Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

worksonmymachine.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 432 posts

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#231

Post by rapind »

chamomeal wrote: post #167
lordnacho wrote: post #15

I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now. I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding. It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to…

I also am enjoying LLMs, but I get no joy out of just prompting them again and again. I get so incredibly bored, with a little side of anxiety that I don’t really know how my program works. I’ll probably get over it, but I’ve been realizing how much fun I get out building something as opposed to just having be built . I used to think all I cared about was results, and now I know that’s not true, so that’s fun! Of cou…

This is interesting. Maybe slow it down a bit? What I've found is I really need to be extremely involved. I approve every change (claude-code). I'm basically micromanaging an AI developer. I'm constantly reading and correcting. Sometimes I tell it to wait while I help it make some change it's hung up on.

There's no way I could hire someone who'd want me hovering over their shoulder like this.

This sounds tedious I guess, but it's actually quite zen, and faster than solo coding most of the time. It gives me a ton of confidence to try new things and new libraries, because I can ask it to explain why it's suggesting the changes or for an overview of an approach. At no point am I not aware of what it's doing. This isn't even close to what people think of as vibe coding. It's very involved.

I'm really looking forward to increasing context sizes. Sometimes it can spin it's wheels during a refactor and want to start undoing changes it made earlier in the process, and I have to hard correct it. Even twice the context size will be a game changer for me.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#232

Post by dyauspitr »

lordnacho wrote: post #15

I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now. I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding. It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to…

Chess is probably a good analogue to how the juniors will learn. You will have to learn for the sake of it even though the space is solved.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#233

Post by dyauspitr »

pkoird wrote: post #218
d00mB0t wrote: post #38

"I'd wander into my office, check what Claude had built, test it real quick. If it worked, great! Commit and push." Man, I'm going to make so much money as a Cybersecurity Consultant!

Potentially. But also remember what they say about self-driving cars, that it'd make fewer and fewer mistakes than a real driver.

Waymos are in many cities and doing really well.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#234

Post by mbesto »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #32
Flatcircle wrote: post #22

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…

> Search has just become Chat I think chat-like LLM interfacing is not the most efficient way. There has to be a smarter way.

Search wasn't just "search". It was "put a prompt in a form and then spend minutes/hours going through various websites until I get my answer". LLMs change that. I don't have to go through 20 different people's blog posts on "Which 12v 100Ah LifePO4 battery tests for the highest watt hours", the LLM simply just gives me answer that is most relevant across those 20 blog posts. It just distilled what I would have taken an hour to do down to seconds or 2 minutes.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#235

Post by timpieces »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #143
facefactsdamnit wrote: post #16

The only thing that should matter in software development is: does it work to spec? Why are these chatbots that mangle data 1/3 to 1/2 of the time getting their budgets 10x over and over again? This is irrational. If the code mangles data this bad, it's garbage.

> The only thing that should matter in software development is: does it work to spec? Unless you've never written code outside of a classroom you should know how unbelievably wrong this is.

Maybe it's just semantics, but it doesn't feel so wrong to me. The main nuance is that this statement needs to be true over time as the spec changes. Developers try to write maintainable code so that their code will still work/adapt to spec when the spec changes. Maintainable code feels less important in a world where AI can rewrite a growing portion of your code quickly. I find myself accepting a much lower bar for non-critical parts of my projects with the knowledge that claude can rewrite it quickly if needs change. But disclaimer: I haven't yet used this technique in teams. The norms on usage aren't there yet.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#236

Post by hooverd »

mnky9800n wrote: post #49
lordnacho wrote: post #33

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…

I like computers quite a lot and the direction of the tech industry has been to destroy every single think I like or thought would be good about them.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#237

Post by ares623 »

fmbb wrote: post #4

That time dilation feels a bit like what METR reported: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... Developers believe they complete tasks 25% faster with AI but when measured they are 19% slower when using AI.

Reminds me of that quaalude scene from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#238

Post by ip26 »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #186
ivanjermakov wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Search has just become Chat I think chat-like LLM interfacing is not the most efficient way. There has to be a smarter way.

English and other languages come with lots of ambiguity and assumptions. A significant benefit of programming languages is they have explicit rules for how they will be converted into a running program. An LLM can take many paths from the same starting prompt and deliver vastly different output.

I do agree… perhaps the thing to do is write fragments of the program, like the start and end, asking it to complete the middle. If you have precisely described how the output will be printed, for example, then you have essentially formally specified how the data should be organized…

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#239

Post by hooverd »

vitaflo wrote: post #114
karel-3d wrote: post #24

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 don't want to work with somebody who works like this. You will most likely get your wish but not in the way you want. In a few years when this is fully matured there will be little reason to hire devs with their inflated salaries (especially in the US) when all you need is someone with some technical know-how and a keen eye on how to work with AI agents. There will be plenty of those people all over the globe who…

> some technical know-how

how do they develop the technical know-how? how will you review the AI agents when you understand nothing?

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#240

Post by hooverd »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #162
karel-3d wrote: post #24

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…

Genuinely this is what it sounds like to accept obsolescence and I just can’t understand it. What are you attached to and identify with that you’re rejecting new ways to work? Change is the only constant and tools now look like superhuman tools created for babies compared to the sota at bell or NASA in the 1960s when they were literally trying to create superhuman computing. We have more access to powerful compute an…

I think it's a great technology but if people's ability to put food on the table is compromised what's their incentive not to ventilate people working for AI labs?
Post reply on HN