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GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom

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358 points andrewstetsenko | 4 comments | 23 Jun 25 20:50 UTC | HN request time: 3.229s | source
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taysix ◴[23 Jun 25 22:23 UTC] No.44360808[source]▶
I had a fun result the other day from Claude. I opened a script in Zed and asked it to "fix the error on line 71". Claude happily went and fixed the error on line 91....

1. There was no error on line 91, it did some inconsequential formatting on that line 2. More importantly, it just ignored the very specific line I told it to go to. It's like I was playing telephone with the LLM which felt so strange with text-based communication.

This was me trying to get better at using the LLM while coding and seeing if I could "one-shot" some very simple things. Of course me doing this _very_ tiny fix myself would have been faster. Just felt weird and reinforces this idea that the LLM isn't actually thinking at all.

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klysm ◴[23 Jun 25 22:24 UTC] No.44360819[source]▶
LLMs probably have bad awareness of line numbers
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1. mcintyre1994 ◴[23 Jun 25 22:32 UTC] No.44360870[source]▶
I suspect if OP highlighted line 71 and added it to chat and said fix the error, they’d get a much better response. I assume Cursor could create a tool to help it interpret line numbers, but that’s not how they expect you to use it really.
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2. recursive ◴[23 Jun 25 23:02 UTC] No.44361092[source]▶
How is this better from just using a formal language again?
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3. svachalek ◴[24 Jun 25 00:51 UTC] No.44361793[source]▶
Who said it's better? It's a design choice. Someone can easily write an agent that takes instructions in any language you like.
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4. recursive ◴[24 Jun 25 02:36 UTC] No.44362395{3}[source]▶
The current batch of AI marketing.