Nice
Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
111–120 of 156 posts
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#112I always enjoy these "domain expert has fun using AI to do something in their domain" articles. But it's always a hobby project, never something serious.
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Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#113Building 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…
Regarding the changes to your grading weights: https://acbart.github.io/2026/04/19/proctored-grades/ Sounds like 50/50 for the distribution? That means you are okay with a student getting a 40% across all your quizzes and then passing the class with a C-?
What an odd bit to latch onto. What ratio would you find more appropriate?
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#114Earlier 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
This may have been true six months ago, but I doubt it holds water today.
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#115Terry Tao using coding agents feels like watching a Michelin-starred chef discover microwave dinners and get genuinely excited about them.
I liked this article about an old recipe book and what cooking could have looked like if we took microwave cooking seriously: https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/my-journey-to-the-microwav...
Wow. That article totally sucked me in!
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#116Nice balanced perspective there at the end: "as such [LLM-coded interactive] supplements are not mission-critical to the core of the paper, I again feel that the downside risk of using guided interaction with LLM agents to generate such visualizations is acceptable." It's a tool. Good for some things but not others and generally not to be trusted.
I don't understand what trust means in this context. Even if I were able to hire Donald Knuth to write all my code, I wouldn't "trust" it to be bug-free, let alone to be the right fit for my needs.
It’s quite clear from the blog post that LLM was used for something that was:
- nice to have but clearly not important enough to invest time in
- definitely not worthwhile paying someone to do
- not going to hurt anything or anyone if it wasn’t implemented as close to what was envisioned.
If you read between the lines then trust may also mean privacy, if you’re furthering the goal of some company that may be stealing your data for training even when they say they are not because there are legal loopholes that allows them to get away with it, etc.
Your example of hiring Donald Knuth to write your code doesn’t fit into what’s being said about trust either. If you were never going to trust anyone to write your code, it doesn’t matter who it is anyway.
For most of us, even if we are engineers, chances are hiring someone legendarily good at writing code to requirement will produce far better results than what we knew we could achieve.
I would trust someone who is that good to write the code — more than myself — to do things I want to do it better than I can while being able to catch all the things that didn’t realize I needed.
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#117Earlier 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…
Personal software is the future and a person building software for themselves tends to withstand enshittifcation. That's why I love when people open-source projects they love and are passionate about and I will always choose them over proprietary ones. People always argue "well, Slack and Notion have distribution and the product isn't everything." Ok and? The person making it for themselves doesn't necessarily need d…
Basic economics still holds. There will be firms investing loads of time and money into specific, winning approaches and folks using custom builds will be competed away by them.
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, wha…
> Metamathematics, by Kleene, is programming in maths.
Ookay.
Back in the day i was confused by 'Linear programming', which is optimisation and has nothing to do with coding.
> every feature is ultimately filled in and the underlying beauty is obscured by a fractal of complexity required by the ever growing requirements.
Right. I would say Mathematics tries to unobscure (patterns in) nature. Engineering is creating tools, sometimes leveraging natural patterns. But yeah, Fourier or Laplace definitely created tools, too.
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#119Earlier 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
I've vibe coded multiple apps that I now use regularly throughout the day. I doubt I could sell them, but they are very useful to me.
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#120Using LLMs to generate dashboards is probably their most productive use case
I don't think it's dashboards specifically, I think it's things that require a relatively small amount of code that fits in the context window and is easy to iterate on using natural language.