Say i buy into your mysticism based take, is it a useful tool if it blows up in damn well near every professionals face?
lets say i accept you and you alone have the deep majiks required to use this tool correctly, when major platform devs could not so far, what makes this tool useful? Billions of dollars and environment ruining levels of worth it?
I'd say the only real use for these tools to date has been mass surveillance, and sometimes semi useful boilerplate.
> is it a useful tool if it blows up in damn well near every professionals face
It doesn't, that's ego-preserving cope. Saying that this stuff doesn't work for "damn well near every professional" because it doesn't work for you is like a thief saying "Everybody else steals, why are you picking on me"? It's not true, it's something you believe to protect your own self-image.
It works fine for me, because I don't trust to to do anything more than line changes, self-contained prototypes or minor updates. I've seen what happens when people give llms full control over authoring, and it has never worked out. Just look at the dumpster fire spotify has become. Its a buggy mess that barely works and is openly touted as being primarily llm developed at present.
point me towards something complex which llms have contributed towards significantly without massive oversight where they didnt fuck things up. I'll eat my words happily, with just a single example.
Honestly people are in such a weird place with this shit. I'm not saying don't read the fucking code - but I managed to get my setup to write 100k lines of indistinguishable SWE code in a week or so. The main limitation was my reading speed. This is something like a 10x speedup for me.
How does one verify 100k lines in a week? Let alone evaluate it to being SWE equivallent? That's super human. I like to think I am pretty good at what I do, but really critically engaging with 100k lines in a week is beyond even 10 of me. Forgive my skepticism, but I'm going to hazard the guess that you don't know what the fuck you're doing. You've lost your goddamn mind if you think you're doing anything other than skim read at a rate of 42 lines a minute for your entire work day without a break.
You have a fair perspective and I'm not going to try to move you from it. You have my exact opinion as of 3 months ago. I will just suggest you earnestly try it yourself.
On Saturday I had claude generate ~10k of lines of Lua code which uses the libASS subtitle format to build up nearly two dozen GUI widgets from subtitle drawing primitives, including nestable scrollable containers with clipping, drop down menus, animated tab bars, and everything else I could think of. I read probably about 100 lines of code myself that day, I "verified" the code only by testing out the demo claude was updating through the process.
Then on Sunday I woke up and had claude bang out a series of half a dozen projects each using this GUI library. First, a script that simply offers to loop a video when the end is reached. Updated several of my old scripts that just print text without any graphical formatting. Then more adventurous, a playlist visualizer with support for drag to reorder. Another that gives a nice little control overlay for TTS reading normal media subtitles. Another that let's people select clips from whatever they're watching, reorder them and write out an edit decision list, maybe I'll turn this one into a complete NLE today when I get home from work.
Reading every line of code? Why? The shit works, if I notice a bug I go back to claude and demand a "thoughtful and well reasoned" fix, without even caring what the fix will be so long as it works.
The concepts and building blocks used for all of this is shit I've learned myself the hard way, but to do it all myself would take weeks and I would certainly take many shortcuts, like certainly skipping animations and only implementing the bare minimum. The reason I could make that stuff work fast is because I already broadly knew the problem space, I've probably read the mpv manpage a thousand times before, so when the agent says its going to bind to shift+wheel for horizonal scrolling, I can tell it no, mpv has WHEEL_LEFT and RIGHT, use those. I can tell it to pump its brakes and stop planning to load a PNG overlay, because mpv will only load raw pixel data that way. I can tell it that dragging UI elements without simultaneously dragging the whole window certainly must be possible, because the first party OSC supports it so it should go read that mess of code and figure it out, which it dutifully does. If you know the problem space, you can get a whole lot done very fast, in a way that demonstrably works. Does it have bugs? I'd eat a hat if it doesn't. They'll get fixed if/when I find them. I'm not worried about it. Reading every line of code is for people writing airliner autopilots, not cheeky little desktop programs.
right, but we're not talking cheeky desktop personal programs here. Who cares what you do for your own devices and in your own time? Absolutely no one gets to tell you what to do there, so why discuss it? Live your life, do your thing, great! But that isn't what is being discussed here.