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by atomicnumber34 hours ago |
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upvoteby zozbot2343 hours ago|
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> because the real version of LLM coding is boring and unsexy

Some people do find it unfun, saying it deprives them of the happy "flow" of banging out code. Reaching "flow" when prompting LLMs arguably requires a somewhat deeper understanding of them as a proper technical tool, as opposed to a complete black box, or worse, a crystal ball.

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upvoteby cindyllm2 hours ago|
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upvoteby marhee4 hours ago|
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Software engineering is only about 20% writing code (the famous 40-20-40 split). Most people use it only for the first 40%, and very succesfully (im in that camp). If you use it to write your code you can theorettically maybe get 20% time improvement initially, but you loose a lot of time later redoing it or unraveling. Not worth bothering.
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upvoteby bdangubic3 hours ago|
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20% is one of those cool lies SWEs have been able to push through (like “our jobs are oh so very special we can’t really estimate it, we’ll create an entire sub-industries with our industry to make sure everyone knows we can’t estimate”).

SWEs spend 20% of the time writing code for exactly the same reason brick-layers spend 20% of their time laying bricks

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upvoteby megous3 hours ago|
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It can be any number of things. From spending hour or two just writing requirements, to giving an example of existing curated code from another project you wrote and would like to emulate, or rewriting existing apps in a different language/architecture (sort of like translating), to serving as a QA agent or reviewer for the LLM agent, or vice versa.

I kinda like how you can just use it for anything you like. I have bazillion personal projects, I can now get help with, polish up, simplify, or build UI for, and it's nice. Anything from reverse engineering, to data extraction, to playing with FPGAs, is just so much less tedious and I can focus on the fun parts.

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upvoteby devmor4 hours ago|
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There’s also just the negative association factor.

I use LLMs in my every day work. I’m also a strong critic of LLMs and absolutely loathe the hype cycle around them.

I have done some really cool things with copilot and Claude and I keep sharing them to within my working circle because I simply don’t want to interact that much with people who aren’t grounded on the subject.

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upvoteby cossray2 hours ago|
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I would be interested to hear your take on Copilot vs Claude. I have used Copilot (trial) in VS Code and I found it to mostly meet my needs. It could generate some plans and code, which I could review on the go. I found this very natural to me as I never felt 'left behind' in whatever code the AI was generating. However, most of the posts I see here are on Claude (I haven't tried it) and very few mentions of Copilot. What is your impression about them and the use cases each is strong in?
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upvoteby cassidy_co1 hours ago|
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(Context: I'm a different person, but have thoughts on this)

I started using Copilot at work because that's what the company policy was. It's a pretty strict environment, but it's perfectly serviceable and gets a lot of fresh, vetted updates. IDE integration with vs code was a huge plus for me.

Claude code is definitely a messier, buggier frontend for the LLM. It's clunkier to navigate and it has much more primitive context management tools. IDE integration is clunky with vs code, too.

However, if you want to take advantage of the Anthropic subscription services, I've found Claude Code is the way to go... Simply because Anthropic works hard to lock you into their ecosystem if you want the sweet discounts. I'm greedy, so I bit the bullet for all of the LLM coding stuff I do in my personal life.

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