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Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I can deliver 5k LoC in a day easily on a greenfield project and 10k if I sweat or there's a lot of …

… I can deliver 5k LoC in a day easily on a greenfield project and 10k if I sweat or there's a lot of boilerplate. I can do code reviews of massive multi-thousand line PRs in a few minutes that are better than most of the ones done by engineers I've worked with throughout a long career, the list just goes on and on. I only manually code stuff if there's a small issue that I see the LLM isn't understanding that I can edit faster than I can run another round of the agent, which isn't often. LLMs are a force multiplier for everyone, really senior devs just need to learn to use them as well as they've learned to use their current tools. It's like saying that a master archer proves bows are as good as guns because the archer doesn't know how to aim a rifle.

Original discussionAfter months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain221 source comments · at import
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MR

How useful the various tools will be depends on the person and the problem. Take two hypothetical people working on different problems and consider if, for example, Cursor would be useful. IF you're a: * 10 year python dev * work almost entirely on a very large, complex python code base * have a pycharm IDE fine tuned over many years to work perfectly on that code base * have very low tolerance for bugs (stable product, no room for move fast, break things) THEN: LLMs aren't going to 10x you. An IDE like Cursor will likely make you slower for a very long time until you've learned to use it. IF you're a: * 1 year JS (react, nextjs, etc.) dev * start mostly from scratch on new ideas * have little prior IDE preference * have high tolerance for bugs and just want to ship and try stuff THEN: LLMs will to 10x you. An IDE like Cursor will immediately make you way faster.

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MR

were you immediately more productive in Cursor specifically? my point is exactly inline with your comment. The tools you get immediate value out of will vary based on circumstance. There's no silver bullet.

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MR

Assuming that your workflow works, and the rest of us just need to learn to use LLMs equally effective, won't that plateau us at the current level of programming? The LLMs learn from examples, but if everyone uses LLMs to generate code, there's no new code to learn new features, libraries or methods from. The next generation of models are just going to be trained on the code generated by it's predecessors with now new inputs. Being an LLM maximalist is basically freeze development in the present, now and forever.

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OT

> we're back to counting programming projects in kloc, like it's the radical 1980's again Yikes. But also lol.

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