61–70 of 280 posts
1. Perhaps with a handful of skyscrapers sprinkled in.
I've said for a long time that composability in software is a bit like playing Tetris: the lines have to clear. I feel like that gives an even more literal tower-rising metaphor, and that's what it feels like people using agents naively (and software engineers of lower skill or earlier-career), end up violating. Agents are getting better at folding things into themselves, especially if you direct them to... but unfor…
Agreed, and ever since LLMs started being able to write competent code, I've noticed a massive difference in quality on codebases where I knew the technology, and ones I didn't. This is because I can much more efficiently steer the LLM on e.g. backend code, which is my expertise, vs yoloing everything on mobile, where I have no idea. The codebases using technologies I have no idea about tend to quickly become unmaint…
Shipping 100x more features per day?
I've said for a long time that composability in software is a bit like playing Tetris: the lines have to clear. I feel like that gives an even more literal tower-rising metaphor, and that's what it feels like people using agents naively (and software engineers of lower skill or earlier-career), end up violating. Agents are getting better at folding things into themselves, especially if you direct them to... but unfor…
Do you believe "micro services" can make a comeback? local daemons with an exposed API, each daemon vibe coded?
In other words, if you can’t design a modular monolith, you can’t design a set of microservices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I'll meet you in the middle: an LLM "understands" words in the same way a toddler understands the phrases they say. "My want cookie!" The toddler has zero comprehension of what any of those words mean, but they know that saying them in that order might result in something desirable. An LLM has zero understanding of "my", "want", or "cookie" because an LLM has no id/ego, has never felt desire, and has never eaten a co…
HN would commonly recommend reading the book Blindsight here.
Moreso, all you've done is recreate the Searle Chinese Room thought experiment which gets bounced around with no means of deciding if it reflects reality or not.
> There is the appealing idea that AI-assisted programming means better tools which lets us build more ambitious software. That is certainly true at the level of the individual and without doubt a developer with an agent will be dramatically more capable of changing a codebase. But large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people c…
I feel like with software, things have gotten way too complicated (just layer's upon layers upon layers). But to deal with that complexity, now we're using something that just creates WAY more complexity. I've been coding for a while, and I remember the 90s and early 00s where people could make pretty powerful applications with like visual basic or php with essentially no formal training. Those technologies weren't g…
Drowning in complexity. Paralysis of choice.
I read a comment (joke) that if you want to follow all LLM development you should have to be unemployed.
I've said for a long time that composability in software is a bit like playing Tetris: the lines have to clear. I feel like that gives an even more literal tower-rising metaphor, and that's what it feels like people using agents naively (and software engineers of lower skill or earlier-career), end up violating. Agents are getting better at folding things into themselves, especially if you direct them to... but unfor…
Sorry, the lines have to clear what? Surely there must be some kind of constraint on "lines" that they have to overcome.
My comment is not directly responding to the essay, but it got me thinking about about how agentic programming is much more akin to management than it is to actual programming. Managers generally only have a high level idea of what ICs are working on and often don't have the time, bandwidth, and in some cases ability to understand everything the ICs they're supervising are doing. As more and more software gets writte…
It feels to me like I'm stuck doing code reviews for a junior dev all day so I use it as little as possible and mostly to look for things I may have missed.
I finally learned to let go of the code. I dont even run my C++ editor anymore.
I run frequent code and architectural reviews. Its awesome.
The core thesis of this essay is reminiscent of the Lisp Curse [1] / Bipolar Lisp Programmer [2]. It's been a few years since I read these, but if I recall the argument there, it was that Lisp makes it so easy to build stuff and scratch exactly your own itch, that there's no real strong push for lisp programmers to come together and collaborate to build non-trivial and general purpose artifacts. And that is why the l…
It is not clear at all to me that other languages "demand much more effort" for the same end result.
It is clear that many non-lisp programmers value syntax, and many lisp programmers don't. Even many people who programmed enough lisp to have their minds blown and expanded still prefer not to program in lisp. I'm still awaiting psychological studies on this, but the rift is so large, I think there may be some significantly different brain processing going on between the two groups.
To your point, yes, it is also clear that, to the extent that lisp can match the productivity of other languages, whether it exceeds them or not, one of the tools that is needed to achieve this productivity boost in lisp is heavy usage of homoiconicity, and this results in every serious lisp program being a collection of DSLs, each of which is only understood by one person or very few people.
I've said for a long time that composability in software is a bit like playing Tetris: the lines have to clear. I feel like that gives an even more literal tower-rising metaphor, and that's what it feels like people using agents naively (and software engineers of lower skill or earlier-career), end up violating. Agents are getting better at folding things into themselves, especially if you direct them to... but unfor…
Do you believe "micro services" can make a comeback? local daemons with an exposed API, each daemon vibe coded?