I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off o…
People who say they code faster with an LLM just blindly accept the given answer, maybe with a quick glance and some simple testing. Not in depth code review, which is hard and costs time.
It helps me code faster, but I really only outsource boilerplate to an LLM. I will say it also helps with learning the syntax for libraries I’m unfamiliar with just in that I don’t have to go through several pages of documentation to get the answers I need in the moment. The speed-up is modest and nowhere near the claims of vibe coders.
I always wonder this as well… I will use tools to help me write some repetitive stuff periodically. Most often I’ll use a regex replace but occasionally I’ll write a little perl or sed or awk. I suspect the boilerplate these people talk about are either this it setting up projects, which I think there are also better tools for
I’ve been writing Java lately (not my choice), which has boilerplate, but it’s never been an issue for me because the Java IDEs all have tools (and have for a decade+) that eliminate it. Class generation, main, method stubs, default implementations, and interface stubs can all be done in, for example: Eclipse, easily.
Same for tooling around (de)serialization and class/struct definitions, I see that being touted as a use case for LLMs; but like… tools have existed[1] for doing that before LLMs, and they’re deterministic, and are computationally free compared to neural nets.
It helps me code faster, but I really only outsource boilerplate to an LLM. I will say it also helps with learning the syntax for libraries I’m unfamiliar with just in that I don’t have to go through several pages of documentation to get the answers I need in the moment. The speed-up is modest and nowhere near the claims of vibe coders.
Because this comes up so often, I have to ask, specifically what kind of boilerplate? Examples would be great.
I always wonder this as well… I will use tools to help me write some repetitive stuff periodically. Most often I’ll use a regex replace but occasionally I’ll write a little perl or sed or awk. I suspect the boilerplate these people talk about are either this it setting up projects, which I think there are also better tools for
My experience as well.
I’ve been writing Java lately (not my choice), which has boilerplate, but it’s never been an issue for me because the Java IDEs all have tools (and have for a decade+) that eliminate it. Class generation, main, method stubs, default implementations, and interface stubs can all be done in, for example: Eclipse, easily.
Same for tooling around (de)serialization and class/struct definitions, I see that being touted as a use case for LLMs; but like… tools have existed[1] for doing that before LLMs, and they’re deterministic, and are computationally free compared to neural nets.
e.g. https://transform.tools/json-to-java ↩︎