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What is going on right now?

(catskull.net)
378 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 22 Aug 25 07:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.249s | source
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grey-area ◴[22 Aug 25 13:22 UTC] No.44984361[source]▶
The heart of the article is this conclusion, which I think is correct from first-hand experience with these tools and teams trying to use them:

So what good are these tools? Do they have any value whatsoever?

Objectively, it would seem the answer is no.

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thinkingtoilet ◴[22 Aug 25 14:01 UTC] No.44984803[source]▶
The main benefit I've gotten from AI that I see no one talking about is it dramatically lessens the mental energy required to work on a side project after a long day of work. I code during the day, it's hard to find motivation to code at night. It's a lot easier to say "do this", have the AI generate shitty code, then say, "you duplicated X function, you over complicated Y, you have a bug at Z" then have it fix it. On a good day I get stuff done quicker, on an average day I don't think I do. However, I am getting more done because the it takes a huge chunk out of the mental load for me and requires significantly less motivation to get something done on my side project. I think that is worth it to me. That said, I am just about to ban my junior engineers from using it at work because I think it is detrimental to their growth.
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1. piva00 ◴[22 Aug 25 14:43 UTC] No.44985277[source]▶
Very much the same for me. I use some LLMs to do small tasks at work where I know they can be useful, it's about 5-10% of my coding work which itself is about 20% of my time.

Outside of work though it's been great to have LLMs to dive into stuff I don't work with, which would take me months of learning to start from scratch. Mostly programming microcontrollers for toy projects, or helping some artists I know to bring their vision to life.

It's absurdly fun to get kickstarted into a new domain without having to learn the nitty-gritty first but I eventually need to learn it, it just lowers the timeframe to when the project becomes fun to work with (aka: it barely works but does something that can be expanded upon).