.
> The second thing is that using LLMs in a useful way is a skill in itself.
I have to disagree here. People who are really into agentic coding like to say/believe this, but come on, it's not rocket science! You literally ask the agent to do something and it does it, that's it. As long as you use a recent model it will do it really well regardless of how fancy your prompt is. There's no moat here, anyone can do it. Your job will be gone and so will mine.
> You literally ask the agent to do something and it does it, that's it
Exactly, you have to know what to ask, especially on large codebase. I still have to baby sit Astra and opus 5.5 into reusing existing structures/functions, not reinventing the wheels, telling them "yes this might be a legit race condition, but you added 5000 LOC and I'm pretty sure it will never ever be a problem in production given it would require 5 distinct catastrophic failures at once to trigger it, if it ever happens log it in sentry and we'll have a look by then".
Some people are really really bad and won't even think about asking stuff like "run a memory profile and see if we can decrease our footprint", "benchmark the top 3 options for this bug and keep the one that uses the less cpu but still respond under 150ms".
You still need to have a broad understanding of what a computer is and how it works, both are skills, which a lot of dev didn't have anyways, but now they can shit out a looooot more code
My wording was bad. I've been using latest models recently and I can pretty much say build xyz feature or fix xyz bug and it will do it really well. It will ask me any clarifying questions. It will highlight things I haven't thought about. It will make suggestions on how to test and verify. And all of these things it will highlight the recommended choice I should choose.
So I stand by my assertion that anyone can do this now, it's definitely not a hard to learn/master skill, and people who say it is are naively believing there is a moat around their career.
So people who choose to not use it are not losing out on building any skills- in fact if they are focusing on hand coding and learning and keeping their brain sharp they, in my opinion, will be in a much stronger place than the AI enthusiasts whose brains are rotting.
You’re so profoundly incorrect that it’s obviously not worth the time and effort to even begin to try to realign you with reality on a site like this. I don’t know how to educate others on this topic. It’s a serious problem and the gap is continually broadening.
chicken-stew · · focus · HN ↗
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.
xgb84j · · focus · HN ↗
The second thing is that using LLMs in a useful way is a skill in itself.
i_love_retros · · focus · HN ↗
I have to disagree here. People who are really into agentic coding like to say/believe this, but come on, it's not rocket science! You literally ask the agent to do something and it does it, that's it. As long as you use a recent model it will do it really well regardless of how fancy your prompt is. There's no moat here, anyone can do it. Your job will be gone and so will mine.
toasty228 · · focus · HN ↗
Exactly, you have to know what to ask, especially on large codebase. I still have to baby sit Astra and opus 5.5 into reusing existing structures/functions, not reinventing the wheels, telling them "yes this might be a legit race condition, but you added 5000 LOC and I'm pretty sure it will never ever be a problem in production given it would require 5 distinct catastrophic failures at once to trigger it, if it ever happens log it in sentry and we'll have a look by then".
Some people are really really bad and won't even think about asking stuff like "run a memory profile and see if we can decrease our footprint", "benchmark the top 3 options for this bug and keep the one that uses the less cpu but still respond under 150ms".
You still need to have a broad understanding of what a computer is and how it works, both are skills, which a lot of dev didn't have anyways, but now they can shit out a looooot more code
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
i_love_retros · · focus · HN ↗
So I stand by my assertion that anyone can do this now, it's definitely not a hard to learn/master skill, and people who say it is are naively believing there is a moat around their career.
So people who choose to not use it are not losing out on building any skills- in fact if they are focusing on hand coding and learning and keeping their brain sharp they, in my opinion, will be in a much stronger place than the AI enthusiasts whose brains are rotting.
cheevly · · focus · HN ↗