Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state s…
> Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess. That is how compiler-generated assembly looks to humans, as well. Human-produced is typically much more readable. Yet, here we are. Most programmers only know the very basics of assembly programming, but the world keeps spinning just fine.
Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
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Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know they were even trying in the first place? Have you analyzed the prompt they used?
How do you know they weren't? Have you analyzed the prompt they used? There's no shortage of examples of unmaintainable spaghetti AI code, Claude Code is just one of many. If you have examples of good codebases maintained by "prompting experts", I'd love to see them.
Recent notable examples would be the Linux kernel or cURL.
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#43Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state s…
Yes but it’s far better than anything anyone, let alone a small child, could make in 15 minutes On the other hand an engineer might take a couple hours and build this in a clean way with the right prompting These “got ‘em” ai criticism comments are getting so old
The fact that this is possible and works at all is mind blowing - even more mind blowing is that my 8 yo is growing up in a world where they can talk to a machine to produce a custom application in seconds and they don’t realise how mind blowing it is!
In terms of the code, it would take even less time than that to tidy it up. For this application you wouldn’t bother. That’s almost a form of “premature optimisation” unless you’re actually planning on doing more work on it.
My hunch is that what the world is about to see a lot of is much bigger bits of work, or changes to other bigger existing systems done by people without the skills to know how to contain the complexity. That’s going to come with a burden.
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess. That is how compiler-generated assembly looks to humans, as well. Human-produced is typically much more readable. Yet, here we are. Most programmers only know the very basics of assembly programming, but the world keeps spinning just fine.
Comparing LLM output to compiler output is such a stale meme by now that it's surprising to see people still saying it. Obviously a deterministic translation of a higher level programming language to machine code is different than the slop cannon.
2. Compilers and building tool chains change all the time. CI and automated testing catch any regressions. Tye same can be done with LLMs.
3. LLM code generation, with some work, can be made deterministic, if that mattered to somebody.
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#45Had this song in my head, wrote some lyrics, hummed it into Suno, generated the song. I love listening to it. What a world. I make little tools like that all the time. My GitHub is filled with these little things I write or gen once never to be used again. Some of them I use daily (GitHub.com/dexterlagan). Since LLMs became decent I make even more of these. The more we move forward, the more people make things for th…
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#46Had this song in my head, wrote some lyrics, hummed it into Suno, generated the song. I love listening to it. What a world. I make little tools like that all the time. My GitHub is filled with these little things I write or gen once never to be used again. Some of them I use daily (GitHub.com/dexterlagan). Since LLMs became decent I make even more of these. The more we move forward, the more people make things for th…
[flagged]
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Edit: as your most recent comments have all been breaking the site guidelines in a similar way, I've banned this account. It's not ok to do that here.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#47Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state s…
> A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".
nah, it reflects on how applications built by humans usually do become spaghetti messes with all the resulting brittleness and unintended negative side effects of changes that result
but it probably doesn't matter for a little toy piano app
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#48Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state s…
> A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".
Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#49Re: Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
#50Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state s…
> A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".
I have noticed this with co-workers also, when you have the ability to read/write/understand things very quickly, you tend to spend much less time on making things tidy, clear and maintainable.