the net productivity is still very much positive because it's one-time setup cost
loveparade on Hacker News
In the thread “Why the push for Agentic when models can barely follow a simple instruction?”, replying to this comment
Helped: Feeding right context and letting models self-correct errors.
Got in the way: Not always following instructions from CLAUDE/AGENT.md files.
… I've used LLMs to write highly specific scientific/niche code and they did great, but obviously I had to feed them the right context (compiled from various websites and books convered to markdown in my case) to understand the problem well enough. That adds additional work on my part, but the net productivity is still very much positive because it's one-time setup cost. Telling LLMs which files they should look at was indeed necessary 1-2 years ago in early models, but I have not done that for the last half year or so, and I'm working on codebases with millions of lines of code. …