As a developer but also product person, I keep trying to use AI to code for me

Ditto. I started out excited about LLMs and eager to use them everywhere, but have become steadily disillusioned as I have tried to apply them to daily tasks, and seen others try and fail in the same way. Honestly, LLMs can't even get language right. They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee. GPT can't perform to the level of a middle market copywriter or content marketer. I am convinced that people who think LLMs can write have simply not understood what professional writers do. For me the "plateau of productivity" after the disillusionment has been using LLMs a bit like search engines. Quick standalone summaries, snippets or thoughts. A nice day-to-day productivity boost, but nothing that's going to allow me to work less hard.

I build a pretty popular LLM tool. I think learning when/how to use them is as big a mental hurdle as it was learning to google well or whether something is googlable or not. In the realm of coding here are a few things its really good at: - Translating code, generating cross language clients. I'll feed it a golang single file API backend and tell it to generate the typescript client for that. You can add hints like e.g "use fetch", "allow each request method to have a header override", "keep it typesafe, use zod", etc - Basic validation testing. It's pretty good at generating scaffold tests that do basic validation (Opus is good at writing trickier tests) as your building. - Small module completion. I write an interface of a class/struct with it's methods and some comments and tell it to fill in. A recent one I did looked something like (abbreviated): type CacheDir struct { dir string, …

A lot of startups are selling the dream/hype of not ever having to learn to code. Be aware that it’s hype. Learn to code if you want to build stuff. They will be tools for those that have the knowledge needed to effectively use them.

lol I was on the same boat until I sinked it all together. I ended up wasting more time arguing with the LLM chat than doing anything remotely useful. I just use it for reference now, and even that I am not 1000% sure.

Claude Opus is working for me. It's not perfect but it definitely handles busy work well enough that it's a net positive. Like I add some new fields to a table and ask it to update all the files that depend on the field and it works after 1 or 2 tries. There is a time saving benefit but there is also an avoiding mental fatigue benefit for busywork.

I think it requires years of proficiency in the field you are asking about in order to get openai to produce meaningful, useful output. I can make use of it, but sometimes it makes me think "how would a newbie even phrase an objection to this misunderstanding or omission?" Currently it seems gpts are pretty much not on par with the needs of non-experts.

In my experiments at Pythagora[0], we've found that sweet spot is technical person who doesn't want to know, doesn't know, or doesn't care about the details, but is still technical enough to be able to guide the AI. Also, it's not either/or, for best effect use human and AI brainpower combined, because what's trivial vs tedious for human and AI is different so actually we can complement each other. Also, current crop of LLMs are not there yet for large/largish projects. GPT4 is too slow and expensive, while Groq is superfast but open source models are not quite there yet. Claude is somewhere in the middle. I expect somewhere in the next 12 months there's going to be a tipping point where they will be capable, fast, and reliable enough to be in wide use for coding in this style[1]. [0] I have an AI horse in the game with http://pythagora.ai , so yeah I'm biased [1] It already works well f…

I use ChatGPT every day and it’s excellent at: - replacing StackOverflow and library documentation - library search - converting between formats and languages - explaining existing code/queries - deobfuscating code - explaining concepts (kinda hit or miss) - helping you get unstuck when debugging or looking for solution (‘give me possible reasons for …’) I feel like many of this things require asking the right questions, which assumes certain level of experience. But once you reach this level, it’s an extremely valuable assistant.