111–120 of 744 posts
It's not just about "building" ... who is going to maintain all this new sub-par code pushed to production every day? Who is going to patch all bugs, edge cases and security vulnerabilities?
The theory goes very simple, you tell the agent to patch the bug. Now the practice though...
what is the percentage risk of malfunction you are going to accept as a passenger?
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But even if that did happen, the open source models are excellent and cost virtually nothing? Like I prefer Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 to the open weights models, but if Anthropic or Google upped the pricing 10x then everyone would switch to the open weights models. Arguably you could say that the Chinese labs may stop releasing them, true, but even if all model development stopped today then they'd still be extremely use…
Again I’m not in the “AI” industry so I don’t fully understand the economics and don’t run open models locally. What’s the cost to run this stuff locally, what type of hardware is required. When you say virtually nothing, do you mean that’s because you already have a 2k laptop or gpu? Again I am only asking because I don’t know. Would these local models run OK on my 2016 Mac Pro intel or do I need to upgrade to the l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The theory goes very simple, you tell the agent to patch the bug. Now the practice though...
yeah, in practice: would you like to onboard a Boeing 747 where some of the bugs were patched by some agents, what is the percentage risk of malfunction you are going to accept as a passenger?
I'm not sure about this. The tests I've gotten out in a few hours are the kind I'd approve if another dev sent then but haven't really ended up finding meaningful issues.
Maybe we should collect all of these predictions, then go back in 5-10 years and see if anyone was actually right.
I closed a comment from ~2.5y ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36594800) with this sentence: "I'm not sure that incorporating LLMs into programming is (yet) not just an infinite generator of messes for humans to clean up." My experience with it is convincing me that that's just what it is. When the bills come due, the VC money dries up, and the AI providers start jacking up their prices... there's probably going to be a boom market for humans to clean up AI messes.
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It has dropped by maybe MORE than 90%. My sons school recently asked me to build some tools for them -- I did this over a decade ago for them, for free. I did it again using AI tools (different problem though) and I had it mostly done in 30 minutes (after I got the credentials set up properly -- that took up more time than the main coding part). This was probably several days of work for me in the past.
But in the past, you knew the codebase very well, and it was trivial to implement a fix and upgrade the software. Can the same be done with LLMs ? Well from what I see, it depends on your luck. But if the LLMs can't help you, then you gotta read the whole codebase that you've never read before and you quickly lose the initial benefits. I don't doubt someday we'll get there though.
It's not just about "building" ... who is going to maintain all this new sub-par code pushed to production every day? Who is going to patch all bugs, edge cases and security vulnerabilities?
It was built by real people. Not a single line of AI slop in it. It was the most fragile crap I had ever the misfortune to witness. Even in my wildest vibe coding a prototype moments I was not able to get the AI to produce that amount of anti patterns, bad shit and code that would have had Hitchcock running.
I think we would be shocked to see what kind of human slop out there is running in production. The scale might change, but at least in this example, if I had rebuilt the app purely by vibe coding the code quality and the security of the code would actually have improved. Even with the lowest vibe coding effort thinkable.
I am not in any way condoning (is this the right word) bad practices, or shipping vibe code into prod without very, very thorough review. Far from it. I am just trying to provide a counter point to the narrative, that at least in the medium sized business I got to know in my time consulting/working in agencies, I have seen quite a metric ton of slop, that would make coding agents shiver.
Did I miss something or is there actually no evidence provided that costs have dropped?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has dropped by maybe MORE than 90%. My sons school recently asked me to build some tools for them -- I did this over a decade ago for them, for free. I did it again using AI tools (different problem though) and I had it mostly done in 30 minutes (after I got the credentials set up properly -- that took up more time than the main coding part). This was probably several days of work for me in the past.
But in the past, you knew the codebase very well, and it was trivial to implement a fix and upgrade the software. Can the same be done with LLMs ? Well from what I see, it depends on your luck. But if the LLMs can't help you, then you gotta read the whole codebase that you've never read before and you quickly lose the initial benefits. I don't doubt someday we'll get there though.
I recently found some assembly source for some old C64 games and used an LLM to walk me through it (purely recreational). It was so good at it. If I was teaching a software engineering class, I'd have students use LLMs to do analysis of large code bases. One of the things we did in grad school was to go through gcc and contribute something to it. Man, that code was so complex and compilers are one of my specialties (at the time). I think having an LLM with me would have made the task 100x easier.