There is a big difference between vibe coding and using an LLM to assist with coding. Vide coding is just accepting what ever slop it outputs and saying LGTM. You are not going to get quality code that way. You need to review what it does. I often find that it uses outdated libraries and deprecated functions.
Some ways an LLM can assist with coding:
I recently needed to refactor a bunch of code. Claude was very helpful this and it completed in about 5 minutes what would have taken me a couple of hours by hand.
Also they are very handy when using new frameworks and libraries. As we all know documentation for open source projects is often lacking. Just yesterday I ran into this. I pointed Claude at the projects GitHub repo and had the answers to my questions in just a couple of minutes. Manually I would have been spending a hour or two reading the code to figure out what I needed.
They are very handy when debugging. Get a weird hours that makes no sense. Instead of banging your head against the wall for a few hours, an LLM can help you find the problem much quicker.
In a past life I was a Domino admin and I ran it on an AS/400. It was great, handled incredible amounts of load, and required little maintenance. The only outage we had was when I accidentally deleted all the databases from the file system. Even that was pretty easy to recover from.
What about the old school processors like Authorize.net and Cybersource? It has been over a decade since I worked with them, so not sure what they are like now.
It has been 25 years, but back in college I had a job refurbishing and repairing PCs. Most problems were caused by cheap no name hardware. Most the quality hardware rarely had problems.
Maybe when quality hardware has problems, the owner knows how to deal with it, but when no-name hardware has problems, the owner has no clue how to build a computer
If you don't need color I recommend going with a laser printer. Not only for lower consumable costs, but better software support too. In 2009 I bought a Lexmark laser printer new for $120 at Frys. It has native postscript support, so it will work with anything without having to load software from the manufacturer. I systems ranging from an old Macintosh Quadra running System 7 to new Mac running MacOS Tahoe, a PC running Windows 11 and everything in between. It even works in Linux too.
The consumables are cheap too. I have just replaced the toner cartridge once and a new OEM one was about $80 on Amazon.
Pricing is something I struggle with too. I really need to figure out my pricing model and price point as it makes a difference to some deferred architecture decisions. I can't put the decision off much longer as I'm getting to the point where I need to make a decision.
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