141–146 of 146 posts
It took you 8 months to burn out from churning SaaS slop? My mind was cooked in 3 weeks trying to six neglected ideas at once
It took you 8 months to burn out from churning SaaS slop? My mind was cooked in 3 weeks trying to six neglected ideas at once
I was pretty tired a month in, but this new way of coding felt so much fun that I was along for the ride. But now it's really starting to weigh me down and I feel like I need something new.
I had this issue before AI too. Staring at code I wrote, wondering what the hell I was thinking...
I'd often start a project or file with a big pseudocode comment block at the top. But I'd rarely keep it! After reading your post, I'm thinking that may have been a mistake...
Very cool project.
I think the reverse direction is more important: taking a massive complex problem/codebase and decomposing it to short pseudocode. Then you could edit the pseudocode and compile it back into the system. That's the way software engineers working on large projects work anyway: you first gather context on the state of the system and read it at a level you can understand. Then you propose a change on the simplified repre…
The results were disgusting: the spec would encode all sorts of irrelevant implementation details, and then the new version would reimplement them faithfully, and be 3x more bloated than the original. The exact opposite of what I was going for!
I didn't put much effort into it, maybe it was solvable with prompting (or more likely, more human effort on the spec phase), but it looks like the LLM has the same problem as the human, it can't know what the intention was, and it can't know what's relevant, what's essential and incidental.
But basically, what I needed wasn't a spec but user stories. (And probably multiple prototype outputs to choose from...)
I should definitely give it another crack though...