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511 points meetpateltech | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.219s | source
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prhn ◴[] No.44006680[source]
Is anyone using any of these tools to write non boilerplate code?

I'm very interested.

In my experience ChatGPT and Gemini are absolutely terrible at these types of things. They are constantly wrong. I know I'm not saying anything new, but I'm waiting to personally experience an LLM that does something useful with any of the code I give it.

These tools aren't useless. They're great as search engines and pointing me in the right direction. They write dumb bash scripts that save me time here and there. That's it.

And it's hilarious to me how these people present these tools. It generates a bunch of code, and then you spend all your time auditing and fixing what is expected to be wrong.

That's not the type of code I'm putting in my company's code base, and I could probably write the damn code more correctly in less time than it takes to review for expected errors.

What am I missing?

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1. elyase ◴[] No.44014213[source]
What you're missing is how to use the tools properly. With solid documentation, good project management practices, a well-organized code structure and tests, any junior engineer should be able to read up on your codebase, write linted code following your codebase style, verify it via tests and write you a report of what was done, challenges faced etc. State of the art coding agents will do that at superhuman speeds.

If you haven't set things up properly (important info lives only in people’s heads / meetings, tasks dont have clear acceptance criteria, ...) then you aren't ready for Junior Developers yet. You need to wait until your Coding Agents are at Senior level.