[HN Gopher] AI and Home-Cooked Software
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AI and Home-Cooked Software
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 17 points
Date : 2025-10-06 12:41 UTC (8 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mrkaran.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (mrkaran.dev)
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| "Every line of AI-generated code is a plausible-looking
| liability. It may pass basic tests, only to fail spectacularly in
| production with an edge case you never considered."
|
| Every time I read something along the lines I have to wonder
| whose code these people review during code reviews. It's not like
| the alternative is bulletproof code.
| adocomplete wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing. Humans push terrible code to
| production all the time that slips through code reviews. You
| spot it, you fix it, and move on.
| kanwisher wrote:
| Also a lot of the AI code reviewer tools catch bugs that you
| wouldn't catch otherwise
| resize2996 wrote:
| I do not know the future, every line of code is a plausible-
| looking liability.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I've made this point before, and in the short to medium term, I
| really do think it's one of the biggest and most underrated uses
| of AI. If I am making a tool for myself, and only myself, and if
| I deeply understand both the inputs and the expected outputs, and
| if it's a one off script or tool designed to solve a specific
| problem I have, then a huge swath of the issues with AI coding go
| away.
|
| It's still not perfect, but it is dramatically easier to be fast
| and productive, and it is a huge leap in capabilities for people
| who previously couldn't code anything at all, but had deep enough
| domain knowledge to know what tools they wanted, and
| approximately how they should work, what kind of information they
| should ingress, and what kind of information they should egress.
| bitwize wrote:
| Ah, another "Now that we have AI, people can do [thing people
| could do for decades]" article. If there was something you wanted
| a computer to do, that it did not yet do, you programmed it. And
| if you didn't know how, you learned. BASIC was always there.
|
| But the industry as a whole moved away from the idea that end
| users are to program computers sometime in the 80s or 90s (the
| glorious point and click future was not evenly distributed). So
| now the only tools for writing software out there are either
| outdated, or require considerable ceremony to get started with
| (even npm install). So what, we're gonna paper over the gap with
| acres of datacenter stealing our energy and fresh water to play
| token numberwang? Fuck me!
|
| This article, and generative AI in general, is appealing to the
| people on Golgafrinchian Ark Fleet Ship B (aka "the managerial
| class") because it helps them convince themselves that they can
| now do all the things the folks on Golgafrinchian Ark Ship A can
| do (so who needs them, anyway) without having to learn anything.
| Now you can program without having to program! You're an Idea
| Person, and that's what's really important; so just idea-person
| into ChatGPT and all the rest will be taken care of for you. I
| think these folks are in for a rude awakening.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| I feel personally targeted :D
|
| Programming classes didn't work out for me in college, so I went
| into sysadmin with a dash of Devops.
|
| Now I can make small tools for things like syncing my living room
| PC to a big LED panel above the TV (was app-only but there's a
| Python reverse engineering which I vibe-coded a frontend for) or
| an orchestration script which generates a MAC address, assigns a
| DHCP reservation in OPNsense, and created the VM or CT using that
| MAC and a password which gets stored in my password manager.
|
| I could have done either of these projects myself with a few
| weekends and tutorials. Now it's barely an evening for proof of
| concept and another evening to patch it up to an acceptable
| level. Knowing most of the stuff around coding itself definitely
| helped a lot.
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