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In my experience, it's usually good for finding out the bugs, but I take the fixes it provides with a grain of salt. There were numerous times where the fix could have lead to some more serious bugs because of some business logic special case scenarios that it didn't understand.
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Yeah, I'm seeing this at work too. It's capable of adjusting behavior to meet some narrow success criteria, but it can easily introduce bigger problems in the process in large coupled code bases, which it doesn't catch on its own. Automated tests help a bit, but I find I still have to steer it very strongly at work.
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It sounds like you understood what was happening here and used a tool effectively, nice.

That's very different from what a lot of vibe-coders do, like wholesale cloning and relicensing projects. This is happening in the GIS space, and these vibe-clone projects slightly hilariously inherit all the technical debt they didn't understand.

Nothing wrong with using LLMs, but I agree with Andrej Karpathy: "you can outsource your thinking, but not your understanding".

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I think that quote is very apt. I experimented with making realistic video game grass (inspired by Ghost of Tsushima), and let it take the reins. But its solution became very contrived and hard to steer in the direction I wanted without me learning the specifics of how grass rendering should work. Still, it seems that I can limit my understanding to the higher levels of abstractions in most cases now. For example, I made it clump grass together according to a voronoi diagram, yet I have no idea how the voronoi algorithm works.
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