Earlier quoted context omitted.
> two orders of magnitude more productive Shipping 100x more features per day?
Yes.
Do you have specifics? It would be interesting to see what kind of improvements are possible.
The Tower Keeps Rising
101–110 of 280 posts
Re: The Tower Keeps Rising
#102I'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?
What problem would it solve? They're still part of a larger system ultimately. Sure, smaller codebases with more focused scope can be good for e.g. human individuals and LLMs, but there's multiple ways to achieve that that don't require a network boundary.
Re: The Tower Keeps Rising
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> two orders of magnitude more productive Shipping 100x more features per day?
100x faster towards becoming an email client
Re: The Tower Keeps Rising
#104> But it’s not the biblical story. At Babel, the loss of common language stops construction whereas in AI-assisted engineering, construction can continue after shared understanding has already collapsed. The lack of an immediate failure is what makes it curious and a bit disorienting. The tower does not fall, and so we do not notice what was lost. It just keeps rising. I don't know whether the author thinks this is a…
> Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit
Intelligence is learning to avoid using childish cliches, unless your intention was to mislead. Categorisation and understanding dependencies are hard enough problems already.
At the supermarket or taxation (Nix v. Hedden) tomatoes are a vegetable.
Re: The Tower Keeps Rising
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes.
Do you have specifics? It would be interesting to see what kind of improvements are possible.
I just see in my usage that I can release tens of features a day, whereas I'd be able to release one or two a day usually. I don't know if it's 100x, but it's definitely more than 10x.
I've written up my process here:
https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/
The biggest thing to get right is to let the LLMs do what they're great at (code implementation from very detailed specs, and code review), and you do what humans are great (architecture and making sure the high level of the implementation is sane). That way, you get the best of both worlds, and a lot of speed at high quality.
Re: The Tower Keeps Rising
#106I'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…
The upper bound on program complexity used to be the power of the human mind. "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions. It's the AI-powered version of the scaling problem Brooks described back in "The Mythical Man-Month". The combinatoric problems get worse with scale. Concretely…
> The upper bound on program complexity used to be the power of the human mind.
Maybe for simple one-person projects. We've long since developed methods and models to allow us to make things bigger than ourselves. Linux, SAP, etc. These software projects are not held in the mind of a single developer. But we use structure, rules, and other tools so that the pieces still fit together.
Re: The Tower Keeps Rising
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions. It's the infinite AI monkeys at a computer keyboard phenomenon. Or the car on the highway that bumps left and right on the guardrails until, eventually, it arrives at its destination and nearly everybody is amazed at that great success.…
It's perhaps how some humans code but frankly if you have those people employed to build software for you, you have big problems
That's some idealistic nostalgia. Software is generally poorly built today, and it's evidently not big enough a problem to fix.
Re: The Tower Keeps Rising
#108> The shared language of a software project is not English or Python but it is the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are, which invariants matter, who owns what, and why the system has the shape it does. This language is rarely written down in one place. It lives partly in documentation and code, but also in code review, conversations, arguments, and the experience of having to expl…
Would be interesting to see an example. I heard a couple times that code maturance is very similar on how a city grows naturally, but never seen an example.
Re: The Tower Keeps Rising
#109I'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…
I think part of the problem is the context windows for humans are actually much smaller than what an LLM can keep track of today. The small context window of humans is a feature that forces modularity and abstraction in software engineering so that you can decompose what you're working on into something that can fit into your head. But since LLMs can fit so much more in their head, so to speak, they don't have this same incentive, and you get the unorganized mess of spaghetti code that current agents often produce.
Re: The Tower Keeps Rising
#110I'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…
I have a theory (armchair take here lmao) that AIs are trained on public code, but the biggest codebases are not public. Although I suspect models from Google, Facebook and Microsoft can be trained on their massive internal codebases. Whether they are is another question.
I’m not sure you’d see that big of a difference in quality. There is quite a bit of cruft that can accumulate when you know the code will never be public.
But, you would probably see a difference of scale and architecture. Larger projects that need better organization are probably more likely to be in private codebases (Linux excluded). So you might be right about the lack of private code in LLM being an issue.