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Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

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101–110 of 156 posts

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#101
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here you go, Michelin-starred chef: > Marco Pierre White passionately defends chefs using microwaves. White dubbed microwaves “sensational things” and revealed he thinks they’re far better at preparing kippers than any other technique, like boiling or grilling https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/marco-pierre-white-... And another one: > José Andrés, a renowned Michelin-starred chef, New York Times bestselling au…

The comment specifically said "microwave dinners." That's frozen meals you just heat up in the microwave.

A microwave omelet is almost the same way, especially to a chef, many of which are very pretentious about their eggs.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#103
post #21

I am far from a mathematician but I am excited by the possibilities of using AI for generating more math. Math in my mind exists purely in the world of forms, and cannot be appropriated for profit, but is downstream to everything else. I am keen to see what this enables.

I have never seen a profitable enterprise that doesn’t have a core of people good at math defending the maximum money behavior. A lot more people graduate with math degrees than can get jobs in research maths, but finance, operations research, insurance companies, logistics, all can hire a lot of them. As a software engineer with a math degree, I find that some of software is like math, but not very often like research math and relatively few of my colleagues have math degrees.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#104

Building visualizations with LLMs has been a major boost for my CS classes: https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/#demos-visualiza... Many visualizations that I have always wanted but just didn't have the time to build, I now have. To give an example, I wanted a simplified 8-bit computer to complement the 16-bit teaching computer I use and designed this in a few days with the help of claude: https://bdp.cs.mont…

Using LLMs to build out the nice-to-haves that I’ve always wanted but never had time for is one of their great use cases. Visualizations are a perfect use case for this because they don’t have to be perfectly architected, maintainable code. Getting to the correct visual output is good enough, and LLMs excel at iterating something until it looks right.

What format do you have it build? PNG? Svg? Open document drawing? I am interested.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#105
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very humbling thought, thank you.

The humbling thought should be all the blue collar workers on r/vibecoding demoing their apps and games. And then realizing they put together something that would have taken you a few days to do. The supply of software is about to go way up, and that's going to massively impact demand unless every firm on earth is clamoring for more. We're going to see if Jevons paradox holds true, or if wages get impacted drasticall…

The supply of software has already gone up, and most of the new stuff is close to useless

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#106
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematicians are a kind of programmers, the original ones.

Why are mathematicians a kind of programmers? Besides applied maths, aren't they more researchers that explore and discover, in contrast to the majority of programmers who are more like handymen?

Metamathematics, by Kleene, is programming in maths. Theoretical computer science is maths. A lot of foundations work is programming. Coding itself is like an extended problem set from a maths class. LaTeX itself is programming.

The difference to me is one of directionality - maths research is seeing a far off island and getting there by hook or by crook; bridge, draining the swamp, inventing an airplane or boat, whatever it takes. Software engineering is like covering a plain with tiles - every feature is ultimately filled in and the underlying beauty is obscured by a fractal of complexity required by the ever growing requirements.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#107
This post inspired me to have Claude port my 30 year old high school German Java applet game to Javascript, complete with a faked git history:

https://github.com/bradfitz/koffer#der-verloren-koffe

Play online at https://bradfitz.github.io/koffer/js/

So neat seeing ~30 year old code come back alive.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are so confident that this just-a-tool will hit its limits any day now...

People are so confident that this not-just-a-tool will show signs of ASI/AGI any day now...

I thought the narrative a few months ago was that we had AGI[1]? What happened? It's not like these trillion dollar companies would have an interest in using AGI to hype up their technologies that they would need to replace a percentage of the global workforce over the next few years to justify their current valuations?

/s

[1]https://sequoiacap.com/article/2026-this-is-agi/

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#109
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The humbling thought should be all the blue collar workers on r/vibecoding demoing their apps and games. And then realizing they put together something that would have taken you a few days to do. The supply of software is about to go way up, and that's going to massively impact demand unless every firm on earth is clamoring for more. We're going to see if Jevons paradox holds true, or if wages get impacted drasticall…

The supply of software has already gone up, and most of the new stuff is close to useless

In my very small business, the supply of software has gone up (I'm building things), and they're custom to my business--so highly useful. Moreso than any off the shelf product could hope to be.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#110
I laughed at this "but the code complexity became too much for me, and I abandoned the project." even Terry Tao finds some code too complex to write.

Really bullish on LLMs expanding code development by a very large group of people who are really smart in some domain but could not get into 'coding'.

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