Comment by simonw

It's trivial in the sense that a lot of the work isn't high cognitive load. But... that's exactly the point of LLMs. It takes the noise away so you can focus on high-impact outcomes.

Yes, the core of that pull requests is an hour or two of thinking, the rest is ancillary noise. The LLM took away the need for the noise.

If your definition of trivial is signal/noise ratio, then, sure, relatively little signal in a lot of noise. If your definition of "trivial" hinges on total complexity over time, then this kicks the pants of manual writing.

I'd assume OP did the classic senior engineer stick of "I can understand the core idea quickly, therefore it can't be hard". Whereas Mitchel did the heavy lifting of actually shipping the "not hard" idea - still understanding the core idea quickly, and then not getting bogged down in unnecessary details.

That's the beauty of LLMs - it turns the dream of "I could write that in a weekend" into actually reality, where it before was always empty bluster.

nightski 3 days ago

If all I did was call it trivial that would be a fair critique. But it was followed up with a lot more justification than that.

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simonw 3 days ago

Here's the PR. It touched 21 files. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/9116/files
If that's your idea of trivial then you and I have very different standards in terms of what's a trivial change and what isn't.

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- groby_b 3 days ago
  
  It's trivial in the sense that a lot of the work isn't high cognitive load. But... that's exactly the point of LLMs. It takes the noise away so you can focus on high-impact outcomes.
  Yes, the core of that pull requests is an hour or two of thinking, the rest is ancillary noise. The LLM took away the need for the noise.
  If your definition of trivial is signal/noise ratio, then, sure, relatively little signal in a lot of noise. If your definition of "trivial" hinges on total complexity over time, then this kicks the pants of manual writing.
  I'd assume OP did the classic senior engineer stick of "I can understand the core idea quickly, therefore it can't be hard". Whereas Mitchel did the heavy lifting of actually shipping the "not hard" idea - still understanding the core idea quickly, and then not getting bogged down in unnecessary details.
  That's the beauty of LLMs - it turns the dream of "I could write that in a weekend" into actually reality, where it before was always empty bluster.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies