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Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

danielvaughn.dev

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Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#31

Post by kennywinker »

r0ze-at-hn wrote: post #29

> There’s no reliable record of human intent. Every engineer I have ever mentored got a lesson on how to write a good commit message that included this. This is exactly that. Further Huzzah from skimming it over seems to be re-inventing documenting your code. Together I can only surmise that the author is new out of school or has simply not yet worked on a team with good coding practices.

Two clicks from the article:

> Welcome to my Github! I'm a web engineer who's been building front-ends since 2009. Most of my work is either closed source or behind paywalls, but here is where I tinker on side projects in my spare time.

No need to dismiss the person - you can just say you don't like the approach

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#32

Post by kennywinker »

quasarj wrote: post #24

I'm confused, it looks like you've just written a new terse language that now costs money to compile?

Afaik there's no language - the pseudocode can be written however you want. And the costing money to compile? If you're prompting an llm you're already doing that, just with prose instead of pseudocode. I'm not sure this approach is a good idea, but it might be - and imo it's worth trying :)

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#33

Post by danielvaughn »

dlandis wrote: post #23

curious if you’ve tried Kiro or spec-driven development? that seems like it would solve at least some of the issues you raised with agent based development, albeit in a different way without the emphasis on pseudo code

yeah in the blog post I should have outlined the things I first tried to solve the problem. I tried a variant of gherkin rules, using them for the behavioral spec for a project. It works reasonably well, but without a direct source map from the rules to the code, you still end up with a very difficult-to-understand codebase.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#34

Post by rpastuszak »

What I find interesting about this + a random bucket of associations because I’ve fallen under the spell of Satan’s Lettuce:

Just a few days ago someone was talking about a machine - human patois.

This (your project) sits somewhere between Lean and BDD cucumber syntax.

At the same time Claude spits out phrases like “a container paying the price of -42px”.

Recently I was listening to a lecture about metaphor in poetry, the misconception that poems are riddles whereas we use metaphors all the time in our language because they convey the meaning more precisely.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#36

Post by avaer »

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 representation, and then holistically update the machine-runnable format ("implementation").

I'd be interested in tools that formalize/automate this process more.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#37

Post by danielvaughn »

r0ze-at-hn wrote: post #29

> There’s no reliable record of human intent. Every engineer I have ever mentored got a lesson on how to write a good commit message that included this. This is exactly that. Further Huzzah from skimming it over seems to be re-inventing documenting your code. Together I can only surmise that the author is new out of school or has simply not yet worked on a team with good coding practices.

A good commit message is not a record of human intent, it's a record of changes in human intent. You can read a change log to see the evolution of a codebase, sure.

But before AI arrived on the scene, source code was a single artifact that directly expressed the intended behavior of a piece of software as it currently exists. After AI, the artifact is still there, but it's no longer the true record of human intent.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#38

Post by dukeofdoom »

I just use a lot of folders, like folder for ever class and manager class with it and anything else. So its kind of organized by folders like plugins. Much easier to reason about. The biggest problem is the central class that glues everything is now 30 thousand lines, but its mostly repetitive delegation, init update, draw, delete. Still should be some nicer solution than having a huge class in center.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#39

Post by danielvaughn »

kennywinker wrote: post #32
quasarj wrote: post #24

I'm confused, it looks like you've just written a new terse language that now costs money to compile?

Afaik there's no language - the pseudocode can be written however you want. And the costing money to compile? If you're prompting an llm you're already doing that, just with prose instead of pseudocode. I'm not sure this approach is a good idea, but it might be - and imo it's worth trying :)

Yes, there's no language. And exactly - we're effectively already doing this, but with waaay more words.
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