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Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

worksonmymachine.substack.com

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Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#91
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An I the only one who has to constantly tell Claude and Gemini to stop making edits to my codebase because they keep messing things up and breaking the build like ten times in a row, duplicating logic everywhere, etc? I keep hearing about how impressive agents are. I wish they could automate me out of my job faster

Are you paying for the higher end models? Do you have proper system prompts and guidance in place for proper prompt engineering? Have you started to practice any auxiliary forms of context engineering? This isn't a magic code genie, it's a very complicated and very powerful new tool that you need to practice using over time in order to get good results from.

guy 1: I put money in the slot machine everyone says wins all the time and I lose

you: HAVE YOU PUT MORE TOKENS IN???? ARE YOU PUTTING THEM IN THE EXPENSIVE MACHINES???

super compelling argument /s

if you want to provide working examples of "prompt engineering" or "context engineering" please do but "just keep paying until the behavior is impressive" isn't winning me as a customer

it's like putting out a demo program that absolutely sucks and promising that if I pay, it'll get good. why put out the shit demo and give me this impression, then, if it sucks?

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#92
I feel increasingly tired of reading excuse after excuse when you bring up that AI tools simply cannot solve anything beyond extremely basic problems.

It's always a mix of:

1. "Wait for the next models", despite models having all but plateaued for the past 3 years,

2. "It's so good for boilerplate code", despite libraries and frameworks being much better suited for this task, and boilerplate code being actually rare to write in the normal lifecycle of a project,

3. "You need to prompt it differently", glossing over the fact that to prompt it so it can do what you want it to do accurately it would take longer than not to use AI at all,

4. And the worst: "We don't know how to use those models yet"

Maybe the real reason it doesn't work is because IT JUST DOESN'T FUCKING WORK.

Why is it so unfathomable that a next token generator is gonna suck at solving complex problems? It is blindingly obvious.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you also can't not swim with the tide. If you drove a horse-buggy 100 years ago, it was probably worth your while to keep your eye on whether motor-cars went anywhere. I was super skeptical about a year ago. Copilot was making nice predictions, that was it. This agent stuff is truly impressive.

I think the agent stuff is impressive because we are giving the AI scaffold and tools and things to do. And that is why it is impressive because it has some directive. But it is obvious if you don't give it good directives it doesn't know what to do. So for me, I think a lot of jobs will be making agents do things, but a lot won't. i think its really strange that people are all so against all this stuff. it's cool ne…

> does nobody actually like computers anymore

I think this is a really interesting question and an insight into part of the divide.

Places like HN get a lot of attention from two distinct crowds: people who like computers and related tech and people who like to build. And the latter is split into "people who like to build software to help others get stuff done" and "people who like to build software for themselves" too. Even in the professional-developer-world that's a lot of the split between those with "cool" side projects and those with either only-day-job software or "boring" day-job-related side projects.

I used to be in the first group, liking computer tech for its own sake. The longer I work in the profession of "using computer tools to build things for people" the less I like the computer industry, because of how much the marketing/press/hype/fandom elements go overboard. Building-for-money often exposes, very directly, the difference between "cool tools" and "useful and reliable tools" - all the bugs I have to work around, all the popular much-hyped projects that run into the wall in various places when thrown into production, all the times simple and boring beats cool when it comes to winning customers. So I understand when it makes others jaded about the hype too. Especially if you don't have the intrinsic "cool software is what I want to tinker with" drive.

So the split in reactions to articles like this falls on those lines, I think.

If you like cool computer stuff, it's a cool article, with someone doing something neat.

If you are a dev enthusiast who likes side projects and such (regardless of if it's your day job too or not), it's a cool article, with someone doing something neat.

If you are in the "I want to build stuff that helps other people get shit done" crowd then it's probably still cool - who doesn't like POCs and greenfield work? - but it also seems scary for your day to day work, if it promises a flood of "adequate", not-well-tested software that you're going to be expected to use and work with and integrate for less-technical people who don't understand what goes into reliable software quality. And that's not most people's favorite part of the job.)

(Then there's a third crowd which is the "people who like making money" crowd, which loves LLMs because they look like "future lower costs of labor." But that's generally not what the split reaction to this particular sort of article is about, but is part of another common split between the "yay this will let me make more profit" and "oh no this will make people stop paying me" crowds in the biz-oriented articles.)

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#94

Reading articles like this feels like being in a different reality. I don't work like this, I don't want to work like this and maybe most importantly I don't want to work with somebody who works like this. Also I am scared that any library that I am using through the myriad of dependencies is written like this. On the other hand... if I look at this as some alternate universe where I don't need to directly or indirec…

I know, it's scary. But I guess it's the direction we are aiming for.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#96
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the agent stuff is impressive because we are giving the AI scaffold and tools and things to do. And that is why it is impressive because it has some directive. But it is obvious if you don't give it good directives it doesn't know what to do. So for me, I think a lot of jobs will be making agents do things, but a lot won't. i think its really strange that people are all so against all this stuff. it's cool ne…

A lot of people join this profession because they like building stuff. They enjoy thinking about a problem and coming up with a solution and then implementing and testing it. Prompting is not the same thing and it doesn't scratch the same itch and at the end of the day it's important to enjoy your job, not only be efficient at it. I have heard the take that "writing code is not what makes you an engineer, solving pro…

Rick Beato posted a video recently where he created a fictitious artist and a couple of songs based on a few prompts. The results were somewhat passable, generic indie/pop music but as he said (I'm paraphrasing) "I didn't create anything here. I prompted a computer to put together a bunch of words and melodies that it knew from what other people had written."

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#97

Reading articles like this feels like being in a different reality. I don't work like this, I don't want to work like this and maybe most importantly I don't want to work with somebody who works like this. Also I am scared that any library that I am using through the myriad of dependencies is written like this. On the other hand... if I look at this as some alternate universe where I don't need to directly or indirec…

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Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#98

Reading articles like this feels like being in a different reality. I don't work like this, I don't want to work like this and maybe most importantly I don't want to work with somebody who works like this. Also I am scared that any library that I am using through the myriad of dependencies is written like this. On the other hand... if I look at this as some alternate universe where I don't need to directly or indirec…

[deleted]

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The are around three Golang HTTP2.0 servers on Github, but it wasn't just regurgitating the application from memory, as if it was then it would have been mostly correct first try, and it wouldn't have needed to spend 80%+ of the development time in a code-compile-test cycle of fixing bugs identified by integration tests and spec conformance tests.

So you are saying that LLMs have no capacity to re-use existing work, and will just burn hours and money re-inventing wheels?

Welcome to The Future™!

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#100

My theory on AI is it's the next iteration of google search, a better more conversational, base layer over all the information that exists on the internet. Of course some people will lose jobs just like what happened to several industries when search became ubiquitous. (newspapers, phone books, encyclopedias, travel agents) But IMHO this isn't the existential crisis people think it is. It's just a tool. Smart, clever…

As search gives the answer rather than the path to it, the job of finding things out properly and writing it down for others is lost. If we let that be lost, then we will all be lost. If we cannot find a way to redirect income from AI back to the creators of the information they rehash (such as good and honest journalism), a critical load-bearing pillar of democratic society will collapse. The news industry has been…

I am looking forward to the "news industry" breathing its last breath. They're the ones primarily responsible for the distrust and division.
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