I think this is it. Some people are willing to invest the time in writing natural language code for the LLM.
> I spent time tweaking prompts, writing rule files, and experimenting with different models, I could improve that output significantly. But this is being sold to me as a productivity tool. I've got code to write, and I'm pretty sure I can write it fairly quickly myself, and I simply don't have time at my start up to muck around with babysitting an AI all day -- I have human junior engineers that need babysitting.
I agree and this is the divide I think: skeptical people think this is a flimsy patch that will eventually collapse. I for one can't see how trying to maintain ever growing files in natural language won't lead to a huge cognitive load quite soon and I bet we're about to hear people discussing how to use LLMs to do that.
I think if you're trying stuff, you're not, otherwise, you wouldn't even use them. What I'd say is more that you're having a bad time, whereas I'm not.
> I wonder if part of this is simply level of patience, or, similarly, having a work environment that's chill enough to allow for experimentation?
Maybe? I don't feel like I've had to had a ton of patience. But maybe I'm just discounting that, or chiller or something, as you allude to.
I am also trying to sort this out, but I'm probably someone you'd consider to be on the other, "anti-LLM" side.
I wonder if part of this is simply level of patience, or, similarly, having a work environment that's chill enough to allow for experimentation?
From my admittedly short attempts to use agentic coding so far, I usually give up pretty quickly because I experience, as others in the thread described, the agent just spinning its wheels or going off and mangling the codebase like a lawnmower.
Now, I could totally see a scenario where if I spent time tweaking prompts, writing rule files, and experimenting with different models, I could improve that output significantly. But this is being sold to me as a productivity tool. I've got code to write, and I'm pretty sure I can write it fairly quickly myself, and I simply don't have time at my start up to muck around with babysitting an AI all day -- I have human junior engineers that need babysitting.
I feel like I need to be a lot more inspired that the current models can actually improve my productivity in order to spend the time required to get there. Maybe that's a chicken-or-egg problem, but that's how it is.