> With Claude, that time cost has plummeted to nearly zero
Only for short code you want to throw away.
If you care about the quality of the code -- how it is organized, naming things, meaningful tests it's not.
LLMs have gotten so much better at code that I'm surprised I still don't vibe code, but it's just laughable at how bad they are stil -- test cases that just add fluff and just how "autistic" they seem and how much they miss in context that a human would not miss.
I recently changed some code where a null was returned previously and what I really needed was sort of a java Optional but with a Reason for why the value returned was not present -- I called it AdviseDecision -- it had 2 constructors -- either the value returned or the reason a value could not be computed.
I then asked Gemini 2.5 to refactor a piece of code that dealt with the null previously.
Gemini 2.5 could not jump to the conclusion that it was not possible for both the computation result or the failure to compute could not be null at the same time.
Anyway, the examples of when LLMs fail are becoming the exception and it shows how good they have gotten, but I would never says cost time plummeted to nearly zero.
For me the biggest advantage is that even though I only get about a 30% programming speed boost, I get a 300% productivity boost because I procrastinate much less, because for me it's easier to fix/modify the LLMs tasteless code than getting over the initial bump of starting from scratch.
It probably is a contradiction then that I say LLMs are so bad and so good at the same time.
Only for short code you want to throw away.
If you care about the quality of the code -- how it is organized, naming things, meaningful tests it's not.
LLMs have gotten so much better at code that I'm surprised I still don't vibe code, but it's just laughable at how bad they are stil -- test cases that just add fluff and just how "autistic" they seem and how much they miss in context that a human would not miss.
I recently changed some code where a null was returned previously and what I really needed was sort of a java Optional but with a Reason for why the value returned was not present -- I called it AdviseDecision -- it had 2 constructors -- either the value returned or the reason a value could not be computed.
I then asked Gemini 2.5 to refactor a piece of code that dealt with the null previously.
Gemini 2.5 could not jump to the conclusion that it was not possible for both the computation result or the failure to compute could not be null at the same time.
Anyway, the examples of when LLMs fail are becoming the exception and it shows how good they have gotten, but I would never says cost time plummeted to nearly zero.
For me the biggest advantage is that even though I only get about a 30% programming speed boost, I get a 300% productivity boost because I procrastinate much less, because for me it's easier to fix/modify the LLMs tasteless code than getting over the initial bump of starting from scratch.
It probably is a contradiction then that I say LLMs are so bad and so good at the same time.