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$85,000 in tokens later: What I learned from scaling agentic coding at Lovable

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Re: $85,000 in tokens later: What I learned from scaling agentic coding at Lovable

#41

Post by simianwords »

wonnage wrote: post #32
jdjdkrjdjjdj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look my point here is not to troll. My point here is to make you think. I learnt assembly and I never want to do it again, I learnt to code in many languages (compiled and interpreted) and you know what, there has not been an issue i found that required me to dig into the assembly of a compiled language (there are edge cases if there was a compiler bug, but I have not seen them myself). Now the change from assembly t…

You created a throwaway to “not troll” and post the same three tired tropes every tokenmaxxing vibe coder trots out

They are right though. The entire history of human civilisation involves a thing called “specialisation”. The primary reason we were able to prosper as humans is because we all dont have to know how to procure our food. Did humanity lose the skills for making food as people specialised? No.

same thing with memory management - as Java became popular, should the concern have been towards losing skills on memory management? That’s stupid. LLMs don’t allow you (yet) to not understand the code completely. But it allows you to understand less and less directionality. We are getting there. I don’t read all code anymore, just high level design.

This kind of performative concern over skill atrophy is annoying.

Re: $85,000 in tokens later: What I learned from scaling agentic coding at Lovable

#42

Post by realusername »

nylonstrung wrote: post #28
willtemperley wrote: post #8

Instead of employing an engineer for a year we burned an obscene amount of resources to generate code which will enable vibe coders to burn more resources. But we’re lovable! Cute smile. Heart emoji.

50M projects built on Lovable and somehow I've never seen any of them

Because these things do not scale beyond a landing page, it's the modern Frontpage

Re: $85,000 in tokens later: What I learned from scaling agentic coding at Lovable

#43

Post by simianwords »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #36
jdjdkrjdjjdj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look my point here is not to troll. My point here is to make you think. I learnt assembly and I never want to do it again, I learnt to code in many languages (compiled and interpreted) and you know what, there has not been an issue i found that required me to dig into the assembly of a compiled language (there are edge cases if there was a compiler bug, but I have not seen them myself). Now the change from assembly t…

- to answer your question, i did not start with assembly - i started in 2010s with c++ directly but I did go back and learn how to do 8086 opcodes and while i am not good at it, i am still learning it slowly - mundane stuff? algorithms, business logic, critical thinking, architectural understanding is being outsourced to LLMs at an unprecedented rate and there is nothing mundane about any of this - you can sit and ta…

Very respectfully this all sounds incoherent. You have also untastefully mixed in some concern over frontier labs having too much power - this is orthogonal to the discussion.

Your reckoning for when we will look back to this time and regret using LLMs won’t happen, as much as you crave for it.

- Here’s what will happen: agents allow you to understand less and less of the code (directionally) and allow you to focus on high level design.

- this won’t make it such that no one will look at code, just like some still look at assembly

- LLMs won’t allow you to never look at code (yet) but it pushes you in such a way that you may need to read less and less of your code

Also the fact that you have written about how writing code from requirements is an art. This is just not gonna be true anymore with LLMs. Very few in enterprise is writing artful code - they are getting stuff done. The art part is understanding the requirements and high level design. If you’ve ever worked in enterprise, there’s always a few people who nitpick on code reviews to artify code - these sorts eventually learn and forget this tic.

Re: $85,000 in tokens later: What I learned from scaling agentic coding at Lovable

#44

Post by simianwords »

discreteevent wrote: post #40
jdjdkrjdjjdj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look my point here is not to troll. My point here is to make you think. I learnt assembly and I never want to do it again, I learnt to code in many languages (compiled and interpreted) and you know what, there has not been an issue i found that required me to dig into the assembly of a compiled language (there are edge cases if there was a compiler bug, but I have not seen them myself). Now the change from assembly t…

> there has not been an issue i found that required me to dig into the assembly of a compiled language (there are edge cases if there was a compiler bug, but I have not seen them myself). The compiler did exactly what you said because the programming language forced you to be exact. There was no room for misunderstanding. This will never be the case with an LLM even if it becomes infallible (it won't). It's you who i…

Eh this is also not true. Non determinism doesn’t disqualify something from being useful and necessary. If you are a manager, you employ people (who are non deterministic) to get stuff done.

In fact entirety of humanity has been delegating work to non deterministic specialists. Like how I delegate making food to non deterministic supply chains and capitalism. No one complains about skill atrophy here I’m sure.

“But humans can learn..” well sure agents can learn too, adapt the markdown files.

“But humans are accountable..” distinction without a difference

Re: $85,000 in tokens later: What I learned from scaling agentic coding at Lovable

#45

Post by simianwords »

customguy wrote: post #38
jdjdkrjdjjdj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Apples and oranges, since there is not determinism. That this argument gets trotted out so often is part of the dumbing down IMO.

Non determinism doesn’t discount something from still being useful. Companies outsource projects to consultancies all the time. Imagine you wanted to rebrand your logo - you hire a freelance guy to make it. He’s non deterministic. Does this stop you from hiring him? Why or why not?

Re: $85,000 in tokens later: What I learned from scaling agentic coding at Lovable

#46

Post by discreteevent »

simianwords wrote: post #44
discreteevent wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there has not been an issue i found that required me to dig into the assembly of a compiled language (there are edge cases if there was a compiler bug, but I have not seen them myself). The compiler did exactly what you said because the programming language forced you to be exact. There was no room for misunderstanding. This will never be the case with an LLM even if it becomes infallible (it won't). It's you who i…

Eh this is also not true. Non determinism doesn’t disqualify something from being useful and necessary. If you are a manager, you employ people (who are non deterministic) to get stuff done. In fact entirety of humanity has been delegating work to non deterministic specialists. Like how I delegate making food to non deterministic supply chains and capitalism. No one complains about skill atrophy here I’m sure. “But h…

My argument was not that LLMs aren't useful but that a compiler is a completely misleading anamlogy.

You compared them to humans. Humans live in the world, have a world model, meet people for lunch and exchange ideas. Agents read markdown files and code.

Simanwords, you spend a lot of time on HN promoting LLMs and being dismissive of humans in comparison. I have to ask:

Whose side are you on?

Re: $85,000 in tokens later: What I learned from scaling agentic coding at Lovable

#47

Post by customguy »

simianwords wrote: post #45
customguy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples and oranges, since there is not determinism. That this argument gets trotted out so often is part of the dumbing down IMO.

Non determinism doesn’t discount something from still being useful. Companies outsource projects to consultancies all the time. Imagine you wanted to rebrand your logo - you hire a freelance guy to make it. He’s non deterministic. Does this stop you from hiring him? Why or why not?

Would you call him or her "the next step in the evolution of the brush" or something like that? Would you call an assistant who reads from books to or for you the "next level of literacy"? Does objecting to such statements -- because they're false and insulting the intelligence of the reader on the surface, and outright sinister in their long term implications -- mean I am "anti" either of these or other things?

No x3. It also doesn't mean that I think if you have taste, even maybe some artistic skill, you will instantly lose it all when you hire that one person for that one logo, and so on. It just means what it says, that this comparison is nonsense. I don't have to justify myself for recognizing that, it should be the other way around if anything.

Re: $85,000 in tokens later: What I learned from scaling agentic coding at Lovable

#48

Post by TiredOfLife »

customguy wrote: post #38
jdjdkrjdjjdj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Apples and oranges, since there is not determinism. That this argument gets trotted out so often is part of the dumbing down IMO.

FreeBSD took some 30 years to get deterministic builds
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