Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
LLM code is higher quality than any codes I have seen in my 20 years in F500. So yeah you need to "guide" it, and ensure that it will not bypass all the security guidance for ex...But at least you are in control, although the cognitive load is much higher as well than just "blind trust of what is delivered".

But I can see the carnage with offshoring+LLM, or "most employees", including so call software engineer + LLM.

Huh, that explains a lot about the F500, and their buzzword slogans like "culture of excellence".

LLM code is still mostly absurdly bad, unless you tell it in painstaking detail what to do and what to avoid, and never ask it to do a bigger job at a time than a single function or very small class.

Edit: I'll admit though that the detailed explanation is often still much less work than typing everything yourself. But it is a showstopper for autonomous "agentic coding".

> unless you tell it in painstaking detail what to do and what to avoid, and never ask it to do a bigger job at a time than a single function or very small class.

This is hyperbolic, but the general sentiment is accurate enough, at least for now. I've noticed a bimodal distribution of quality when using these tools. The people who approach the LLM from the lens of a combo architect & PM, do all the leg work, set up the guard rails, define the acceptance criteria, these are the people who get great results. The people who walk up and say "sudo make me a sandwich" do not.

Also the latter group complains that they don't see the point of the first group. Why would they put in all the work when they could just code? But what they don't see is that *someone* was always doing that work, it just wasn't them in the past. We're moving to a world where the mechanical part of grinding the code is not worth much, people who defined their existence as avoiding all the legwork will be left in the cold.

loading story #47288534
loading story #47289556
loading story #47289124
loading story #47288898
loading story #47291970

  > LLM code is higher quality than any codes I have seen in my 20 years in F500.
"Any codes"?
At least my comment hasn't been reviewed or written by a LLM.

And in my French brain, code or codebase is countable and not uncountable.

loading story #47285502
loading story #47285205
loading story #47285228
loading story #47288065
You'll find, at times, that those communicating in a language that's not their primary language will tend to deviate from what one whose it was their primary language might expect.

If that's obvious to you than you're just being rude. If it's not obvious to you, then you'll also find this is a common deviance (plural 'code') from those who come from a particular primary language's region.

Edit; This got me thinking - what is the grammar/rule around what gets pluralized and what doesn't? How does one know that "code" can refer to a single line of code, a whole file of code, a project, or even the entirety of all code your eyes have ever seen without having to have an s tacked on to the end of it?

loading story #47285218
loading story #47285265
loading story #47285728
FWIW, I've noticed that scientists (native English speakers at least) will say "codes" rather "code". I don't know if this is universal or just specific domains (physics) nor if this is common or rare, but I've noticed it.
Giving it prompts of the Shannon project helps for security
Offshoring pretty much guarantees a couple vibe coders will be there to operate
You've worked at some shitty places. Nothing I've seen from Claude matches even my worst coworker (and my last job was an F500)