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413 points martinald | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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simonw ◴[] No.46198601[source]
The cost of writing simple code has dropped 90%.

If you can reduce a problem to a point where it can be solved by simple code you can get the rest of the solution very quickly.

Reducing a problem to a point where it can be solved with simple code takes a lot of skill and experience and is generally still quite a time-consuming process.

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loandbehold ◴[] No.46198714[source]
Most of software work is maintaining "legacy" code, that is older systems that have been around for a long time and get a lot of use. I find Claude Code in particular is great at grokking old code bases and making changes to it. I work on one of those old code bases and my productivity increased 10x mostly due to Claude Code's ability to research large code bases, make sense of it, answer questions and making careful surgical changes to it. It also helps with testing and debugging which is huge productivity boost. It's not about its ability to churn out lots of code quickly: it's an extra set of eyes/brain that works much faster that human developer.
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1. locknitpicker ◴[] No.46202088[source]
> It's not about its ability to churn out lots of code quickly: it's an extra set of eyes/brain that works much faster that human developer.

This is the key take right here. LLMs excel at parsing existing content, summarizing it, and use it to explore scenarios and hypotheticals.

Even the best coding agents out there such as Claude Code or Gemini often fail to generate at the first try code that actually compiles, let alone does what it is expected to do.

Apologists come up with excuses such as the legacy software is not architected well enough to be easily parseable by LLMs but that is a cheap excuse. The same reference LLMs often output utter crap in greenfield projects they themselves generated, and do so after a hand full of prompts. The state of a project is not the issue.

The world is coming to the realization that the AI hype is not delivering. The talk of AI bubble is already mainstream. But like IDEs with auto complete, agents might not solve every problem but they are nevertheless useful and are here to stay. They are more a kin to a search engine where a user doesn't need to copy/paste code snippets to apply a code change.

The sooner we realize this, the better.

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