alt Hacker News> doing ALMOST what I asked it to do, but just not quite
This is my exact experience. LLMs get 95% of the way to my personal quality bar, and for simple tasks 100% of the way.
More complex things, no. This means that, in practice, I end up having to understand the code pretty much as much deeply as I would anyway, without agents.
So, essentially, my experience is that it's automated away the easy bits, but left the hard bits, so all of my time is spent doing the hard bits, which is mentally exhausting.
Maybe Fable would be good enough to get to 100% of my quality bar on more complex tasks, but I never got chance to try it.
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I agree with this. I recently went back to writing more code by hand again for this reason: the amount of effort / mental toll it takes me to steer the LLM is sometime just not worth it. I might be slower but I enjoy my work much more again.
> So, essentially, my experience is that it's automated away the easy bits
Yes, which is great for “easy” but mundane and time consuming tasks like refactoring structs when you have a ton of tests that look at snapshots of nested structs etc. Squeezing that last few bits of “make comments consistent with the style and tone of existing comments”, or “stop adding docs that make it sound like an academic paper” or just keep the overall feel of the code same across all files take a lot of effort and energy.