I've been experimenting with them quite a bit for the past two weeks. So far the best productivity i've found from them is very tight hand-holding and clear instructions, objectives, etc. Very, very limited thinking. Ideally none.
What that gets me though is less typing fatigue and less decisions made partly due to my wrists/etc. If it's a large (but simple!) refactor, the LLM generally does amazing at that. As good as i would do. But it does that with zero wrist fatigue. Things that i'd normally want to avoid or take my time on it bangs out in minutes.
This coupled with Claude Code's recently Hook[1] introduction and you can help curb a lot of behaviors that are difficult to make perfect from an LLM. Ie making sure it tests, formats, Doesn't include emojis (boy does it like that lol), etc.
And of course a bunch of other practices for good software in general make the LLMs better, as has been discussed on HN plenty of times. Eg testing, docs, etc.
So yea, they're dumb and i don't trust their "thinking" at all. However i think they have huge potential to help us write and maintain large codebases and generally multiplying out productivity.
It's an art for sure though, and restraint is needed to prevent slop. They will put out so. much. slop. Ugh.
What that gets me though is less typing fatigue and less decisions made partly due to my wrists/etc. If it's a large (but simple!) refactor, the LLM generally does amazing at that. As good as i would do. But it does that with zero wrist fatigue. Things that i'd normally want to avoid or take my time on it bangs out in minutes.
This coupled with Claude Code's recently Hook[1] introduction and you can help curb a lot of behaviors that are difficult to make perfect from an LLM. Ie making sure it tests, formats, Doesn't include emojis (boy does it like that lol), etc.
And of course a bunch of other practices for good software in general make the LLMs better, as has been discussed on HN plenty of times. Eg testing, docs, etc.
So yea, they're dumb and i don't trust their "thinking" at all. However i think they have huge potential to help us write and maintain large codebases and generally multiplying out productivity.
It's an art for sure though, and restraint is needed to prevent slop. They will put out so. much. slop. Ugh.
[1]: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/hooks