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It is meant to offset not knowing why everything degrades and you can't make progress after the first month. Is that OK for you?
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No you misunderstand me. I support such a view but cannot hold it because my pace at work is so much fast. And hand coding like this will make personal projects s slow and choreful with no visible progress. Like where is the joy in that?
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The bottleneck is very rarely the typing.
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Has this been your first hand experience?

And if so, in what work, and have you tried debugging issues with SOTA models?

From my experience it is certainly not the case that you cannot make progress after the first month.

I work on native mobile applications.

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I work on mobile native applications.

Without an active harness (eg. Appium) that can end-to-end deterministically verify the changes you make continue to work correctly it is almost impossible to continue to keep the same pace on the app.

Unsupervised LLMs (even fabel) are categorically incapable of running parallel unsupervised mobile app feature development.

That is my personal, first hand experience working in a team in this space.

What you are (I guess?) experiencing is user-in-the-loop light touch LLM development where you can 80% most tasks quite quickly (much faster than without assistance!) with a small number of human developers working on largely unrelated features and manually verifying they are correct and manually fixing the platform specific issues you encounter.

Maintaining a strong appium end-to-end test suite is still extremely challenging with notifications and maps.

Honestly, it blows my mind you could even being to claim that of all things, native apps using obscure languages like swift are suitable for this, compared to the much much easier path of web + react.

You might say “yeah yeah, but one month? Come on!”

…but have you actually seen how much code fabel can write in a month?

Its a lot.

So sure, you say, work at a slower pace. Don't just endlessly run a frontier model in unsupervised feature development mode.

Yes… you see, thats the point. Thats what the op is saying.

Move more slowly, and you can avoid building a spaghetti castle (ok sure! If you dont wanna, maybe don't retype every character by hand, but the point of that practice is not upping your wpm typing speed. :p It is to take the time to think, design and collaborate, not rush rush rush)

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I have no idea what "an active harness" is referring to, Appium looks like a cross platform testing framework.

I doubt it brings any advantage over XCUITest here.

What is supposed to be the problem with parallel development? I use worktrees, and it works just fine with five agents in parallel.

Automated end-to-end testing on mobile is notoriously flaky, but that's nothing new, and I think it is now much easier to deal with.

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Depends what they're doing... I can crack out a basic UI in a few hours at my job, and I don't use LLMs at all, and I wouldn't class myself as an expert developer or anything
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AKA preventing cognitive debt
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Do you really find your typing speed to be the bottleneck in getting things done? I suppose that's pretty easily fixed, at least.

Anyway the author did address that

> Using LLMs this way allows me to work faster than not using LLMs at all, but I'm still slower than those who are willing to allow the machine to think for them. Instead of being 10x faster, I'm probably only 2x faster. But what I lose out on in terms of speed, I gain in terms of a deeper understanding of my code.

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