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> I bet you could replace your slop pile with a tenth of the lines of clean code, and chances are it'd be less work than you think.

Actually, no. When LLMs produce good, working code, it also tends to be efficient (in terms of lines, etc).

May vary with language and domain, though.


Eh, when is that, though? I'm always worrying about the bugs that I haven't noticed if I don't review the changes. The other day, I gave it a four-step algorithm to implement, and it skipped three of the steps because it didn't think they were necessary (they were).
Hmm...

It may be the size of the changes you're asking for. I tend to micromanage it. I don't know your algorithm, but if it's complex enough, I may have done 4 separate prompts - one for each step.

Isn't it easier to just write the code???
Depends on the algorithm. When you've been coding for a few decades, you really, really don't want to write yet another trivial algorithm you've written multiple tens of times in your life. There's no joy in it.

Let the LLM do the boring stuff, and focus on writing the fun stuff.

Also, setting up logging in Python is never fun.

Right-- it's only really capable of trivial code and boilerplate, which I usually just copy from one of my older programs, examples in docs, or a highly-ranked recent SO answer. Saves me from having to converse with an expensive chatbot, and I don't have to worry about random hallucinations.

If it's a new, non-trivial algorithm, I enjoy writing it.

> Also, setting up logging in Python is never fun.

import logging

Not fun at all.

Configuring it to produce useful stuff (e.g. timestamps, autologging exceptions, etc). Very boilerplate and tedious.

It was really simple, just traversing a list up and down twice. It just didn't see the reason why, so it skipped it all (the reason was to prevent race conditions).

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