131–140 of 321 posts
It seems to me that AI won the code Battle and that humans are just trying to justify the defeat. I will relax and wait for the Next AI generation to see how it fixed its problems. May be, everything will be ok.
I've seen so many of these already. It would be hilarious to see Brooks proving right once again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you gonna make? Yet another CRUD app? An API subscription? A game? A mobile app? We’ve created software for virtually every place we can put software. There’s nothing new. It’s like bridges. We’ve seen all the ways bridges can be built by now. There’s nothing new left to discover.
When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he could not have predicted the teleprompter. Now that code is easy to generate, it’s plausible that we will use much, much more of it than before. It’s also a bit ironic to imagine that we’re at the end of new software ideas on a site owned(?) by YC.
Personally, I think we've already reached that point.
Even at YC, I have not really seen any startup doing anything interesting where their main value prop is enabled by new proprietary code that does stuff no one else can already do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly. I'm as hateful of LLMs hollowing out the job market as the next guy, but the reality is the frontier LLMs are really good at writing anything that's been done and documented on the Internet a million times and unfortunately most of what software devs have been doing the last couple decades is shitting out…
Claude is perfectly capable of writing assembly. Here's a working (basic) Prolog interpreter that Claude Fable 5 wrote in WebAssembly in 61 minutes for $16.75 in token costs: https://github.com/emk/fable-wasm-prolog/blob/main/prolog.wa... WebAssembly is slightly easier than real assembly, but here Fable used WASM GC extensions, which are poorly documented and not yet super common. Fable didn't even need to debug it;…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That quote is the lead in to an example I talk about after this quote illustrates what I often see. > Agents bias to making the current change as safely as possible. I had a situation in a previous codebase where one morning, pre-caffeinated, my meat brain mentioned using browser local storage. So some random state was managed in local storage. Everything else through a backend database. When I looked at the code, th…
Right, but this just seems like underspecification. In my experience as both a team leader and an "agentic engineer" (ugh), I try to blame myself for the lack of clarity of my asks, rather than the person/agent for making the "wrong" choice. I'm sure plenty of meat humans out there would make the same mistake (sorry, you said to use local storage boss!). You might give them a scolding. And maybe document that policy.…
I noticed this phenomenon way before LLMs came along. Some people would put a halo around a particular technology and blame everything around it when something went wrong.
I always hated writing code but loved debugging. LLM super charges systems thinkers & auditors, it’s just a different process and no different than copy and paste from stack overflow. It all comes down to the architecture design and LLM just exposes how bad people are at designing dynamic architectures.
> and no different than copy and paste from stack overflow This isn't really the point of your comment, and for that I apologise, but: not all of us did that. For many good reasons, too.
In my personal life, I cannot justify more than a $20 sub per month. I only use the Web Chat anyway. Shelling out $100-$200 a month for a sub in which I would get little to no ROI is a poor choice. Besides, I've never hit the limit on my $20 a month plan either.
The day I am forced to prompt LLMs all day, every day is the day I am cashing out of programming as a career. Though to be clear, I have no opposition towards anyone that uses LLMs, and think they are fantastic tools when used appropriately. (I love them as a StackOverflow replacement, and have learned a lot from going back and forth with LLMs).
Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. I do know people, and companies, that says: "So what, we ask Claude to write the code, Codex will then do the review". The thing that then strikes me as odd is that they still ask for the code in Python, Java, or some other high level language.... Why? Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don…
There's more to it than that: writing is thinking. If you stop writing code, you aren't thinking anymore.
Many argue that they're now thinking at a higher level (maybe they weren't before?), but, guess what, that high-level design can be done better by the LLM than by you anyway. It's only temporary.
Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. I do know people, and companies, that says: "So what, we ask Claude to write the code, Codex will then do the review". The thing that then strikes me as odd is that they still ask for the code in Python, Java, or some other high level language.... Why? Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don…
> Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. There's more to it than that: writing is thinking. If you stop writing code, you aren't thinking anymore. Many argue that they're now thinking at a higher level (maybe they weren't before?), but, guess what, that high-level design can be done better by the LLM than by you anyway. It's only temporary.
Humans have been thinking long before writing was invented. Why is code special?
At this point I haven't looked at code for many months. Before that, I spent 4 years hand coding a Google Docs competitor in JS without any libraries. My brain feels equally as exercised (in fact more so as I am not as good at agentic coding as I was at real coding) But now I'm making highly polished Mac OS apps and I really like that move from JS. I feel... conflicted.
Do you like to look at code? I’m finding it’s really just a personal preference. And honestly not worth getting worked up about either way.
So, making a real time collaborative tool from scratch there was a lot of deep work in things like sockets, queues, memory structures, etc. That's just what needed attention.
Right now I'm building a memory app for AI.
So far I haven't spent much time looking at code on the swift side of things. But I have spent a lot of time up front working on domain driven design, screaming architecture, and module based design.
I think with AI the polish is in deep QA, design taste, running trace logs and constantly asking it to do html diagrams of the architecture and such.
ngl I miss "knowing what's going on" at the code level, but it feels like not a good use of my time to go into those weeds.
When I look at the code it seems well structured due to screaming architecture, and module based design.
Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. I do know people, and companies, that says: "So what, we ask Claude to write the code, Codex will then do the review". The thing that then strikes me as odd is that they still ask for the code in Python, Java, or some other high level language.... Why? Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don…
No defense for not writing or reading code if want to call yourself a software engineer or programmer. However I do think there is reason to use Java or Python (as much as I loathe both) they have GC, and it'd be a lot easier for AI to fuck up memory safety in something like assembly or C.
One has to program computers to be a computer programmer. If one just prompts LLMs, they are a software prompter. I think both can fit under the title of a software developer or perhaps even software engineer.