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Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

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Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#141
> Why write code if the LLM can

I mean, I'll do the stuff I'm confident I can do, because I already can.

I'll let the AI do the stuff where I'm confident it can't fuck shit up.

I tried Xcode's built-in ChatGPT integration and Claude for some slightly-above-basic stuff that I already knew how to do, and they suggested some horribly inefficient ways of doing things and outdated (last year) APIs.

On the other hand, what I presume is Xcode's local model is nice for a sort of parameterized copy/paste or find/replace though: Slightly different versions of what I've already written, to reduce effort on bothersome boilerplate that can't be eliminated.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazing. This is the Internet moment of AI. I am a big proponent of AI. To me, this experiment mostly shows how not to use AI.

Have you tried the thought experiment though? I agree this way seems "wrong", but try putting on your engineering hat and ask what would you change to make it right? I think that is a very interesting thread to tug on.

Running inference for every interaction seems a bit wasteful IMO, especially with a chance for things to go wrong. I’m not smart enough to come up with a way on how to optimize a repetitive operation though.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#143

It's orders of magnitude cheaper to serve requests with conventional methods than directly with LLM. My back-of-envelope calculation says, optimistically , it takes more than 100 GFLOPs to generate 10 tokens using a 7 billion parameter LLM. There are better ways to use electricity.

Sure, but we can start with an LLM to build V1 (or at least a demo) faster for certain problem domains. Then apply traditional coding techniques as an efficiency optimization later after establishing product-market fit.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#145

If you added a few more tools that let the LLM modify code files that would directly serve requests, that would significantly speed up future responses and also ensure consistency. Code would act like memory. A direct HTTP request to the LLM is like a cache miss. You could still have the feedback mechanism allowing a bypass that causes an update to the code. Perhaps code just becomes a store of consistency for LLMs o…

You should try making this.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#146
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to convince the investors. The way the industry is headed is not necessarily related to what is most optimal. That might be the future whether we like it or not. Losing billions seems to be the trend.

Eventually the utility will be correctly priced. It's just a matter of time.

We are all dead in a matter of time.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#147
post #135

Like a lot of people in this thread I prototyped something similar. One experiment just connected GPT to a socket and gave it some bindings to SQLite. With a system prompt like “you’re an http server for a twitter clone called Gwitter.” you can interact directly with the LLM from a browser. Of course it was painfully slow, quickly went off the rails, and revealed that LLM’s are bad at business logic. But something li…

"The Mother of All Demos" was a showcase of an early generation of technology that existed and had a practical purpose. There was never a question if and how the technology would improve. It was only a matter of time and solid engineering.

On the other hand, improvements to "AI" of similar scales are very much uncertain. We have seen moderate improvements from brute force alone, i.e. by throwing more data and compute at the problem, but this strategy has reached diminishing returns, and we have been at a plateau for about a year now. We've seen improvements by applying better engineering (MCP, "agents", "skills", etc.), but have otherwise seen the same tech demos in search of a problem, with a bit more polish at every iteration.

There's no doubt that statistical models are a very useful technology with many applications, some of which we haven't discovered yet. But given the technology we have today, the claim that something like it could be used to generate interactive video which could be used instead of traditional software is absurd. This is not a matter of gradual iterations to get there—it would require foundational breakthroughs to work even remotely reliably, which is as uncertain as LLMs were 10 years ago.

In any case, whatever sama and his ilk have to say about this topic is hardly relevant. These people would say anything to keep the hype-driven valuation pump going.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#148
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can you set some timers for my sport session, can you plan a pure body weight session ? Yes, that's perfect. Wait, actually, remove the jumping jacks." Better yet, why exercise -which is so repetitive- if we can create a machine that just does it for you, including the dopamine triggering, why play an arcade video game where we can create a machine that fires the neuron needed to produce the exact same level of a ex…

Maybe I should have rephrased everything with : " Make me happy" "Make me happy" "Make me happy" "Make me happy"

That's an infinite loop.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#149
post #30

The question posed sounds like "why should we have deterministic behavior if we can have non-deterministic behavior instead?" Am I wrong to think that the answer is obvious? I mean, who wants web apps to behave differently every time you interact with them?

> who wants web apps to behave differently every time you interact with them? Technically everyone, we stopped using static pages a while ago. Imagine pages that can now show you e.g. infinitely customizable UI; or, more likely, extremely personalized ads.

> infinitely customizable UI; or, more likely, extremely personalized ads

Yeah, NO.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI wouldn't be intelligent though if it was deterministic. It would just be information retrieval

It already is "just" information retrieval, just with stochastic threads refining the geometry of the information.

Haha u mean it isn't AGI? /s
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