Comment by dagss

Comment by dagss 10 hours ago

I've been programming for 20 years, and I've always been under-estimating how long things will take (no, not pressured by anyone to give firm estimates, just talking about informally when prioritizing work order together).

The other day I gave an estimate to my co-worker and he said "but how long is it really going to take, because you always finish a lot quicker than you say, you say two weeks and then it takes two days".

The LLMs will just make me finish things a lot faster and my gut feel estimation for how long things will take still is not yet taking that into account.

(And before people talk about typing speed: No that isn't it at all. I've always been the fastest typer and fastest human developer among my close co-workers.)

Yes, I need to review the code and interact with the agent. But it's doing a lot better than a lot of developers I've worked with over the years, and if I don't like the style of the code it takes very few words and the LLM will "get it" and it will improve it..

Some commenters are comparing the LLM to a junior. In some sense that is right in that the work relationship may be the same as towards a (blazingly fast) junior; but the communication style and knowledge area and how few words I can use to describe something feels more like talking to a senior.

(I think it may help that latest 10 years of my career a big part of my job was reviewing other people's code, delegating tasks, being the one who knew the code base best and helping others into it. So that means I'm used to delegating not just coding. Recently I switched jobs and am now coding alone with AI.)

trashb 7 hours ago

I see your point in that you can use advanced terms with the LLM which makes it more like peer programming with a senior instead of a junior.

> "but how long is it really going to take, because you always finish a lot quicker than you say, you say two weeks and then it takes two days"

However these statement just kinda makes your comment smell of r/thatHappend. Since it is such a tremendous speed up.

Therefore I am intrigued what kind of problems you working on? Does it require a lot of boilerplate code or a lot of manually adjusting settings?

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dagss 6 hours ago

I obviously don't know that my past two days of work would have taken two weeks in the alternative route, but it's my feeling for this particular work:
I'm implementing a drawing tool on top of maps for fire departments (see demo.syncmap.no -- it's only in Norwegian for now though, plan to launch in English and Show HN it in some months). Typescript, Svelte, Go, Postgres.
This week I have been making the drawing tools more powerful (not deployed publicly yet).
* Gesture recognition to turn wobbly lines into straight lines in some conditions
* Auto-fill closed shapes: Vector graphics graph algorithms to segment the graph and compute the right fill regions that feel natural in the UI (default SVG fill regions were not right, took some trial and error to find something that just feels natural enough)
* Splines to make smoother curves .. fitting Catmull-Rom, converting those to other splines for SVG representation etc
* Constraints when dragging graph nodes around that shapes don't intersect when I don't want them to etc
I haven't been working all that much with polygon graphics before, so the LLM is very helpful in a) explaining me the concepts and b) providing robust implementations for whatever I need.
And I've had many dead ends that didn't feel natural in UI that I could discard after trying them out in full, without loosing huge investment.
These are all things that are very algorithm and formula intensive and where I would have had do to a lot of reading and research to do things right myself. (I could deal with it, but it takes a lot of time to read up on it.)
I review to see that it "looks sensible", not every single addition and division in the spline interpolations, or every step of the graph segmentation algorithms used to compute fill regions. I review function signatures and overall architecture, not the small details (in frontend -- obviously the backend authorization code is reviewed line by line..)

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- dagss 5 hours ago
  
  Fresh example:
  I described a problem on UI level. LLM suggested the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker algorithm to solve it, which I have never heard about before. It implemented it. Works perfectly. It is 40 lines of code (of which I only really need to review the function signature, and note the fact that it's a recursive bisection algorithm). I would have spent a very long trying to figure out what to do here otherwise and the LLM handed me the solution.
  
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