141–150 of 234 posts
It took you 8 months to burn out from churning SaaS slop? My mind was cooked in 3 weeks trying to six neglected ideas at once
It took you 8 months to burn out from churning SaaS slop? My mind was cooked in 3 weeks trying to six neglected ideas at once
I was pretty tired a month in, but this new way of coding felt so much fun that I was along for the ride. But now it's really starting to weigh me down and I feel like I need something new.
I had this issue before AI too. Staring at code I wrote, wondering what the hell I was thinking...
I'd often start a project or file with a big pseudocode comment block at the top. But I'd rarely keep it! After reading your post, I'm thinking that may have been a mistake...
Very cool project.
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…
The results were disgusting: the spec would encode all sorts of irrelevant implementation details, and then the new version would reimplement them faithfully, and be 3x more bloated than the original. The exact opposite of what I was going for!
I didn't put much effort into it, maybe it was solvable with prompting (or more likely, more human effort on the spec phase), but it looks like the LLM has the same problem as the human, it can't know what the intention was, and it can't know what's relevant, what's essential and incidental.
But basically, what I needed wasn't a spec but user stories. (And probably multiple prototype outputs to choose from...)
I should definitely give it another crack though...
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P.S., Spoiler for next ten years: software as biology (esp. crossbreeding, mutation, selection pressure...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sol…
The coding really is such a small part of that process.
I agree, but I just log all user messages in a chat_log.md and review them regularly with an agent to detect deviation from user intent.
I find it bonkers most coding harnesses simply discard one of the most valuable streams of information, those user messages can also identify harness weaknesses and project issues by reflection.
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…
Exactly, it is a skill, and it is different from programming, but in the age of cars why train to outrun them on foot? train to drive the car.
Using AI for hours and hours every day has got to leave a new skill set in the human users. It's hard to sit there and steer every minute, just the volume of verbiage and speed of change is amazing. That time and effort spent into AI steering is your new training.
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%…
Helps me think about the problem, like your post mentioned, but I don't have to pay a tax on converting a prototyping language to a different language.