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AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

weeraman.com

21–30 of 317 posts

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#21

When you have built your working product try this prompt: - Review the codebase is it production ready? I'm selling it for $1million dollars can it meet that standard. Then cry as the ai reveals that it didn't actually do anything close to what it said it did. I call this my million dollar prompt, as in it teaches you just how much you are being fooled.

> Then cry as the ai reveals that it didn't actually do anything close to what it said it did.

If using AI to generate code, you told it generate some code, so it did. No amount of "You are an expert developer" or "Make no mistakes" will change the fact that it just generates tokens and has a limited thinking budget.

Adversarial review loops of N parallel agents looking at whatever characteristics you care about will make it better, even if it will Nx the tokens you need to achieve something, though in general it will be cheaper than N human reviewers (which you might not have).

Obviously you shouldn't forget about traditional tooling for formatting and linting, as well as static code analysis and having test coverage that approaches 100%. It might be annoying to do manually, but AI has no issues with refactoring code to make it more testable and eventually will catch some issues that way. It's never going to be perfect in the 1st attempt.

> Review the codebase is it production ready? I'm selling it for $1million dollars can it meet that standard.

This is far too vague though and will never be good, even sans AI. When it comes to AI, it will nitpick the fuck out of the codebase if you ask it to do and sometimes jump around between different approaches because neither is actually a good fit for the problem space (there might not be a good fit at all, just various tradeoffs). If you still ask it to find issues and there's nothing obvious, it will just make shit up in pursuit of being useful (RLHF).

When it comes to people, you will get various standards, from "It looks like Java, ship it" to "You should rework a quarter of your codebase because I read about this one approach in an authoritatively written book that you should also follow because I view it as dogma and will hold back your merge until it all works exactly like I want it to." (you get all sorts of people and personalities).

In my experience other people are no panacea either, nor is writing code all by myself. Fuck it, I'll take anything and everything to help me ship stuff that's good enough and on time (even if some/most? deadlines within the industry are made up). I'd argue that producing something that would pass most critique and could be considered "good code" (not "good enough") or even more broadly a "good product" might take about an order of magnitude more effort than most people and organizations actually can, or can budget for.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#22

The litmus test is this: do you enjoy consuming AI-generated stuff? I don’t. Whether it’s written text, or video, audio, restaurant menus, clothing pictures, documentation, airport control, ads… I do think there’s value in LLMs but as a sort of better search engines and q/a machines.

To be fair. I hate slop as much as any other person. But for me the issue is poor quality rather than just the fact that it's ai.

I love good ai stuff even if it's obvious it's ai

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#24
The test is simple: have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months?

The only great new product I’ve used is my LLM of choice, and those labs seem to be hiring more humans than ever.

Maybe it’s true that Claude only just got good enough and that 12 months from now our day to day lives will be way better thanks to LLM-driven product improvements/breakthroughs.

My bet is that 12 months from now we will still have no great improvements and the claim will be “LLMs only got good enough in Feb 2027 so you can’t judge anything yet!”

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#25

When you have built your working product try this prompt: - Review the codebase is it production ready? I'm selling it for $1million dollars can it meet that standard. Then cry as the ai reveals that it didn't actually do anything close to what it said it did. I call this my million dollar prompt, as in it teaches you just how much you are being fooled.

Then ask it to fix it. When “fixed”, ask the same question again and you’ll get a similar response again!

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#26
post #22

The litmus test is this: do you enjoy consuming AI-generated stuff? I don’t. Whether it’s written text, or video, audio, restaurant menus, clothing pictures, documentation, airport control, ads… I do think there’s value in LLMs but as a sort of better search engines and q/a machines.

To be fair. I hate slop as much as any other person. But for me the issue is poor quality rather than just the fact that it's ai. I love good ai stuff even if it's obvious it's ai

The problem becomes how to sift through it all to see what is and isn’t good. It was already hard enough with human generated crap to avoid wasting time on the pseudoscience, fabricated data, clickbait/ragebait, and product placement.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#27

The litmus test is this: do you enjoy consuming AI-generated stuff? I don’t. Whether it’s written text, or video, audio, restaurant menus, clothing pictures, documentation, airport control, ads… I do think there’s value in LLMs but as a sort of better search engines and q/a machines.

You enjoy good AI all the time you just don’t know it.

Nobody enjoys bad 1-shot AI.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#28

When you have built your working product try this prompt: - Review the codebase is it production ready? I'm selling it for $1million dollars can it meet that standard. Then cry as the ai reveals that it didn't actually do anything close to what it said it did. I call this my million dollar prompt, as in it teaches you just how much you are being fooled.

Popped over to HackerNews, read two comment sections and the top comments in both articles were users saying the same thing: "AI can't write code! The whole thing will come crumbling down any minute! Just you wait!"

I've never seen this community like this. Are these people cooked? We are years into this and they haven't been able to figure it out? They are going to continue to tell people using these tools successfully every day that, actually, it's just a mirage?

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#29

There's going to be plenty of work helping other companies make some sense of their vibe coded efforts. The value of individual projects might decrease, but there will be a lot more of them. And without help they won't actually work out all that well. I talked to a company that does not employ software engineers that were doing some things with Claude Code a few weeks ago. Insightful comment: I want that person to do…

> Insightful comment: I want that person to do what I hired them to do, not mess around with code.

What does that mean? Who is that person who should not mess with the code?

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#30

When you have built your working product try this prompt: - Review the codebase is it production ready? I'm selling it for $1million dollars can it meet that standard. Then cry as the ai reveals that it didn't actually do anything close to what it said it did. I call this my million dollar prompt, as in it teaches you just how much you are being fooled.

Popped over to HackerNews, read two comment sections and the top comments in both articles were users saying the same thing: "AI can't write code! The whole thing will come crumbling down any minute! Just you wait!" I've never seen this community like this. Are these people cooked? We are years into this and they haven't been able to figure it out? They are going to continue to tell people using these tools successfu…

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