Off topic: That font/layout/contrast on the page is very pleasing and inviting.
Tools: Code Is All You Need
61–70 of 234 posts
Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need
#62> It demands too much context. This is solved trivially by having default initial prompts. All majors tools like Claude Code or Gemini CLI have ways to set them up. > You pass all your tools to an LLM and ask it to filter it down based on the task at hand. So far, there hasn't been much better approaches proposed. Why is a "better" approach needed? If modern LLMs can properly figure it out? It's not like LLMs don't k…
> cost: They keep getting cheaper and cheaper no they don't[0], the cost is just still hidden from you but the freebies will end just like MoviePass and cheap Ubers https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lsw4vatg3k2b "Cursor released a $200-a-month subscription then made their $20-a-month subscription worse (worse output, slower) - yet it seems even on Max they're rate limiting people!" https://bsky.app/profile/…
The cost will stay hidden from me because my job will pay it, just like the cost of my laptop, o365 license, and every other tool I use at work.
Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need
#63Honestly, I’m getting tired of these sweeping statements about what developers are supposed to be, how it’s “the right way to use AI”. We are in uncharted territories that are changing by the day. Maybe we have to drop the self-assurance and opinionated view points and tackle this like a scientific problem.
Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting take but too bearish on LLMs in my opinion. LLMs have already found large-scale usage (deep research, translation) which makes them more ubiquitous today than 3D printers ever will or could have been.
What we call an LLM today (by which almost everyone means an autogressive language model from the Generative Pretrained Transformer family tree, and BERTs are still doing important eork, believe that) is actually an offshoot of neural machine translation. This isn't (intentionally at least) mere HN pedantry: they really do act like translation tools in a bunch of observable ways. And while they have recently crossed…
> There is a hole in the ground where something between 100 billion and a trillion dollars in the ground that so far has about 20B in revenue (not profit) going into it annually.
This is a concern for me. I'm using claude-code daily and find it very useful, but I'm expecting the price to continue getting jacked up. I do want to support Anthropic, but they might eventually need to cross a price threshold where I bail. We'll see.
I expect at some point the more open models and tools will catch up when the expensive models like ChatGPT plateau (assuming they do plateau). Then we'll find out if these valuations measure up to reality.
Note to the Hypelords: It's not perfect. I need to read every change and intervene often enough. "Vibe coding" is nonsense as expected. It is definitely good though.
Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
wouldn't this defeat the point? Claude Code already has access to the terminal, adding specific instruction in the context is enough
No. You are giving textual instructions to Claude in the hopes that it correctly generates a shell command for you vs giving it a tool definition with a clearly defined schema for parameters and your MCP Server is, presumably, enforcing adherence to those parameters BEFORE it hits your shell. You would be helping Claude in this case as you're giving a clearer set of constraints on operation.
Either way it is text instructions used to call a function (via a JSON object for MCP or a shell command for scripts). What works better depends on how the model you’re using was post trained and where in the prompt that info gets injected.
Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need
#66Honestly, I’m getting tired of these sweeping statements about what developers are supposed to be, how it’s “the right way to use AI”. We are in uncharted territories that are changing by the day. Maybe we have to drop the self-assurance and opinionated view points and tackle this like a scientific problem.
100% agreed - he mentions 3 barriers to using MCP over code: "cost, speed, and general reliability". But all 3 of these could change by 10-100x within a few years, if not months. Just recently OpenAI dropped the price of using o3 by 80%
This is not an environment where you can establish a durable manifesto
Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
My reference is the daily usage of chatgpt around me (outside of tech circles). I don’t want to sound like a hard-core LLM believer. I get your point and it’s fair. I just wanted to point out that the current usage of chatgpt is a lot broader than that of 3D printers even at the peak hype of it.
Outside of tech circles it looks like NFTs: people following hype using tech they don't understand which will be popular until the downsides we're aware of that they are ignorant to have consequences, and then the market will reflect the shift in opinion.
I see it differently: people are switching to chatgpt like they switched to google back in 2005 (from whatever alternative existed back then)
And I mean random people, not tech circles
It’s very different from NFTs in that respect
Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
My reference is the daily usage of chatgpt around me (outside of tech circles). I don’t want to sound like a hard-core LLM believer. I get your point and it’s fair. I just wanted to point out that the current usage of chatgpt is a lot broader than that of 3D printers even at the peak hype of it.
Outside of tech circles it looks like NFTs: people following hype using tech they don't understand which will be popular until the downsides we're aware of that they are ignorant to have consequences, and then the market will reflect the shift in opinion.
No way.
Everybody under a certain age is using ChatGPT, where they were once using search and friendship/expertises. It’s the number 1 app in the App Store. Copilot use in the enterprise is so seamless, you just talk to PowerPoint or outlook and it formulated what you were supposed to make or write.
It’s not a fad, it is a paradigm change.
People don’t need to understand how it works for it to work.
Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need
#69Unpopular Opinion: I hate Bash. Hate it. And hate the ecosystem of Unix CLIs that are from the 80s and have the most obtuse, inscrutable APIs ever designed. Also this ecosystem doesn’t work on Windows — which, as a game dev, is my primary environment. And no, WSL does not count. I don’t think the world needs yet another shell scripting language. They’re all pretty mediocre at best. But maybe this is an opportunity to…
Nobody likes coding in bash but everyone does it (a little) because it is everywhere.
> because it is everywhere
Except for the fact that actually it is not everywhere.
Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need
#70Unpopular Opinion: I hate Bash. Hate it. And hate the ecosystem of Unix CLIs that are from the 80s and have the most obtuse, inscrutable APIs ever designed. Also this ecosystem doesn’t work on Windows — which, as a game dev, is my primary environment. And no, WSL does not count. I don’t think the world needs yet another shell scripting language. They’re all pretty mediocre at best. But maybe this is an opportunity to…
Python CAN be a "shell script" in this case though... Tool composition over stdio will get you very very far. That's what an interface "from the 80s" does for you 45 years later. That same stdio composability is easily pipe into/through any number of cli tools written in any number of languages, compiled and interpreted.
Composing via stdio is so bloody terrible. Layers and layers of bullshit string parsing and encoding and decoding. Soooo many bugs. And utterly undebuggable. A truly miserable experience.