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Web development is fun again

ma.ttias.be

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Re: Web development is fun again

#211

Post by MattSayar »

mands wrote: post #162
simonw wrote: post #7

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…

Yep, have seen this myself as previously a manager and now with a young family. I can make incredible progress on side-projects that I never would have started with only 2-4 hours carved out over the course of a week. There is a hopefully a Jevon's paradox here that we will have a bloom of side-projects, "what-if" / "if only I had the time" type projects come to fruition.

This is exactly the case. Businesses in the past wouldn't automate some process because they couldn't afford to develop it. Now they can! Which frees up resources to tackle something else on the backlog. It's pretty exciting.

Re: Web development is fun again

#212

Post by brandensilva »

llmslave2 wrote: post #158
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm building an AI agent for Godot, and in paid user testing we found the median speed up time to complete a variety of tasks[0] was 2x. This number was closer to 10x for less experienced engineers [0] tasks included making games from scratch and resolving bugs we put into template projects. There's no perfect tasks to test on, but this seemed sufficient

That sounds reasonable to me. AI is best at generating super basic and common code, it will have plenty of training on game templates and simple games. Obviously you cannot generalize that to all software development though.

As you get deeper beyond the starter and bootstrap code it definitely takes a different approach to get value.

This is in part because context limits of large code bases and because the knowledge becomes more specialized and the LLM has no training on that kind of code.

But people are making it work, it just isn't as black and white.

Re: Web development is fun again

#214

Post by llmslave2 »

simonw wrote: post #184
llmslave2 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you using AI to learn? I see a lot of people say this but simply reading AI generated overviews or asking it questions isn't really learning.

I'm using it to build things. Here's an example from the other day. I've always been curious about writing custom Python C extensions but I've never been brave enough to really try and do it. I decided it would be interesting to dig into that by having Codex build a C extension for Python that exposed simple SQLite queries with a timeout. It wrote me this: https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/sqlite-time-lim.…

With all due respect you were reading, not learning. It's like when people watch educational YouTube videos as entertainment, it feels like they're learning but they aren't.

It's fine to use the LLMs in the same way that people watch science YouTube content, but maybe don't frame it like it's for learning. It can be great entertainment tho.

Re: Web development is fun again

#215

Post by [deleted] »

llmslave2 wrote: post #118
yomismoaqui wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little shameful but I still struggle when centering divs on a page. Yes, I know about flexbox for more than a decade but always have to search to remember how it is done. So instead of refreshing that less used knowledge I just ask the AI to do it for me. The implications of this vs searching MDN Docs is another conversation to have.

Surely searching "centre a div" takes less time than prompting and waiting for a response...

[deleted]

Re: Web development is fun again

#216

Post by rendaw »

Jaygles wrote: post #146
wackget wrote: post #123

> On the frontend, you have build pipelines, bundlers, CSS frameworks with their own toolchains, progressive web apps, Core Web Vitals, SEO, layout shifts, srcset/responsive images… I remember when the biggest challenge was IE6 compatibility. You only have those things if you choose to use them. I've been building websites for 25 years. I use the same core technologies today that I did when I started. Sure, I make us…

Those technologies don't just solve tech issues, they solve organizational issues. If one or two people manage a website, going without fancy tooling is completely fine. When 1000 people are managing a product with complex business logic across multiple platforms, you need fancy tooling to ensure everyone can work at a reasonable level of productivity.

The article is about developing as a solo developer.

Re: Web development is fun again

#217

Post by antonvs »

xav_authentique wrote: post #176
yason wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…

I think this is showing the difference between people who like to /make/ things and those that like to make /things/. People that write software because they see a solution for a problem that can be fixed with software seem to benefit the most of LLM technology. It's almost the inverse for the people that write software because they like the process of writing software.

I like both the process and the product, and I like using LLMs.

You can use LLMs in whatever way works for you. Objections like the ones in this thread seem to assume that the LLM determines the process, but that’s not true at present.

Perhaps they’re worrying about what might happen in future, but more likely they’re just resisting change in the usual way of inventing objections against something they haven’t seriously tried. These objections serve more as emotional justifications to avoid changing, than rational positions.

Re: Web development is fun again

#218

Post by [deleted] »

Palomides wrote: post #103
HPsquared wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specialization is for insects, as Heinlein said. We are going back to the Renaissance Man ideal and I'm all for it.

isn't it exactly the opposite? LLMs have killed the generalist, only specialists with very targeted skills have anything marketable

[deleted]

Re: Web development is fun again

#219

Post by jtbayly »

arjie wrote: post #209
yason wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…

I think a lot of us just discovered that the actual programming isn't the fun part for us. It turns out I don't like writing code as much as I thought. I like solving my problems. The activation energy for a lot of things was much higher than it is now. Now it's pretty low. That's great for me. Baby's sleeping, 3d printer is rolling, and I get to make a little bit of progress on something super quick. It's fantastic.

Exactly. And I was never particularly good at coding, either. Pairings with Gemini to finally figure out how to decompile an old Java app so I can make little changes to my user profile and some action files? That was fun! And I was never going to be able to figure out how to do it on my own. I had tried!

Re: Web development is fun again

#220

Post by blitz_skull »

arjie wrote: post #209
yason wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…

I think a lot of us just discovered that the actual programming isn't the fun part for us. It turns out I don't like writing code as much as I thought. I like solving my problems. The activation energy for a lot of things was much higher than it is now. Now it's pretty low. That's great for me. Baby's sleeping, 3d printer is rolling, and I get to make a little bit of progress on something super quick. It's fantastic.

This 1000x!

I had a bit of an identity crisis with AI first landed and started producing good code. “If I’m not the man who can type quickly, accurately, and build working programs… WHO AM I?”

But as you pointed out, I quickly realized I was never that guy. I was the guy who made problems go away, usually with code.

Now I can make so many problems go away, it feels like cheating. As it turns out, writing code isn’t super useful. It’s the application of the code, the judgement of which problems to solve and how to solve them, that truly mattered.

And that sparks a LOT of joy.

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