Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47412084

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Using LLMs to generate documentation for the code that I write, explaining data sheets to me, and writing boilerplate code does save me a lot of time, though.

The Pragmatic Programmer and Code Complete were integral on my first job.

me the first time my boss forced me to unit test my code

...

The best thing you can do is listen to your gut and try to act as rationally as you can.

Talk with trusted mentors if you've got them. Don't listen to me and for the love of god don't listen to people on HN or reddit or Youtube or any other social media.

Nobody knows what they're talking about and they certainly don't know how it'll impact you.

If somebody is making you feel afraid, left behind/out, inferior -- they're trying to sell you shit. Don't listen to the bullies and con artists.

You're entitled to your opinion. If you think AI output is crap, it's crap. Don't be pressured to conform. This is supposed to be hackernews after all. There are plenty of companies using java 8 today. You won't be unhireable.

I use Claude every day. It is definitely impressive, but in my experience only marginally more impressive than ChatGPT was a few years ago. It hallucinates less and compiles more reliably, but still produces really poor designs. It really is an overconfident junior developer.

The real risk, and what I am seeing daily, is colleagues falling for the "if you aren't using Cursor you're going to be left behind" FUD. So they learn Cursor, discover that it's an easy way to close tickets without using your brain, and end up polluting the codebase with very questionable designs.

It's nowhere near as good as someone actually building and maintaining systems. It's barely able to vomit out an MVP and it's almost never capable of making a meaningful change to that MVP.

If your experiences have been different that's fine, but in my day job I am spending more and more time just fixing crappy LLM code produced and merged by STAFF engineers. I really don't see that changing any time soon.

In all seriousness, sans young baby the most productive time of my life has been fitting exercise/side project time in between 4:30-6am. I made some real gains during that time and plan to get back into that routine once sleep isn't so rare.

I'm a self taught dev with 2 young kids. I've always had a healthy approach to work, but now I'm feeling quite a lot of pressure to learn new things on my own time, whether to make sure I'm prepared for the interview circuit if I get laid off, or to patch my skills that are needed at work.

I'm starting to feel burnout creep in, getting an hour of study in the morning, taking care of family, and then working 8 hours.

I appreciate your insight.

We're a documentation-heavy org and having to open Confluence, find the right root page, drill down to where I need to be, and deal with ~1s page loads drives me nuts.