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Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

danielvaughn.dev

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Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#131

Post by pixelatedindex »

reticulates wrote: post #80
darthcircuit wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree that there is no thinking. I think a strong understanding of the fundamentals of coding are still wildly important to get good quality code, and a big part of that is thinking or reasoning through a particular problem. It’s just now we have a way of using common language in order for that to happen instead of having to learn or keep up with every new tool and framework in order to do so. The new prog…

I don’t mean to imply that making things with these tools is lesser, or that it doesn’t require some skill, but it is fundamentally different to programming. I’m glad you’re able to bring new things to life with these tools, that’s a great thing :) My broader philosophical take is that we, programmers, lived through a golden age where our skills used on our terms were some of the most valuable skills. The golden age…

I sympathize with this take but I think it’s conflating programming as a hobby vs code needed to run a business.

I always believed that programming was solving problems and building things. With AI, you can still solve problems - the better your questions/ prompts the faster you get to your answer. To ask those questions you need to probably have that meditative thinking to grasp the crux of what you’re trying to solve.

On the business side, paying a programmer for their meditative time would be the first line item to cut, when you can bark orders at an idiot savant instead.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#133

Post by danielvaughn »

rpastuszak wrote: post #34

What I find interesting about this + a random bucket of associations because I’ve fallen under the spell of Satan’s Lettuce: Just a few days ago someone was talking about a machine - human patois. This (your project) sits somewhere between Lean and BDD cucumber syntax. At the same time Claude spits out phrases like “a container paying the price of -42px”. Recently I was listening to a lecture about metaphor in poetry…

Appreciate the new word in my lexicon - had to google "patois", and I love thinking about this as a way towards code "dialects." Even the example I gave sits somewhere between python and, idk, something else. In other examples I wrote, I found myself intermixing Rust and Lisp.

Also love the BDD reference - this is in fact an evolution of an earlier approach where I was trying to combine DDD event storming with Gherkin Rules. Very keen observation.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#134

Post by danielvaughn »

saejox wrote: post #63

this is a question whole software industry is trying to solve. "how can we make sense of the ai generated codebase" what you did is spec-driven development, instead of use-cases and requirements you have pseudo-code. spec-driven did not work in my case, likely yours suffer the same "issue of walls of text no one wants to read".

I also tried spec-driven development, and also found that it did not work. I don't want to read a wall of text, and they also fell out of parity with the code, so engineers ended up just having the LLM update the specs. But now the specs are not only a wall of text, they're LLM-generated and we have no idea whether they reflect the real intent.

This project maintains a mapping of each line of pseudocode to every line of real code it generates. It's also terse, because it's code, and in my initial tests I've found it dramatically easier to read than a big list of longform specs.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#135

Post by danielvaughn »

avaer wrote: post #36

I think the reverse direction is more important: taking a massive complex problem/codebase and decomposing it to short pseudocode. Then you could edit the pseudocode and compile it back into the system. That's the way software engineers working on large projects work anyway: you first gather context on the state of the system and read it at a level you can understand. Then you propose a change on the simplified repre…

Yeah I'm not opposed to bi-directionality, though right now there are a ton of projects attempting to do some variation on that theme. Extracting specs from code, producing short summaries, etc. I've tried a few ideas at the company I work for, and they never seem to pan out. At the end of the day, you need something that was simply written by human hands.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#138

Post by danielvaughn »

quasarj wrote: post #24

I'm confused, it looks like you've just written a new terse language that now costs money to compile?

Yes exactly. Except now, the language has zero constraints. It can be a perfect distillation of your intentions.

You might think, well code is perfect. But code is syntactically perfect, because it has to be. Because compilers can handle very little ambiguity. But that doesn't mean it's a perfect representation of your thoughts. A huge part of language design is for the compiler, not for the author.

And I'm not 100% sure of this, but I'm fairly confident that this approach would be far more token efficient than the way we currently use AI for programming.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#139

Post by danielvaughn »

markiannucci wrote: post #51
danielvaughn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a dumb question - you can totally do this. I was doing this for a while. Before Claude Code really took off, this was my primary way to use Cursor. I'd write some pseudocode, highlight it, and just write to the AI "make it real". Works like a charm. The issue is that with very large or complex codebases, you tend to forget what was AI generated and what was written by a human. And it's also extremely tedious and…

I think there's a lot to like about this approach, especially persisting my intent. I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out when it comes time to debug. At that time, someone else may be reading my pseudo code and implicitly assuming that the code was translated correctly. If the code wasn't translated correctly, wouldn't the human who naturally assumes it was miss the bug every time? Huzzah would be…

Yep one of the things a real version would need (this is just a proof of concept) is a kind of safeguarding and error handling. You could easily write code that the LLM couldn't feasibly implement, and it would need some way to mitigate that with you.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#140

Post by danielvaughn »

piterrro wrote: post #73

You could write that pseudocode as a prompt for the agent and get the same result. Use plan mode to understand what agent wants to do. Am i missing anything?

the difference is that you lose the prompt, and even if you kept the prompt around, there's no built-in mechanism that ties your prompt to the exact code that it produced. with this editor, that's all automated for you.
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