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With AI you need to think bigger

rodyne.com

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Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#141

Post by xur17 »

someothherguyy wrote: post #98
xrd wrote: post #92

Where are the LLM leaderboards for software estimation accuracy? I have been using Claude Code and Aider and I do think they provide incredibly exciting potential. I can spin up new projects with mind boggling results. And, I can start projects in domains where I previously had almost no experience. It is truly exciting. AND... The thing I worry most about is that now non-technical managers can go into Claude and say…

> I can spin up new projects with mind boggling results Boggle a skeptical mind

I used Claude + aider to create a webhook forwarding service (receives webhooks, forwards them to multiple destinations, and handles retries, errors, etc). Included a web interface for creating new endpoints and monitoring errors, and made it fully dockerized and ready to be deployed into a kubernetes cluster.

Took me like 3 hours and a few dollars in api credits to build something that would have taken me multiple days on my own. Since it's just an internal tool for our dev environments that already does what we need, I don't care that much about maintainability (especially if it takes 3 hours to build from scratch). That said, the code is reasonably usable (there was one small thing it got stuck on at the end that I assisted with).

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#142

Post by haswell »

dangus wrote: post #131
magic_hamster wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead it took a few hours, and I finished a project. Did you? If you wanted to expand on it, or debug it when it fails, do you really understand the solution completely? (Perhaps you do.) Don't get me wrong, I've done the same in the last few years and I've completed several fun projects this way. But I only use AI on things I know I don't care about personally. If I use too much AI on things I actually want to k…

I think this effect of losing your abilities is somewhat overblown. Especially when AI has saved me on actually explaining specific lines of code that would have been difficult to look up with a search engine or reference documentation and know what I was looking for. At some point understanding is understanding, and there is no intellectual "reward" for banging your head against the wall. Regex is the perfect exampl…

This summarizes my feelings pretty well. I've been writing code in a dozen languages for 25+ years at this point. Not only do I not gain anything from writing certain boilerplate for the nth time, I'm also less likely to actually do the work unless it reaches some threshold of importance because it's just not interesting.

With all of this said, I can see how this could be problematic with less experience. For this scanner project, it was like having the ability to hand off some tasks to a junior engineer. But having juniors around doesn't mean senior devs will atrophy.

It will ultimately come down to how people use these tools, and the mindset they bring to their work.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#143

Post by xrd »

xrd wrote: post #102
someothherguyy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can spin up new projects with mind boggling results Boggle a skeptical mind

Meaning, give you an example? This morning I created a new project. I provided a postgres database URL to a remote service (with a non-standard connection string, includes a parameter "?sslmode=require"). Then, I said: * "Write me a fastapi project to connect to a postgres database using a database url." * "Retrieve the schema from the remote database." It used psql to connect, retrieves the schema. That was unexpect…

And, the update is that in the last hour claude somehow removed the rendering of the actual items. It is clever in troubleshooting: it created mocks if the data could not be loaded, it added error messages with the number of items retrieved. But, it does not have access to my browser console nor the DOM, and therein lies the problem. It is slow to copy and paste back and forth from the browser into the terminal. But, this feels like a great opportunity for a browser extension.

But, my takeaway is that I could have fixed this exact problem in five minutes if I had written the JS code. But, I have not looked at anything other than glancing at the diffs that fly by in the session.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#144

Post by xrd »

xur17 wrote: post #141
someothherguyy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can spin up new projects with mind boggling results Boggle a skeptical mind

I used Claude + aider to create a webhook forwarding service (receives webhooks, forwards them to multiple destinations, and handles retries, errors, etc). Included a web interface for creating new endpoints and monitoring errors, and made it fully dockerized and ready to be deployed into a kubernetes cluster. Took me like 3 hours and a few dollars in api credits to build something that would have taken me multiple d…

Claude Code and Aider, or aider using claude sonnet as the model? If you are using both claude code and aider I would love to know why.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#145

Post by xrd »

axkdev wrote: post #136
xrd wrote: post #92

Where are the LLM leaderboards for software estimation accuracy? I have been using Claude Code and Aider and I do think they provide incredibly exciting potential. I can spin up new projects with mind boggling results. And, I can start projects in domains where I previously had almost no experience. It is truly exciting. AND... The thing I worry most about is that now non-technical managers can go into Claude and say…

> I'm excited to understand more about how aider creates a map of the repository and effectively compresses the information in ways similar to how I keep track of high level ideas. Run /map. It's nothing fancy, really.

Ok, I meant to say, I know about /map, but there is so much to explore here with an open source coding tool and LSP. It feels like you could build some very powerful ways to represent connections using a lot of cool tools that are in use inside our editors. More structured and more relevant that the poor representations I can keep inside my crappy head.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#146

Post by xur17 »

xrd wrote: post #144
xur17 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Claude + aider to create a webhook forwarding service (receives webhooks, forwards them to multiple destinations, and handles retries, errors, etc). Included a web interface for creating new endpoints and monitoring errors, and made it fully dockerized and ready to be deployed into a kubernetes cluster. Took me like 3 hours and a few dollars in api credits to build something that would have taken me multiple d…

Claude Code and Aider, or aider using claude sonnet as the model? If you are using both claude code and aider I would love to know why.

Aider + Claude sonnet as the model.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#147

Post by w10-1 »

Think bigger in 3 distinct ways:

1. Lower learning curve, for new or revived skills (weaving - gather and summarize)

2. Lower incremental cost: almost always faster at choosing the next step (scouting)

3. Faster time-to-maturity: when building test suites, faster both at first-pass coverage and at gap-filling (zoo-keeping)

But the huge, gaping pitfall -- now coming down the tracks even faster -- is the same as without AI: once you build a complex system, committing to its invariants, you quickly find it difficult to change in the direction you want, because each choice triggers a tangle of incommensurable choices. Sometimes heroic re-factorings (beyond AI now) can extend life a bit, but usually the only people who can avoid abrupt stasis are those with deep experience and the insight into how to change things (incrementally). I'd guess with AI such pitfalls become more common and more difficult to escape.

So: yes, think bigger for projects with relatively definitive and complete requirements, but take care with foundational code you expect to grow.

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#148

Post by [deleted] »

epiccoleman wrote: post #116
nineplay wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my more effective uses of AI is for rubber duck debugging. I tell it what I want the code to do, iterate over what it comes back with, adjust the code ( 'now rewrite foo() so 'bar' is is passed in'). What comes back isn't necessarily perfect and I don't blindly copy and paste but that isn't the point. At the end I've worked out what I want to do and some of the tedious boiler-plate code is taken care of.

I had some results last week that I felt were really good - on a very tricky problem, using AI (Claude 3.7) helped me churn through 4 or 5 approaches that didn't work, and eventually, working in tandem, "we" found an approach that would. Then the AI helped write a basic implementation of the good approach which I was able to use as a reference for my own "real" implementation. No, the AI would not have solved the pro…

[deleted]

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#149

Post by d0mine »

CaffeineLD50 wrote: post #97

I had a minor desire to make a feature that had a slightly higher effort than reward, so although I knew I could struggle it out I didn't bother. After years of this I decided to give an AI a shot at the code. It produced something plausible looking and I was excited. Was it that easy? The code didn't work. But the approach made me more motivated to look into it and I found a solution. So although the AI gave me crap…

it looks like a variation of Stone soup story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup

Re: With AI you need to think bigger

#150

Post by thrwthsnw »

haswell wrote: post #140
magic_hamster wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead it took a few hours, and I finished a project. Did you? If you wanted to expand on it, or debug it when it fails, do you really understand the solution completely? (Perhaps you do.) Don't get me wrong, I've done the same in the last few years and I've completed several fun projects this way. But I only use AI on things I know I don't care about personally. If I use too much AI on things I actually want to k…

> Did you? Yes. > do you really understand the solution completely? Yes; fully. I'd describe what I delegated to the AI as "busy work". I still spent time thinking through the overall design before asking the AI for output. > But I only use AI on things I know I don't care about personally. Roughly speaking, I'd put my personal projects in two different categories: 1. Things that try to solve some problem in my life…

For category #2 it’s very useful as well and ties in with the theme of the article in that it reduces the activation energy required to almost zero. I’ve been using AI relentlessly to pursue all kinds of ideas that I would otherwise simply write down and file for later. When they involve some technology or theory I know little about I can get to a working demo in less than an hour and once I have that in hand I begin exploring the concepts I’m unfamiliar with by simply asking about them: what is this part of the code doing? Why is this needed? What other options are there? What are some existing projects that do something similar? What is the theory behind this? And then also making modifications or asking for changes or features. It allows for much wider and faster exploration and let’s you build things from scratch instead of reaching for another library so you end up learning how things work at a lower level. The code does get messy but AI is also a great tool for refactoring and debugging, you just have to adjust to the faster pace of development and remember to take more frequent pauses to clean up or rebuild from a better starting point and understanding of the problem.
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