[HN Gopher] Things I've Done with AI
___________________________________________________________________
Things I've Done with AI
Author : shepherdjerred
Score : 64 points
Date : 2026-03-09 19:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sjer.red)
(TXT) w3m dump (sjer.red)
| semiquaver wrote:
| I feel pretty productive myself with AI but this list isn't
| beating the rap that AI boosters mostly use AI to do useless
| stuff focused on pretending to improve productivity or projects
| that make it easier to use AI.
| stavros wrote:
| Here's what I made:
|
| * https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/ - A
| voice note recorder.
|
| * https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot - My secure AI
| personal assistant that's made my life admin massively easier.
|
| * https://github.com/skorokithakis/macropad - A macropad.
|
| * https://github.com/skorokithakis/sleight-of-hand - A clock
| that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for minutes.
|
| * https://pine.town - A whimsical little massively multiplayer
| drawing town.
|
| * https://encyclopedai.stavros.io - A fictional encyclopedia.
|
| * https://justone.stavros.io - A web implementation of the
| board game Just One.
|
| * https://www.themakery.cc - The website and newsletter for my
| maker community.
|
| * https://theboard.stavros.io - A feature board that implements
| itself.
|
| * https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula - A blood test
| viewer.
|
| * https://github.com/skorokithakis/support-email-bot - An email
| bot to answer common support queries for my users.
|
| Maybe some of these will beat the rap.
| profsummergig wrote:
| > "A clock that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for
| minutes."
|
| Sounds like something that could be tried as a fix for a kind
| of OCD (obsessive seconds counting).
| stavros wrote:
| Maybe, although it's actually _giving_ me OCD, I think. It
| 's really hard to tune out because of the irregular
| ticking. I implemented a regular mode to combat this,
| defeating the purpose somewhat.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| what was the motivation for originally making it with
| irregular ticking?
| stavros wrote:
| It sounded fun (and it is)! My favorite mode is one that
| ticks each second imperceptibly fast, and then stalls for
| a second in one of the ticks (so that it lasts two).
|
| It's just the right amount of "did that clock just skip a
| beat? Nah must just be my imagination".
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Ha, cool! I love the whimsicality of this
| stavros wrote:
| Thanks, I love it too!
| observationist wrote:
| Unpredictable things catch our attention - it's the
| exceptions that are important to survival, and our brains
| evolved to cope with the stimuli that this experiment
| messes with.
|
| Something like this would be anxiety inducing for most
| people, I bet. That'd be an excellent experiment, track
| heart rate, EEG, and performance on a range of cognitive
| tasks with 2 minute long breaks between each tasks, one
| group exposed to the irregular ticking, another exposed
| to regular ticking, another with silence, and one last
| one with pleasant white noise.
| saulpw wrote:
| Some of them definitely do not. Like a fictional
| encyclopedia? What is the point of that? That's like "an
| alphabetical novel".
|
| And even for the ones that might "beat the rap", I don't
| understand from your descriptions why they are interesting or
| unique. A voice note recorder? Cool. There are already
| hundreds if not thousands of those, why did you need to make
| your own in the first place? I'm not saying that yours isn't
| special, I'm just saying that it doesn't help to post the
| blandest description possible if you're trying to impress
| people with the utility of your utility.
| stavros wrote:
| Sounds like the goalposts are moving from "not useless
| stuff focused on pretending to improve productivity or
| projects that make it easier to use AI" to "extremely
| useful stuff".
| jjee wrote:
| Fair. But finally we are seeing what LLM proponents are
| putting forward.
|
| And it's exactly what I expected - lines of code. Cute.
| But... so what? This is not good for the AI hype and nor
| any continued support for future investment.
|
| On the other hand all this stuff is going to drive
| continual innovation. The more tokens generated the more
| model producers invest. And we might eventually get to a
| place of local models.
| stavros wrote:
| I swear, I'm going to stop commenting on this site, the
| amount of shitting on people who use LLMs (ie everyone)
| is just impossible to deal with.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| I have the opposite experience, the amount of AI boosters
| deriding the less enthusiastic, gleefully exclaiming how
| someone will be "left behind" if they don't immediately
| adopt the latest hype cycle, or sharing AI slop and
| either embellishing or outright lying about it's
| capabilities is making me want to log off forever.
| "Handwritten code? Don't you only care about providing
| maximum shareholder value?" No.
| saulpw wrote:
| One issue is that I interpreted the parent as OR, not
| AND. "useless stuff OR productivity tools OR AI tools".
|
| Moreover though, I'm not even saying you shouldn't do
| those things. I'm actually playing around with AI quite a
| bit, and certainly have created my share of
| useless/productivity tools. But it's not a flex to show
| off your own Flappy Birds or OpenNanoClaw clone, even if
| they are written in COBOL or MUMPS.
|
| And they definitely do not have to be "extremely useful".
| But they should answer the question: what problem does it
| solve?
| senko wrote:
| So not only does he have to show what he built with AI,
| what he built with AI has to be interesting and unique to
| you? Why? He's not selling it to you.
|
| Seems like the bar is now it has to be a mass market
| product. On another post someone else commented a SaaS
| doesn't count if it doesn't earn sustainable revenue.
|
| I guess OpenClaw also doesn't count because we don't know
| how much Peter got from OpenAI.
|
| This is an ideological flame war, not a rational
| discussion. There's no convincing anyone.
| risyachka wrote:
| It does not matter how much stuff is built. What matters is
| what comes out of it.
|
| And with AI the result of 99.9% is abandonware. Just piles of
| code no one will ever touch again.
|
| Which proves the point of no productivity gains. Its just
| cheap dopamine hits.
| tempaccount5050 wrote:
| Missing the point. I no longer need to buy or rely on
| someone else for software I want to use. A lot of things I
| want to do ARE one offs. I can write software and throw it
| away when I'm done.
| incr_me wrote:
| I know this sounds sarcastic but I really mean it: For
| years everyone has been monastically extolling some
| variation of "the best code is deleted code". Now, we
| have a machine that spits out infinite code that we can
| infinitely delete. It's a blessing that we can have
| shitty code generated that exposes at light speed how
| shitty our ideas are and have always been.
| sarchertech wrote:
| You still need to spend plenty of time verifying they
| work though unless it's something where that truly
| doesn't matter.
| grim_io wrote:
| Abandonware is what the customer wants.
|
| Constant enshittification and UI redesigns are driven by
| the provider to justify monthly extortion.
| danso wrote:
| The user you're responding too lists a "blood test viewer"
| [0], which looks to be a tool that turns his blood test
| PDFs into structured and analyzed data. You're saying that
| unless he continuously revises/upgrades the code, it's
| still "abandonware" even if it meets his needs for the near
| future?
|
| [0] https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula
| sarchertech wrote:
| Bit rot is real. The dependencies listed here include
| calling into AI APIs that will stop working with time. So
| yes if no one keeps this up to date it will rot into
| useless likely very quickly.
|
| That's not even mentioning that this tools doesn't do
| much beyond wrap a call to Claude. And it's using Claude
| to display blood test data to the end user. This is not
| something I'd trust an LLM to not mess up. You'd really
| want to double check every single result.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| I've actually felt the same way about some (not all) but some
| "productivity" hacks I've seen people post online with their
| OpenClaw setups.
|
| I chuckle when I see some of them because you could achieve the
| same (or often faster) result by jotting a note onto a notecard
| and sticking it in your pocket.
|
| Most of the other automations running don't really seem to
| serve any real purpose at all.
|
| But hey, if it's fun, have at it.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| That's a fair criticism of my personal projects. Maybe 3-4 of
| those could potentially see usefulness outside of myself.
|
| At work, I would say I've done plenty of "useful" things with
| AI, but that's hard to show off given that I work on an
| internal application.
| peteforde wrote:
| I don't think you should feel like your personal projects
| need to be vetted by an armchair peanut gallery. It's
| actually kind of offensive how so many people show up in a
| thread like this and demand that what sparked joy for you be
| formally subjected to a gauntlet of moving goalpost
| validation markers.
|
| Quite simply, I don't think that they are asking or arguing
| in good faith.
| gopher_space wrote:
| I mean I'm using it to deconstruct and reinvent my development
| process from the ground up, but it's so easy to do this now and
| so customized for my specific needs that the idea of posting
| about it never crossed my mind.
| lukan wrote:
| "Or projects that make it easier to use AI"
|
| I get the sentiment, but this is natural with a groundbraking
| new technology. We are still in the process of figuring out how
| to best apply generative LLM's in a productive way. Lots of
| people tinker and share their results. Most is surely hype and
| will get thrown away and forgotten soon, but some is solid. And
| I am glad for it as I did not take part in that but now enjoy
| the results as the agents have become really good now.
| harry8 wrote:
| > "Or projects that make it easier to use AI"
|
| This is exactly the same reason why the appropriate question
| to ask about Haskell is "where are the open source projects
| that are useful for something that is not programming?"
|
| The answer for Haskell after 3 decades is very, very little.
| Pandoc, Git Annexe, Xmonad. Might be something else since I
| last did the exercise but for Haskell the answer is not much.
| Then we examine why the kids (us kids of all ages) can't or
| don't write Haskell programs.
|
| The answer for LLM coding may be very different. But the
| question "where is the software that does something that
| solves a problem outside its own orbit" is crucial. (You have
| a problem. You want to use foo to solve it, now you have two
| problems but you can use foo to solve a part of the second
| one!!)
|
| The price of getting code written just went down. Where are
| the site/business launches? Apps? New ideas being built?
| Specifically. With links. Not general, hand-wavy "these are
| the sorts of things that ..." because even if it's superb
| analysis, without some data that can be checked it's
| indistinguishable from hype.
|
| Whatever data we get will be very informative.
| lukan wrote:
| For instance, there is a abandoned open source project, I
| would have liked to see revived,
| https://www.wickeditor.com/ (a attempt at recreating flash
| with web technology). Current official state in the repo:
| outdated dependencies, build process, etc.
|
| I looked into doing it manually, but gave up. Way too much
| dirty work and me no energy for that.
|
| Then I discovered that claude CLI got good - and told it to
| do it (with some handholding).
|
| And it did it. Build process modernized. No more outdated
| dependencies. Then I added some features I missed in the
| original wick editor. Again, it did it and it works.
|
| A working editor that was abandoned and missed features -
| now working again with the missing features. With minimal
| work done from my side (but I did put in work before to
| understand the source).
|
| I call this a very useful result. There are lots of
| abandoned half working projects out there. Lots of value to
| be recovered. Unlike Haskell, Agents are not just busy with
| building agents, but real tools. Currently I have the
| agents refactor a old codebase of mine. Lot's of tech dept.
| Lot's of hacks. Bad documentation. There are features I
| wanted to implement for ages but never did as I did not
| wanted to touch that ugly code again. But claude did it. It
| is almost scary of what they are already capable of.
| stavros wrote:
| What did you think of Dagger? I used Earthly a while ago but the
| one thing I didn't like was that it couldn't parallelize runs,
| since it only ran on one CI instance. Other than that, I liked
| that I could run my entire CI pipeline locally, but didn't like
| it so much that I ended up using it for much else.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I really like Dagger. I had a _lot_ of weird issues with
| Earthly, like edge cases. Dagger has been mostly solid.
|
| It still has gaps. I don't think they've landed on the right
| model for CI. Like Earthly, their model is a CI runner + local
| cache. I believe a distributed cache (like Bazel) makes more
| sense.
|
| If I were choosing between the two I'd personally always pick
| Dagger, but I think there is a strong argument for Earthly for
| simpler projects. If you're using multiple Earthfiles or a few
| hundred lines of Earthly, I think you've outgrown it.
| stavros wrote:
| Thanks, I'll give it another shot!
| piker wrote:
| > I'll continue use these tools with the hope that they don't
| make me obsolete too quickly.
|
| I'm starting to believe using them is more likely to make you
| obsolete than not.
| vermilingua wrote:
| It baffles me that so many people are so willing to pay for the
| privilege of training their own replacement.
| jjee wrote:
| But are you though?
|
| From where I stand this thing is going to provide great
| leverage to those who don't simply just write code. I
| personally doubt the thing will ever get to a place where it
| can be trusted to operate alone - it needs a team of people
| and to go super fast you need more people.
|
| Moreover, the price won't be high due to competition.
|
| I've changed my view on LLMs as being good, as long as
| competition is fierce.
| alas44 wrote:
| Looks like a LLM generated comment
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| It reads like a human to me. But I understand being
| suspicious of an account that's 40min old
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I completely agree. Most programmers work on rather boring and
| not particularly novel things. If they don't adapt, then
| they'll be replaced.
|
| I do think it'll be a while before LLMs make significant
| contributions to complex projects, though. For example I can't
| imagine many maintainers of the Linux kernel use LLMs much.
| max_streese wrote:
| And if we do adapt we might still get replaced because less
| of us will be able to do more. Or we wont because of Jevons
| Paradox. Linux maintainers on the other hand can code (with
| and without AI) what I could not (with or without AI). So in
| a way becoming a more knowledgeable, more skilled programmer
| is the way? In any case, too much speculation about the
| future.
| piker wrote:
| No. That's not really where I'm coming from.
|
| I believe your skills are atrophying when you use these
| things no matter how trivial the case. That compounds with
| their bias towards solving problems by producing more code to
| further reduce your productivity without them.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Ah I read it wrong. I must be using LLMs too much :)
|
| I do agree with you to some extent. I think anyone who uses
| LLMs will need to set aside some time writing code by hand
| to keep their skills sharp.
| keybored wrote:
| That's the most craven AI user line I've read. Well at least
| from this week.
| JeanMarcS wrote:
| And like everyone else you trained the AI how to replace you by
| giving it more insight on how to prompt stuff.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Yes. I also freely release almost all of the code I've ever
| written, aside from what I've done at work (which I would
| release if I legally could)
| brotchie wrote:
| Not enough time, too many projects. Useful projects I did over
| the weekend with Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 (just casually chatting
| with it).
|
| 2025 Taxes
|
| Dumped all pdfs of all my tax forms into a single folder, asked
| Claude the rename them nicely. Ask it to use Gemini 2.5 Flash to
| extract out all tax-relevant details from all statements / tax
| forms. Had it put together a webui showing all income,
| deductions, etc, for the year. Had it estimate my 2025 tax refund
| / underpay.
|
| Result was amazing. I now actually fully understand the tax
| position. It broke down all the progressive tax brackets, added
| notes for all the extra federal and state taxes (i.e. Medicare,
| CA Mental Health tax, etc).
|
| Finally had Claude prepare all of my docs for upload to my
| accountant: FinCEN reporting, summary of all docs, etc.
|
| Desk Fabrication
|
| Planning on having a furniture maker fabricate a custom walnut
| solid desk for a custom office standing desk. Want to create a
| STEP of the exact cuts / bevels / countersinks / etc to help with
| fabrication.
|
| Worked with Codex to plan out and then build an interactive in-
| browser 3D CAD experience. I can ask Codex to add some component
| (i.e. a grommet) and it will generate a parameterized B-rep
| geometry for that feature and then allow me to control the
| parameters live in the web UI.
|
| Codex found Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) B-rep modeling
| library, which has a web assembly compiled version, and
| integrated it.
|
| Now have a WebGL view of the desk, can add various components,
| change their parameters, and see the impact live in 3D.
| thijsvandien wrote:
| I don't know, but I would never upload such sensitive
| information to a service like that (local models FTW!) or trust
| the numbers.
| basch wrote:
| Which part is sensitive? Social is public, income is private
| but what is someone going to do with it?
| thijsvandien wrote:
| Now that's a question I'd feel more confident having
| answered by an LLM. Personally, I'm tired of arguing with
| "nothing to hide", which (no offense) is just terribly
| naive these days.
| jumpman500 wrote:
| It's not good in some job negotiations if someone has a
| very clear picture of what your current net worth and
| income is. Also in some purchases companies could price
| discriminate more effectively against you.
| cj wrote:
| I love the tax use case.
|
| What scares me though is how I've (still) seen ChatGPT make up
| numbers in some specific scenarios.
|
| I have a ChatGPT project with all of my bloodwork and a bunch
| of medical info from the past 10 years uploaded. I think it's
| more context than ChatGPT can handle at once. When I ask it
| basic things like "Compare how my lipids have trended over the
| past 2 years" it will sometimes make up numbers for tests, or
| it will mix up the dates on a certain data points.
|
| It's usually very small errors that I don't notice until I
| really study what it's telling me.
|
| And also the opposite problem: A couple days ago I thought I
| saw an error (when really ChatGPT was right). So I said "No,
| that number is wrong, find the error" and instead of pushing
| back and telling me the number was right, it admitted to the
| error (there was no error) and made up a reason why it was
| wrong.
|
| Hallucinations have gotten way better compared to a couple
| years ago, but at least ChatGPT seems to still break down
| especially when it's overloaded with a ton of context, in my
| experience.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I've gotten better results by telling it "write a Python
| program to calculate X"
| cj wrote:
| Good call. I've also had better results pre-processing
| PDFs, extracting data into structured format, and then
| running prompts against that.
|
| Which should pair well with the "write a script" tactic.
| tavavex wrote:
| Yeah, asking for a tool to do a thing is almost always
| better than asking for the thing directly, I find. LLMs
| are kind of not there in terms of always being correct
| with large batches of data. And when you ask for a
| script, you can actually verify what's going on in there,
| without taking leaps of faith.
| dmd wrote:
| Yeah, in my user prompt I have "Whenever you are asked to
| perform any operation which _could_ be done
| deterministically by a program, you should write a program
| to do it that way and feed it the data, rather than
| thinking through the problem on your own. " It's worked
| wonders.
| brotchie wrote:
| For the tax thing. I had Claude write a CLI and a prompt
| for Gemini Flash 2.5 to do the structured extraction: i.e.
| .pdf -> JSON. The JSON schema was pretty flexible, and open
| to interpretation by Gemini, so it didn't produce 100%
| consistent JSON structures.
|
| To then "aggregate" all of the json outputs, I had Claude
| look at the json outputs, and then iterate on a Python tool
| to programmatically do it. I saw it iterating a few times
| on this: write the most naive Python tool, run it, throws
| exception, rinse and repeat, until it was able to parse all
| the json files sensibly.
| arjie wrote:
| In my case, what I like to do is extract data into machine-
| readable format and then once the data is appropriately
| modeled, further actions can use programmatic means to
| analyze. As an example, I also used Claude Code on my taxes:
|
| 1. I keep all my accounts in accounting software (originally
| Wave, then beancount)
|
| 2. Because the machinery is all in programmatically queriable
| means, the data is not in token-space, only the schema and
| logic
|
| I then use tax software to prep my professional and personal
| returns. The LLM acts as a validator, and ensures I've done
| my accounts right. I have `jmap` pull my mail via IMAP, my
| Mercury account via a read-only transactions-only token and
| then I let it compare against my beancount records to make
| sure I've accounted for things correctly.
|
| For the most part, you want it to be handling very little
| arithmetic in token-space though the SOTA models can do it
| pretty flawlessly. I did notice that they would occasionally
| make arithmetic errors in numerical comparison, but when
| using them as an assistant you're not using them directly but
| as a hypothesis generator and a checker tool and if you ask
| it to write out the reasoning it's pretty damned good.
|
| For me Opus 4.6 in Claude Code was remarkable for this use-
| case. These days, I just run `,cc accounts` and then look at
| the newly added accounts in fava and compare with Mercury.
| This is one of those tedious-to-enter trivial-to-verify use-
| cases that they excel at.
|
| To be honest, I was fine using Wave, but without machine-
| access it's software that's dead to me.
| ElFitz wrote:
| I'd say for these use cases it's better to make it build the
| tools that do the thing than to make it doing the thing
| itself.
|
| And it usually takes just as long.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| I had ai hallucinate that you can use different container
| images at runtime for emr serverless. That was incorrect its
| only at application creation time.
|
| Hope you dont get audited
| MikeNotThePope wrote:
| Be careful with taxes. Hallucinations will cost you.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| > had Claude prepare all of my docs for upload to my
| accountant: FinCEN reporting, summary of all docs, etc.
|
| I imagine your accountant had the same reaction I do when an
| amateur shows me their vibe codebase.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > Result was amazing. I now actually fully understand the tax
| position.
|
| You couldn't do that with TurboTax or block's tax file? You
| don't have to submit or pay.
| bronlund wrote:
| If you are a parent, you know that feeling when your child is
| struggling with something and gets frustrated, but you keep
| silent and don't help because you know that the child has to
| figure this out by themselves. That's the same feeling I get when
| I hear all those doom and gloom perspectives on how AI is ruining
| coding :D
| smokel wrote:
| I've written an Obsidian clone for myself, which has _proper
| Emacs keybindings_. Took me a few hours too many to get in all
| the features that I need.
|
| What I find interesting is that I have little motivation to open
| source it. Making it usable for others requires a substantial
| amount of time, which would otherwise be just a fraction of the
| development time.
| xorvoid wrote:
| I was thinking about doing the same. Build a clone with AI
| custom tailored for my own quirks. And not bothering to open
| source it because it's too bespoke for anyone else. How hard
| was this? Can you share any advice?
| bityard wrote:
| I have a theory (and I'm sure I am far from the first one to
| voice it) that the number of useful open source projects
| released to the public will be on the decline now that anyone
| scratch their own itch with a few hours of vibe coding. Why
| would I spend hours evaluating a dozen different note-taking
| applications and _maybe_ find one that is _kinda close_ to what
| I want, if I can instead have Claude vibe me one up _exactly_
| the way I want it?
|
| (I actually did write my own note-taking application, but that
| was before LLMs were any good at writing code.)
| vunderba wrote:
| I tend to only use LLMs to complete projects that are relatively
| unique and that haven't been done before. Because if I'm not
| going to get anything out of the journey, I might as well get
| something out of the destination.
|
| *Piece Together*
|
| An animated puzzle game that I built with a fairly heavy reliance
| on agentic coding, especially for scaffolding. I did have to jump
| in and tweak some things manually (the piece-matching algorithm,
| responsive design, etc.), but overall I'd estimate that LLMs
| handled about 80% of the work. It's heavily based on the concept
| of animated puzzles in the early edutainment game _The Island of
| Dr. Brain_.
|
| https://animated-puzzles.specr.net
|
| *Lend Me Your Ears*
|
| _Lend Me Your Ears_ is an interactive web-based game inspired by
| the classic Simon toy (originally by Milton Bradley). It presents
| players with a sequence of musical notes and challenges them to
| reproduce the sequence using either an on-screen piano, MIDI
| keyboard, or an acoustic instrument such as a guitar.
|
| https://lend-me-your-ears.specr.net
|
| *Shah Kur - Invisible Chess*
|
| A voice controlled blindfold chess game that uses novel types of
| approaches (last N pieces moved hidden, fade over time, etc).
| Already been already playing it daily on my walks.
|
| https://shahkur.specr.net
|
| *Word game to find the common word*
|
| It's based off an old word game where one person tries to come up
| with three words: sign, watch, bus. The other person has to think
| of a common word that forms compound-style words with each of
| them: stop.
|
| I was quite surprised to see that this didn't exist online
| already.
|
| https://common-thread.specr.net
|
| *A Slide Puzzle*
|
| Slide puzzles for qualified MENSA members. I built it for a
| friend who's basically a real-life equivalent of Dustin Hoffman's
| character from _Rain Man_. So you might have to rearrange a slide
| puzzle from the periodic table of elements, or the U.S.
| presidents by portrait, etc.
|
| https://slide-puzzles.specr.net
|
| *Glyphshift*
|
| Transforms random words on web pages into different writing
| systems like Hiragana, Braille, and Morse Code to help you learn
| and practice reading these alphabets so you can practice the most
| functionally pointless task, like being able to read braille
| visually.
|
| https://github.com/scpedicini/glyph-shift
|
| All of these were built with varying levels of assistance from
| agentic coding. None of them were purely vibe-coded and there was
| a great deal of manual and unit testing to verify functionality
| as it was built.
| fmbb wrote:
| > All of these were built with varying levels of assistance
| from agentic coding. None of them were purely vibe-coded and
| there was a great deal of manual and unit testing to verify
| functionality as it was built.
|
| It also seems like none of them are relatively unique and all
| of them have been done before.
| vunderba wrote:
| _Name them. Go ahead, I 'll wait._
|
| Simon toy that's integrated into an ear training tool?
|
| Blindfold chess with Last N moves hidden?
|
| Mensa-style slide puzzles?
|
| An extension that converts random words into phonetic
| equivalents like morse, braille, and vorticon?
|
| I've also made some way less useful stuff like a win32 app
| that lets you physically grab a window and hurl it which
| invokes an WM_DESTROY when it completely is off the screen.
|
| And an app that measures low frequencies to tell if you are
| blowing into the mic and then increases the speed of the CPU
| fan to cool it down.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| > Speaking in the context of solving a problem: does AI need to
| write beautiful code? No. It needs to write code that works. The
| code doesn't need to be maintainable in the traditional sense. If
| you have sufficient tests, you can throw some LLMs at a pile of
| "bad" code and have them figure it out.
|
| Code doesn't need to be "beautiful", but the beauty of code has
| nothing to do with maintainability. Linus once said "Bad
| programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about
| data structures and their relationships." The actual hard part of
| software is not the code, it's what isn't in the code - the
| assumptions, relationships, feedback loops, emergent behaviours,
| etc. Maintainability in that regard is about system design.
| Imagine software as a graph, the nodes being pieces of code and
| the edges being those implicit relationships. LLM's are good at
| generating the nodes but useless at the edges.
|
| The only thing that seems to work is to have a validation
| criteria (eg. a test suite) that the LLM can use to do a guided
| random walk towards a solution where the edges and nodes align to
| satisfy the criteria. This _can_ be useful if what you are doing
| doesn 't _really matter_ , like in the case of all the pet
| projects and tools people share. But it _does_ matter if your
| program assumes responsibility somewhere, like if you 're
| handling user data. This idea of guardrail-style programming has
| been around for a while, but nobody drives by bouncing off the
| guardrails to get to their destination, because it's much more
| efficient to encode what a program _should_ do instead of what it
| _shouldn 't_, which is the case with this type of mega-test-
| driven-development. Is it more efficient to tell someone where
| _not_ to go when giving directions as opposed to telling them how
| to get there?
|
| Take the Cloudflare Next.js experiment for example - their
| version passed all the Next.js tests but still had issues because
| the test suite didn't even come close to encoding how the system
| works.
|
| So no, you still need to care about maintainability. You don't
| need to obsess over code aesthetics or design patterns or
| whatever, but you _never_ needed to do that. In fact, more than
| ever programmers need to be concerned with the edges of their
| software and how they can guide the LLM 's to generate the nodes
| (code) while maintaining the invariants of the edges.
| sarchertech wrote:
| They whole "you can just throw LLMs at the test suite and
| regenerate the code" thing needs to die excuse it can't work
| for any software that has users. A test suite cannot feasibly
| cover every observable behavior. Every time you regenerate the
| code this way you'll change a huge chunk of the thousands of
| little observable behaviors that aren't fixed in place by the
| test suite. You can't do this if you have users.
|
| Similarly to your directions analogy, I've been using the the
| analogy id trying to ensure that a 1000 restaurant franchise
| produces the exact same peanut butter sandwich for ever
| customer.
|
| It's much easier to figure out the primitives that your
| employees understand and then use those primitives to describe
| exactly how to build a sandwich than it is to write a massive
| specification that describes what they should produce and just
| let them figure it out.
| lowsong wrote:
| > At work, all that matters is that value is delivered to the
| business. Code needs to be maintainable so that new requirements
| can be met. Code follows design patterns, when appropriate,
| because they are known solutions to common problems, and thus are
| easy to talk about with others. Code has type systems and static
| analysis so that programmers make fewer mistakes.
|
| This is a narrow view of software engineering. Thinking that your
| role is "code that works" is hardly better than thinking you're a
| "(human) resource that produces code". Your job is to provide
| value. You do that by building knowledge, not only of the system
| you're developing but of the problem space you're exploring, the
| customers you're serving, the innovations you can do that your
| competitors can't.
|
| It's like saying that a soccer player's purpose is "to kick a
| ball" and therefore a machine that launches balls faster and
| further than any human will replace all soccer players, and soon
| all professional teams will be made up of robots.
| saint-evan wrote:
| I think your view is sentimental. For businesses the code
| usually IS the value, and devs ARE human resources that produce
| code. It sounds cynical, but it's basically how most orgs
| operate. From the company's POV employees function as cogs in a
| larger system whose purpose is to generate value considering
| that businesses are structured to optimize outcomes i.e.
| Profit. If tech appears that can produce the same output more
| cheaply or efficiently, companies will most definitely as we've
| seen so far explore replacing people with it. I mean take a
| look at corporate posture around LLMs. But do I get the point
| you're making about knowledge, domain understanding, and
| solving real problems because those things clearly matter in
| practice but from the company's pov, they matter only because
| they help produce better code/systems which are still the
| concrete artifact that embodies the business logic and
| operations. A symbolic model of the business itself encoded in
| software. So the framing of devs as human resources that
| produce code and code as the primary value correctly describes
| how many businesses see the relationship. And I don't really
| see the equivalence between SWE-ing in a business context and
| sports
| lowsong wrote:
| > From the company's POV employees function as cogs in a
| larger system whose purpose is to generate value considering
| that businesses are structured to optimize outcomes i.e.
| Profit. If tech appears that can produce the same output more
| cheaply or efficiently, companies will most definitely as
| we've seen so far explore replacing people with it.
|
| Businesses _wish_ this were the case, and many will even say
| it or start to believe it. But it doesn 't bare out to be
| true in practice.
|
| Think about it this way, engineers are expensive so a company
| is going to want to have as few of them as possible to do as
| much work as possible. Long before LLMs came along there have
| been many rounds of "replace expensive engineers" fads.
|
| Visual programming was going to destroy the industry, where
| any idiot could drag and drop a few boxes and put together
| software. Turns out that didn't work out and now visual
| programming is all but dead. Then we had consultants and
| software consultancies. Why keep engineers on staff and have
| to deal with benefits and HR functions when you can hire
| consultants for just long enough to get the job done and end
| their contracts. Then we had offshoring. Why hire expensive
| developers in markets like California when you can hire far
| cheaper engineers abroad in a country with lower wages and
| laxer employment law. (It's not a quality thing either, many
| of these engineers are unquestionably excellent.)
|
| Or, think about what happens when software companies get
| acquired. It's almost unheard of for the acquiring company to
| layoff all of the engineering staff from the acquired company
| right away, if anything it's the opposite with vesting
| incentives to convince engineers to stay.
|
| If all that mattered was the code and the systems, and people
| were cogs that produced code that businesses wanted to
| optimise, then none of these actions make sense. You'd see
| companies offshore and use consultants with the company that
| does "good enough" as cheaply as possible. You'd see
| engineers from acquisitions be laid off immediately, replaced
| with cheaper staff as fast as possible.
|
| There are businesses like that operate like this, it happens
| all the time. But, all of the most successful and profitable
| tech companies in the world _don 't_ do this. Why?
| ipaddr wrote:
| I've heard a few people say I haven't written a single line of
| code since ...
|
| What do people think of it?
|
| I personal don't think that's a badge of honor. Aside from losing
| your coding skills you miss oppurtunities to generate AI pieces
| and connect them to existing systems that can't be feed into the
| AI. Plus making small changes is easier than having the AI make
| them without messing something else up.
| Maxatar wrote:
| I wouldn't say strictly speaking that I've written no code, but
| the amount of code I've written since "committing" to using
| Claude Code since February is absolutely miniscule.
|
| I prefer having Claude make even small changes at this point
| since every change it makes ends up tweaking it to better
| understand something about my coding convention, standard,
| interpretation etc... It does pick up on these little changes
| and commits them to memory so that in the long run you end up
| not having to make any little changes whatsoever.
|
| And to drive this point further, even prior to using LLMs, if I
| review someone's work and see even a single typo or something
| minor that I could probably just fix in a second, I still
| insist that the author is the one to fix it. It's something my
| mentor at Google did with me which at the time I kind of felt
| was a bit annoying, but I've come to understand their reason
| for it and appreciate it.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Unfortunately Claude has a context window limit so it's not
| going to keep "learning" forever.
| Maxatar wrote:
| Sort of... Claude Code writes to a memory.md file that it
| uses to store important information across conversations.
| If I review mine it has plenty of details about things like
| coding convention, structure, and overall architecture of
| the application it's working on.
|
| The second thing Claude Code does is when it reaches the
| end of its context window it /compact the session, which
| takes a summary of the current session, dumps it into a
| file, and then starts a new session with that summary. But
| it also retains logs of all the previous sessions that it
| can use and search through.
|
| Looking over my session of Claude Code, out of the 256k
| tokens available, about 50k of these tokens are used among
| "memory" and session summaries, and 200k tokens are
| available to work with. The reality is that the vast
| majority of tokens Claude Code uses is for its own internal
| reasoning as opposed to being "front-end" facing so to
| speak.
|
| Additionally given that ChatGPT Codex just increased its
| context length from 256k to 1 million tokens, I expect
| Anthropic will release an update within a month or so to
| catch up with their own 1 million token model.
| sarchertech wrote:
| There's a few problems with that.
|
| 1. The closer the context gets to full the worse it
| performs.
|
| 2. The more context it has the less it weights individual
| items.
|
| That is Claude might learn you hate long functions and
| add a line about short functions. When that is the only
| thing in the function it is likely to follow other very
| closely. But when it's 1 piece of such longer context, it
| is much more likely to ignore it.
|
| 3. Tokens cost money even you are currently being
| subsidized.
|
| 4. You have no idea how new models and new system prompt
| will perform with your current memory.md file.
|
| 5. Unlike learning something yourself, anything you teach
| Claude is likely to start being controlled by your
| employer. They might not let you take it with you when
| you go.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| > 3. Tokens cost money even you are currently being
| subsidized.
|
| keep in mind that those 50k memory tokens would likely be
| cached after the first run and thus significantly cheaper
| aerhardt wrote:
| I haven't typed a line of code in like six months but I still
| review all production code and stay very connected to the
| codebase. I don't feel my skills have withered at all.
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