It’s a skill this “fractional CTO” lacks
Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoI’ve made full-ass changes on existing codebases with Claude
It’s a skill you can learn, pretty close to how you’d work with actual humans
MangoCats@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
pretty close to how you’d work with actual humans
That has been my experience as well. It’s like working with humans who have extremely fast splinter skills, things they can rip through in 10 minutes that might take you days, weeks even. But then it also takes 5-10 minutes to do some things that you might accomplish in 20 seconds. And, like people, it’s not 100% reliable or accurate, so you need to use all those same processes we have developed to help people catch their mistakes.
demonsword@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
full-ass (…) with Claude
heh
TheBlackLounge@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
What full ass changes have you made that can’t be done better with a refactoring tool?
I believe Claude will accept the task. I’ve been fixing edge cases in a vibe colleague’s full-ass change all month. Would have taken less time to just do it right the first time.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I just did three tasks purely with Claude - at work.
All were pretty much me pasting the Linear ticket to Claude and hitting go. One got some improvement ideas on the PR so I said “implement the comments from PR 420” and so it did.
These were all on a codebase I haven’t seen before.
The magic sauce is that I’ve been doing this for a quarter century and I’m pretty good at reading code and I know if something smells like shit code or not. I’m not just YOLOing the commits to a PR without reading first, but I save a ton of time when I don’t need to do the grunt work of passing a variable through 10 layers of enterprise code.
MangoCats@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
True that LLMs will accept almost any task, whether they should or not. True that their solutions aren’t 100% perfect every time. Whether it’s faster to use them or not I think depends a lot on what’s being done, and what alternative set of developers you’re comparing them with.
What I have seen across the past year is that the number of cases where LLM based coding tools are faster than traditional developers has been increasing, rather dramatically. I called them near useless this time last year.