Your definition of a glorified autocomplete is … oof. So in short, “try ask it to do something you’d hate on bad code you’d yourself fail at and it might fail”.

And I’m pretty sure I could try Claude on a repo as you describe and it wouldn’t in fact fail. You’re letting your opinions of what LLMs were like a few months ago influence what you think of them now.

Comments like yours really annoy me because they are ridiculously confident about AI being “glorified autocomplete”, but also clearly not informed about the capabilities. I don’t get how some people can be on HN and not actually … try these things, be curious about them, try them on hard problems.

I’m a good engineer. I’ve coded for 24 years at this point. Yesterday in 45 minutes I built a feature that would have taken me three months without AI. The speed gains are obscene and because of this, we can build things we would never have even started before. Software is accelerating.