zlacker

My take is: It is OK to don't buy into the hype. There's a lot of hype, no denying that.

But if you're actively avoiding everything related to it, you might find yourself in a position where you're suddenly being left in the dust. Maybe not now, not next month, not next year, but who some time in the future. The models really are improving fast!

I've talked with devs that (claim they) haven't touched a model since ChatGPT was released - because it didn't live up to their expectations, and they just concluded it was a big nothingburger.

Even though I don't follow the development religiously anymore, I do try to get acquainted with new releases every 3 months or so.

I hate the term "vibe coding", but I personally know non-tech people that have vibe coded products / apps, shipped them, and make more money in sales than what most "legit" coders are making. These would be the same "idea people" that previously were looking for a coder to do all the heavy lifting. Something is changing, that's for sure.

So, yeah, don't sleepwalk through it.

>>Tracke+(OP)
The counter-argument as I see it is that going from “not using LLM tooling” to “just as competent with LLM tooling” is…maybe a day? And lessening and the tools evolve.

It’s not like “becoming skilled and knowledgeable in a language” which took time. Even if you’re theoretically being left behind, you can be back at the front of the pack again in a day or so. So why bother investing more than a little bit every few months?

>>Fridge+l1
It takes deliberate practice to learn how to work with a new tool.

I believe that AI+Coding is no different from this perspective. It usually takes senior engineers a few weeks just to start building an intuition of what is possible and what should be avoided. A few weeks more to adjust the mindset and properly integrate suitable tools into the workflow.

>>abdull+24
In theory, but how long is that intuition going to remain valid as new models arrive? What if you develop a solid workflow to work around some limitations you've identified, only to realize months late that these limitations don't exist anymore and your workflow is suboptimal? AI is a new tool, but it's a very unstable one at the moment.

>>Fridge+l1
I think the more "general" (and competent) AI gets, the less being an early adopter _should_ matter. In fact, early adopters would in theory have to suffer through more hallucinations and poor output than late adopters.

Here, the early bird gets the worm with 9 fingered hands, the late bird just gets the worm.

>>breule+i6
I'd say that the core principles stayed the same for more than a year by now.

What is changing - constraints are relaxing, making things easier than they were before. E.g. where you needed a complex RAG to accomplish some task, now Gemini Pro 2.5 can just swallow 200k-500k of cacheable tokens in prompt and get the job done with a similar or better accuracy.

>>Fridge+l1
> The counter-argument as I see it is that going from “not using LLM tooling” to “just as competent with LLM tooling” is…maybe a day? And lessening and the tools evolve.

Very much disagree with that. Getting productive and competent with LLM tooling takes months. I've been deeply invested in this world for a couple of years now and I still feel like I'm only scraping the surface of what's possible with these tools.

>>abdull+b9
Sure, the core principles are mostly the same, but the point is that it is getting easier and easier to extract value from these models, which means that the learning curve is getting flatter. The main difficulty for now and for the foreseeable future is to get the models to do what we mean, but DWIM is the trend line, it's the objective everyone's trying to get at. Even if we don't quite reach, we'll get closer. And AI that does what you mean is the ultimate tool: it doesn't require any expertise at all. There is no first mover advantage (save for a hypothetical singularity, perhaps).

>>simonw+Kc
Does it take months _now_ or did it take months, months/a year ago?

I’m still not entirely sure why it’s supposed to take months. I usually retry every few weeks whenever a new model comes out, and they get marginally better at something, but using them isn’t a massive shift? Maybe I’m missing something? I have some code, I pop open the pane, ask it, accept/reject the code and go on. What else is everyone even doing?

Edit: I’ve seen the prompt configs people at work have been throwing around, and I’m pretty glad I don’t bother with cursor-and-friends when I see that. Some people get LLM’s to write git commits? Lazygit has made most of my git workflow friction disappear and the 1 minute it takes me to write commits and pr’s is less effort than having to police a novel writing incorrect ones.

>>simonw+Kc
Plug for Simon's (very well written) longer form article about this topic: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/