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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#141

Post by cossray »

devmor wrote: post #73
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm deeply convinced that there's 2 reasons we don't see real takes like this: 1) is because these people are quietly appreciating the 2-50% uplift you get from sanely using LLMs instead of constantly posting sycophantic or doomer shit for clout and/or VC financing. 2) is because the real version of LLM coding is boring and unsexy. It either involves generating slop in one shot to POC, then restarting from scratch fo…

There’s also just the negative association factor. I use LLMs in my every day work. I’m also a strong critic of LLMs and absolutely loathe the hype cycle around them. I have done some really cool things with copilot and Claude and I keep sharing them to within my working circle because I simply don’t want to interact that much with people who aren’t grounded on the subject.

I would be interested to hear your take on Copilot vs Claude. I have used Copilot (trial) in VS Code and I found it to mostly meet my needs. It could generate some plans and code, which I could review on the go. I found this very natural to me as I never felt 'left behind' in whatever code the AI was generating. However, most of the posts I see here are on Claude (I haven't tried it) and very few mentions of Copilot. What is your impression about them and the use cases each is strong in?

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#142

Post by devmor »

ffsm8 wrote: post #138
devmor wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get better at something without understanding why, but you should be able to think about it and determine why fairly easily. This is something everyone who cares about improving in a skill does regularly - examine their improvement, the reasons behind it, and how to add to them. That’s the basis of self-driven learning.

Not really. I can obviously say something, like you learn which features the models are able to actually implement, and you learn how to phrase and approach trickier features to get the model too do what you want. And that's not really explainable without exploring specific examples. And now we're in thousands of words of explanation territory, hence my decision to say it's hard to put it into words.

I think you’re handwaving away vague, ungrounded intuition and calling it learning.

For instance, if I say “I noticed I run better in my blue shoes than my red shoes” I did not learn anything. If I examine my shoes and notice that my blue shoes have a cushioned sole, while my red shoes are flat, I can combine that with thinking about how I run and learn that cushioned soles cause less fatigue to the muscles in my feet and ankles.

The reason the difference matters is because if I don’t do the learning step, when buy another pair of blue shoes but they’re flat soled, I’m back to square one.

Back to the real scenario, if you hold on to your ungrounded intuition re what tricks and phrasing work without understanding why, you may find those don’t work at all on a new model version or when forced to change to a different product due to price, insolvency, etc.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#143

Post by zozbot234 »

lowsong wrote: post #130
csallen wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again it's the opposite. A landscape of vibe coded micro apps is a landscape of buggy, vulnerable, points of failure. When you buy a product, software or hardware, you do more than buy the functionality you buy the assurance it will work. AI does not change this. Vibe code an app to automate your lightbulbs all you like, but nobody is going to be paying millions of dollars a year on vibe coded slop apps and apps li…

> This is what everyone says when technology democratizes something that was previously reserved for a small number of experts. What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run. Over the past 20 years software engineering has become something that just about anyone can do with li…

"Thousands of dollars of GPU" as a one-time expense (not ongoing token spend) is dirt cheap if it meaningfully improves productivity for a dev. And your shitty laptop can probably run local AI that's good enough for Q&A chat.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#144

Post by moron4hire »

Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

Someone used Claude Code to generate a very simple staffing management app. The sort of thing that really wouldn't take that long to make, but why pay for any software when you can just ignore the problem, amiright? Anyway, the code that got generated was full of SQL injection issues for the most absurd sorts of things. It would have 80% of the database queries implemented through the ORM, but then the leftover stuff was raw string concat junk, for no good reason because it wasn't even doing any dynamic query or anything that the ORM couldn't do.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#145

Post by 2ccg »

csallen wrote: post #96
lowsong wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you're missing is that fewer and fewer projects are going to need a ton of technical depth. > I have friends who'd never written a line of code in their lives who now use multiple simple vibe-coded apps at work daily. Again it's the opposite. A landscape of vibe coded micro apps is a landscape of buggy, vulnerable, points of failure. When you buy a product, software or hardware, you do more than buy the functi…

> Again it's the opposite. A landscape of vibe coded micro apps is a landscape of buggy, vulnerable, points of failure. When you buy a product, software or hardware, you do more than buy the functionality you buy the assurance it will work. AI does not change this. Vibe code an app to automate your lightbulbs all you like, but nobody is going to be paying millions of dollars a year on vibe coded slop apps and apps li…

Your whole argument is based on 'the technology improves'.

Ok, so another fundamental proposition is monetary resources are needed to fund said technology improvement.

Whats wrong with LLMs? They require immense monetary resources.

Is that a problem for now? No because lots of private money is flowing in and Google et al have the blessing of their shareholders to pump up the amount of cash flows going into LLM based projects.

Could all this stop? Absolutely, many are already fearing the returns will not come. What happens then? No more huge technology leaps.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#146

Post by 2ccg »

lowsong wrote: post #130
csallen wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again it's the opposite. A landscape of vibe coded micro apps is a landscape of buggy, vulnerable, points of failure. When you buy a product, software or hardware, you do more than buy the functionality you buy the assurance it will work. AI does not change this. Vibe code an app to automate your lightbulbs all you like, but nobody is going to be paying millions of dollars a year on vibe coded slop apps and apps li…

> This is what everyone says when technology democratizes something that was previously reserved for a small number of experts. What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run. Over the past 20 years software engineering has become something that just about anyone can do with li…

Dont waste your time on him. He reminds me of people who are so concentrated on one part of the picture, they can't see the whole damn thing and how all the pieces fit and interact with each other.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#148

Post by lowsong »

zozbot234 wrote: post #143
lowsong wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what everyone says when technology democratizes something that was previously reserved for a small number of experts. What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run. Over the past 20 years software engineering has become something that just about anyone can do with li…

"Thousands of dollars of GPU" as a one-time expense (not ongoing token spend) is dirt cheap if it meaningfully improves productivity for a dev. And your shitty laptop can probably run local AI that's good enough for Q&A chat.

On a SWE salary maybe. If the baseline cost of doing business is a $5k GPU you've excluded like a quarter of the US working population immediately.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#149

Post by jillesvangurp »

jaccola wrote: post #87
jillesvangurp wrote: post #41

This is the hardest it's ever going to be. That's been my mode for the last year. A lot of what I did in the last month was complete science fiction as little as six months ago. The scope and quality of what is possible seems to leap ahead every few weeks. I now have several projects going in languages that I've never used. I have a side project in Rust, and two Go projects. I have a few decades experience with backe…

But why are you making projects in so many languages? The language is very rarely the barrier to performance, especially if you don't even understand the language.

I try to pick the language best to the situation rather than giving into my own biases. I need to broaden my horizon to be able to cover the full stack of stuff that I need, not just the things I've been doing myself a lot for years. There's a lot of stuff that used to be out of my comfort zone that I can now tackle easily. Stepping over my own biases is part of that.

I know not everybody is quite ready for this yet. But I'm working from the point of view that I won't be manually programming much professionally anymore.

So, I now pick stuff I know AIs supposedly do well (like Go) with good solid tool and library ecosystems. I can read it well enough; it's not a hard language and I've seen plenty other languages. But I'm clearly not going to micro manage a Go code base any time soon. The first time I did this, it was an experiment. I wanted to see how far I could push the notion. I actually gave it some thought and then I realized that if I was going to do this manually I would pick what I always pick. But I just wasn't planning to do this manually and it wasn't optimal for the situation. It just wasn't a valid choice anymore.

Then I repeated the experiment again on a bigger thing and I found that I could have a high level discussion about architectural choices well enough that it did not really slow me down much. The opposite actually. I just ask critical questions. I try to make sure to stick with mainstream stuff and not get boxed into unnecessary complexity. A few decades in this industry has given me a nose for that.

My lack of familiarity with the code base is so far not proving to be any issue. Early days, I know. But I'm generating an order of magnitude more code than I'll ever be able to review already and this is only going to escalate from here on. I don't see a reason for me to slow down. To be effective, I need to engineer at a macro level. I simply can't afford to micro manage code bases anymore. That means orchestrating good guard rails, tests, specifications, etc. and making sure those cover everything I care about. Precisely because I don't want to have to open an editor and start fixing things manually.

As for Rust, that was me not thinking about my prompt too hard and it had implemented something half decent by the time I realized so I just went with it. To be clear, this one is just a side project. So, I let it go (out of curiosity) and it seems to be fine as well. Apparently, I can do Rust now too. It's actually not a bad choice objectively and so far so good. The thing is, I can change my mind and redo the whole thing from scratch and it would not be that expensive if I had to.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#150

Post by adrian_b »

The_Goonies1985 wrote: post #44
Morpheus_Matrix wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Thanks Morpheus_Matrix. I'll take a look at Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B for offline C. I appreciate your guidance. By extraordinary coincidence, I was just a moment ago part-of-the-way through re-watching The Matrix (1999) and paused it to check Hacker News . There your reply greeted me. Wild glitch!

There is also a successor to that: Qwen3-Coder-Next, which is a newer and bigger model, but it obviously requires more hardware resources, being an 80B model.

However it is likely to be the most powerful open weights coding assistant that you can run locally, without having to worry about token price or reaching the subscription limits in the most inconvenient moment.

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