Ask HN: Anyone struggling to get value out of coding LLMs?

I use LLMs daily for stuff like: - solving tasks that just require applying knowledge ("here's a paste of my python import structure. I don't write Python often and I'm aware I'm doing something wrong here because I get this error, tell me the proper way organise the package"). - writing self-contained throwaway pieces of code ("here's a paste of my DESCRIBE TABLE output, write an SQL query to show the median [...]"). - as a debugging partner ("I can SSH to this host directly, but Ansible fails to connect with this error, what could be causing this difference"). All these use cases work great, I save a lot of time. But with the core work of writing the code that I work on, I've almost never had any success. I've tried: - Cursor (can't remember which model, the default) - Google's Jules - OpenAI Codex with o4 I found in all cases that the underlying capability is clearly there (the model can understand and write code) but the end-to-end value is not at all. It could write code t ... Read full article.