[HN Gopher] With AI you need to think bigger
___________________________________________________________________
With AI you need to think bigger
Author : boznz
Score : 243 points
Date : 2025-03-09 19:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (rodyne.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rodyne.com)
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| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Accidentally thought too big
| jm4rc05 wrote:
| https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/is_it_worth_the_time.png
| boznz wrote:
| bugger! More than two visitors to my web site and it falls
| apart, I might fork out the $10 for the better CPU and more
| memory option before I post something in future.
| antonkar wrote:
| Agree, let's build direct democratic simulated multiverse.
|
| Or at least make a digital back up of Earth.
|
| Or at least represent an LLM as a green field with objects, where
| humans are the only agents:
|
| you stand near a monkey, see chewing mouth nearby, go there (your
| prompt now is "monkey chews"), close by you see an arrow pointing
| at a banana, father away an arrow points at an apple, very far
| away at the horizon an arrow points at a tire (monkeys rarely
| chew tires).
|
| So things close by are more likely tokens, things far away are
| less likely, you see all of them at once (maybe you're on top of
| a hill to see farther). This way we can make a form of static
| place AI, where humans are the only agents
| boznz wrote:
| A simulation in a simulation... Neat!
| antonkar wrote:
| Thanks, I wrote extensively about it) If interested, you can
| find a link in my profile or ask anything here
| boznz wrote:
| Thanks I will take my time reading it, you certainly could
| never be criticized for thinking too small.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Probably right at the end of your career is where this tool would
| be the most useful
|
| An undergrad using the hottest tech right of the bat? Cooked.
|
| It's like giving the world 128gb of ram and 64bits in 1970, we
| would have just maxed it out by 1972.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| _An undergrad using the hottest tech right of the bat? Cooked._
|
| What if I tell you there is an undergrad that just flunked a
| class and is depressed and cries about it? Considers changing
| their major? This is pre-AI. We have a chance that undergrads
| will never feel that way again. Not intimidated by anything.
| TZubiri wrote:
| There's a misconception that passing is worth 1 and flunking
| is worth 0.
|
| There's shitty ways to pass and good ways to pass
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| > Cooked
|
| People using this phrase should probably stop, it's become
| extremely tiresome as a cliche
| jgord wrote:
| Im guessing "cooked" means the opposite of "based" ?
|
| but I could be a Feynman radian out on those vectors in leet
| space.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| Cooked means "you're finished, it's over, no return", it's
| a really definitive term which I'm opposed to by philosophy
| wbakst wrote:
| it's interesting, it feels like less needing to think much bigger
| and more so that we're now able to accept that much bigger ideas
| we've been thinking about are far more feasible.
|
| that's so cool. all those grand ideas that felt so far away are
| right here ready to grasp and realize.
| mindwok wrote:
| This article is strangely timed for me. About a year ago a
| company reached out to me about doing an ERP migration. I turned
| it away because I thought it'd just be way, way too much work.
|
| This weekend, I called my colleague and asked him to call them
| back and see if they're still trying to migrate. AI definitely
| has changed my calculus around what I can take on.
| klabb3 wrote:
| As a mostly LLM-skeptic I reluctantly agree this is something AI
| actually does well. When approaching unfamiliar territory, LLMs
| (1) use simple language (improvement over academia but also much
| professional intentionally obfuscated literature), (2) use the
| right abstraction (they seem good at "zooming out" to big picture
| of things, and (3) you can move both laterally between topics and
| "zoom in" quickly. Another way of putting it is "picking the
| brain" of an expert in order to build a rough mental model.
|
| It's downsides, such as hallucinations and lack of reasoning
| (yeah) aren't very problematic here. Once you're familiar enough
| you can switch to better tools and know what to look for.
| keeptrying wrote:
| Yes. LLMs are the perfect learning assistant.
|
| You can now do literally anything. Literally.
|
| Going to take a while for everyone to figure this out but they
| will given time.
| whartung wrote:
| > You can now do literally anything. Literally.
|
| In theory.
|
| In practice, not so much. Not in my experience. I have a
| drive littered with failed AI projects.
|
| And by that I mean projects I have diligently tried to work
| with the AI (ChatGP, mostly in my case) to get something
| accomplished, and after hours over days of work, the projects
| don't work. I shelve them and treat them like cryogenic
| heads. "Sometime in the future I'll try again."
|
| It's most successful with "stuff I don't want to RTFM over".
| How to git. How to curl. A working example for a library more
| specific to my needs.
|
| But higher than that, no, I've not had success with it.
|
| It's also nice as a general purpose wizard code generator.
| But that's just rote work.
|
| YMMV
| tqwhite wrote:
| First, rote work is the kind I hate most and so having AI
| do it is a huge win. It's also really good for finding
| bugs, albeit with guidance. It follows complicated logic
| like a boss.
|
| Maybe you are running into the problem I did early. I told
| it what I wanted. Now I tell it what I want done. I use
| Claude Code and have it do its things one at a time and for
| each, I tell it the goal and then the steps I want it to
| take. I treat it as if it was a high-level programming
| language. Since I was more procedural with it, I get pretty
| good results.
|
| I hope that helps.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| They seem pretty good with human language learning. I used
| ChatGPT to practice reading and writing responses in
| French. After a few weeks I felt pretty comfortable reading
| a lot of common written French. My grammar is awful but
| that was never my goal.
| keeptrying wrote:
| You just aren't delving deep enough.
|
| For every problem that stops you, ask the LLM. With enough
| context it'll give you at least a mediocre way to get
| around your problem.
|
| It's still a lot of hard work. But the only person that can
| stop yourself is you. (Which it looks like you've done.)
|
| List the reasons you've stopped below and I'll give you
| prompts to get around them.
| rectang wrote:
| It's true that once you have learned enough to tell the
| LLM exactly what answer you want, it can repeat it back
| to you verbatim. The question is how far short of that
| you should stop because the LLM is no longer an efficient
| way to make progress.
| keeptrying wrote:
| From a knowledge standpoint an LLM can give you pointers
| at any point.
|
| Theres no way it will "fall short".
|
| You just have to improve your prompt. In the worst case
| scenario you can say "please list out all the different
| research angles I should proceed from here and which of
| these might most likely yield a useful result for me"
| collingreen wrote:
| My skepticism flares up with sentences like "Theres no
| way it will "fall short"." Especially in the face of so
| many first hand examples of LLMs being wrong, getting
| stuck, or falling short.
| redman25 wrote:
| I spent a couple weekends trying to reimplement microsoft's
| inferencing for phi4 multimodal in rust. I had zero
| experience messing with ONNX before. Claude produced a
| believably good first pass but it ended up being too much
| work in the end and I've put it down for the moment.
|
| I spent a lot of time fixing Claude's misunderstanding of the
| `ort` library, mainly because of Claude's knowledge cutoff.
| In the end, the draft just wasn't complete enough to get
| working without diving in really deep. I also kind of learned
| that ONNX probably isn't the best way to approach these
| things anymore. Most of the mindshare is around the python
| code and torch apis.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember when they first said that about
| the Internet. We were going to enter a new enlightened age of
| information, giving everyone access to the sum total of human
| knowlege, no need to get a fancy degree, universities will be
| obsolete, expertise will be democratized.... See how that
| turned out.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| The motivated will excel even further, for the less
| motivated nothing will change. The gap is just going to
| increase between high-agency individuals and everyone else.
| svnt wrote:
| I'd suggest we are much closer to that reality now than we
| were in the 90s, in large part thanks to the internet.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| Since the Internet became ubiquitous, more people believe
| the moon landing, climate change, and vaccines are
| hoaxes.
| 1dom wrote:
| LLMs and the internet both make it easier for us to
| access more information, which also means we can reach
| dumber conclusions quicker. It does go both ways though.
| Verdex wrote:
| I don't know. I wouldn't trust a brain surgeon who has up til
| now only been messing around on LLMs.
|
| Edit: and for that matter I also would not trust a brain
| surgeon who had only read about brain surgery in medical
| texts.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| My experience is instead that LLMs (those I used) can be
| helpful there where solutions are quite well known (e.g. a
| standard task in some technology used by many), and terrible
| where the problem has not been tackled much by the public.
|
| About language (point (1)), I get a lot of "hypnotism for
| salesmen to non technical managers and roundabout comments"
| (e.g. "which wire should I cut, I have a red one and a blue
| one" // "It is mission critical to cut the right wire; in order
| to decide which wire to cut, we must first get acquainted with
| the idea that cutting the wrong wire will make the device
| explode..." // "Yes, which one?" // "Cutting the wrong one can
| have critical consequences...")
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > My experience is instead that LLMs (those I used) can be
| helpful there where solutions are quite well known
|
| Yes, that's a necessary condition. If there isn't some well
| known solution, LLMs won't give you anything useful.
|
| The point though, is that the solution was not well known to
| the GP. That's where LLMs shine, they "understand" what you
| are trying to say, and give you the answer you need, even
| when you don't know the applicable jargon.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > and terrible where the problem has not been tackled much by
| the public
|
| Very much so (I should have added this as a downside in the
| original comment). Before I even ask a question I ask myself
| "does it have training data on this?". Also, having a bad
| answer is only one failure mode. More commonly, I find that
| it drifts towards the "center of gravity", i.e. the
| mainstream or most popular school of thought, which is like
| talking to someone with a strong status-quo bias. However,
| before you've familiarized yourself with a new domain, the
| "current state of things" is a pretty good bargain to learn
| fast, at least for my brain.
| sunami-ai wrote:
| LLMs don't reason the way we do, but there are similarities at
| the cognitive pre-conscious level.
|
| I made a challenge to various lawyers and the Stanford Codex
| (no one took the bait yet) to find critical mistakes in the
| "reasoning" of our Legal AI. One former attorney general told
| us that he likes how it balances the intent of the law. Sample
| output (scroll and click on stats and the donuts on the second
| slide):
|
| Samples: https://labs.sunami.ai/feed
|
| I built the AI using an inference-time=scaling approach that I
| evolved over a year's time, and it is based on Llama for now,
| but could be replace with any major foundational model.
|
| Presentation: https://prezi.com/view/g2CZCqnn56NAKKbyO3P5/
| 8-minute long video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rib4gU1HW8&t=233s
|
| info sunami ai
| elicksaur wrote:
| .
| sunami-ai wrote:
| A former attorney general is taking it for a spin, and has
| said great things about it so far. One of the top 100
| lawyers in the US. HN has turned into a pit of hate. WTF
| all this hate for? People just really angry at AI, it
| seems. JFC, Grow up.
| sunami-ai wrote:
| The sensitivity can be turned up or down. It's why we are
| asking for input. If you're talking about the Disney EULA,
| it has the context that it is a browsewrap agreement. The
| setting for material omission is very greedy right now, and
| we could find a happy middle.
| simonw wrote:
| I wrote something similar about this effect almost two years ago:
| https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...
| "AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my
| projects"
|
| With an extra 23 months of experience under my belt since then
| I'm comfortable to say that the effect has stayed steady for me
| over time, and even increased a bit.
| shmoogy wrote:
| 100% agree with this, sometimes I feel I'm becoming too reliant
| on it - but I step back and see how much more ambitious of
| projects I take on, and finish quickly still, due to it.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Claude 3.7 basically one-shot a multiplayer game's server-
| authority rollback netcode with client-side prediction and
| interpolation.
|
| I spent months of my life in my 20s trying to build a non-
| janky implementation of that and failed which was really
| demoralizing.
|
| Over the last couple weekends I got farther than I was able
| to get in weeks or months. And when I get stumped, I have the
| confidence of being able to rubber-duck my way through it
| with an LLM if it can't outright fix it itself.
|
| Though I also often wonder how much time I have left
| professionally in software. I try not to think about that. :D
| fallinditch wrote:
| Around that time you highlighted the threat of prompt injection
| attacks on AI assistants. Have you also been able to make
| progress in this area?
| simonw wrote:
| Frustratingly I feel we've made very little progress towards
| a fix for that problem in nearly 2.5 years!
| bloomingkales wrote:
| I definitely felt this. I thought "If I have to redo this in
| Flutter or in Swift, I can". I don't know either, so have to move
| with some caution (but it's all very exciting).
| jgord wrote:
| At first glance, it seems like _porting_ code to another
| language / api .. is probably a good sweet spot for these code
| LLMs ..
|
| .. and even automating the testing to check results match,
| coming up with edge cases etc.
|
| ... and if thats true, then they could be useful for
| _optimizing_ by porting to other apis / algos, checking same-
| ness of behavior, then comparing performance.
|
| The whole "vibe coding" doesn't grab me - as I feel the
| bottleneck is with my creativity and understanding rather than
| generating viable code - using a productive expressive language
| like javascript or lisp and working on a small code base helps
| that.
|
| eg. I would like to be able to take an algo and port it to run
| on GPU for example... without having to ingest much arcane api
| quirks. JAX looks like a nice target, but Ive held off for now.
| nop_slide wrote:
| > At first glance, it seems like _porting_ code to another
| language / api .. is probably a good sweet spot for these
| code LLMs ..
|
| I recently ported skatevideosite.com from svelte/python to
| ruby on rails. I leaned on AI heavily to translate the svelte
| files to ERB templates and it did a wonderful job.
|
| My experiene generally with these systems is that they are
| good with handling things you _give_ it, but less so when
| coming up with stuff from scratch.
|
| For example I've tried to use it to build out additional
| features and the results are subpar.
|
| Agree, yeah "vibe coding" is super cringe haha
| haswell wrote:
| I recently discovered that some of the Raspberry Pi models
| support the Linux Kernel's "Gadget Mode". This allows you to
| configure the Pi to appear as some type of device when plugged
| into a USB port, i.e. a Mass Storage/USB stick, Network Card,
| etc. Very nifty for turning a Pi Zero into various kinds of
| utilities.
|
| When I realized this was possible, I wanted to set up a project
| that would allow me to use the Pi as a bridge from my document
| scanner (has the ability to scan to a USB port) to a SMB share on
| my network that acts as the ingest point to a Paperless-NGX
| instance.
|
| Scanner -> USB "drive" > Some of my code running on the Pi > The
| SMB Share > Paperless.
|
| I described my scenario in a reasonable degree of detail to
| Claude and asked it to write the code to glue all of this
| together. What it produced didn't work, but was close enough that
| I only needed to tweak a few things.
|
| While none of this was particularly complex, it's a bit obscure,
| and would have easily taken a few days of tinkering the way I
| have for most of my life. Instead it took a few hours, and I
| finished a project.
|
| I, too, have started to think differently about the projects I
| take on. Projects that were previously relegated to "I should do
| that some day when I actually have time to dive deeper" now feel
| a lot more realistic.
|
| What will truly change the game for me is when it's reasonable to
| run GPT-4o level models locally.
| liotier wrote:
| Please, I would be delighted if you published that code... Just
| yesterday I was thinking that a two-faced Samba share/USB Mass
| Storage dongle Pi would save me a lot of shuttling audio
| samples between my desktop and my Akai MPC.
| haswell wrote:
| I've been thinking about writing up a blog post about it.
| Might have to do a Show HN when time allows.
|
| This guide was a _huge_ help:
| https://github.com/thagrol/Guides/blob/main/mass-storage-
| gad...
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| Please do-I think this is a great example of how AI can be
| helpful.
|
| We see so many stories about how terrible AI coding is. We
| need more practical stories of how it can help.
| woleium wrote:
| The tool itself would be of a lot of use in school
| science and design labs where a bunch of older kit lands
| from universities and such. I used to put a lot of floppy
| to usb converters on things like old ir spectrometers
| that were good enough still for school use.
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| Yep!
|
| I'm teaching kids in Bayview how to code using AI tools.
| I'm trying to figure out the best way to do it without
| losing anything in between.
|
| With my pilot students I've found the ones I gave cursor
| are outperforming the ones who aren't using AI.
|
| Not just with deliverables, but with fundamental
| knowledge(what is a function?).
|
| Small sample size so I don't want to make
| proclamations... but I think a generation learning how to
| code with these tools is going to be unstoppable.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Not just with deliverables, but with fundamental
| knowledge(what is a function?)
|
| Are you testing this knowledge in a situation where they
| don't have access to AI tools?
|
| If not, then I seriously wonder if this claim means
| anything
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| Yeah, to clarify-testing is closed book for everyone.
|
| Control group _might_ be using AI tools(I tell them not
| to but who knows) but the experiment group has received
| instructions and are encouraged to use the tools.
| teeray wrote:
| I was also writing a SANE-to-Paperless bridge to run on an
| RPi recently, but ran into issues getting it to detect my
| ix500. Would love to see the code!
| genewitch wrote:
| Well, R1 is runnable locally for under $2500; so I guess you
| could pool money and share the cost with other people that
| think they need that much power, rather than a quantized model
| with fewer parameters (or a distil).
| downboots wrote:
| would you have paid someone to do it over solving the challenge
| yourself?
| tux3 wrote:
| Fun fact: Gadget mode also works on Android phones, if you want
| a programmable USB device that you can easily program and carry
| around
|
| I made a PoC of a 2FA authenticator (think Yubikey) that
| automatically signs you in. I use it for testing scenarios when
| I have to log out and back in many times, it flies through what
| would otherwise be a manual 2FA screen with pin entry, or
| navigating 2FA popups to select passkey and touching your
| fingerprint reader.
|
| Obviously not very secure, but very useful!
| albert_e wrote:
| Interesting !
|
| I have a bunch of older android phones that could be
| repurposed for some tinkering.
|
| The touchscreen display and input would open a lot more
| interactive possibilities.
|
| Is there a community or gallery of ideas and projects that
| leverage this?
| tux3 wrote:
| There is this repository:
| https://github.com/tejado/android-usb-gadget
|
| They have some examples that emulate an USB keyboard and
| mouse, and the app shows how to configure the Gadget API to
| turn the phone into whatever USB device you want.
|
| The repo is unfortunately inactive, but the underlying
| feature is exposed through a stable Linux kernel API (via
| ConfigFS), so everything will continue working as long as
| Android leaves the feature enabled.
|
| You do need to be root, however, since you will essentially
| be writing a USB device. Then all you have to do is open
| `/dev/hidg0`, and when you read from this file you will be
| reading USB HID packets. Write your response and it is sent
| on the cable.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| > Instead it took a few hours, and I finished a project.
|
| Did you?
|
| If you wanted to expand on it, or debug it when it fails, do
| you really understand the solution completely? (Perhaps you
| do.)
|
| Don't get me wrong, I've done the same in the last few years
| and I've completed several fun projects this way.
|
| But I only use AI on things I know I don't care about
| personally. If I use too much AI on things I actually want to
| know, I feel my abilities deteriorating.
| dangus wrote:
| I think this effect of losing your abilities is somewhat
| overblown.
|
| Especially when AI has saved me on actually explaining
| specific lines of code that would have been difficult to look
| up with a search engine or reference documentation and know
| what I was looking for.
|
| At some point understanding is understanding, and there is no
| intellectual "reward" for banging your head against the wall.
|
| Regex is the perfect example. Yes, I understand it, but it
| takes me a long time to parse through it manually and I use
| it infrequently enough that it turns into a big timewaster.
| It's very helpful for me to just ask AI to come up with the
| string and for me to verify it.
|
| And if I were the type of person who didn't understand the
| result of what I was looking at, I could literally ask that
| very same AI to break it down and explain it.
| haswell wrote:
| This summarizes my feelings pretty well. I've been writing
| code in a dozen languages for 25+ years at this point. Not
| only do I not gain anything from writing certain
| boilerplate for the nth time, I'm also less likely to
| actually do the work unless it reaches some threshold of
| importance because it's just not interesting.
|
| With all of this said, I can see how this could be
| problematic with less experience. For this scanner project,
| it was like having the ability to hand off some tasks to a
| junior engineer. But having juniors around doesn't mean
| senior devs will atrophy.
|
| It will ultimately come down to how people use these tools,
| and the mindset they bring to their work.
| haswell wrote:
| > _Did you?_
|
| Yes.
|
| > _do you really understand the solution completely?_
|
| Yes; fully. I'd describe what I delegated to the AI as "busy
| work". I still spent time thinking through the overall design
| before asking the AI for output.
|
| > _But I only use AI on things I know I don 't care about
| personally._
|
| Roughly speaking, I'd put my personal projects in two
| different categories:
|
| 1. Things that try to solve some problem in my life
|
| 2. Projects for the sake of intellectual stimulation and
| learning
|
| The primary goal of this scanner project was/is to de-clutter
| my apartment and get rid of paper. For something like this, I
| prioritize getting it done over intellectual pursuits.
| Another option I considered was just buying a newer scanner
| with built-in scan-to-SMB functionality.
|
| Using AI allowed me to split the difference. I got it done
| quickly, but I still learned about some things along the way
| that are already forming into future unrelated project ideas.
|
| > _If I use too much AI on things I actually want to know, I
| feel my abilities deteriorating._
|
| I think this likely comes down to how it's used. For this
| particular project, I came away knowing quite a bit more
| about everything involved, and the AI assistance was a
| learning multiplier.
|
| But to be clear, I also fully took over the code after the
| initial few iterations of LLM output. My goal wasn't to make
| the LLM build everything for me, but to bootstrap things to a
| point I could easily build from.
|
| I could see using AI for category #2 projects in a more
| limited fashion, but likely more as a tutor/advisor.
| thrwthsnw wrote:
| For category #2 it's very useful as well and ties in with
| the theme of the article in that it reduces the activation
| energy required to almost zero. I've been using AI
| relentlessly to pursue all kinds of ideas that I would
| otherwise simply write down and file for later. When they
| involve some technology or theory I know little about I can
| get to a working demo in less than an hour and once I have
| that in hand I begin exploring the concepts I'm unfamiliar
| with by simply asking about them: what is this part of the
| code doing? Why is this needed? What other options are
| there? What are some existing projects that do something
| similar? What is the theory behind this? And then also
| making modifications or asking for changes or features. It
| allows for much wider and faster exploration and let's you
| build things from scratch instead of reaching for another
| library so you end up learning how things work at a lower
| level. The code does get messy but AI is also a great tool
| for refactoring and debugging, you just have to adjust to
| the faster pace of development and remember to take more
| frequent pauses to clean up or rebuild from a better
| starting point and understanding of the problem.
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| The exciting thing about AI is it let's you go back to any
| project or idea you've ever had and they are now possibly doable,
| even if they seemed impossible or too much work back then. Some
| of the key pieces missing have become trivial, and even if you
| don't know how to do something AI will help you figure it out or
| just let you come up with a solution that may seem dirty, but
| actually works, whereas before it was impossible without expert
| systems and grinding out so much code. It's opened so many doors.
| It's hard to remember ideas that you have written off before,
| there are so many blind spots that are now opportunities.
| wruza wrote:
| It doesn't do that for things rarely done before though. And
| it's poisoned with opinions from the internet. E.g. you can
| convince it that we have to remove bullshit layers from
| programming and make it straightforward. It will even print a
| few pages of vague bullet points about it, if not yet. But when
| you ask it to code, it will dump a react form.
|
| I'm not trying to invalidate experiences itt, cause I have a
| similar one. But it feels futile as we are stuck with our pre-
| AI bloated and convoluted ways of doing things^W^W making lots
| of money and securing jobs by writing crap nobody understands
| why, and there's no way to undo this or to teach AI to
| generalize.
|
| I think this novelty is just blindness to how bad things are in
| the areas you know little about. For example, you may think it
| solves the job when you ask it to create a button and a route.
| And it does. But the job wasn't to create a route, load and
| validate data and render it on screen in a few pages and files.
| The job was to take a query and to have it on screen in a
| couple of lines. Yes it helps writing pages of our nonsense,
| but it's still nonsense. It works, but feels like we have
| fooled ourselves twice now. It also feels like people will soon
| create AI playbooks for structuring and layering their output,
| cause ability to code review it will deteriorate in just a few
| years with less seniors and much more barely-coders who get
| into it now.
| jboggan wrote:
| > And it's poisoned with opinions from the internet.
|
| This is the scary part. What current AI's are very
| effectively doing is surfacing the best solution (from a pre-
| existing blog/SO answer) that I might have been able to
| Google 10 years ago when search was "better" and there was
| less SEO slop on the internet - and pre-extract the relevant
| code for me (which is no minor thing).
|
| But I repeatedly have been in situations where I ask for a
| feature and it brings in a new library and a bunch of extra
| code and only 2 weeks later as I get more familiar with that
| library do I realize that the "extra" code I didn't
| understand at first is part of a Hello World blog post on
| that framework and I suddenly understand that I have enabled
| interfaces and features on my business app that were meant
| for a toy example.
| saltcod wrote:
| Found the same thing. I was toying with a Discord bot a few weeks
| ago that involved setting up and running a node server, deployed
| to Fly via docker. A bunch of stuff a bit out of my wheelhouse.
| All of it turned out to be totally straightforward with LLM
| assistance.
|
| Thinking bigger is a practice to hone.
| autocole wrote:
| Can you describe how you used LLMs for deployment? I'm actually
| doing this exact thing but I'm feeling annoyed by DevOps and
| codebase setup work. I wonder if I'm just being too particular
| about which tools I'm using rather than just going with the
| flow
| 101008 wrote:
| > I am now at a real impasse, towards the end of my career and
| knowing I could happily start it all again with a new insight and
| much bigger visions for what I could take on. It feels like
| wining the lottery two weeks before you die
|
| I envy this optimistic. I am not the opposite (im a sr engineer
| with more than 15 years of experience), but I am scared about my
| future. I invested too much time in learning concepts, theory,
| getting a Master degree, and in a few years all of my knowledge
| can be useless in the market.
| boznz wrote:
| IT is never static. I have had to take several forks in my
| career with languages and technologies often leading to dead-
| ends and re-training. It is amazing how much you learn doing
| one thing directly translates to another, it can often lead to
| you not having a specific/narrow mindset too.
|
| Having an LLM next to you means there is never a stupid
| question, I ask the AI the same stupid questions repeatedly
| until I get it, that is not really possible with a smart human,
| even if they have the patience, you are often afraid to look
| dumb in their eyes.
| 101008 wrote:
| I'm worried about being replaced by LLM. If it keeps evolving
| to the point where a CTO can ask LLM to do something and
| deploy it, why he would pay for a team of engineers?
|
| Forking to different technologies and languages is one thing
| (I've been there, I started with PHP and I haven't touch it
| for almost a decade now), but being replaced by a new tech is
| something different. I don't see how I could pivot to still
| be useful.
| wruza wrote:
| I see it more as "if an LLM can do that, why would I need
| an employer?"
|
| This coin has two sides. If a CTO can live without you, you
| can live without an expensive buffer between you and your
| clients. He's now just a guy like you, and adds little
| value compared to everyone else.
| 101008 wrote:
| I know what you mean but I don't see it positive either.
| If each engineer is now a startup, it will be extra
| complicated to make money.
|
| It's like saying since all of us know how to write, we
| all can sell books.
| doug_durham wrote:
| Where in reality can a CTO talk to a human and deploy it?
| It takes engineers to understand the requirements and to
| iterate with the CTO. The CTO has better things to do with
| their time than wrestle with an LLM all day.
| yifanl wrote:
| I guarentee that the first thought in any good CTO's mind
| in that world is "How much payroll do computer
| babysitters deserve?"
| jimbokun wrote:
| They ask that already.
| yifanl wrote:
| Right now we're trained computer masseuses, not yet
| computer babysitters.
|
| And to torture the analogy further since Im already in
| this rabbit hole, masseuses and babysitters probably have
| to put in the same amount of effort in their work.
| randcraw wrote:
| I think the replacement for developers won't be CTOs but
| program managers -- folks with business degrees (or none at
| all) but who understand the company's needs for the
| software and can translate them into prompts to build the
| product without any understanding of how to code. (Some
| places call these folks 'software anthropologists'.)
| They'll hone the product iteratively though development
| almost like a genetic algorithm would, by trial and error
| -- rejecting or revising the output verbally (and
| eventually by interacting with components seen on the
| screen). Vibe programming by business types will replace
| today's software engineers.
| tqwhite wrote:
| I could not disagree more. Those concepts, theories and all
| that knowledge is what makes it so powerful. I feel successful
| with AI because I know what to do (I'm older than you by a
| lot). I talk to younger people and they don't know how to think
| about a big system or have the ability to communicate their
| strategies. You do. I'm 72 and was bored. Now that Claude will
| do the drudgery, I am inspired.
| 101008 wrote:
| I understand your point of view and I do agree that with the
| current state of affairs I am kind of OK. It's useful for me,
| and I am still needed.
|
| But seeing the progress and adoption, I wonder what will
| happen when that valuable skill (how to think about a big
| system, etc) will also be replicated by AI. and then, poof.
| xp84 wrote:
| I certainly feel uneasy. To whatever extent "AI" fulfills its
| promise of enabling regular people to get computers to do
| exactly what needs doing, that's the extent that the "priest
| class" like me who knows how to decide what's feasible and
| design a good system to do it, will be made redundant. I guess
| I hope it moves slowly enough that I can get enough years in on
| easy mode (this current stage where technical people can easily
| 5-10x their previous output by leveraging the AI tools
| ourselves).
|
| But if the advancement moves too slowly, we will have some
| serious pipeline problems filling senior engineer positions,
| caused by the destruction that AI (combined with the end of
| ZIRP) has caused to job prospects for entry level software
| engineers.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This is much like other advances in computing.
|
| Being able to write code that compiled into assembly, instead of
| directly writing assembly, meant you could do more. Which soon
| meant you had to do more, because now everyone was expecting it.
|
| The internet meant you could take advantage of open source to
| build more complex software. Now, you have to.
|
| Cloud meant you could orchestrate complicated apps. Now you can't
| not know how it works.
|
| LLMs will be the same. At the moment people are still mostly
| playing with it, but pretty soon it will be "hey why are you
| writing our REST API consumer by hand? LLM can do that for you!"
|
| And they won't be wrong, if you can get the lower level
| components of a system done easily by LLM, you need to be looking
| at a higher level.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| Even the example in the post seemed closely related to other
| advances in consumer-level computing: I re-
| created this system using an RPi5 compute module and a $20
| camera sensor plugged into it. Within two hours I wrote my
| first machine learning [application], using the AI to assist me
| and got the camera on a RPi board to read levels of wine in
| wine bottles on my test rig. The original project took me six
| weeks solid!
|
| Undoubtedly this would have taken longer without AI. But I
| imagine the Raspberry Pi + camera was easier to set up out-of-
| the-box than whatever they used 14 years ago, and it's
| definitely easier to set up a paint-by-numbers ML system in
| Python.
| 8373746439 wrote:
| > LLMs will be the same. At the moment people are still mostly
| playing with it, but pretty soon it will be "hey why are you
| writing our REST API consumer by hand? LLM can do that for
| you!"
|
| Not everyone wants to be a "prompt engineer", or let their
| skills rust and be replaced with a dependency on a proprietary
| service. Not to mention the potentially detrimental cognitive
| effects of relegating all your thinking to LLMs in the long
| term.
| crent wrote:
| I agree that not everyone wants to be. I think OPs point
| though is the market will make "not being a prompt engineer"
| a niche like being a COBOL programmer in 2025.
|
| I'm not sure I entirely agree but I do think the paradigm is
| shifting enough that I feel bad for my coworkers who
| intentionally don't use AI. I can see a new skill developing
| in myself that augments my ability to perform and they are
| still taking ages doing the same old thing. Frankly, now is
| the sweet spot because the expectation hasn't raised enough
| to meet the output so you can either squeeze time to tackle
| that tech debt or find time to kick up your feet until the
| industry catches up.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| I recall hearing a lot of assembly engineers not wanting to
| let their skills rust either. They didn't want to be a "4th
| gen engineer" and have their skills replaced by proprietary
| compilers.
|
| Same with folks who were used to ftp directly into prod and
| used folders instead of source control.
|
| Look, I get it, it's frustrating to be really good at current
| tech and feel like the rug is getting pulled. I've been
| through a few cycles of all new shiny tools. It's always been
| better for me to embrace the new with a cheerful attitude.
| Being grumpy just makes people sour and leave the industry in
| a few years.
| anon373839 wrote:
| This is a different proposition, really. It's one thing to
| move up the layers of abstraction in code. It's quite
| another thing to delegate authoring code altogether to a
| fallible statistical model.
|
| The former puts you in command of more machinery, but the
| tools are dependable. The latter requires you to stay sharp
| at your current level, else you won't be able to spot the
| problems.
|
| Although... I would argue that in the former case you
| _should_ learn assembly at least once, so that your
| computer doesn't seem like a magic box.
| bitpush wrote:
| > It's quite another thing to delegate authoring code
| altogether to a fallible statistical model.
|
| Isnt this what a compiler is really doing? JIT optimizes
| code based on heuristics, it a code path is considered
| hot. Sure, we might be able to annotate it, but by and
| large you let the tools figure it out so that we can
| focus on other things.
| tqwhite wrote:
| Using AI has changed everything for me and made my ambition
| swell. I despise looking up the details of frameworks and api's,
| transmitting a change of strategy through a system, typing the
| usual stupid loops and processes that are the foundation of all
| programs. Hell, the amount of time I save on typing errors is
| worth it.
|
| I have plans for many things I didn't have the energy for in the
| past.
| Xen9 wrote:
| What psychedelic/mind-altering/weird coaching prompts do you use?
|
| I have separate system prompts for taboo-teaching, excessive-
| pedanticism, excessive-toxicity, excessive-praise, et cetera.
|
| My general rules is anything & everything humans would never ever
| do, but that would somehow allow me to explore altered states of
| consciousness, ways of thinking, my mind, the world, better.
| Something to make me smarter from the experience of the chat.
| TooTony wrote:
| I use Cursor to write Python programs to solve tasks in my daily
| work that need to be completed with programming. It's very
| convenient, and I no longer need to ask the company's programmers
| for help. Large language models are truly revolutionary
| productivity tools.
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| Yes -- LLMs can write a lot of code and after some reviewing it
| can also go to prod -- but I have not nearly enough applications
| of LLMs on the post-prod phase; like dealing with evolution in
| requirements, ensuring security as zero days get discovered, etc.
|
| Would love to hear folks' experience around "managing" all this
| new code.
| SamPatt wrote:
| For me, it isn't just about complexity, but about customization.
|
| I can have the LLMs build me custom bash scripts or make me my
| own Obsidian plugins.
|
| They're all little cogs in my own workflow. None of these
| individual components are complex, but putting all of them
| together would have taken me ages previously.
|
| Now I can just drop all of them into the conversation and ask it
| for a new script that works with them to do X.
|
| Here's an example where I built a custom screenshot hosting tool
| for my blog:
|
| https://sampatt.com/blog/2025-02-11-jsDelivr
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I feel like I'm straddling the fence a bit on this topic.
|
| When it comes to some personal projects, I've written a slew of
| them since AI coding tools got quite good. I'm primarily a
| backend developer, and while I've done quite a bit of frontend
| dev, I'm relatively slow at it, and I'm _especially_ slow as CSS.
| AI has completely removed this bottleneck for me. Often times if
| I 'm coding up a frontend, I'll literally just say "Ok, now make
| it pretty with a modern-looking UI", and it does a decent job,
| and anything I need to fix is an understandable change that I can
| do quickly. So now I'll whip up nice little "personal tool" apps
| in literally like 30 mins, where in the past I would have spent
| 30 mins just trying to figure out some CSS voodoo about why it's
| so hard to get a button centered.
|
| But in my job, where I also use AI relatively frequently, it is
| great for helping to learn new things, but when I've tried to use
| it for things like large scale, repo-wide refactorings it's
| usually been a bit of a PITA - reviewing all of the code and
| fixing it's somewhat subtle mistakes often feels like it's slower
| than doing it myself.
|
| It that sense, I think it's reasonable to consider AI like a
| competent junior developer (albeit at "junior developer" level
| across every technology ever invented). I can give a junior
| developer a "targeted" task, and they usually do a good job, even
| if I have to fix something here or there. But when I give them
| larger tasks that cross many components or areas of concern,
| that's often where they struggle mightily as well.
| tomjuggler wrote:
| I have been using AI coding tools since the first GitHub co-
| pilot. One thing has not changed: garbage in = garbage out.
|
| If you know what you are doing the tools can improve output a lot
| - but while you might get on for a little bit without that
| experience guiding you, eventually AI will code you into a corner
| if it's not guided right.
|
| I saw mention of kids learning to code with AI and I have to say,
| that's great, but only if they are just doing it for fun.
|
| Anyone who is thinking of a career in generating code for a
| living should first and foremost focus on understanding the
| principles. The best way to do that is still writing your own
| programs by hand.
| nottorp wrote:
| > I have noticed that I am no longer scared that a project will
| be too big or too complex for me,
|
| That's still a valid worry. At best, you can do larger projects
| on your own than before.
|
| > or that a project will use a technology or programming language
| I don't know.
|
| Was that ever a worry? I've always considered it an opportunity
| for self improvement.
| xrd wrote:
| Where are the LLM leaderboards for software estimation accuracy?
|
| I have been using Claude Code and Aider and I do think they
| provide incredibly exciting potential. I can spin up new projects
| with mind boggling results. And, I can start projects in domains
| where I previously had almost no experience. It is truly
| exciting.
|
| AND...
|
| The thing I worry most about is that now non-technical managers
| can go into Claude and say "build me XYZ!" and the AI will build
| a passable first version. But, any experienced software person
| knows that the true cost of software is in the maintenance.
| That's 90% of the cost. Reducing that starting point to zero cost
| only reduces the total cost of software by 10%, but people are
| making it seem like you no longer need a software engineer that
| understands complex systems. Or, maybe that is just my fears
| vocalized.
|
| I have seen LLMs dig into old and complex codebases and fix
| things that I was not expecting them to handle. I tend to write a
| lot of tests in my code, so I can see that the tests pass and the
| code compiles. The barbarians have come over the walls, truly.
|
| But, IMHO, there is still a space where we cannot ask any of the
| AI coding tools to review a spec and say "Will you get this done
| in 2 months?" I don't think we are there, yet. I don't see that
| the context window is big enough to jam entire codebases inside
| it, and I don't yet see that these tools can anticipate a project
| growing into hundreds of files and managing the interdepedencies
| between them. They are good at writing tests, and I am impressed
| by that, so there is a pathway. I'm excited to understand more
| about how aider creates a map of the repository and effectively
| compresses the information in ways similar to how I keep track of
| high level ideas.
|
| But, it still feels very early and there are gaps. And, I think
| we are in for a rude awakening when people start thinking this
| pushes the cost and complexity of software projects to zero. I
| love the potential for AI coding, but it feels like it is
| dangerously marketing and sales driven right now and full of
| hype.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| > I can spin up new projects with mind boggling results
|
| Boggle a skeptical mind
| xrd wrote:
| Meaning, give you an example?
|
| This morning I created a new project. I provided a postgres
| database URL to a remote service (with a non-standard
| connection string, includes a parameter "?sslmode=require").
| Then, I said: * "Write me a fastapi project
| to connect to a postgres database using a database url."
| * "Retrieve the schema from the remote database." It used
| psql to connect, retrieves the schema. That was unexpected,
| it figured out not only a coding task, but an external tool
| to connect to a database and did it without anything more
| than me providing the DATABASE_URL. Actually, I should say, I
| told it to look inside the .env file, and it did that. I had
| that URL wrong initially, so I told it to reload once I
| corrected it. It never got confused by my disorganization.
| * It automatically added sqlalchemy models and uses pydantic
| once it figured out the schema. * "Create a webpage
| that lets me review one table." * "Rewrite to use
| tailwindcss." It adds the correct tailwindcss CDN imports.
| * It automatically adds a modal dialog when I click on one of
| the records. * It categorized fields in the database
| into groupings inside the modal, groupings that do indeed
| make sense.
|
| I know the devil is in the details, or in the future. I'm
| sure there are gaping security holes.
|
| But, this saved me a lot of time and it works.
| xrd wrote:
| And, the update is that in the last hour claude somehow
| removed the rendering of the actual items. It is clever in
| troubleshooting: it created mocks if the data could not be
| loaded, it added error messages with the number of items
| retrieved. But, it does not have access to my browser
| console nor the DOM, and therein lies the problem. It is
| slow to copy and paste back and forth from the browser into
| the terminal. But, this feels like a great opportunity for
| a browser extension.
|
| But, my takeaway is that I could have fixed this exact
| problem in five minutes if I had written the JS code. But,
| I have not looked at anything other than glancing at the
| diffs that fly by in the session.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I used claude to create a piece of software that can render
| gerber files (essentially vector files used in electronics
| manufacturing), overlay another gerber file on top of it with
| exact alignment, and then provide a GUI for manually
| highlighting components. The program then calculates the
| centroid, the rotation, and prompts for a component
| designator. This all then gets stored in a properly formatted
| Place file, which is used for automating assembly.
|
| The day before this I was quote $1000/yr/user for software
| that could do this for us.
| xur17 wrote:
| I used Claude + aider to create a webhook forwarding service
| (receives webhooks, forwards them to multiple destinations,
| and handles retries, errors, etc). Included a web interface
| for creating new endpoints and monitoring errors, and made it
| fully dockerized and ready to be deployed into a kubernetes
| cluster.
|
| Took me like 3 hours and a few dollars in api credits to
| build something that would have taken me multiple days on my
| own. Since it's just an internal tool for our dev
| environments that already does what we need, I don't care
| that much about maintainability (especially if it takes 3
| hours to build from scratch). That said, the code is
| reasonably usable (there was one small thing it got stuck on
| at the end that I assisted with).
| xrd wrote:
| Claude Code and Aider, or aider using claude sonnet as the
| model? If you are using both claude code and aider I would
| love to know why.
| xur17 wrote:
| Aider + Claude sonnet as the model.
| brulard wrote:
| I wanted a whiteboard app - simple, infinite, zoomable,
| scrollable svg-based area with custom shapes and elements. It
| just needed prompts like "add zoom", "add a rect shape", "add
| control points for resize", "add text shape", "make position
| attributes able to reference another objects properties, +
| basic arithmetic" (for example to make line connect 2
| objects, or size of one mirror size of another, etc.). It
| made all of these with so little effort from me. I would
| never undertake such a project without an LLM.
| mentalgear wrote:
| The "coding benchmarks" like "SWE-verified" are actually of
| very low quality and the answer riddled with problems.
|
| Good Explainer: "The Disturbing Reality of AI Coding"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnOc_kKKuac
| rurp wrote:
| This largely fits with a pattern I've been seeing with LLM
| coding. The models are often helpful, sometimes extremely so,
| when it comes to creating prototypes or other small greenfield
| projects. They can also be great at producing a snippet of code
| in an unfamiliar framework or language. But when it comes to
| modifying a large, messy, complicated code base they are much
| less helpful. Some people find them a useful as a beefed up
| autocomplete, while others don't see enough gains to offset the
| time/attention to use them.
|
| I think a lot of arguments about LLM coding ability stem from
| people using them for the former or the latter and having very
| different experiences.
| aaalll wrote:
| There is a tool cool lovable that is basically targeted at that
| exact thing having designers and product managers get something
| that kinda works
| inerte wrote:
| I've been programming for 20 years, just so y'all know I have
| at least some level of competence.
|
| I tried Vibe Coding for the first time on Friday and was blown
| away. It was awesome. I met some people (all programmers) at a
| party on Friday and excitedly told them about it. One of them
| tried, he loved.
|
| Then yesterday I read a LinkedIn (Lunatic?) post about "Vibe
| Design", where PMs will just tell the computer what to do using
| some sort of visual language, where you create UI elements and
| drop them on a canvas, and AI makes your vision come true, etc,
| etc...
|
| And my first thought was: "Wait a minute, I've seen this movie
| before. Back on late 90s / early 2000s it was the 4th
| generation programming language, and Visual Basic would allow
| anyone to code any system"...
|
| And while it's true Visual Basic did allow a BUNCH of people to
| make money building and selling systems to video rental shops
| and hair saloons, programmers never went away.
|
| I welcome anyone building more software. The tools will only
| get better. And programmers will adapt them, and it will make
| us better too, and we will still be needed.
| axkdev wrote:
| > I'm excited to understand more about how aider creates a map
| of the repository and effectively compresses the information in
| ways similar to how I keep track of high level ideas.
|
| Run /map. It's nothing fancy, really.
| xrd wrote:
| Ok, I meant to say, I know about /map, but there is so much
| to explore here with an open source coding tool and LSP. It
| feels like you could build some very powerful ways to
| represent connections using a lot of cool tools that are in
| use inside our editors. More structured and more relevant
| that the poor representations I can keep inside my crappy
| head.
| CaffeineLD50 wrote:
| I had a minor desire to make a feature that had a slightly higher
| effort than reward, so although I knew I could struggle it out I
| didn't bother.
|
| After years of this I decided to give an AI a shot at the code.
| It produced something plausible looking and I was excited. Was it
| that easy?
|
| The code didn't work. But the approach made me more motivated to
| look into it and I found a solution.
|
| So although the AI gave me crap code it still inspired the
| answer, so I'm calling that a win.
|
| Simply making things feel approachable can be enough.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I had a similar experience but found that with a little
| prodding, I was even able to get it to finish the job.
|
| Then it was a little messy, so I asked it to refactor it.
|
| Of course, not everything lends itself to this: often I already
| know exactly the code I want and it's easier to just type it
| than corral the AI.
| headcanon wrote:
| Agreed, its always nicer for me to have _something_ to work
| with, even if by the end of it its entirely rewritten.
|
| It helps to have it generate code sometimes to just explore
| ideas and refine the prompt. If its obviously wrong, thats ok,
| sometimes I needed to see the wrong answer to get to the right
| one faster. If its not obviously wrong, then its a good enough
| starting point we can iterate to the answer.
| __xor_eax_eax wrote:
| I love throwing questions at it where previously it would
| have been daunting because you don't even know the right
| questions to ask, and the amount of research you'd need to do
| to even ask the proper question is super high.
|
| Its great for ideating in that way. It does produce some
| legendary BS though.
| nineplay wrote:
| One of my more effective uses of AI is for rubber duck
| debugging. I tell it what I want the code to do, iterate over
| what it comes back with, adjust the code ( 'now rewrite foo()
| so 'bar' is is passed in'). What comes back isn't necessarily
| perfect and I don't blindly copy and paste but that isn't the
| point. At the end I've worked out what I want to do and some of
| the tedious boiler-plate code is taken care of.
| soperj wrote:
| I've tried it, and ended up with the completely wrong
| approach, which didn't take that long to figure out, but
| still wasted a good half hour. Would have been horrible if i
| didn't know what I was doing though.
| gopalv wrote:
| > some of the tedious boiler-plate code is taken care of.
|
| For me that is the bit which stands out, I'm switching
| languages to TypeScript and JSX right now.
|
| Getting copilot (+ claude) to do things is much easier when I
| know exactly what I want, but not here and not in this
| framework (PHP is more my speed). There's a bunch of stuff
| you're supposed to know as boilerplate and there's no time to
| learn it all.
|
| I am not learning a thing though, other than how to steer the
| AI. I don't even know what SCSS is, but I can get by.
|
| The UI hires are in the pipeline & they should throwaway
| everything I build, but right now it feels like I'm making
| something they should imitate in functionality/style better
| than a document, but not in cleanliness.
| dartos wrote:
| The idea of untangling AI generated typescript spaghetti
| fills me with dread.
|
| It's as bad as untangling the last guy's typescript
| spaghetti. He quit, so I can't ask him about it either.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I had some results last week that I felt were really good -
| on a very tricky problem, using AI (Claude 3.7) helped me
| churn through 4 or 5 approaches that didn't work, and
| eventually, working in tandem, "we" found an approach that
| would. Then the AI helped write a basic implementation of the
| good approach which I was able to use as a reference for my
| own "real" implementation.
|
| No, the AI would not have solved the problem without me in
| the loop, but it sped up the cycle of iteration and made
| something that might have taken me 2 weeks take just a few
| days.
|
| It would be pretty tough to convince me that's not
| spectacularly useful.
| golergka wrote:
| > I decided to give an AI
|
| What model? What wrapper? There's just a huge amount of options
| on the market right now, and they drastically differ in
| quality.
|
| Personally, I've been using Claude Code for about a week (since
| it's been released) and I've been floored with how good it is.
| I even developed an experimental self-developing system with
| it.
| infogulch wrote:
| > although the AI gave me crap code it still inspired the
| answer
|
| This is exactly my experience using AI for code and prose. The
| details are like 80% slop, but it has the right overall
| skeleton/structure. And rewriting the details of something with
| a decent starting structure is way easier than generating the
| whole thing from scratch by hand.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| My experience with ChatGPT is underwhelming. It does really
| basic language questions faster and easier than google now.
| Questions about a function signature or questions like, "how do
| I get the first n characters of a string". Things like that.
| Once I start asking it more complex questions not only does it
| get it wrong often, if you tell it the answer is wrong and ask
| to do it again it will often give you the same answer. I have
| no doubt it will get there, but I continue to be surprised at
| all the positives I hear about it.
| kansface wrote:
| What language are you writing? I mostly write go these days,
| and have often wondered if it is uniquely good in that
| language given its constraints.
| d0mine wrote:
| it looks like a variation of Stone soup story
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup
| nbzso wrote:
| Lost me there: that a project will use a technology or
| programming language I don't know.:) Good luck.
| smhinsey wrote:
| It seems like the emphasis on getting results in one shot reduces
| the maximum potential quality of the output as compared to a more
| incremental approach. For example, create an initial prompt to
| generate a structured description of the features in the program
| you've described. You can then iterate on this and follow up with
| a prompt that generates a structured description of a system
| architecture based on the feature description, and iterate on
| that. You could build up other informational layers as well,
| before aggregating all that structural data into the generation
| of the actual code. This can feed into the generation of tests as
| well.
|
| If you look at things like LLM party for comfyui, it's the same
| basic concept.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| We really need to get nuanced about the discussion around LLMs in
| programming. My experience is that LLMs work great for producing
| glue code. Join together a bunch of well documented APIs? LLMs
| will make enough progress that I can finish it myself. Produce a
| pile of HTML and CSS for a nondescript design? I'll get at least
| a mostly working result that I can easily fix up. But try to,
| say, design a cross platform GUI library and the results are
| underwhelming. LLMs know a heck of a lot of stuff, but they are
| not very good at working with concepts.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| The missing piece in your view here is that eventually nearly
| all code is or eventually becomes gibberish glue code, or it
| stops being used. LLMs just speed up the cycle.
| aantix wrote:
| Humans are inherently greedy.
|
| Once we get a feel for what the AI can and cannot do, bigger bets
| will occur.
|
| Currently, companies seem tight - team counts are held low, and
| hiring is frozen. Very much a position of "let's see how much AI
| efficiency gains us".
|
| But eventually, the money sitting on the sidelines will look
| attractive again - attractive for taking bigger, more ambitious
| bets.
|
| More hiring has to take place.
| amunozo wrote:
| This is the most important change AI assisted code for me: it's
| making me confident I can tackle any problem.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Think bigger in 3 distinct ways:
|
| 1. Lower learning curve, for new or revived skills (weaving -
| gather and summarize)
|
| 2. Lower incremental cost: almost always faster at choosing the
| next step (scouting)
|
| 3. Faster time-to-maturity: when building test suites, faster
| both at first-pass coverage and at gap-filling (zoo-keeping)
|
| But the huge, gaping pitfall -- now coming down the tracks even
| faster -- is the same as without AI: once you build a complex
| system, committing to its invariants, you quickly find it
| difficult to change in the direction you want, because each
| choice triggers a tangle of incommensurable choices. Sometimes
| heroic re-factorings (beyond AI now) can extend life a bit, but
| usually the only people who can avoid abrupt stasis are those
| with deep experience and the insight into how to change things
| (incrementally). I'd guess with AI such pitfalls become more
| common and more difficult to escape.
|
| So: yes, think bigger for projects with relatively definitive and
| complete requirements, but take care with foundational code you
| expect to grow.
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