this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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Yeah, LLMs are decent with coding tasks if you know what you're doing and can properly guide it (and check it's work!), but fuck if they don't take a lot of effort to reign in. I will say they're pretty damned good at debugging the shit I wrote. I've been working on an audit project for a few months and 4o/5 have helped me a good bit to find persistent errors in my execution logic that I just kept missing on rereads and debug runs.
But new generation is painful. I had 5 generate a new function for me yesterday to do some issues recon and report generation, and I spent 20 minutes going back and forth with it dropping fields in the output repeatedly. Even on 5, it still struggles at times to not give you the same wrong answer more than once, or just waffles between wrong answers at times.
Dude forgetting stuff has to be one the most frustrating parts of the entire process . Like forgetting a column in a database or just an entire piece of a function you just pasted in... Or trying to change things you never asked it to touch. So freaking annoying. I had standing instructions in it's memory to not leave out pieces or modify things I didn't ask for and will put that stuff in the prompt and it just does not care lol.
I've used it a lot for coding because I'm not a real programmer (more a code hacker) and need to get things done for a website, but I know just enough to know it's really stupid sometimes lol.
It was actually worse. I was pulling data out of local logs and processing events. I asked to assess a couple columns that I was struggling to parse properly, and it got those ones in, but dropped some of my existing columns. I pointed out the error, it acknowledged the issue, then spat out code that reverted to the first output!
Though, that wasn't nearly as bad as it telling me that a variable a couple hundred lines and multiple transformations in wasn't being populated by an early variable, and I literally went in and just copied each declaration line and sent it back like I was smacking an intern on the nose or something....
For a bit designed to read and analyze text, it is surprisingly bad at the whole 'reading' aspect. But maybe that's just how human like the intelligence is /s
OMFG this. I've had decent luck recently after setting up a project and explicitly laying out a number of global directives, because yeah, it was awful trying to figure out exactly what changed when I diff the input and output, and fucking everything is red because even the goddamned comments are changed. But even just trying to make it understand basic style requirements was a solid half hour of arguing with it (only partially because I forgot the proper names of casings) so it wouldn't make me lint the whole goddamned script I just told it to analyze and fix one item.