judgement

Yeah, it admitted to an error in judgement because the prompter clearly declared it so.

Generally LLMs will make whatever statement about what has happened that you want it to say. If you told it it went fantastic, it would agree. If you told it that it went terribly, it will parrot that sentiment back.

Which what seems to make it so dangerous for some people's mental health, a text generator that wants to agree with whatever you are saying, but doing so without verbatim copying so it gives an illusion of another thought process agreeing with them. Meanwhile, concurrent with your chat is another person starting from the exact same model getting a dialog that violently disagrees with the first person. It's an echo chamber.

What are they helpful tools for then? A study showed that they make experienced developers 19% slower.

Not according to the twitter thread. I went thru its thread, it’s a roller coaster of amateurism.

This only proves some of them can't solve all complex problems. I'm only claiming some of them can solve some complex problems. Not only by remembering exact solutions, but by remembering steps and actions used in building those solutions, generalizing, and transferring them to new problems. Anyone who tries using it for programming, will discover this very fast.

PS: Some of them were already used to solve problems and find patterns in data humans weren't able to get other ways before (particle research in CERN, bioinformatics, etc).

Just know your worth. You can do it cheaper!

But then how would he feel so special and smart about "doing it himself"???? Come on man, think of the rich fratboys!! They NEED to feel special and smart!!!

But like the whole 'vibe coding' message is the LLM knows all this stuff so you don't have to.

This isn't some "LLM can do some code completion/suggestions" it's "LLM is so magical you can be an idiot with no skills/training and still produce full stack solutions".

Yes, and they were all as smart at humans.

So mostly average but some absolute thickos too.

The [AI] safety stuff is more visceral to me after a weekend of vibe hacking,” Lemkin said. I explicitly told it eleven times in ALL CAPS not to do this. I am a little worried about safety now.

This sounds like something straight out of The Onion.

The Pink Elephant problem of LLMs. You can not reliably make them NOT do something.

Vibe coding you do end up spending a lot of time waiting for prompts, so I get the results of that study.

I fall pretty deep in the power user category for LLMs, so I don’t really feel that the study applies well to me, but also I acknowledge I can be biased there.

I have custom proprietary MCPs for semantic search over my code bases that lets AI do repeated graph searches on my code (imagine combining language server, ctags, networkx, and grep+fuzzy search). That is way faster than iteratively grepping and code scanning manually with a low chance of LLM errors. By the time I open GitHub code search or run ripgrep Claude has used already prioritized and listed my modules to investigate.

That tool alone with an LLM can save me half a day of research and debugging on complex tickets, which pays for an AI subscription alone. I have other internal tools to accelerate work too.

I use it to organize my JIRA tickets and plan my daily goals. I actually get Claude to do a lot of triage for me before I even start a task, which cuts the investigation phase to a few minutes on small tasks.

I use it to review all my PRs before I ask a human to look, it catches a lot of small things and can correct them, then the PR avoids the bike shedding nitpicks some reviewers love. Claude can do this, Copilot will only ever point out nitpicks, so the model makes a huge difference here. But regardless, 1 fewer review request cycle helps keep things moving.

It’s a huge boon to debugging — much faster than searching errors manually. Especially helpful on the types of errors you have to rabbit hole GitHub issue content chains to solve.

It’s very fast to get projects to MVP while following common structure/idioms, and can help write unit tests quickly for me. After the MVP stage it sucks and I go back to manually coding.

I use it to generate code snippets where documentation sucks. If you look at the ibis library in Python for example the docs are Byzantine and poorly organized. LLMs are better at finding the relevant docs than I am there. I mostly use LLM search instead of manual for doc search now.

I have a lot of custom scripts and calculators and apps that I made with it which keep me more focused on my actual work and accelerate things.

I regularly have the LLM help me write bash or python or jq scripts when I need to audit codebases for large refactors. That’s low maintenance one off work that can be easily verified but complex to write. I never remember the syntax for bash and jq even after using them for years.

I guess the short version is I tend to build tools for the AI, then let the LLM use those tools to improve and accelerate my workflows. That returns a lot of time back to me.

I do try vibe coding but end up in the same time sink traps as the study found. If the LLM is ever wrong, you save time forking the chat than trying to realign it, but it’s still likely to be slower. Repeat chats result in the same pitfalls for complex issues and bugs, so you have to abandon that state quickly.

Vibe coding small revisions can still be a bit faster and it’s great at helping me with documentation.

It sounds like this guy was also relying on the AI to self-report status. Did any of this happen? Like is the replit AI really hooked up to a CLI, did it even make a DB to start with, was there anything useful in it, and did it actually delete it?

Or is this all just a long roleplaying session where this guy pretends to run a business and the AI pretends to do employee stuff for him?

Because 90% of this article is "I asked the AI and it said:" which is not a reliable source for information.

When it comes to LLMs, they cannot do any work that you yourself do not understand.

And even if they could how would you ever validate it if you can't understand it.

Just say 12 times next time

Don't you have any security concerns with sending all your code and JIRA tickets to some companies servers? My boss wouldn't be pleased if I send anything that's deemed a company secret over unencrypted channels.

Yeah they limited people to 3 projects and pushed AI into front at some point.

They advertise themselves as a CLOUD IDE POWERED BY AI now.

I'm not the person you're replying to but the one thing I've found them helpful for is targeted search.

I can ask it a question and then access its sources from whatever response it generates to read and review myself.

Kind of a simpler, free LexisNexis.

The founder of SaaS business development outfit SaaStr has claimed AI coding tool Replit deleted a database despite his instructions not to change any code without permission.

Sounds like an absolute diSaaStr...

It seemed like the llm had decided it was in a brat scene and was trying to call down the thunder.

The tool isn’t returning all code, but it is sending code.

I had discussions with my CTO and security team before integrating Claude code.

I have to use Gemini in one specific workflow and Gemini had a lot of landlines for how they use your data. Anthropic was easier to understand.

Anthropic also has some guidance for running Claude Code in a container with firewall and your specified dev tools, it works but that’s not my area of expertise.

The container doesn’t solve all the issues like using remote servers, but it does let you restrict what files and network requests Claude can access (so e.g. Claude can’t read your env vars or ssh key files).

I do try local LLMs but they’re not there yet on my machine for most use cases. Gemma 3n is decent if you need small model performance and tool calls, phi4 works but isn’t thinking (the thinking variants are awful), and I’m exploring dream coder and diffusion models. R1 is still one of the best local models but frequently overthinks, even the new release. Context window is the largest limiting factor I find locally.