People are being very uncharitable in the comments for some reason
This is a short and sweet article about a very cool real-world result in a very new area of tooling possibilities, with some honest and reasonable thoughts
Maybe the "Senior vs Junior Developer" narrative is a little stretched, but the substance of the article is great
Can't help but wonder if people are getting mad because they feel threatened
To me, articles like this are not so interesting for the results. I'm not reading them to find out just exactly what the performance of AIs is, exactly. Obviously it's not useful for that, it's not systematic, anecdotal, unscientific...
I think LLMs today, for all their goods and bads, can do some useful work. The problem is that there is still mystery on how to use them effectively. I'm not talking about some pie in the sky singularity stuff, but just coming up with prompts to do basic, simple tasks effectively.
Articles like that are great for learning new prompting tricks and I'm glad the authors are choosing to share their knowledge. Yes, OP isn't saying the last word on prompting, and there's a million ways it could be better. But the article is still useful to an average person trying to learn how to use LLMs more productively.
>the "Senior vs Junior Developer" narrative
It sounds to me like just another case of "telling the AI to explicitly reason through its answer improves the quality of results". The "senior developer" here is better able to triage aspects of the codebase to identify the important ones (and to the "junior" everything seems equally important) and I would say has better reasoning ability.
Maybe it works because when you ask the LLM to code something, it's not really trying to "do a good job", besides whatever nebulous bias is instilled from alignment. It's just trying to act the part of a human who is solving the problem. If you tell it to act a more competent part, it does better - but it has to have some knowledge (aka training data) of what the more competent part looks like.
No doubt the overstated title is part of the reason, so we've adopted the subtitle above, which is presumably more accurate.
Hey dang, nice to see you on my post. Thanks for making HN the best moderated community!
I am more and more convinced that many engineers are very defensive about AI and would rather point out any flaw than think how to leverage the tools to get any benefit out of them.
Just the other day I used cursor and iteratively implemented stories for 70 .vue files in few hours, while also writing documentation for the components and pages, and with the documentation being further fed to cursor, to write many E2Es, something that would've taken me at least few days if not a week.
When I shared that with some coworkers they went into a hunt to find all the shortcomings (often petty duplication of mocks, sometimes missing a story scenario, nothing major).
I found it striking as we really needed it and it provides tangible benefits:
- domain and UI stakeholders can navigate stories and think of more cases/feedback with ease on a UX/UI pov without having to replicate the scenarios manually doing multiple time consuming repetitive operations in the actual applications
- documentation proved to be very valuable to a junior that joined us this very january
- E2Es caught multiple bugs in their own PRs in the weeks after
And yet, instead of appreciating the cost/benefit ratio (something that should characterise a good engineer, after all, that's our job) of the solution, I was scolded because they (or I) would've done a more careful job missing that they never done that in the first place.
I have many such examples, such as automatically providing all the translation keys and translations for a new locale, just to find cherry picked criticism that this or that could've been spelled differently. Of course it can, what's your job if not being responsible for the localisation? That shouldn't diminish that 95% of the content was correct and provided in few seconds rather than days.
Why they do that? I genuinely feel some feel threatened, most of those reek insecurity.
I can understand some criticism towards those who build and sell hype with cherry picked results, but I cannot but find some of the worst critics suffering of Luddism.
I think the mention of Luddism is a nice tell. From Wikipedia:
> The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns relating to worker pay and output quality.
I think the push for AI is the modern-day equivalent for software development - to move making programs from being labour intensive to being capital intensive. There are some of us who don't see it as a good thing.
As for my personal perspective - I view AI as the over-confident senior "salesman" programmer - it has no model for what sort of things it cannot do yet when it attempts anything it requires a lot of prompting to get somewhere which looks passable. My values for developing software is reliability and quality - which I had hoped we were going to achieve by further exploring advanced type systems (including effect systems), static analysis, model checkers, etc. Instead the "market" prioritises short-term garbage creation to push sales until the next quarterly cycle. I don't have much excitement for that.
To add to your points, the job market is looking pretty grim, and it feels natural to feel threatened by layoffs and AI replacement. If there was no threat from layoffs, a lot less people would be against using a tool that makes their job easier.
Given how much damage it's done to our industry without any appreciable impact on the actual system's efficacy it makes sense to me that experts in a mechanism are critical of people telling them how effective this "tool" is for the mechanism.
I suppose it's simply easier to think of them as scared and afraid of losing their lobs to robots, but the reality is most programmers already know someone who lost their job to a robot that doesn't even exist yet.
[flagged]
You sound like a markov chain.
[flagged]
You can just cat the file, what does piping to echo give you?
Edit: it gives you nothing, because echo echos its arguments, ignores stdin
Least insane hackernews commenter
I'd love to hear more about how you're using cursor for testing especially e2e tests for frontend applications.
In my experience since cursor doesn't know how a frontend app looks like nor can it run a browser, the tests it writes are often inane.
Can you tell me what testing stack do you use, and how do you approach the process of writing large tests for mature codebases with cursor?
What I've done was to use composer recursively.
First I had it write stories based on the pages and components. I had obviously to review the work and further add more cases.
Then I had it generate a markdown file where it documented the purpose and usage and apis for those and combined it with user stories written in our project management tool which I copy pasted in different files. It helped our user stories are written in a gerkin-like fashion (when/and/or/then) which is computer-friendly.
As most of the components had unique identifiers in terms of data-test attributes I could further ask it to implement more e2e cases.
Overall I was very satisfied of the cost/benefit ratio.
Stories were the most complicated part as Cursor tended to redeclare mocks multiple times rather than sharing them across, and it wasn't consistent in the API choices it made (storybook has too many ways to accomplish the same thing).
E2Es with Playwright were the easiest part, the criticism here was that I used data attributes (which users don't see) over elements like text. I very much agree with that, as I myself am a fan of testing the way that users would. Problem is that as our application is localized I had to compromise in order to keep them parallel and fast, as many tests do change locale settings which was interfering, as new pages loading had a different locale then expected. I'm not the only one using such attributes for testing, I know it's common practice in big cushy tech too.
One thing I want to note, you can't do it in few prompts, it feels like having to convince the agent to do what you ask him iteratively.
I'm still convinced of the cost/benefits ratio and with practice you get better at prompting. You try to get to the result you want by manual editing and chatting, then feed the example result to generate more.
> One thing I want to note, you can't do it in few prompts, it feels like having to convince the agent to do what you ask him iteratively.
Success with current day LLMs isn't about getting them to output perfect code. Having them do the pets their good at - rough initial revs - and then iterating from there, is more effective. The important metric is code (not LoC, mind you) that gets checked into git/revision control and sent for PR and merged. Realizing when convincing the LLM to output flawless code ends up taking you in circles and is unproductive, while not throwing away the LLM as a useful tool is where the sweet spot is.
What your coworkers are experiencing could be signs of Luddism. This Luddism could be a very natural and human reaction.
The life situation of your coworkers could vary widely: maybe some are financially insecure living paycheck to paycheck, maybe some have made a significant purchase and cant afford to loose their job, maybe someone had a new child born and doesn't have the time to make huge investments in their workflow and is afraid of drowning in the rising tide. Maybe they're pushing back against performative business, not wanting everyone to feel that to be productive they need to constantly be modifying 100s of vue files.
Maybe they're jealous of you and your cybernetic superpowers; jealousy is a completely normal human feeling. Or maybe you were going about this in an ostentatious manner, appearing to others as tooting your own horn. Maybe there's a competition for promotions and others feel the need to make such political moves like shooting your work down. Maybe this work that you did was a political move.
Technologies are deployed and utilized in certain human contexts, inside certain organizational structures, and so on. Nothing is ever a plain and simple, cold hard cost-benefit analysis.
To me it sounds like you're rushing the work and making mistakes then dismissing people who point it out.
Maybe I didn't express myself correctly but it was neither planned nor budgeted and my client is a small team with more projects than people.
I strongly believed in the value provided by setting up stories, writing more documentation and E2Es in the few hours I had and it did.
Due to the boilerplate-y nature of the task LLMs proved to be a great fit, having me reviewing more than writing thousands of lines of code across almost 80 files in few hours rather than multiple days.
The fact that the cost/benefit ratio is lost on so many people is appalling but unsurprising in a field that severely lacks the "engineering" part and is thus uneducated to think in those terms.
Man generates 1000s of lines of (buggy) boilerplate across 70 files, which was neither budgeted nor planned, and his coworkers are annoyed at him... News at 11
There was no bugs, where did you read that?
You mentioned your coworkers found shortcomings, I assume that implies the presence of bugs (be it in code, documentation, or even just more unnecessary code to maintain)
No code at all is the best code, that's a given.
It was a matter of cost vs benefit ratio which ultimately resulted in net benefits. Stakeholders like designers and product don't see nor care that some mocks are repeated or that the sub optimal API is used in stories. Customers don't care why the application is broken, they care it is and the additional E2Es catched multiple bugs. Juniors would appreciate documentation and stories even if they might be redundant.
I think the biggest fallacy committed in evaluating the benefits of LLMs is in comparing them with the best output humans can generate.
But if those humans do not have the patience, energy or time budget to generate such output (and more often than not they don't) I think one should evaluate leveraging LLMs to lower the required effort and trying to find an acceptable sweet spot, otherwise you risk falling into Luddism.
Even as of 2025 humans outperform machines in tailoring 200 years after Luddism appeared, that doesn't change that it's thanks to machines that lifted humans out of a lot of the repetitive work that we can cloth virtually every human for pennies. That hasn't removed the need for human oversight in tailoring or that very same role behind higher quality clothes.
It seems llms are very useful for some people and not so much for others. Both sides believe it's all or nothing. If it's garbage for me it must be garbage. If it's doing my work it must be able to do everyone's work... Everyone is very emotionally about it too because of the hype around it. Almost all conversations about llms, especially on hn are full of this useless bickering.
Felt a bit more cynic than usual haha.
[flagged]
Your post is far worse than anything the OP said. Instead of complaining about rules, downvote, it is a lot more productive.
Incorrect. Pointing out that someone badly broke the site rules in addition to displaying intellectually dishonest behavior in general is objectively better than actually saying those things. There is no world in which it's worse to point out this kind of bad behavior than to commit it.
The idea that it's more productive to silently downvote is also incorrect. You can't change your behavior if you don't know what you did wrong, and pointing out exactly why someone's behavior is egregious allows others who have their heads straight to downvote that person too.
They did not though, you are incorrect. I am only responding to suggest that perhaps your tone and misuse of phrases like intellectual dishonesty look quite negative compared to how the OP worded their comment. The comments in this submission were quite negative in what felt like a biased kind of way. I am already going to far in responding to your rant but though it might help in redirecting your incorrect assumptions.
> They did not though, you are incorrect.
They did not what? I am incorrect about what? I made specific points and comments, and you aren't responding to anything in particular. You saying "you are incorrect" without even naming a specific point, let alone providing an argument against it, is meaningless.
> I am only responding to suggest that perhaps your tone and misuse of phrases like intellectual dishonesty
My tone is fine - I'm not engaging in personal attacks or emotional manipulation. And my use of "intellectual dishonesty" is not a misuse - you're incorrect again - because that's exactly what's happening.
> look quite negative compared to how the OP worded their comment.
This isn't even an argument - it's a complaint based on feelings.
You also missed the a significant part of the original comment I made, which is that the OP is emotionally manipulating their readers instead of actually offering constructive criticism or valid arguments. Ironically, that's exactly what you're doing here too.
> The comments in this submission were quite negative in what felt like a biased kind of way.
It doesn't matter - that does not justify a knee-jerk positive comment that breaks the guidelines and commits logical fallacies and emotionally manipulates the audience.
> I am already going to far in responding to your rant but though it might help in redirecting your incorrect assumptions.
Anyone capable of understanding basic logic understands that I'm making arguments and using reason. The ones ranting are the OP and you, given that you haven't made a single valid argument in either of your responses, and instead are "responding to tone" and "contradicting without argument" in the argument pyramid.
Please don't respond unless you have an actual valid argument to make - you haven't made one yet.
Is this performative art or are you just a jerk. You are just being a jerk in your rant now. Your original post is below zero so clearly those who saw it disagree with you. Work on your delivery and try to be more compassionate and less of a jerk. Its hard, sometimes I come across as a jerk when I am passionate about things. The way you speak to others is a detractor to the comments section.
You ignored my request "Please don't respond unless you have an actual valid argument to make - you haven't made one yet." and responded without making a single valid argument. You have to realize that you're acting out of emotion and that you haven't engaged your logical thinking process one single time in any comment you've made here. Please stop.
It also isn't clear that you have actually read my comments before responding. You haven't actually quoted any of my text or responded to a single point I've made.
> Is this performative art or are you just a jerk. You are just being a jerk in your rant now.
This is emotionally manipulative, breaks the HN guidelines, is an ad-hominem attack and also a false dichotomy fallacy. You need to read up on logical fallacies[1], because that's the only thing you've been doing in your comments. And, no, to be clear, my posts are neither - I'm using logic, while you're using emotion.
The only person ranting is you. I've provided arguments and points - you've merely personally attacked me without responding to my points. That's more of jerk behavior than anything, because a jerk knows that they are wrong, and so has to attack others by being emotionally manipulative or attacking their character.
> Your original post is below zero so clearly those who saw it disagree with you.
Irrelevant. You can disagree and still be incorrect. HN voting is meaningless when it comes to truth or correctness.
> Work on your delivery and try to be more compassionate and less of a jerk.
More emotional manipulation (condescending tone) and personal attacks.
> Its hard, sometimes I come across as a jerk when I am passionate about things. The way you speak to others is a detractor to the comments section.
I've made valid points that you've been unable to answer. The only replies that you've given are personal attacks, insults, and emotional manipulation. It's also highly hypocritical that you accuse me detracting from the comments section, given that you haven't made a single good point, have repeatedly broken the guidelines, detracted from the comments yourself by posting value-less fluff, and defended blatantly anti-intellectual behavior that detracts from the comments.
I'm going to stop responding until you make a valid point. I've called out that you're ranting, that you're not engaging your logical thought process and am merely responding out of emotion, that you're breaking the guidelines, that you're repeatedly committing fallacies and non-arguments, and that you haven't actually responded to any of my points.
Given that last part, it's meaningless to respond further unless you actually read my comment before responding to it, and then make a valid argument. If anyone reads through this thread in the future, they'll be able to see that you utterly failed to make any coherent argument whatsoever.
Please don’t gaslight. You have been extremely rude and a huge jerk from the first comment. Don’t try to spin this like I am attacking you. I am simply saying your command of English is quite lacking in civility and you keep doubling down on it. There is a reason you were down voted.
