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NoTool not named · 11 Aug 2025

It struggled so badly with that task that I eventually gave up and just did it by hand

smithkl42 on Hacker News

20%

In the thread “Claude Code is all you need”, replying to this comment

Got in the way: Struggled with 2 million lines of code and tribal knowledge.

… The last task I tried to get an LLM to do was a fairly straightforward refactor of some of our C# web controllers - just adding a CancellationToken to the controller method signature whenever the underlying services could accept one. It struggled so badly with that task that I eventually gave up and just did it by hand. The widely cited study that shows LLMs slow things down by 20% or so very much coheres with my experience, which is generally: fight with the LLM, give up, do it by hand.