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23 points nocobot | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source

I tend to be sceptical when it comes to LLM based coding tools but many people seem to be raving about huge productivity gains which I wouldn’t mind as well.

However when trying cc it left me vey disappointed. For context I’m working on a relatively greenfield rust project and gave it tasks that I would consider appropriate for a junior level colleague like:

- change the return type of a trait and all it’s impls

- refactor duplicate code into a helper function

- replace some of our code with an external crate

it didn’t get any of them correct and took a very long time. Am I using the tool wrong?

How are you using cc or other agentic tools?

1. atleastoptimal ◴[] No.44557256[source]
It's very good at refactoring, creating boilerplate, making big changes with moderate levels of precision.

Current LLM's at least a reasonable percentage of the time still get stuck on race conditions and bugs not obvious via static analysis. If you can explain the exact source of a bug to an LLM they can get it, but if there's a seemingly obvious solution that isn't the correct one, they will try to fix things the wrong way.

It's best to use AI in areas where a lack of specificity or precision isn't a major hinderance, and all abstraction is a closed loop that won't hurt you in the future due to not knowing how it works.