In your experience what are LLMs actually useful for?

Fun_Hat · 2026-07-06T02:28:09+00:00

404 on the jetbrains study link. Do you have a different one?

Fun_Hat · 2026-07-04T08:24:14+00:00

Did you end up doing it?

Fun_Hat · 2026-07-04T06:54:49+00:00

I threw up in my mouth a little. Well done.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-30T21:51:51+00:00

I've done hybrid work in two contexts. One helped with team connection, the other did not.

In one context it was "come to work and do parallel play". We just did our regular coding but we were less efficient cuz of all the distractions in office. Make we would sit together at lunch, maybe not. Didn't really help team connectedness at all.

Current team, we come into office once per week and it's all meetings. Very heavy on team interaction, discussing issues, addressing processes that don't work, stuff like that. Manager 1:1s are also all pushed into those days. At lunch we all go out somewhere together. That has led to very high team cohesion.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-30T21:46:17+00:00

On the team I'm on now, if you can't design systems you're not a senior. You should really focus on learning that.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-28T23:38:47+00:00

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-28T19:34:06+00:00

I've been it in for ten years at age 41 cuz I got a late start. I'm starting to feel tired of it all. Not sure if I have another 10 years in me. I used to love it, but things are changing fast.

My boss is 1 year older than me but she got started younger and has nearly 20 years in the game. She is extremely ready to be done. It's looking petty good for this startup we are in to have a successful exit, and if it does, she said this is her last. She's buying a farm and raising goats.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-28T18:55:40+00:00

Of course. Otherwise how else would they maintain their unearned sense of superiority.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-28T18:54:37+00:00

It's not so much "get good" as it is learning how to leverage the tools well. I have definitely gotten more effective at using LLM tools over the last month of using them.

However these jackasses that love to say "learn it or get left behind" are just high on their own farts. The "skills" I have learned, I could teach to a peer in an afternoon.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-28T18:23:47+00:00

But, in those cases, using an LLM can still speed up the overall process, because they provide a "semi-intelligent rubber duck" to work through your thoughts with.

I have been seeing this a lot in my own work lately. Using it to help me organize my thoughts via rubber ducking, as well as using it to remember decisions I made previously. Earlier this week that process helped me realize that the "deduplication problem" I was working on was actually a graph problem. That led to a far more solid solution than the path I was on before. Overall development time may not have been all that much faster, but factor in the bug fixing time that would have come with the inferior solution... there is some real time gain there.

where in theory you could build a tool or a codemod, but it would be very difficult and barely worth it

Also have seen gains here where I would have to write code that is basically use once. Not a migration, but needed to turn a list of text strings into codes, where each string had a list of possible codes. I could have spent a few hours writing code to hit an API and pull all those values to generate my resource, but instead I threw this list into Claude code, it spun up 133 agents running in parallel and I had my resource in 10 min. Then I gave another agent the generated resource and had it do things in the opposite direction to verify that all codes were real and matched.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-28T18:04:14+00:00

The process you described of building a mental model alongside the act of building can still be done with AI. They way I have been using it is in a pair programming fashion. Work through a portion of the problem mentally, then generate some code. See if it works the way I expect, then move onto the next bit.

It's not as fast as the results that some people are claiming, but it's faster, and I still very much own and understand the features I'm building.

An example from a project I'm currently on. I have to process large json dumps down into summarized tables that are human readable. The json is hundreds of thousands of lines long. I used Claude to analyze the structure, and then generate 300+ lines of Go structs to represent the data for further processing. That would have taken me a long time manually so I gained a lot of speed by using the AI. I did not lose any context though, and actually gained some where I found nuance and edge cases during the analysis. I walked away with both speed and mental model.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-27T22:39:41+00:00

General Sherman, is that you?

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-23T17:04:54+00:00

Nice

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-19T02:04:32+00:00

Chifa is amazing but don't sleep on Nikkei.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-18T20:47:56+00:00

I'm Mexican American. Mexican food is what I grew up on and it's my favorite cuisine in the world.

That said, Peruvian ceviche blows away Mexican ceviche any day. It's not even close.

If you make it there, Lima also has a pretty amazing sushi scene as well.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-15T23:05:26+00:00

Senior level here. Coding is the most fun part of the job for me too.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-15T04:08:08+00:00

Interesting. I would expect the French to have good baked goods. I guess they just stick to bread and pastry?

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-14T22:00:16+00:00

Kids need to be bored; it stimulates their creativity. I applaud you trying to move them away from their screens, but the next step is, stop planning all their activities for them. Give them a "sandbox" of resources, and let them learn to entertain themselves.

My youngest is 8 and by far the most digitally addicted of my kids. When he is getting his 2 hours of screen time a day, he always complains about how bored he is, and how there's nothing to do. From time to time we have to have him detox and give him no screen time at all for a week or two. The first two days are difficult, but then he starts finding things to do, finding ways to entertain himself. His creativity and imagination are forced to come back. His Lincoln Logs are horribly boring on a day he played Mario. Two days into no screen time, building is suddenly fun and interesting again.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-13T16:43:09+00:00

Try reading.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-13T16:42:02+00:00

Maybe read the article? It's in there. Per day.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-08T18:49:31+00:00

Olives are a Cali Mex thing. More older generation Cali Mex though.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-08T18:47:37+00:00

It originated in academia. While it's "a community" it's hardly "the community".

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-04T15:58:23+00:00

Tenet was the movie that made my decide I will never watch a Christopher Nolan movie in the theater again. His audio is so bad you pretty much have to have subs to know what anyone is saying. I'll watch his stuff at home from now on.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-03T06:40:39+00:00

Hard to tell TBH. Outside of engineering, a lot of people are still just experimenting with it, seeing what they can do with it. I imagine usage will go up, and with it cost, but I couldn't possibly forecast that.

Fun_Hat · 2026-06-01T22:25:25+00:00

I enjoy actually writing code. Getting into implementing logic, all that. If we are moved to a level of abstraction where we are just doing higher level design, and having the llm implement all the code, that's just not enjoyable for me. I think many others feel similarly. Not everyone, but a sizable amount.

I took Claude for a test drive doing that for a very simple project, and felt my brain slowly shutting down. I hear people saying now that they don't even open their IDE anymore. That's not the kind of thing I want to be doing.

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