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

241–250 of 432 posts

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#241

Post by hooverd »

jon-wood wrote: post #111
verisimilidude wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI's superpower is doing mediocre work at high speed. That's okay. Great, even. There's lots of mediocre work to do. And mediocre still clears below average. But! There's still room for expertise. And this is where I disagree about swimming with the tide. There will be those who are uninterested in using the AI. They will struggle. They will hone their craft. They will have muscle memory for the tasks everyone else f…

My ongoing concern is that most of us probably got to being able to do good work via several years of doing mediocre work. We put in the hours and along the way learned what good looks like, and various patterns that allow us to see the path to solving a given problem. What does the next generation do when we’ve automated away that work? How do they learn to recognise what good looks like, and when their LLM has got…

they don't!

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#242

Post by fmbb »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #7
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.

This was the study with a population size of 16?

Do you have any better research we can read?

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#243

Post by fmbb »

logicchains wrote: post #11
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.

It depends on how the AI is used; there's a huge difference in productivity between a structured workflow with repeated automated feedback to the AI, and just ad-hoc prompting. For instance, Gemini 2.5 coding up a spec-compliant HTTP2.0 server in two weeks: https://outervationai.substack.com/p/building-a-100-llm-writ... . 15k lines of code and 30k lines of tests; no human coder could produce something like that so fa…

I would not say that is ”how the AI is used”. That problem space is one where humans have spent unusually much time defining a spec and writing a test suite.

A million monkeys randomly typing could actually complete that task as well.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#244

Post by rapind »

dyauspitr wrote: post #232
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.

That's a pretty good take. I was actually looking for a good analogy recently

I think if I was just starting out learning to program, I would find something fun to build and pick a very correct, typed, and compiled language like Haskell or Purescript or Elm, and have the agent explaining what it's doing and why and go very slow.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#245

Post by cedws »

I’m feeling limited by the tools right now. The software for using LLMs is an incongruent mess. For example, how can I have a global system prompt shared across all the apps I use my OpenRouter key with? I can’t, I have to set it in each application. How can I carry a conversation over from one app to another? How can I give all my apps access to the same set of MCP tools? Most of the apps I use don’t even properly support MCP yet.

It sounds like Claude Code is the best UX right now but I don’t want to be locked into a Claude subscription, I want to bring my own key and tap into whatever provider I want.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#246

Post by nhaehnle »

asadotzler wrote: post #112

I seem to have missed the part where he successfully prompted for security, internationalizability, localizability, accessibility, usability, etc., etc. This is a core problem with amateurs pretending to be software producers. There are others, but this one is fundamental to acceptable commercial software and will absolutely derail vibe coded products from widespread adoption. And if you think these aspects of qualit…

I'm skeptical too, but at least accessibility and usability do show up in those four documents they link to.

I didn't see internationalization and localization, but I don't see anything fundamental about those that would be different.

Security, on the other hand, does feel like a different beast.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#247

Post by dustincoates »

baxter001 wrote: post #192
dustincoates wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repl.it is so hit or miss for me, and that's that is so frustrating. Like, it can knock out something in minutes that would have taken me an afternoon. That's amazing. Then other times, I go to create something that is suggested _by them below the prompt box_ and it can't do it properly.

The fact that you think it was suggested _by_ them is I think where your mental model is misleading you. LLMs can be thought of metaphorically as a process of decompression, if you can give it a compressed form for your scenario 1 it'll go great - you're actually doing a lot of mental work to arrive at that 'compressed' request, checking technical feasibility, thinking about interactions, hinting at solutions. If you…

You're misunderstanding me. Underneath the prompt box on the main page are suggestions of types of apps you can build. These are, presumably, chosen by people at the company. I'm not talking about things suggested within the chat.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#249

Post by noodletheworld »

There is a fundamentally unfortunate reality here which is quite problematic.

Namely, you don’t deserve to be paid for working 8 hours if you only worked for 30 minutes over an eight hour period.

I don’t care if you personally agree with that or not, the reality is that businesses believe it.

That means, sooner or later there will be a great rebalancing where people will be required to do significantly more work; probably the work of other developers who will be fired.

It’s fun for home projects; but the somewhat depressing reality is that there is no chance in hell this (sitting around for 7 hours a day reading reddit while Claude codes) will fly in corporate environments; instead, you’re looking at mass layoffs.

So. Enjoy it while you can folks.

In the future you’ll be spending that 8 hours struggling to juggle the context and review 20 different tasks, not playing with your kids.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#250

Post by bryanrasmussen »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #211
baxter001 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you think it was suggested _by_ them is I think where your mental model is misleading you. LLMs can be thought of metaphorically as a process of decompression, if you can give it a compressed form for your scenario 1 it'll go great - you're actually doing a lot of mental work to arrive at that 'compressed' request, checking technical feasibility, thinking about interactions, hinting at solutions. If you…

I don't think that the suggestions in the prompt box are being automatically generated on the fly for everyone. At least I don't see why they would be. Why not just have some engineers come up with 100 prompts, test them to make sure they work, and then hard-code those?

I would hope the suggestions in the prompt box are not being automatically generated by everyone else's inputs, I know what matters most is not the idea but execution but in the off hand you do have a really great and somewhat unique idea you probably wouldn't want it to be sent out to everyone who likes to take great ideas and implement it while you yourself are working on it.
Post reply on HN