[HN Gopher] Some things just take time
___________________________________________________________________
Some things just take time
Author : vaylian
Score : 810 points
Date : 2026-03-21 14:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lucumr.pocoo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lucumr.pocoo.org)
| vaylian wrote:
| Speed is useful, when you have a good idea or a hypothesis you
| want to test. But if you are running in the wrong direction,
| speed is of very little value. With LLMs it might be even harder
| to stop and realize that you are creating the wrong thing,
| because you are not spending effort to create the wrong thing.
| binsquare wrote:
| I can relate to this, when time and effort of coding is a
| limiting factor it forces people to be more thoughtful about
| what to create.
| allenu wrote:
| > But if you are running in the wrong direction, speed is of
| very little value.
|
| I think of it differently. Speed is great because it means you
| can change direction very easily, and being wrong isn't as
| costly. As long as you're tracking where you're going, if you
| end up in the wrong place, but you got there quickly and
| noticed it, you can quickly move in a different direction to
| get to the right place.
|
| Sometimes we take time mostly because it's expensive to be
| wrong. If being wrong doesn't cost anything, going fast and
| being wrong a lot may actually be better as it lets you explore
| lots of options. For this strategy to work, however, you need
| good judgment to recognize when you've reached a wrong
| position.
| julenx wrote:
| I'm seeing this cultural pattern where developers have started
| accepting LLM output with very little scrutiny. This ends up
| code that works on the surface, but most of the times problems
| are not addressed at their source.
|
| Creating these wrong things is only cheaper with LLMs. Since
| developers now spend less time and effort to create that wrong
| thing, they don't feel the need validate or reflect on them so
| much.
|
| The risk is not the tool itself, but the over-reliance on it
| and forgoing feedback loops that have made teams stronger, e.g.
| debugging, testing, and reasoning why something works a
| particular way.
| Swizec wrote:
| > everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic
| tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall
| into a trap where we're immediately filling it with more things
|
| You fill a jar with sand and there is no space for big rocks.
|
| But if you fill the jar with big rocks, there is plenty of space
| for sand. Remove one of the rocks and the sand instantly fills
| that void.
|
| Make sure you fit the rocks first.
| big-chungus4 wrote:
| You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, you
| remove half of the water, the bottle is still half full, but if
| you remove the fish, it will have less water than before.
|
| You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish
| in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first
| half, you will end up with more water.
| auggierose wrote:
| What?
| ghurtado wrote:
| Psilocybin?
|
| Not sure, I used to be better at diagnosing this type of
| episode.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I assume post used extreme example to demonstrate that
| wise-sounding metaphors may not have inherent point or
| value.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| They're talking about Archimedes' principle, displacement
| of water. The fish makes the water bottle overflow, so be
| careful when you add the fish so that it doesn't. It's a
| counter analogy to the rocks one above.
| spencerflem wrote:
| They're pointing out that if the jar was _filled_ with
| sand, then of course you can't fit any rocks in because
| it's full. It's cute but misunderstands the original
| metaphor I think.
| sritchie wrote:
| Hahah, I just have to reply and say I loved the original
| comment and was happy for the laugh. Obviously this is the
| answer to the riddle of
|
| > Given a 3-liter container and a 5-liter container, both
| initially empty, and access to tap water, how can you
| measure exactly 4 liters of water without using any
| additional containers
|
| I've offered and received some convoluted metaphors
| recently, love leaning hard into this one.
| ghurtado wrote:
| In a more advanced civilisation, you would be put in the
| pillory for the townsfolk to throw rotten cabbage at you
| until the Lord fixed whatever made you say that.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| you fill the 3 liter bottle up to the top, and pour the
| contents into the 5 liter bottle
|
| then you fill 3 liter bottle again, and pour the contents
| into the 5 liter bottle until the 5 liter one is full
|
| empty the 5 liter bottle, and pour the 1 liter in the 3 liter
| bottle into the 5 liter bottle
|
| fill the 3 liter bottle again and pour that into the 1 liter
| already in the 5 liter bottle to get 4 liters of water
| wiml wrote:
| Then you bring the fox back, take the hen across the river,
| ...
| gzread wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/2348
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'm so glad that style of inerview was dying out right when
| I graduated. And I love puzzles. But I don't need wannabe
| IQ tests for a job that expects me to work in legacy code
| and coordinae with other engineers.
| hedayet wrote:
| > You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, [some
| water overflows], you remove half of water...
|
| That water overflow step is missing / implicit. But that's an
| observable event.
| otterley wrote:
| You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out, you
| put your right foot in, and you shake it all about.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| The point of the metaphor is not to say "spending time is
| mechanically similar to putting things in a container". It is
| to look at spending time from a new angle, and see if it
| helps you understand it better. A wise person sees a metaphor
| as a launching point for thought, not as an expression of a
| metaphysical connection.
|
| Yes, there are bad metaphors, and people who take metaphors
| too seriously. That you can conjure a bad metaphor with
| somewhat similar to semantics to some other metaphor does not
| mean that said metaphor is bad.
| hk__2 wrote:
| You write a metaphore in a comment, you remove half of it,
| you add another one in the middle, you add the half of the
| first one, and... nobody understands anything.
| gzread wrote:
| Is it the ultimate result of LLM use? People internalising
| the idea that writing is about stringing words together
| like a Markov chain without realising they're not saying
| anything of substance?
| imtringued wrote:
| That is the philosophy of "humans are just token
| predictors", yes.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| But if you teach the bottle how to fish it will be able to
| feed itself for life.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| If that ain't the secret to solving an np complete problem I
| don't know what is!
| d0liver wrote:
| I think that's kind of the point though: AI is the sand, but
| it's the rocks that hold all of the value; the further you get
| away from using AI the more real value you obtain. Like, a few
| of the rocks have gold deposits in them, and the sand is just
| infinitely copious but never holds anything valuable. And
| you've got a bunch of people running around saying, "Behold my
| mountains of sand!"
| titanomachy wrote:
| > We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermes bags and old
| properties precisely because of the time embedded in them
|
| Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because
| they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long
| time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the
| sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to
| zero.
| simonw wrote:
| I would say that wearing a sweater knitted by one's grandmother
| is its own kind of status symbol. I'm more impressed by that
| (someone having a grandmother willing to invest that much
| effort in a gift for them) than someone spending $1000 on an
| item of clothing.
|
| The fact that those items took a long time to make is part of
| what makes them status symbols though, because if you pay a lot
| of money for something that took no time to make at all (see
| most NFTs) you look like an idiot to a lot of people.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I like the sweater, and some people like you might recognize
| it as special, but it doesn't have the universal cachet of a
| Rolex or something. It's also a bit chunky and funny-looking
| (but I guess so are some Rolexes).
| daveguy wrote:
| "universal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > status symbol.
|
| This sort of thing was done at a time when everybody did it,
| and now that it's not done, nobody does it
|
| No kid ever said "did you see the sweater that Timmy's
| grandma knitted for him? That kid is so cool! "
|
| Mostly because they all had grams sweaters as well.
|
| I don't know what term you were looking for, but a handmade
| present for someone dear is about the furthest thing from a
| "status symbol" that I can think of:
|
| - it can't be bought
|
| - it can't be transferred without losing almost all value
| (ie: it's only valuable to you, or at most your family, eBay
| doesn't want it)
|
| - it provides no improvement whatsoever in one's social
| standing
| simonw wrote:
| I don't care about the opinion of kids.
|
| I'm also completely unimpressed by someone wearing a Rolex
| though, so different mileage for different people.
| ghurtado wrote:
| You should be able to understand the definition of a
| common term such as "status symbol" though.
|
| Understanding words does not require being impressed by
| anything, nor caring about the opinion of kids.
| daveguy wrote:
| If most people are thinking "whoopdedoo... you clearly
| have more money than sense" when they see your status
| symbol, is it still a status symbol?
| Avicebron wrote:
| It depends, if someone fundamentally believes that having
| more money than someone else means that person is of
| higher status, then it is.
|
| If people don't consider that someone with more money is
| of a higher status then symbols of that wealth aren't
| meaningful.
|
| I think a lot of people have an ingrained belief that
| "more money == more status"
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Status symbols signal different status in different
| contexts. Some contexts (mostly lower middle class and
| below) are impressed by Rolex watches because they are
| expensive and the struggle for money forms a collective
| experience.
|
| The old rich doesn't give a shit about Rolex watches
| beyond noticing the newb rich using them to tell on
| themselves.
| daveguy wrote:
| And some people just don't give a shit about a fancy
| watch no matter how much money they have or don't have.
| simonw wrote:
| Different mileage for different people.
| NiloCK wrote:
| What are you referring to with the phrase "status symbol"?
|
| I can't connect it at all to your listed points. An Olympic
| medal is about obvious a status symbol as I can imagine but
| it can't (meaningfully) be bought or transferred.
|
| The status signified with a knit sweater is membership (and
| good standing!) in a caring family with elders not yet
| fully subsumed into their phones.
|
| People, acquaintances and strangers alike, frequently
| comment on the knit socks I often wear, ask after who made
| them, and all of a sudden we're on "how's your mom" terms.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > it can't (meaningfully) be bought or transferred.
|
| https://www.ebay.com/b/Olympic-
| Medal/27291/bn_55191416?_sop=...
|
| > People, acquaintances and strangers alike, frequently
| comment on the knit socks I often wear,
|
| Ok, that explains pretty much everything about your line
| of thought.
|
| Thanks.
| NiloCK wrote:
| (edited for clarity)
|
| > https://www.ebay.com/b/Olympic-
| Medal/27291/bn_55191416?_sop=...
|
| Of course you can buy an Olympic medal. You can't buy the
| _status_ conferred by the medal (of Olympic champion /
| nth runner up).
|
| > Ok, that explains pretty much everything about your
| line of thought.
|
| I don't understand this either. Are you insulting me?
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| Buying someone else's medal is not a status symbol. That
| is why they included the word meaningfully.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You're the kind of person that would try to buy a Nobel
| peace prize off a recipient, aren't you?
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Very often kids are un-knowing participants in status
| signalling by adults.
|
| Parents want to signal "this child is looked after and we
| have a lot of capacity". Clothes, lunches, a lot of things
| are quietly like this.
|
| A good hand-made gift demonstrates the status of the
| _giver_ and provides proof-of-work for their regard of the
| recipient.
| cineticdaffodil wrote:
| To be worthy that much time is the statussymbol of love. Its
| a rare thing, money can't buy. Somebody gifts part of his
| finite time on the planet to you bundled in an artifact.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe the analogy was wrong but more and more, I believe that
| some of a value was implicitly about how many organs/industries
| did it touch.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yes, Veblen goods, and there are examples of cloning Hermes
| bags for example (still by hand) where they're much cheaper yet
| took the same amount of time to create.
|
| https://youtu.be/02CjWIkTy-M
| airstrike wrote:
| Reads like a feel good article to signal virtue and feel
| validated in the wake of the Delve scandal. But ultimately
| obvious, opportunistic, and mid.
| doe88 wrote:
| I feel you, I guess i succeeded in not being lost and keep
| reading by solving the conendrum in telling myself: it
| certainly should take time to grow the cows for the bags.
| Nonetheless I'm glad i finished reading it, it was a good
| essay.
| cambrianentropy wrote:
| I clicked the back button exactly when I got to that line haha.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| It would be more accurate to say "we value these things
| highly". Most people don't give a damn about your sweater, but
| it's probably _extremely_ valuable to you precisely because of
| the time your grandmother put into it.
| vessenes wrote:
| The point of the essay is good. You called out exactly my
| reaction; we value those things because of the marketing
| dollars that went in to them. As a wealthy friend from Geneva
| said to me once, "Look around this dinner party - the Swiss
| here have either an Apple watch or nothing on their wrist."
| Swiss watches are an export good, and Hermes is a luxury brand.
| Both of generally good quality. And much, much better
| marketing.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Not really. Some items naturally have value due to utility.
| Natural resources only lose their value if we somehow move on
| from all its utilities (like coal is, day by day).
|
| Some are indeed via marketing, but any itema have intrinsic
| or at least, emotional value.
| silisili wrote:
| I agree there, but there are plenty of examples of time cost
| being baked into an item, regardless of status symbols.
|
| The sweater is with whatever value a single person values it as
| or would pay for it. Said another way, would you sell it to me
| for $10? 50? 100? If you said no to all three, it's worth at
| least $100.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Well, I did say "market value". Of course it has value to
| _me_.
| marcta wrote:
| Maybe their point is that the brands _themselves_ have a lot of
| time embedded in them. Generally, status symbols (whatever they
| are) aren 't things that are recently established.
| andyhedges wrote:
| > We require age minimums for driving, voting, and drinking
| because we believe maturity only comes through lived experience.
|
| Not true, we do this because the 99% of the time it's true,
| however there are people who would be perfectly competent and
| responsible to drive without living to the age of 16-18. Same
| with voting, there are humans who have a deep understanding and
| intelligence about politics at a younger age than suffrage.
| Equally there are people who will be reckless drivers at 40 and
| vote on whim at 60.
|
| We have these rules not because sophistication only comes through
| lived experience, we have them because it's strongly correlated
| and covers of most error cases.
|
| To take this to AI, run the model enough times with a higher
| enough temperature, then perhaps it can solve your challenges
| with a high enough quality - just a thought.
| abnry wrote:
| The guiding analogy of the piece is that of planting a tree and
| waiting for it to mature.
|
| The reason we need to wait is that it takes time for some
| things to mature.
| andyhedges wrote:
| Yes, I'm saying it's not a good analogy
| dminor wrote:
| On the contrary, you can solve the tree problem with money. There
| are nurseries that sell mature trees -- most people though will
| not choose to spend $20k on a tree.
| hshsiejensjsj wrote:
| This is nitpicking his point.
|
| But anyhow, you can buy large-ish burlapped trees but they
| aren't as healthy, often die, and nothing close to a 100+ yr
| old estate oak tree or a decades old rose garden. You just
| can't make it faster, transplanting plants that old will kill
| them.
| dminor wrote:
| You're moving the goalposts on his poor analogy :)
|
| Most of the trees do just fine, and these nurseries will
| typically provide a warranty.
| johnthedebs wrote:
| Besides nitpicking, even your original point isn't even
| true. You cannot transplant a 100 year old tree (which has
| not been constrained in size dramatically) and expect it to
| survive for any reasonable length of time.
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| You won't find a 50 year old American Chestnut in a nursery,
| lol.
|
| And forget about 20k. If you find someone willing to sell their
| tree you're looking at at least 10x that for the logistics of
| moving a 20 ton root system.
| dminor wrote:
| You won't find a 50 year old American Chestnut anywhere lol,
| they were wiped out almost entirely.
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| You'll find it if you look hard enough. Whether the owner
| will let you dig up their entire yard is another matter.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| > everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic
| tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall
| into a trap where we're immediately filling it with more things
|
| I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or
| if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more
| projects and burn ourselves out?
| agumonkey wrote:
| A blend of both. You do create more, but the goalposts are
| always one more step away.
|
| ps: it's strange that YouTubers are talking about the same
| thing. People in different dev circles. Agentic feels like doom
| ide scroll.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Sounds similar to a slot machine. How odd...
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone
| up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on
| more projects and burn ourselves out?
|
| It definitely hasn't for me. I spent about an hour today trying
| to use AI to write something fairly simple and I'm still no
| further forward.
|
| I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in
| software development.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in
| software development.
|
| When Russians invaded Germany during WWII, some of them (who
| had never seen a toilet) thought that toilets were advanced
| potato washing machines, and were rightfully pissed when
| their potatoes were flushed away and didn't come back.
|
| Sounds like you're feeling a similar frustration with your
| problem.
| lawn wrote:
| Russians invading Ukraine had some, let's say interesting,
| reactions to modernities like toilets and washing machines
| ghurtado wrote:
| Which begs the question: how many of those Russians
| stealing the appliances also took a potato washer or two?
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| I don't really see where that comparison is relevant.
|
| Why is AI supposed to be good?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| At some point hearing "you're holding it wrong" and "here's
| a metaphor for why you're dumb" in response to real
| shortcomings with AI, and the manic hype behind it, becomes
| repetitive and feels like there really aren't good
| arguments or evidence against those shortcomings and hype.
| Philpax wrote:
| Apologies for the obligatory question, but what did you try
| to do, and with which AI did you try to do it with?
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Well following advice from folk on here earlier, I thought
| I'd start small and try to get it to write some code in Go
| that would listen on a network socket, wait for a packet
| with a bunch of messages (in a known format) come in, and
| split those messages out from the packet.
|
| I ended up having to type hundreds of lines of description
| to get thousands of lines of code that doesn't actually
| work, when the one I wrote myself is about two dozen lines
| of code and works perfectly.
|
| It just seems such a slow and inefficient way to work.
| timacles wrote:
| Hate to pull the skill issue card here, but that is a
| trivial problem that can be one shotted with almost any
| model with
| smj-edison wrote:
| tbh that's not a helpful thing to say. I think a more
| productive thing would be to ask "What model are you
| using?" "Are you using it in chat mode or as a dedicated
| agent?" "Do you have an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md?"
|
| I've also been underwhelmed with its ability to iterate,
| as it tends to pile on hacks. So another useful question
| is "did you try having it write again with what you/it
| learned?"
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > I think a more productive thing would be to ask "What
| model are you using?" "Are you using it in chat mode or
| as a dedicated agent?" "Do you have an AGENTS.md or
| CLAUDE.md?"
|
| In my case I'd have to say "Don't know, whatever VS
| Code's bot uses", and "no idea what those are or why I
| have to care".
| smj-edison wrote:
| > Don't know, whatever VS Code's bot uses
|
| The reason I ask about what model is I initially
| dismissed AI generated code because I was not impressed
| with the models I was trying. I decided if I was going to
| evaluate it fairly though, I would need to try a paid
| product. I ended up using Claude Sonnet 4.5, which is
| much better than the quick-n-cheap models. I still don't
| use Claude for large stuff, but it's pretty good at one-
| off scripts and providing advice. Chances are VS Code is
| using a crappy model by default.
|
| > no idea what those are or why I have to care
|
| For the difference between chat mode and agent mode, chat
| mode is the online interface where you can ask it
| questions, but you have to copy the code back and forth.
| Agent mode is where it's running an interface layer on
| your computer, so the LLM can view files, run commands,
| save files, etc. I use Claude in agent mode via Claude
| Code, though I still check and approve every command it
| runs. It also won't change any files without your
| permission by default.
|
| AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md are pretty much a file that the
| LLM agent reads every time it starts up. It's where you
| put your style guide in, and also where you have
| suggestions to correct things it consistently messes up
| on. It's not as important at the beginning, but it's
| helpful for me to have it be consistent about its style
| (well, as consistent as I can get it). Here's an example
| from a project I'm currently working on:
| https://github.com/smj-edison/zicl/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
|
| I know there's lots of other things you can do, like
| create custom tools, things to run every time, subagents,
| plan mode, etc. I haven't ever really tried using them,
| because chances are a lot of them will be obsolete/not
| useful, and I'd rather get stuff done.
|
| I'm still not convinced they speed up most tasks, but
| it's been really useful to have it track down memory
| leaks and silly bugs.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I decided if I was going to evaluate it fairly though, I
| would need to try a paid product.
|
| Okay. Get me a job and I'll pay for any model of your
| choosing. Until then, finances are very slim.
| smj-edison wrote:
| > Get me a job
|
| Heh, I'm a college student, so I can't help with that...
|
| You could also try Gemini 3 pro with Gemini's CLI which
| is free, though it's not as good at using tools. But, it
| sounds like you're not interested, which is fine!
|
| Just please don't continue to argue with finer points if
| you're not interested. I've done my best to engage with
| your points, but I get the sense that it doesn't matter
| what I say.
|
| I am curious though, why do you feel so strongly about
| LLM products?
| timacles wrote:
| Agreed was a bit rough. Yes they are not great at
| iterating and keeping long contexts, but you look at what
| he's describing and you have to agree that's exactly the
| type of problem llm excel at
|
| Shouldn't have to baby step through the basics when the
| author is clearly not interested in learning himself
| smj-edison wrote:
| > Shouldn't have to baby step through the basics when the
| author is clearly not interested in learning himself
|
| I'd rather assume good faith, because when I first
| started using LLMs I was incredibly confused what was
| going on, and all the tutorials were grating on me
| because the people making the tutorials were clearly
| overhyping it.
|
| It was precisely the measured and detailed HN comments
| that I read that convinced me to finally try out Claude,
| so I do my best to pay it forward :)
| timacles wrote:
| I totally agree, and myself have gone through that cycle.
|
| But the guy is being adversarial and antagonistic. Its a
| 2 way street, sometimes you have to call people out on
| their BS because I'm not seeing someone argue in good
| faith, but rather pretending some superior knowledge
| because hes working on a esoteric protocol like people
| here don't know how packet headers work
| smj-edison wrote:
| I don't read it as superiority, perhaps bitterness would
| be the closest word to what I'm reading.
|
| > sometimes you have to call people out on their BS
|
| That's true, but I think that it's often much later than
| what some people would consider enough. Someone can be
| bitter, and still have good points. It's very dangerous
| to preemptively dismiss points, because it means that I
| won't listen to anyone who disagrees with me. I'm willing
| to put in the work to interpret someone's response in a
| productive light because there's often something to find.
|
| There's a framework that I work within when I'm in a
| discussion. There's three elements: arguments, values,
| and assumptions. An argument is the face value
| statements. But those statements come from the values and
| assumptions of the person.
|
| Values are what people consider most important. In most
| cases, our values are the same, which is good!
|
| The biggest difference is assumptions. For example, one
| assumption I have is that free markets are the best
| method we have to lift individuals out of poverty. This
| colors how I talk about AI. Another person might assume
| that free markets have failed, and we need to use a
| different approach. This colors how they would view AI.
| So we'll completely talk past each other when arguing AI,
| because it's more of a proxy war of our assumptions.
| imtringued wrote:
| There is a big performance difference between models.
|
| Trying to trace back the quality of the model to the
| "skills" of the person sounds extremely manipulative.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Shouldn't have to baby step through the basics when the
| author is clearly not interested in learning himself
|
| Okay. Whip up your favorite model and report back to us
| with your prompts. I'm pretty anti-AI, but you're going
| to attract more bees with honey than smoke.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Okay, tell you what then. Help me learn.
|
| The problem is that I want something that listens on a
| TCP connection for GD92 packets, and when they arrive
| send appropriate handshaking to the other end and parse
| them into Go structs that can be stuffed into a channel
| to be dealt with elsewhere.
|
| And, of course, something to encode them and send them
| again.
|
| How would I do that with whatever AI you choose?
|
| I'm pretty certain you can't solve this with AI because
| there is literally no published example of code to do it
| that it can copy from.
| timacles wrote:
| GD92 packets?
|
| No idea what you're talking about but if it has a spec
| then it doesn't matter if it's trained on it. Break the
| problem down into small enough chunks. Give it examples
| of expected input and output then any llm can reason
| about it. Use a planning mode and keep the context small
| and focused on each segment of the process.
|
| You're describing a basic tcp exchange, learn more about
| the domain and how packets are structured and the problem
| will become easier by itself. Llms struggle with large
| code bases which pollute the context not straightforward
| apps like this
| smj-edison wrote:
| One other thing, it might be worthwhile having the spec
| fresh in the LLM's context by downloading it and pointing
| the agent at it. I've heard that that's a fruitful way to
| get it to refresh its memory.
| timacles wrote:
| Yep you can even extract the relevant parts and put them
| into local files the llm can scan
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > GD92 packets? No idea what you're talking about but if
| it has a spec then it doesn't matter if it's trained on
| it.
|
| Okay, so you're running into the same problem that LLMs
| are.
|
| > Break the problem down into small enough chunks. Give
| it examples of expected input and output then any llm can
| reason about it.
|
| So I have to do lots of grunt work?
|
| > You're describing a basic tcp exchange, learn more
| about the domain and how packets are structured and the
| problem will become easier by itself
|
| I've written dozens of things that deal with TCP. I
| already have a fully-working example of what I want. The
| idea was to test if I could recreate it using LLMs.
|
| How is it _supposed_ to work? How does it put in the code
| I already know I want?
| imtringued wrote:
| >Okay, so you're running into the same problem that LLMs
| are.
|
| I can't tell if you are a troll or not, but you can't
| complain that nobody understands your intentionally vague
| and obtuse way to describe the problem at hand to pretend
| you're superior.
|
| https://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/NoticeDownload
| /Do...
|
| You have to rename the file ending to PDF. It's probably
| the wrong spec, because I'm basing this research on
| literally four letters that could mean anything since
| there is zero context given here. I've also found some
| German documents about chemistry.
|
| If your argument is that LLMs and humans are stupid
| because they don't know what a "GD92" is, then yeah maybe
| it's a you problem.
|
| Go and throw the spec into openai codex inside limactl
| (get it from GitHub) and use zed (the editor) and a SSH
| remote project to get inside the VM, don't forget to
| enable KVM for performance. The free tier for openai is
| fine, but make sure to use codex 5.2.
|
| First ask questions on what the binary encoding is based
| on. It's probably X.400, then once you've asked enough
| questions, tell it to implement it. You probably won't
| have to read the spec at all yourself.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| That is the correct spec.
|
| Remember, I've already written something that does this.
| I'm trying to understand how and why an LLM would help.
|
| Which part of the job is the LLM supposed to do?
| timacles wrote:
| Hes not a troll, hes just trying way too hard to prove a
| point that half the people here can see is nonsense.
|
| Its not worth engaging a guy who is adversarial to
| learning how a tool works, just so he can maintain some
| air of superiority for his ego.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up
|
| Here's the thing: we never had a remotely sane way to measure
| productivity of a software engineer for reasons that we all
| understand, and we don't have it now.
|
| Even if we had it, it's not the sort of thing that management
| would even use: they decide how productive you are based on
| completely unrelated criteria, like willingness to work long
| hours and keeping your mouth shut when you disagree.
|
| If you ask those types whether productivity has gone up with
| AI, they'll probably say something like "of course, we were
| able to let go a third of our programmers and nothing really
| seems to have changed"
|
| "Productivity" became a poisoned word the moment that the suits
| realized what a useful weapon it was, and that it was
| impossible to challenge.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >"Productivity" became a poisoned word the moment that the
| suits realized what a useful weapon it was, and that it was
| impossible to challenge.
|
| Not impossible to challenge. But most people don't have the
| legal funds to do so. Those that do tend to get a cushy
| severance bribe to stay quiet and they move on elsewhere.
|
| That's also why it's a long process to "fire" someone but
| easy to "lay off" instead. layoffs are never about
| productivity (so it doesn't matter anyway), and the US is
| doing absolutely nothing to protect against it like most of
| the world.
| timacles wrote:
| What society and America is about to realize is that it really
| doesn't matter how productive you are at software and
| technological innovations when systemic things outside of the
| economic system are eroding.
|
| It doesn't matter how fast we can make our widgets and chatbots
| when what you need is to have a self sufficient workforce. We
| have outsourced everything material and valuable for society.
| Now we are left with industries of gambling, ad machines and
| pharmaceuticals with a government that is functionally bankrupt
| and politicians that have completely sold out
| lapcat wrote:
| > I'm also increasingly skeptical of anyone who sells me
| something that supposedly saves my time.
|
| Imagine a world in which the promise of AI was that workers could
| keep their jobs, at the same compensation as before, but work
| fewer hours and days per week due to increased productivity.
|
| What could you do with those extra hours and days? Sleep better.
| Exercise more. Prepare healthy meals. Spend more time with family
| and friends. The benefits to physical and mental well-being are
| priceless. Even if you happened to earn extra money for the same
| amount of work, your time can be infinitely more valuable than
| money.
|
| Unfortunately, that's not this world. Which is why the "increased
| productivity" promise doesn't seem to benefit workers at all.
|
| If you look at the technological utopias that people imagined 50,
| 60+ years ago, they involved lives of leisure. If you would have
| told them that advances in technology would not reduce our
| working hours at all, maybe they would have started smashing the
| machines back then. Now we're supposed to be happy with more
| "stuff", even if there's no more time to enjoy stuff.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Unfortunately, that 's not this world._
|
| At one point, it was this world[1]:
|
| > _Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It
| stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight
| in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was
| intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the
| customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and
| place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment
| breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of
| laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times.
| During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the
| year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual.
| According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers[1], the
| medieval workday was not more than eight hours. The worker
| participating in the eight-hour movements of the late
| nineteenth century was "simply striving to recover what his
| ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago."_
|
| > _The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work
| patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The
| medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that
| is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at
| Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints'
| andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in
| feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official
| celebrations, there were often weeks' worth of ales -- to mark
| important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less
| momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All
| told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably
| about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently
| working harder than their neighbors. The ancien regime in
| France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety
| rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted
| that holidays totaled five months per year.[5]_
|
| > _The peasant 's free time extended beyond officially
| sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what
| economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor --
| the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor.
| During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth
| century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the
| half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day."
| And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn
| their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about
| 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours
| annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days
| worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A
| thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did
| not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial
| records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely
| short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later
| evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their
| worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year._
|
| [1]
| https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _We know this intuitively. We pay premiums for Swiss watches,
| Hermes bags and old properties precisely because of the time
| embedded in them. Either because of the time it took to build
| them or because of their age._
|
| Oh, I thought it was because they're a way to show off about
| being rich.
|
| > _We require age minimums for driving, voting, and drinking
| because we believe maturity only comes through lived experience._
|
| Even if she could reach the pedals, my 4yo doesn't have the
| attention span to drive. This isn't a "lived experience" thing,
| it's a physical brain development thing. IIRC the are effects
| with learning math, where starting earlier had limited impact on
| being able to move to certain more advanced topics earlier; ie
| there's more going on than just hours of experience.
|
| The standard age for voting is also the age for being a legal
| adult. There are sound logical reasons that these ages should
| match.
|
| The standard drinking age is due to pressure by activists, and
| AIUI is lower in other countries.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| > Oh, I thought it was because they're a way to show off about
| being rich.
|
| Maybe for some. I think these examples were carefully chosen.
| Hermes are made in France, "Swiss watch" doesn't automatically
| mean Rolex, though in that case Rolex does own most of their
| manufacturing (though there is a whole world of carefully made
| watches out there that don't cost 10K). As for old
| properties... there is a huge range there, but unless you are
| living in a castle, most people, at least my city, are likely
| silently thinking: "I'm so sorry for them that they have to
| live in that old house."
| cdevries wrote:
| https://simplytrees.com/
| sledgehammers wrote:
| Also you know, for programmers, say a 3 day work week is right
| there up for grabs. Even still employers would see big
| productivity increases.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Programmers no longer have any leverage now they can all be
| replaced by machines. It doesn't matter how productive you are,
| the system will always demand more.
| OtomotO wrote:
| This hype too will pass. It's always ebb and flood...
| hedayet wrote:
| you know what most of us end up doing on those other days? we
| start side tech projects that require even more effort for even
| little return.
|
| You can't trust us with self-care. There's just too many shiny
| toys out there!
| mrknmc wrote:
| Speak for yourself!
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| "The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much
| by the possessor, and often without any attention to the
| imperfection of the performance."
| alexpotato wrote:
| I've been working on a clone of Sid Meier's Pirates but with a
| princess theme (for my daughters).
|
| I've been using AI to help me write it and I've come to a couple
| conclusions:
|
| - AI can make working PoCs incredibly quickly
|
| - It can even help me think of story lines, decision paths etc
|
| - Given that, there is still a TON of decisions to be made e.g.
| what artwork to use, what makes sense from a story perspective
|
| - Playtesting alone + iterating still occurs at human speed b/c
| if humans are the intended audience, getting their opinions takes
| human time, not computer time
|
| I've started using this example more and more as it highlights
| that, yes, AI can save huge amounts of time. However, as we
| learned from the Theory of Constraints, there is always another
| bottleneck somewhere that will slow things down.
| simonw wrote:
| I've tried a few game projects with coding agents - having
| never worked on a game before in my life - and the main thing I
| learned is that the hard part is designing it to be _fun_.
|
| Coming up with a genuinely interesting gameplay loop with
| increasing difficulty levels and progressively revealed
| gameplay mechanics is a fascinating and extremely difficult
| challenge, no matter how much AI you throw at the problem.
| martin-t wrote:
| And that's why human work, not its "expression" or some other
| legalese should be protected by law.
|
| If LLMs (or other "AI" or even AI tools) are able to exactly
| replicate the behavior of a program (game or otherwise)
| without access to its source code, that's technologically
| cool. However, that means it's possible to cheaply replicate
| immense amounts of human work in a way the law does not
| cover.
|
| If you take a game and use LLMs to reimplement both its
| assets and code from scratch but players have the same
| movement, weapons do the same damage, have the same spread
| and projectile speed, and so on, then the "new" game is not
| really new, it's based on other people's work. And nobody
| should be allowed to profit from other people's work without
| their consent and without compensating them.
|
| Obviously, work is hard to quantify but that doesn't mean we
| should give up.
| simonw wrote:
| Does that argument also apply to https://www.freeciv.org/
| and https://openxcom.org/ and similar projects?
| martin-t wrote:
| 1) Yes but in those cases what their authors are gaining
| is at best some public recognition, not money. And
| because the projects don't hide what they're based on,
| that recognition goes back to the original games and
| their authors. Now, if they were asking for donations,
| then yes, I think they should give a part of it to the
| original devs.
|
| 2) We can also look at it from a more utilitarian
| perspective. When something starts as closed source,
| people who made it got paid already and the owners (who
| often did not perform any useful work except putting in
| money) keep making money from then on. Reimplementing it
| as open source does not harm the original devs but allows
| more people to access it and it also often leads to a
| much more open and pro-social implementation without dark
| patterns. And the paid version often still has an
| advantage due to existing awareness, marketing and
| network effects.
|
| OTOH when something starts as free/open under conditions
| such as anyone building on top of it has to release under
| the same conditions, then a company taking that work is
| violating explicitly stated wishes, is making money which
| doesn't reach the original devs and does not promote the
| original work. And it also has the aforementioned
| advantages. When the closed version eclipses the open
| one, the owners are free to add dark patterns and
| otherwise exploit their position further.
|
| This way open work is a global social good, closed work
| is only good for those who own it.
|
| ---
|
| I prefer argument 1 because it doesn't require the
| presence of exploitative power structures.
|
| Either way, we should recognize there are multiple
| dimensions to compensation - here recognition and money.
| And work should be rewarded along both axes transitively.
| potro wrote:
| I have very similar experience. I vibecoded a foreign language
| practice app for myself. It works decent from functional
| perspective and I don't see too many bugs. But the biggest
| productivity constraint I see is the time I need to spend using
| it in order to understand what is working and where the issues
| are.
| ozim wrote:
| My newest joke is:
|
| ,,I was able to vibecode those 5 apps I always wanted but
| never had time to code them myself ... it is so different now
| because -- I don't have time to use them".
| bluGill wrote:
| That is wrong - the limit isn't time. The limit is you need
| to create a good ui so you don't need time. time is the
| limit for a fun game (see other comnents on how hard this
| is).
|
| However an app needs to be a good enough ui that it does
| something for you and often they don't. Paper todo lists
| still beat all the todo apps people try to make because the
| ui works for paper. Paper has large limits and so it seems
| there must be an app out there that is better - but so far
| everyone has failed to create it.
| zzleeper wrote:
| LMK if you finish it, sounds like something my daughter would
| enjoy!
| thn-gap wrote:
| I work at FAANG, and leadership is successfully pushing the urge
| for speed by stablishing the new productivity expectations, and
| everyone is rushing as much as they can, as the productivity gain
| doesn't really match the expectations, and people overwork to
| make up for this difference. This works very well with internal
| competition and a quota system for performance ratings, with some
| extra fear due to the bad job market.
|
| I feel this new world sucks. We have new technology that boosts
| the productivity of the individual engineer, and we could be
| doing MUCH better work, instead of just rushed slop to meet
| quotas.
|
| I feel I'm just building my replacement, to bring the next level
| of profits to the c-suite. I just wish I wasn't burning out while
| doing so.
| an0malous wrote:
| I've noticed this dynamic acutely working at YC startups the
| last 5ish years. Coding has become like a sweatshop.
|
| I don't think it's exclusive to startups or tech either, it
| seems more like a downstream consequence of the fact that
| there's no real innovation anymore. Capitalism demands constant
| growth, and when there are real technological improvements you
| can achieve that growth through higher productivity. If there
| are none, you have to achieve that growth through other means
| like forcing employees to work longer or cutting costs. The
| alpha is all coming from squeezing the labor force right now.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| > it seems more like a downstream consequence of the fact
| that there's no real innovation anymore
|
| This doesn't sound right to me. We are currently getting
| smacked upside the head by an enormous technological
| innovation. I believe that, even within the framework of
| capitalism, this problem has social and political roots. The
| "robber baron" period late 19th century America has strong
| similarities to what we are seeing today, and technological
| stagnation was not the cause.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| When are we throwing anti-trust at the robber barons?
| That's the real question.
|
| And as of now, we are not having "technological
| innovation". We found a new jackhammer and are tearing up
| the entire house experimenting with it. Maybe when the
| "shiny new thing" effect wears off we'll get true
| innovation. But as of now people are just getting paid to
| show off jackhammers.
| Chris_Newton wrote:
| With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often
| seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased
| speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also
| heading in the right direction. If we're far enough off course,
| increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking
| longer to get where we want to be.
|
| I've been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all
| of both the good and the bad that I hear about LLM-based coding
| tools. Using AI for research or to spin up a quick demo or
| prototype is using it to help plot a course. A lot of the multi-
| stage agentic workflows also come down to creating guard rails
| before doing the main implementation so the AI can't get too far
| off track. Most of the success stories I hear seem to be in these
| areas so far. Meanwhile, probably the most common criticism I see
| is that an AI that is simply given a prompt to implement some new
| feature or bug fix for an existing system often misunderstands or
| makes bad assumptions and ends up repeatedly running into dead
| ends. It moves fast but without knowing which direction to move
| in.
| skydhash wrote:
| > It moves fast but without knowing which direction to move in.
|
| It also moves fast with a tendency to pick the wrong direction
| (according to the goal of the prompter) at every decision point
| (known or unknown).
| tombert wrote:
| I've definitely gotten it into contexts where it will never
| stop going into the wrong direction, even when I tell it to
| forget everything it did before, and told it a correct path
| forward. Usually restarting the entire session fixes it, but
| not always.
| FrankRay78 wrote:
| Shrewd context management is the go here.
| gopalv wrote:
| > Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we
| are also heading in the right direction.
|
| This is a real problem when the "direction" == "good feedback"
| from a customer standpoint.
|
| Before we had a product person for every ~20 people generating
| code and now we're all product people, the machines are writing
| the code (not all of it, but enough of it that I will -1 a
| ~4000 line PR and ask someone to start over, instead of digging
| out of the hole in the same PR).
|
| Feedback takes time on the system by real users to come back to
| the product team.
|
| You need a PID like smoothing curve over your feature changes.
|
| Like you said, Speed isn't velocity.
|
| Specifically if you have a decent experiment framework to keep
| this disclosure progressive in the customer base, going the
| wrong direction isn't a huge penalty as it used to be.
|
| I liked the PostHog newsletter about the "Hidden dangers of
| shipping fast", I can't find a good direct link to it.
| Ezra wrote:
| This is the article you referred to:
|
| https://newsletter.posthog.com/p/the-hidden-danger-of-
| shippi...
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Thanks! Great link.
| ozim wrote:
| Have been there, we got pushback from users and we had to
| back off with releases. Users hunted product owner with
| pitchforks and torches.
|
| As dev team we were able to crank the speed even more and
| silly product people thought they are doing something good by
| demanding even more from us. But that was one of the
| instances where users were helpful :).
|
| People use dozens of apps every day to do their work. Just
| think about how are you going to make time to give feedback
| to each of each.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > Just think about how are you going to make time to give
| feedback to each of each.
|
| That's pretty much solved by the size of the audiences. You
| won't give feedback on 12 apps, but 11 other people will
| probably do so on 11 different apps.
|
| Of course, the issue with my domain is that there's plenty
| of feedback, and product owners just dismiss it. Burn down
| your entire portfolio to get that boosted shareholder value
| for the next earnings report.
| ozim wrote:
| And how do you solve that when you are one of those 11
| apps when no one wants to talk to you because they have
| their work to do? Where you don't have power to say that
| kind of thing.
|
| Well by asking repeatedly of course but you just piss
| people off.
|
| Have you ever given feedback to Atlassian, Google,
| Microsoft?
| js8 wrote:
| Don't wait for feedback from "real users", become a user!
|
| This tayloristic idea (which has now reincarnated in "design
| thinking") that you can observe someone doing a job and then
| decide better than them what they need is ridiculous and
| should die.
|
| Good products are built by the people who use the thing
| themselves. Doesn't mean though that choosing good features
| (product design and engineering) isn't a skill in itself.
| bluGill wrote:
| Too often that isn't possible. There is a lot of domain
| knowledge in making a widget there is a lot of domain
| knowledge in doing a job. when e complex job needs a
| complex widget often there isn't enough overlap to be
| experts in both.
|
| sure 'everyone' drives so you can be a domain expert in
| cars. However not everyone can be an astronaught - rockets
| are complex enough to need more people than astronaughts
| and so most people designing spaceships will never have the
| opportunity to use one.
| js8 wrote:
| I am not asking anybody to be an expert in both (although
| I am sure such people exist, however rare); I am saying
| people should ideally have some skill in both. Also,
| people can collaborate, and learn new skills.
|
| If you're bottle-necked by waiting for the users of your
| product to give a feedback, you clearly need to spend
| more time learning how to be a user yourself. Or hire
| people with some domain skill who can also code.
| nabbed wrote:
| >Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we
| are also heading in the right direction.
|
| I suppose there is an argument that if you _are_ building the
| wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more
| quickly that you built the wrong thing, allowing you to iterate
| more quickly.
| roughly wrote:
| It's still faster and cheaper to just build the right thing
| to begin with. As the old saying goes, spend your time
| sharpening your ax.
| mgfist wrote:
| Yes, but only if you have an ax to sharpen. With a lot of
| things it takes trial and error to make progress. You can
| take this pretty up high too - sometimes it takes building
| multiple products or companies to get it right
| Jare wrote:
| > With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make
| progress
|
| Way too often that is used as an excuse for various forms
| of laziness; to not think about the things you can
| already know. And that lack of thinking repeats in an
| endless cycle when, after your trial and error, you don't
| use what you learned because "let's look forward not
| backward", "let's fail fast and often" and similar
| platitudes.
|
| Catchy slogans and heartfelt desires are great but you
| gotta put the brains in it too.
| diatone wrote:
| Without commenting about the frequency of negligence
| myself, I suspect at least that you and GP are in
| agreement.
|
| I doubt GP is suggesting 'go ahead and be negligent to
| feedback and guardrails that let you course correct
| early.'
|
| Plugging the Cynefin framework as a useful technique for
| practitioners here. It doesn't have to be hard to choose
| whether or not rigorous planning is appropriate for the
| task at hand, versus probe-test-backtrack with tight
| iteration loops.
| uoaei wrote:
| If you start a business without a concrete idea of the
| timber you need to achieve the idea you have, an axe will
| be all but useless.
| overfeed wrote:
| > I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the
| wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more
| quickly that you built the wrong thing,
|
| A lot of people are so enamored by speed, they are not even
| taking the time to carefully consider the full picture of
| what they are building. Take the HN frontpage story on
| OpenCode: IIRC, a maintainer admitted they keep adding many
| shallow features that are brittle.
|
| Speed cannot replace product vision and discipline.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Tech very quickly shifted to a industry of marketers
| instead of hackers. And with salesmen, you want to
| advertise as many features as possible, not talk about how
| quality one good crucial feature is.
|
| This won't really stop until investors start judging on
| quality and not quantity. But a lot of those are thinking
| in finances, and the thought of removing their biggest cost
| center is too tempting to not go all in on. So they want to
| hear "we made this super fast with 2-3 people!" instead of
| "we optimized and scaled this up to handle 400% more
| workload with double the performance".
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| The outcome of that approach depends entirely on the broader
| process. Imagine golf but you refuse to swing with anything
| less than maximum strength to avoid wasting time.
|
| Discovery is great and all but if what you discover is that
| you didn't aim well to begin with that's not all that useful.
| msteffen wrote:
| I think "iterating more quickly" is good for the company
| doing the building. But if you're the customer, having a new
| piece of shit foisted on you twice a day so that some garbage
| PM can "build user empathy" gets old really fast.
|
| Before AI, I worked at a B2B open source startup, and our
| users were perpetually annoyed by how often we asked them to
| upgrade and were never on the latest version.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| > Before AI, I worked at a B2B open source startup, and our
| users were perpetually annoyed by how often we asked them
| to upgrade and were never on the latest version.
|
| And frankly, they were in point.
|
| Especially in the B2B context stability is massively
| underrated by the product.
|
| There is very little I hate more then starting my work week
| on a Monday morning and find out someone changed the tools
| I'm using for daily business _again_
|
| Even if it's objectively minor like apples last pivot to
| the windows vista design... It just annoys me.
|
| But I'm not the person paying the bills for the tools I'm
| using at work, and the person that is almost never actually
| uses the tools themselves and hence shiny redesigns and
| pointless features galore
| siddboots wrote:
| I've been working on a side project for ~10 years (very
| intermittently) that involves a tricky combination of
| mathematics, classical AI algorithms, and programming language
| design, and I've gone though this very slow but rewarding
| journey to work out how all of the pieces should fit together
| properly.
|
| In the last year or so I've been able to prototype it and
| accelerate the development quite significantly using Claude and
| pals, and now it is very close to a finished product. One one
| hand there's no doubt in my mind that the LLM tools can make
| this sort of thing faster and let you churn through ideas until
| you find the right ones, but on the other hand, if I hadn't had
| that slow burn of mostly just thinking about it conceptually
| for 10 years, I would have ended up vibe coding a much worse
| product.
| TheJord wrote:
| 10 years of thinking before shipping is actually the move.
| The AI just becomes a power tool -- useless if you don't know
| what you're building, unstoppable if you do
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| You're missing out on 10 years of real world feedback if
| you do this.
| ozim wrote:
| There are projects where ,,real world feedback" will be
| actively harmful.
| layla5alive wrote:
| Are you being cute impersonating an LLM, or are you an LLM
| posting?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Ah, metaphors. Abstract concepts are not moving objects. You
| don't actually need to "turn it around" or "sail past it". You
| can break the laws of physics (because they don't apply). You
| can teleport around.
|
| Speed actually just wins, because we are usually constrained by
| time.
| 3121aksj8p wrote:
| Yes, AI can emit BS at a faster rate than ever. We can also
| produce more blog posts than ever.
|
| Working or useful software? AI hasn't produced any at all
| since 2023.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Wow, an account, just for that? I feel honored and slightly
| suspicious.
| nprateem wrote:
| Altman didn't want to post from his own account
| Chris_Newton wrote:
| _Speed actually just wins, because we are usually constrained
| by time._
|
| Sorry, but I don't understand what you mean here. What do we
| win by being faster at producing the wrong things?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| You learn more quickly that you are producing the wrong
| thing.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| This implies that
|
| 1) a lot of shallow, orthogonal directions is better than
| 1 deep, careful approach
|
| 2) There's no social aspect to churning out a bunch of
| slop that will affect the perception of potential "right
| things" later. My domain can be particularly grudgeful in
| this regard.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| 1) If there is uncertainty, that seems to be correct,
| yes. (If there is no uncertainty, then the question and
| the essay become moot: You already know what to do.
| Things take as long as they must. Worst case, you are
| wrong.)
|
| 2) I read that part twice and could not figure out what
| it is you are trying to say.
| sifar wrote:
| Do you ? It takes a some introspection. People can be in
| denial despite the feedback from reality.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| > Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we
| are also heading in the right direction.
|
| A proper capitalist system will tend toward the right direction
| as directed by the market yea? All of this neuroticism about AI
| doesn't matter.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yes, the true market; shareholders.
| andai wrote:
| > If we're far enough off course, increasing speed becomes
| counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we
| want to be.
|
| This reminded me of the idea that civilization is already a
| misaligned superintelligence, and that technology (incl. AI)
| just moves it faster in the wrong direction.
|
| That's basically the problem of supermorality. If you're an
| actually benevolent AI, do you do what civilization tells you?
| Or do you do what is good? What happens if you disagree?
| abustamam wrote:
| I think it depends on what is good, and who it's good for.
|
| Thus far, AI has been good... For venture capitalists. Jury's
| out if it's good for humanity and civilization at large.
| There have been a lot of benevolent usages of AI thus far,
| but also a lot of bad.
|
| As for those who disagree with the "benevolent AI," I think
| they just get sent to the gallows (either metaphorically or
| literally)
| _doctor_love wrote:
| _> velocity is a vector_
|
| Exactly this. Velocity is a vector. It has magnitude (aka
| speed) and direction.
|
| Our industry has chased magnitude over all else for so long.
| Now we can put nitro in everyone's car and we get to where we
| wish to go very fast. Suddenly bad direction-setting is getting
| feedback where there used to be friction and natural time to
| steer.
|
| My greatest hope is that a ton of bad leaders and middle
| managers end up finally getting exposed due to the advent of
| AI. (Will I be disappointed? Almost certainly yes.)
| nprateem wrote:
| The biggest problem is the fact they DON'T clarify their stupid
| assumptions.
|
| The number of times I've seen them get the wrong end of the
| stick in their COT is ridiculous.
|
| Even when I tell them to only implement after my explicit
| approval they ignore this after 2 or 3 followups and then it's
| back to them going down blind alleys.
| jsisto wrote:
| great article. reminds me of the saying "9 women can't make a
| baby in a month"
| felubra wrote:
| "So welcome to the machine"
|
| I'm reading Against The Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, and now
| reading this blog piece is hard not to make connections with the
| points of the book: the usage of the tree as a counter-argument
| for the machine's automation credo exposed in the blog post very
| much aligns with I've read so far.
| wazHFsRy wrote:
| Sounds familiar, for most of my life I have tried to remove all
| "friction" from life - applying that engineering mindset to make
| everything as efficient as possible. Only then I realized that
| life somehow is about that "friction".
| tablet wrote:
| Indeed. Without friction you can't steer.
| ghywertelling wrote:
| All of our current systems are currently designed keeping in
| mind the restrictions of costs and human working speed. What if
| we remove those friction using software, The remaning friction
| will be all due to physical reality. Then humanity's focus will
| shift in removing friction in physical domain. Currently it
| takes some time for a support person to triage a bug request,
| what if that flow takes seconds now.
|
| Think about the analogy of transaction speed of money transfer
| vs actual delivery of good. With AI, we would make all digital
| tasks instantaneous, but the physical world will hum along at
| its own speed unless we speed it up with dark factories and
| what not.
| jspaetzel wrote:
| Was hoping this wasn't ai related, disappointed
| svessi wrote:
| I'm also searching for non-AI content these days. Have you
| found anything since your comment?
| gz5 wrote:
| >Nobody is going to mass-produce a 50-year-old oak. And nobody is
| going to conjure trust, or quality, or community out of a weekend
| sprint.
|
| absolutely although i wonder how different 'trust' is in the
| culture of tomorrow? will it 'matter' as much, be as cherished,
| as earned over the fullness of time?
|
| i suspect it is a pendulum - and we are back to oak trees at some
| point - but which way is the pendulum swinging right now?
| fullstackchris wrote:
| I don't see the problem - everything the author describes has,
| and will always be, true. You can't vibe code anything of value
| in a weekend exactly because anyone _else_ with the same level of
| experience can do the exact same thing in the same weekend! This
| has always been true across all trades and technologies. Once
| again, the domain expertise, wisdom, and simply _time_ of doing
| something always win. LLMs literally don't change that at all.
| bushido wrote:
| I feel for the larger companies and the people who started 10
| years ago, though.
|
| They have spent the last decade building processes and guardrails
| for getting consistent average performance from people. But now,
| some talented people who worked at those companies are building
| their own new companies without the overhead and moving much,
| much more quickly.
|
| I think what we assume is "vibe slop at inference speed" is not
| as simple as people make it out to be. From a perspective, I
| think generally it might be people trying to save jobs.
|
| I'm seeing more slop come out of larger, older companies than the
| new ones (with experienced operators).
|
| And the speed is somewhat scary. For smaller team it doesn't take
| as much effort to build deep, beautiful product anymore.
|
| The bottleneck was never the ability for a engineer to code. It
| was the 16 layers between the customer and the programmer which
| has vanished in smaller companies and is forcing larger ones to
| produce slop.
| locusofself wrote:
| I love this, and it applies to a lot more than software and trees
| :)
| andwaal wrote:
| I think it's hard to argue with the idea that we should slow down
| and think more, and that AI is pushing us to do the opposite. But
| time is limited, it's very limited. And at least in a
| professional setting, to spend time on the correct things is key.
|
| What AI allow us is to do those things we would not have been
| able to prioritize before. To "write" those extra tests, add that
| minor feature or to solve that decade old bug. Things that we
| would never been able to prioritize are we noe able to do. It's
| not perfect, it's sometimes sloppy, but at least its getting shit
| done. It does not matter if you solve 10% of your problem perfect
| if you never have time for the remaining 90.
|
| I do miss the coding, _a lot_, but productivity is a drug and I
| will take it.
| w10-1 wrote:
| What's faster now are the time-dependent factors of production -
| product development, go-to market, etc.
|
| What's slower now are threats to production - even minor
| regulations take years or decades, and often appear only when
| workarounds have surfaced.
|
| So what changed in the last 40+ years are the many tools for
| businesses to shape the conditions of their business -the
| downstream market, upstream suppliers, and regulatory
| support/constraints. This is extremely patient work over
| generations of players, sometimes by individuals, but usually by
| coalitions of mutual corporate self-interest, where even the
| largest players couldn't refuse to participate.
|
| It's evolution.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| evolution towards a dystopia, perhaps. No regulations means no
| worker protections, which means society goes into its next
| depression.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I've been hearing similar things from a lot of different
| directions. The underlying issue about "you cannot replace time"
| is one that is good to internalize early. A number of people I
| know who "missed" their kids growing up because they were working
| hard to make lots of money. You can't go buy "time with my kids
| when they were growing up."
|
| Agentic coding very much feels like a "video game" in the sense
| of you pull the lever and open the loot box and sometimes it's an
| epic +10 agility sword and sometimes its just grey vendor trash.
| Whether or not it generates "good" or even "usable" code fades to
| the background as the thrill of "I just asked for a UI to
| orchestrate micro services and BLAMMO there it was!" moves to the
| fore.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I think the signals that
| we use to determine whether we're doing the right things are
| different with the new AI enhanced toolsets.
|
| Refactoring decent sized components are an order of magnitude
| easier than it was, but the more important signal is still, why
| are you refactoring? What changed in your world or your world-
| view that caused this?
|
| Good things still take time, and you can't slop-AI code your way
| to a great system. You still need domain expertise (as the
| EXCELLENT short story from the other day explained, Warranty Void
| if Regenerated (https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-
| regenerated) ). The decrease in friction does definitely allow
| for more slop, but it also allows for more excellence. It just
| doesn't _guarantee_ excellence.
| whateveracct wrote:
| lots of things take days, not hours. And idt AI changes that
| much. It does let you (or - let's be real - your middle
| management) try to make it happen with hours tho :P
| bytefish wrote:
| As for the tree analogy and open source.
|
| Yes, you cannot build years of community and trust in a weekend.
| But sometimes it's totally sufficient to plant a seed, give it
| some small amounts of water and leave it on its own to grow. Go
| ask my father having to deal with a huge maple tree, that I've
| planted 30 years ago and never cared for it.
|
| Open Source projects sometimes work like this. I've created a
| .NET library for Firebase Messaging in a weekend a few years
| ago... and it grew on its own with PRs flowing in. So if your
| weekend project generates enough interest and continues to grow a
| community without you, what's the bad thing here? I don't get it.
|
| Sometimes a tree dies and an Open Source project wasn't able to
| make it.
|
| That said, I've just finished rewriting four libraries to fix
| long standing issues, that I haven't been able to fix for the
| past 10 years.
|
| It's been great to use Gemini as a sparring partner to fix the
| API surface of these libraries, that had been problematic for the
| past 10 years. I was so quick to validate and invalidate ideas.
|
| Once being one of the biggest LLM haters I have to say, that I
| immensely enjoy it right now.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You didn't so much "leave it on its own" as much as outsource
| the duty to nature. Turns out nature spent eras optimizing for
| tending to trees.
|
| Can't really say the same for vibecoding. You still need to do
| a lot of work that's ultiamtely putting lipstick on a pig.
| Maybe someone talented can make it pretty, but it has a quality
| ceiling, and most won't get anywhere close to that; people will
| just see a pig with lipstick on it.
| imilev wrote:
| Awesome article, I feel a lot of people have also forgotten that
| good projects take iteration not 100 new features. To get few
| features to an excelent state it requires multilpe iterations at
| multiple stages. 1) The developer who does a task validates that
| their thinking was the correct one, they see how they changes
| impact the system, is it scalable? Does it need to be scalable?
| While you are working and thinking on it you get more and more
| context which simply wasn't there at the begining. 2) A feature
| done once (even after my perfect ClaudeCode plan) is not done
| forever, people will want to make it better/faster/smoother/etc.
| But instead of taking the time to analyze and perfect it we go
| onto the next feature, and if we have to iterate on the current
| one, we don't iterate we redo...
|
| Really like the article I think it is awesome, and I strongly
| believe AI for coding will stay, but I also beleive that we need
| to still have a strong understanding of why we are building
| things and what they look like.
| scuff3d wrote:
| We're gonna have to learn some lessons from other engineering
| fields in this regard. Electrical, civil, mechanical,
| aerospace... They've all had to put processes in place to
| intentionally slow things down for a long time. I could throw a
| circuit board layout together 1000x faster then a team of
| engineers could have 50 years ago, but that industry has
| developed a culture of rigorous review processes to ensure
| quality, which means I couldn't actually move nearly as fast as
| possible.
|
| Undoubtedly a lot of that comes down to production cost and
| safety. A plane is far more likely to kill people and it costs a
| shitload more to produce then an app (though plenty of software
| is mission critical). But now in software we can move quick
| enough up front that if we don't start applying some discipline
| it's going to bite us in the ass in the long run.
| keiferski wrote:
| One of my favorite ideas from Nietzsche [1] is that civilizations
| take millennia to "digest" or integrate concepts. It seems a
| little obvious, maybe, until you look at the modern world and
| realize the baseline assumption is something like, "every problem
| is just a question of resources."
|
| An example being the common attitude that [advanced tech] is just
| a math problem to be solved, and not a process that needs to play
| itself out in the real world, interacting with it and learning,
| then integrating those lessons over time.
|
| Another way to put this is: experience is undervalued, and
| knowledge is overvalued. Probably because experience isn't
| fungible and therefore cannot be quantified as easily by market
| systems.
|
| 1. Probably not his original idea, and now that I think about it
| this is kind of more Hegelian. I'm not familiar enough with Hegel
| to reference him though.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I have no problem with people treating advanced tech like a
| math problem. I have a _big goddamned problem_ with the tech
| world seeing things like creativity, expression, exploration,
| imagination, experience, companionship, empathy, sex, fun,
| beauty, inspiration, and all of that human-y sort of stuff as a
| goddamned math problem to be solved. It's just so sad and most
| people resent it being shoved down their throats by tech
| companies abusing their societal leverage.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| > I have a big goddamned problem with the tech world seeing
| things like creativity, expression, exploration, imagination,
| experience, companionship, empathy, sex, fun, beauty,
| inspiration, and all of that human-y sort of stuff as a
| goddamned math problem to be solved.
|
| Resource to be exploited. That's worse of course.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Two sides of the same tech industry coin: engineering and
| commerce. The commerce side _always_ sets the agenda, and
| developing new avenues for resource (or "resource")
| exploitation is often the goal. Anyone working on LLM or
| diffusion model products or projects pretending they're
| solving technical problems in a vacuum without contributing
| to that are, frankly, lying to themselves.
| loandbehold wrote:
| Knowledge is a distilled experience.
| iafiaf wrote:
| shouldnt it be the other way around?
| gzread wrote:
| No. Many great scientists worked for decades to discover
| atoms, and they were controversial at the time. Now you
| read about them in primary school books.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| We value human ingenuity and effort. If there was a button
| "create an Oscar-worty movie" anyone could press it would make a
| paradox. The trick is that this won't render film industry
| useless, since we watch movies only when we believe they're worth
| our time, which is not true for zero-effort content.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Isn't it only of late that the Oscars panel have to watch the
| films?
| fuzzy_biscuit wrote:
| Some of the items listed in the "takes time" list say the
| beginning are not great examples. They are better emblems of
| artificial scarcity, especially Hermes bags.
| bambax wrote:
| > _Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago
| planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land,
| you have something that no amount of money or effort can
| replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old
| gardens, houses sheltered by decades of canopy: if you want to
| start fresh on an empty plot, you will not be able to get that._
|
| This is a bad start. Louis XIV at Versailles and Marly famously
| made while forests appear or disappear overnight, to the utter
| dismay of Saint-Simon, the memorialist, who thought this was an
| unacceptable waste of money and energy.
|
| And this was before the industrial revolution. Today I'm sure
| many more miracles happen every day.
| aantix wrote:
| Everyone is obsessed with speed.
|
| But no one wants to go out of their house.
|
| Social connections. Trust. Facetime. All matter more than ever.
|
| Want a moatable software business? Know your customers on a
| personal level. Have a personal relationship. Know the people
| that sign the contracts, know their kids names, where they
| vacationed last winter, their favorite local restaurant.
|
| Get out of the house.
| ICodeSometimes wrote:
| It's worth noting that just because something takes time doesn't
| mean it's automatically worth doing.
|
| Vibe slop-ing at supersonic speeds and waiting years to grow
| aren't the only options, there's something in between where you
| have enough signal to keep going and enough speed to not waste
| years on the wrong thing.
|
| I feel that today's VCs have completely disregarded the middle
| and are focused on getting as big as possible as fast as possible
| without regard to the effect it's having on the ecosystem.
| mocamoca wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 what Earandil purpose is?
| mayukh wrote:
| Go slow to go fast.
| Lerc wrote:
| Is this not an observation bias?
|
| Consider the idea of trying to determine how quickly an unknown
| number of timers will go ping, It could be 10,000 timers that go
| ping when finished or 1,000,000 timers that go ping when
| finished. I don't know when they are going to go ping, just that
| they all the timers are running at different speeds spread over
| some distribution.
|
| After one time period, 5,000 pings have been detected. Should you
| conclude that timers are pinging fairly quickly?
|
| You cannot tell the overall duration of timers if you don't know
| the number of timers there are out there. Your only data that the
| timer exists is the ping, consequently you cannot tell if a small
| population is at high speed or a large population is at a
| moderate speed. In both cases the data you receive are the
| fastest of the population.
|
| In other words we haven't yet seen what the 10 year project made
| using these tools is like (or even if it exists/will exist),
| because they haven't been around for 10 years.
| erelong wrote:
| yes, we want to avoid counterproductive things that are done too
| quickly
|
| no we don't want to miss genuine ways to speed things up to
| improve our productivity so we can do other or more things
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I find myself sympathetic to the author's PoV, but I am
| incorporating LLMs into my workflow, with a resultant jaw-
| dropping (to me) increase in velocity.
|
| But I am not just dispatching to agents. I work interactively
| with a chat interface, and sometimes, I will just bin a whole
| hour's worth of back-and-forth, because we're not getting
| anywhere (in fact, I did exactly that, about 30 minutes ago).
|
| But that hour is peanuts, compared to the ten hours that I would
| have spent, trying to figure it out on my own. With an LLM (and
| git), I can "run something up the flagpole, and see who salutes."
| I can afford to experiment with very large code bases, and toss
| out a whole bunch of stuff, if need be.
|
| That said, I know damn well, that quite a few folks here, would
| sneer at my methodology, as "awkward, stodgy, and slow."
| Nevertheless, I am pretty chuffed with the results. Yeah, it's
| slower than some folks would do it, but the Quality is really
| high, and I'm happy with the results.
|
| My favorite thing to do, is (for example) toss all 5 of my SDK
| files into the LLM, paste in the JSON server interaction,
| describe the bug, and ask it to help me figure it out.
|
| Nine times out of ten, it finds the bug quickly. The real bug. I
| am not always happy with the proposed solutions, but finding the
| root cause is always the time-consuming part.
| FrankRay78 wrote:
| A perfectly good methodology with the right guardrails in place
| imho.
| ramshanker wrote:
| Same approach as mine. :)
|
| One more thing I try is give same prompt once in a while to
| ChatGPT/Gemini/Grok. Than take the 2 out of 3 ideas forward.
|
| All leading AI seems to have some blind spot. Like some kind of
| intricsic character. 1 will completely overlook some particular
| bug while finding other excellent bugs and edge cases.
|
| Getting the code through all 3 before commiting has shown
| excellent results to me.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Hope you'll be able to afford that workflow once the money
| dries up and costs skyrocket.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > the Quality is really high, and I'm happy with the results.
|
| >toss all 5 of my SDK files into the LLM, paste in the JSON
| server interaction, describe the bug, and ask it to help me
| figure it out.
|
| I wonder if this "quality" code wouldn't have that many bugs to
| dive into if it was more carefully considered and produced up
| front?
|
| This harkens back to a study in 2024 were senior devs were
| actually less productive with LLMS but they _felt_ more
| productive, even after being told they were less productive.
| girvo wrote:
| > were senior devs were actually less productive with LLMS
| but they felt more productive
|
| I'm certain this is true for me. The only thing LLMs _do_ get
| me is the ability to make forward progress on tasks while I
| 'm in meetings, which is a net positive at least.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm sure you're right.
|
| I'm actually a terrible programmer. This is just how I
| compensate.
|
| Of course, you are more than welcome to visit my portfolio
| (easily found from my HN profile), and make fun of it.
| sd9 wrote:
| I do the same. Code is cheap - try it, see if it works, if it
| doesn't completely throw it away. LLMs and agents get into doom
| loops and keep making the situation worse if it's not going
| well from the outset. Usually if you're engaged you can notice
| this happening and change tack.
| Yokohiii wrote:
| I think that is the exact friction with the original post
| title.
|
| For an experienced coder, writing code is never the problem.
| Some tasks are more raw writing effort then others, sure. The
| problem is understanding the problem, the task, the constraints
| and how to express them correctly, in a way that suits your
| environment (i.e. company, ecosystem, platform).
|
| My brain is the actual problem, how fast I can digest
| information and make sense of it. For me, this is the process
| that always consumes the most time.
|
| Last week I've wasted a full day, just because I didn't had a
| decent overview of what I was working on. It was heavily LLM
| chatbot assisted, at no point in time the LLM nudged me into
| the right direction, mainly because I was confidently asking
| the wrong questions.
|
| No AI will help you if you insist being dumb, but it will
| accelerate you in that regard. That at least works for me.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Some things take time
|
| And time takes money
|
| Enough money to pay one's bills while one tends the growing tree
|
| And if we have a society that ensures everyone is given the
| dignity of time
|
| We also get a society that reaps what some create with that time
|
| But if we have a society that only rewards pushing money back up
| the hierarchy
|
| Then we all lose our time and our nest eggs to those who have the
| most.
| Animats wrote:
| "Nobody is going to mass-produce a 50-year-old oak."
|
| Mass production of engineered structural lumber.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCYn3xQ0yS8
| thearrow wrote:
| A 50-year-old oak is not just lumber. The fact that you think
| these are equivalent is a hilarious, classic HN take.
| nchmy wrote:
| I've been slowly working on something for a decade, and I'm
| always comforted by this poem by Mary Oliver
|
| Things take the time they take.
|
| Don't worry.
|
| How many roads did St. Augustine follow
|
| before he became St. Augustine?
| triwats wrote:
| Sometimes to move fast - we have to go slow.
|
| That's a mantra I learned when getting into technology.
|
| Asking questions about how things work, why it is a certain way,
| or why a shortcut was made often give you far better insights
| than anything else.
|
| Slowing down and understandng is great. With AI this is even
| easier. But choose wisely, brains get full.
| socketcluster wrote:
| My current project is the culmination 15 years of software
| development.
|
| I started out building a full stack framework like Meteor
| framework (though I started before Meteor framework was created
| in 2012 and long before Next.js).
|
| Then I ported it to to Node.js because I saw an advantage to
| having the same language on the frontend and backend.
|
| Then I noticed that developers like to mix and match different
| libraries/modules and this was a necessity. The whole idea of a
| cohesive full stack framework didn't make sense for most
| software. So I extracted the most essential part of it that
| people liked and this became SocketCluster. It got a fair amount
| of traction in the early days.
|
| At the time, some people might have thought SocketCluster was
| trying to be a more scalable copycat of Socket.io but actually I
| had been working on it for several years by that point. I just
| made the API similar when I extracted it for better compatibility
| with Socket.io but it had some additional features.
|
| A few years ago, I ended up building a serverless low-code/no-
| code CRUD platform which removes the need for a custom backend
| and it can be used with LLMs directly (you can give them the API
| key to access the control panel). It can define the whole data
| schema for you. I've built some complex apps with it to fully
| prove the concept with advanced search functionality (including
| indexing with a million records).
|
| I've made some technical decisions which will look insane to most
| developers but are crucial and based on 15 years of experience,
| carefully evaluating tradeoffs and actual testing with complex
| applications. For example my platform only has 3 data types.
| String, Number and Boolean. The string type supports some
| additional constraints to allow it to be used to store any kind
| of data like lists, binary files (as base64)... Having just 3
| types greatly simplifies spam prevention and schema validation.
| Makes it much easier for the user (or LLM) to reason about and
| produce a working, stable, bug-free solution.
|
| That said I've been struggling to sell it because there are some
| popular well funded solutions on the market which look
| superficially similar or better. Of course they can't handle all
| the scenarios, they're more complex, less secure, don't scale,
| require far more LLM tokens, lead to constant regressions when
| used with AI. It's just impossible to communicate those benefits
| to people because they will value a one-shotted pretty UI over
| all these other aspects.
|
| You can check out https://saasufy.com/ if interested.
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| You've been working on this for 15 years and you only have 4
| stars on github?
| socketcluster wrote:
| I built it up in parts and brought the parts together over
| time. SocketCluster has over 6k stars on GitHub.
| https://github.com/socketCluster/socketcluster
|
| Saasufy itself isn't open source. I'm planning to sell
| licenses of the code (a limited number of them to make it
| scarce). SocketCluster is a core component of Saasufy. The
| goal did evolve slightly; originally, it was to make it
| easier to build full stack applications. Now it actually lets
| you build entire full stack apps without code. That bigger
| goal has been achieved. I have some videos linked from the
| Docs page showing how it works.
|
| But yes, I'm a bit paranoid about my situation. I do feel
| like my work is suppressed by algorithms. Things feel very
| different for me now than they did before in terms of finding
| users. It's really hard to find people to try my work.
| Difficult even to convince them to watch a 10 minute video.
| Though I guess many people are in the same boat right?
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| That makes more sense but I don't see what pub/sub has to
| do with a no-code full-stack framework. Other than that
| some of them might want a chat widget?
| socketcluster wrote:
| It's real-time by default. Done in a cheap (and
| efficient) way. The views update automatically when
| relevant data changes, no possibility of overriding
| conflicts when editing concurrently. Changes are only
| distributed to users/clients who are looking at the
| affected data.
|
| It's not just for chat. Anytime people update data
| collaboratively, for any data-driven software, you run
| into issues of people overwriting each other's changes...
| Sadly users got really used to poor experiences like
| having to 'refresh the page', or 'locking down resources'
| during edits to avoid concurrent editing altogether.
|
| It's been kind of disturbing for me to realize how few
| people care about data integrity in collaborative
| scenarios. It's a kind of hidden issue which can cause
| major problems but users tend to tolerate. I've had this
| experience first-hand with colleagues using various other
| platforms where someone else had the same resource open
| for a while in the browser, we updated different fields
| and my field was overwritten with its old value but we
| didn't realise for some time until it caused a bug with
| one of the workflows. Then it was like "I'm sure I
| updated that value."
|
| SC's pub/sub channels are part of the secret sauce to
| make this work. SocketCluster makes some unique tradeoffs
| with its pub/sub mechanism; the channels are extremely
| cheap to create and are cleaned up automatically (and
| cheaply)... And at any scale with sharding. This was an
| intentional design decision which is different from
| message queues like Kafka and RabbitMQ which prioritise
| throughput and are typically used in the backend as
| opposed to being end-to-end.
| vincentabolarin wrote:
| Excellent article!
|
| Some things truly just take time.
|
| You may speed them up when you start, but eventually, you will
| likely get to pay back the time. That is not necessarily a bad
| thing; it is just what it is.
|
| AI makes us move faster, but if one is not careful, they may only
| be moving faster in the wrong direction, and they will eventually
| spend time moving back.
| mememememememo wrote:
| I love this piece and read to the end. Currently working on an
| idea. Started with Claude and it made a mess. Now enjoying doing
| it by hand. It just feels easier! AI is assisting on blockers now
| noy writing code.
|
| Anyway 2 areas I slightly disagree on.
|
| Open source abandonware is fine. Sometimes people give up because
| they realize it is not a good idea. Or they get busy or sick.
|
| And 10 years at a startup is great but that relies on it being a
| good startup. Entropy at companies means I have never made it to
| 10yrs even though I wanted to.
| arcadianalpaca wrote:
| The part about open source projects needing years of sustained
| work rings true for sure, but it kind of skips over why a lot
| (most?) projects die. Sometimes the author gets bored, sure, but
| maintaining something used by strangers is a completely different
| job than building something for yourself, and nobody warns you
| about that transition.
| sltr wrote:
| "The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many
| women are assigned." -- Fred Brooks on project management
| rednafi wrote:
| Mandatory read by Peter Norvig - even more relevant now
|
| https://norvig.com/21-days.html
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Reminds me of old wood - companies will dive into water to
| recover for various uses such as musical instruments
|
| It's valued because it's more dense. It grew slowly. Now wood
| grows fast and it's less dense.
|
| Like this article, that's fine for many things - you just need
| wood - but not always.
| analog8374 wrote:
| It takes ten years to track down a really strange good idea, from
| first whiff to laying your hands on it. There's no getting around
| that. And it is neither profitable nor efficient.
| XCSme wrote:
| I've been building my project[0] for 14+ years, but I'm still
| looking forward to the day I won't have to worry about next
| month's rent. Customers are happy though. Last week I got
| messages from two customers that purchased more than 7 years ago,
| because they wanted to install/use the product again. It was fun
| to revisit our email conversations and to see how much the
| product has evolved since. What's funny is that the feeling is
| the same after 1, 5 or 15 years. There's always stuff to optimize
| and improve. Unless it's a standalone experience (e.g. game or a
| movie), most software and tools do need constant updates and
| improvents to keep up-to-date with the current world.
|
| What's funny, is that I had many other projects attempted over
| the years, but many rise and die quickly, yet the one that lasted
| the longest is also the one that is likely to last longest from
| now.
|
| [0]: https://uxwizz.com
| waynerisner wrote:
| It's a tool, and now part of the culture--so people are naturally
| using it. What it seems to reveal is less about the tool and more
| about us. The fragmentation was already there.
|
| Maybe the response is to slow down a bit--revisit what matters,
| and use it with some sense of proportion and coherence.
| andai wrote:
| >Friction is good
|
| This has been on my mind for a long time.
|
| I used to be all about frictionlessness. Speed! Convenience! Make
| it smoother!
|
| Then I found... actually, paper based systems work way better for
| me. Digital systems just turn into big piles of bloat. It's too
| easy to add stuff. So they grow until they collapse under their
| own weight.
|
| (Take a look at your contacts list. How many should still be in
| there? How many did you add for a one time thing and then keep
| forever? Should there be a temporary folder? Shouldn't it be the
| default? That's how it works in nature!)
|
| Ended up using paper as a temporary improvisation, then realized
| it solved all the problems I had with digital systems.
|
| Friction is good.
|
| With communication, it used to cost money to communicate. Now
| it's free, and we now have a sea of noise where most messages are
| "adding negative value", because they steal your time and energy.
|
| Same with the app stores. Do any search and you find an ocean of
| slop! The gems drown in the sea of slop.
|
| Friction is good.
| andai wrote:
| > we seemingly have this desire to ship faster than ever
|
| The desire to make life faster instead of better was identified
| as a neurosis of civilization in the 19th century.
| skybrian wrote:
| If you could grow an oak tree in a week, that would transform the
| timber industry. It would seem pretty silly to wait two decades
| for it.
| snthpy wrote:
| The point about all the extra efficiency just making us more
| stressed and busy resonates deeply with me. It also stood out to
| me in the recent episode of the No Priors podcast with Andrej
| Karpathy. It's that feeling of falling behind is you're not using
| all available compute.
|
| Btw the earendil.com website is gorgeous.
| Chaosvex wrote:
| > Btw the earendil.com website is gorgeous.
|
| It really is but it's come at the cost of actually being
| useful. It has a vague 'about' modal and that's your lot, which
| is confusing since they're encouraging people to join. I'm just
| not sure anybody's going to know what.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > It has a vague 'about' modal and that's your lot, which is
| confusing since they're encouraging people to join.
|
| It's a surprisingly good filter and gets curious people to
| send mail in :)
| bitwize wrote:
| I'm more concerned about the "falling behind" we're doing
| chewing up compute generating, and then running, LLM slop. That
| is a lot of energy used and heat generated for a less-than-
| optimal payoff.
| rando77 wrote:
| It's important to have good feedback at each stage of iteration
| ngburke wrote:
| Went indie after a long run at a big company and this hits. The
| hardest thing wasn't the work, it was getting comfortable with
| the silence between shipping and seeing any signal. Still working
| on it tbh.
| contingencies wrote:
| So who else is gardening? Hands up! Join hngardeners email list.
| https://gaggle.email/join/hn-gardeners@gaggle.email
| samiv wrote:
| Now that everyones running faster than ever and trying to outrun
| the competition by slapping more code on than they do you can
| only brace for the results.
|
| I expect these tools will quickly let people to ramp up several
| orders of magnitude of more complexity and lines of code to any
| software project.
|
| The your 100kloc JS electron app will become a 10m loc JS
| electron app running on a 500m loc browser runtime.
|
| Repeat this across the stack for every software component and
| application and library. If you think things are bloated now just
| wait a few years and your notepad will be a 1m line behemoth with
| runtime performance of a glacier.
| deadbabe wrote:
| But how do you make the case for thoughtful less bloated
| software to people who just value writing less code themselves,
| even if the output produces more lines of code? Seems to me
| like people don't care about LOC, they care about how much
| effort they have to spend writing the lines.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| The website of earendil definitely still takes time, as it is
| right now only a gray area with white on gray labels in the
| corners, not displaying anything in the content area. The labels
| don't work like links either. The background image doesn't load,
| until one clicks some subitem of the "about" label and then
| "closes" the content that is shown. The theme toggle (?) at the
| bottom right does nothing, website stays gray, no content shown.
|
| This website does not resonate with the message I got earlier
| from the article. It does not give the impression of someone
| taking appropriate time to make it.
| presentation wrote:
| I for one am not shedding tears about being able to waste less
| time with SOC 2 drudgery that doesn't even make organizations
| secure.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I see that at play in economics and geopolitics. While the West
| wants results in weeks, months or, anyway, in less than one term,
| China being inspired by Confucius and Sun Tzu is calmly waiting
| and slowly building.
| pmavrodiev wrote:
| What a beautifully expressed thought:
|
| "I keep coming back to the trees. I've been maintaining Open
| Source projects for close to two decades now. The last startup I
| worked on, I spent 10 years at. That's not because I'm
| particularly disciplined or virtuous. It's because I or someone
| else, planted something, and then I kept showing up, and
| eventually the thing had roots that went deeper than my
| enthusiasm on any given day. That's what time does! It turns some
| idea or plan into a commitment and a commitment into something
| that can shelter and grow other people."
|
| Good luck _creating_ this by trying to predict the next best word
| in the sentence.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| users also dont have time to find and report bugs until the next
| release and also get even more desensitized to things being
| broken so will report less likely, or just clone and fix
| something only for themselves because issues and prs are more
| work. contributions are also harder because main is already
| dramatically different by the time your features are ready. ai
| also does not care for mergeabilty of changes. as a user i start
| to git clone everything not just because i can fix bugs myself
| but also because i dont get projects update schedule forced on.
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