> It works.
CEO stops reading, signs a contract, and fires all developers.
> It's just catastrophically slow, absurdly expensive, and has the memory of a goldfish.
Reality sinks in two months later.
Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
271–280 of 332 posts
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#272This reminds me of the recent Claude Imagine, which passed quietly through most people's radars, but let you create web interfaces of any kind on the fly. There was no JS code generated. Instead, any time the user clicked a button, the AI would manually update the page accordingly. It was also slow and terrible, but a fun idea.
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of us actually want to get somewhere to do an activity to then have known we did it for the rest of our lives as if to extract some intangible pleasure from its memory. Why don't we just hallucinate that we did it?
This leads to us asking the deepest question of all: What is the point of our existence. Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand) This can be answered though, albeit imperfectly. On a more reductionist level, we are the cosmos experiencing itself. Now there are many ways to ap…
>Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand)
When you suddenly realize walking down the street that the very high fentanyl zombie is having a better day than you are.
Yeah, you can push the button in your brain that says "You won the game." However, all those buttons were there so you would self-replicate energy efficient compute. Your brain runs on 10 watts after all. It's going to take a while for AI to get there, especially without the capability for efficient self-repair.
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#274Another version of this question: why have high level languages if AI writes the code abd tests it?
Because high level languages are where the libraries that do all of the heavy lifting exist. Libraries provide a suite of tools for absstracting away all of the complexities of creating a 'simple' web app. I think a lot of newer devs dont realise how many shoulders of giants they are standing on, and all the complexities involved in performing a simpl fetch requeust. Sure an LLM could write it's own libraries and abs…
Yes, height of the language aside, why add a dependency to leftpad when the LLM can build the code for you every time?
Extrapolate this to ORMs, why use the ORM when the LLM can build a custom query and map it to objects? And this will probably be more performant. Then extrapolate to the whole web framework? Where should we draw the line?
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of us actually want to get somewhere to do an activity to then have known we did it for the rest of our lives as if to extract some intangible pleasure from its memory. Why don't we just hallucinate that we did it?
This leads to us asking the deepest question of all: What is the point of our existence. Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand) This can be answered though, albeit imperfectly. On a more reductionist level, we are the cosmos experiencing itself. Now there are many ways to ap…
Indeed - stick me in my pod and inject those experience chemicals into me, what's the difference? But also, what would be the point? What's the point anyway?
In one scenario every atom's trajectory was destined from the creation of time and we're just sitting in the passenger seat watching. In another, if we do have free will then we control the "real world" underneath - the quantum and particle realms - as if through a UI. In the pod scenario, we are just blobs experiencing chemical reactions through some kind of translation device - but aren't we the same in the other scenarios too?
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#276Why would you need webapps when you could just talk out loud to your computer ? Why would I need programs with colors, buttons, actual UI ? I am trying to imagine a future where file navigators don't even exist : "I want to see the photos I took while I was in vacations last year. Yes, can you remove that cloud ? Perfect, now send it to XXXX's computer and say something nice." "Can you set some timers for my sport se…
This is what all the people put out of work by AI are going to do.
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Well the need is to arrive where you are going. In order to get to your destination, you need to explain where you want to go. Whatever you call that “imperative language”, in order to actually get the thing you want, you have to explain it. That’s an unavoidable aspect of interacting with anything that responds to commands, computer or not. If the AI misunderstands those instructions and takes you to a slightly di…
this is a weak argument.. i use normal taxis and ask the driver to take me to a place in natural language - a process which is certainly non deterministic.
> a process which is certainly non deterministic
The specific events that follow when asking a taxi driver where to go may not be exactly repeatable, but reality enforces physical determinism that is not explicitly understood by probabilistic token predictors. If you drive into a wall you will obey deterministic laws of momentum. If you drive off a cliff you will obey deterministic laws of gravity. These are certainties, not high probabilities. A physical taxi cannot have a catastrophic instant change in implementation and have its wheels or engine disappear when it stops to pick you up. A human taxi driver cannot instantly swap their physical taxi for a submarine, they cannot swap new york with paris, they cannot pass through buildings… the real world has a physically determined option-space that symbolic token predictors don’t understand yet.
And the reason humans are good at interpreting human intent correctly is not just that we’ve had billions of years of training with direct access to physical reality, but because we all share the same basic structure of inbuilt assumptions and “training history”. When interacting with a machine, so many of those basic unstated shared assumptions are absent, which is why it takes more effort to explicitly articulate what it is exactly that you want.
We’re getting much better at getting machines to infer intent from plain english, but even if we created a machine which could perfectly interpret our intentions, that still doesn’t solve the issue of needing to explain what you want in enough detail to actually get it for most tasks. Moving from point A to point B is a pretty simple task to describe. Many tasks aren’t like that, and the complexity comes as much from explaining what it is you want as it does from the implementation.
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#278The 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?
Every time you need a rarely used functionality it might be better to wait 60s for an LLM with MCP tools to do its work than to update an app. It only makes sense to optimize and maintain app functionalities when they are reused.
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#279You could also ask why use AI when writing the code is trivial?
Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
#280This reminds me of the recent Claude Imagine, which passed quietly through most people's radars, but let you create web interfaces of any kind on the fly. There was no JS code generated. Instead, any time the user clicked a button, the AI would manually update the page accordingly. It was also slow and terrible, but a fun idea.
You may not have been the target user. I found it intriguing to quickly bring a concept to life for dumb users. I think LLMs significantly lower the cost (barriers) for make something quick and dirty. I'm loving Claude code in an LXC sandbox to take my half-thought out ideas and make me something...most of it is throw-away, but it helps me evolve whatever problem is in my head that I'm trying to solve, and that I find valuable.