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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

#211

Post by danielvaughn »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #111

There's a problem being missed here. You're trying to make a big complex thing from a little simple thing. It's like trying to take a hash and turn it back into the original data, without knowing what the original data looked like. You can get close, but things will be missed. So you'll edit, or provide more info to the AI outside your pseudocode, and maybe get to what you want. But another change will undo the fix y…

Yes, human imperfection is and will always be an issue. I think humans should get out of the loop for finite tasks, but the problem specifically with software creation is that it's inherently unbounded. You need a human somewhere to reign it in and ensure it's aligned with intent.

A good example of a finite task is like something we're working on at my company. We're building a multi-agent orchestration engine for large scale offensive network ops. Think like an Active Directory attack. This kind of thing is extremely complex, and involves lots of ambiguity and cross-referencing. You couldn't deterministically program a machine to do this attack, but you could definitely coordinate a bunch of agents to work together to do it. And you don't need a human in the loop outside of some lightweight scoping and gating procedures.

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

#212

Post by Chnmy »

It seems very close to Spec driven development. Here the spec is the pseudocode. I slightly disagree with people on the thought that we don't think when we do agent based development. Most of my Agent based development is me specifying a change(lose one line or full fledged PRD) and most of what agent based development solves for me is being thorough with the rest of the codebase.

Although I like your direction, i would hate to see this become yet another programming language.

Also if your pseudocode has a definitive structure, why not write an interpreter or compiler ? And not waste AI cost? Like how traditional BDD stack works gherkin and cucumber and the likes?

Direction, I love. Approach, we can always change. Peace

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

#213

Post by bah9 »

darthcircuit wrote: post #69
reticulates wrote: post #47

I think you’re probably missing why it’s exhausting. The problem is not writing English, it’s the rate of change. Programming is meditative, it is a thinking process, the code you output is an artifact of your thinking. Agent-based development… there is no thinking, no meditation, you’re delegating the thinking to a machine, you’re just barking what you want at it, incessantly, endlessly. For businesses it makes sens…

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…

"The new programming language is just in your native tongue." False. Engineering was about implementation, not about result. "How to get there"? Now "thinking" is to check that model actually understood what you want. We are much closer to product manager who's testing new product with his hands and giving feedback to engineers, rather than to engineers who's thinking "how we implement that"?

"but AI has opened up an entirely new world" - i hear this all the time exactly from "not a full time dev's". This is FOR SURE opened whole new world to people who didn't code and collapsed whole old world for people who loved to code.

Maybe it is just me, but creating simple CRUD application pre-llm required more cognitive ability from me than to "implement" whole CRM system with UI and multiple integrations right now. It is not hard, just tiring in a boring sense, like finding needle in a haystack

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

#214

Post by bah9 »

cma wrote: post #117
reticulates wrote: post #47

I think you’re probably missing why it’s exhausting. The problem is not writing English, it’s the rate of change. Programming is meditative, it is a thinking process, the code you output is an artifact of your thinking. Agent-based development… there is no thinking, no meditation, you’re delegating the thinking to a machine, you’re just barking what you want at it, incessantly, endlessly. For businesses it makes sens…

> Either be a programmer and code, or be a delegator and delegate Even if you just enjoy programming for the sake of programming, you can use it to review your code and then hand verify its findings, or prototype and explore feasibility of something you will in the end fully code yourself. For most people that enjoy programming there are still tasks they don't enjoy, like making a bunch of cross-language bindings for…

Nope. You can't. Expectations and deadlines aligned with code agent usage. No one let you spent x5 time coding things yourself

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

#215

Post by greenpizza13 »

tananan wrote: post #191

Preface: unpolished thoughts — it is refreshing to see so many people working on this issue! Lately I've been dreaming about a way of using LLMs that never (or in majority of the cases) results in chatting with an agent or checking its traces. Instead, you provide prompts in natural language, e.g. refactor these modules in this way ..., and the result is shown as a visual proposal (some kind of diff on a graph). Then…

Check out Plannotator. It’s not exactly visual, but instead of chats you just give something more like an inline code review. Highlight text, add emoji reactions, contextual comments. This is my preferred way of reveling AI plans. Now I’ve started using it to open planning sessions on existing files and annotating them instead of starting from a prompt, in some cases.

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

#216

Post by danielvaughn »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #198
vdombr wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm personally not happy with that. To manually test something, we have QA, to shape business requirements, we have a business analyst and a product owner. Now a developer needs to be a 3-in-1 person?

No, the AI takes care of everything but the final manual testing, mostly. It's improving on all aspects over time, too. It's not that much work.

For software within a certain complexity scope, this is true. Like the average SaaS CRUD experience that many web developers were building before AI - a lot of that can be handled almost entirely by agents, with very little human in the loop activity. But past a certain point of scale/complexity, this breaks down rapidly. In the past 8 months I've seen this occur several times, and if you only rely on agents to get you to that point, then you're in a heap of trouble when you do reach it, because it's very hard to backtrack.

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

#217

Post by nharziro »

bah9 wrote: post #213
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…

"The new programming language is just in your native tongue." False. Engineering was about implementation, not about result. "How to get there"? Now "thinking" is to check that model actually understood what you want. We are much closer to product manager who's testing new product with his hands and giving feedback to engineers, rather than to engineers who's thinking "how we implement that"? "but AI has opened up an…

When I read stuff like this people I feel like people haven't yet accepted reality. I think knowing how to write code made a lot of people feel very special. Like the could do something magical, and now feel like that's being taken a way from them. I've been writing code since I was a child and spent my entire career as a software engineer, so I understand where these people are coming from, but the reality is AI has changed this profession and this skill set forever. People need to deal with this and move. You can still do very special things with AI that a "normal" person cannot do, so focus your energy there.

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

#218

Post by jaakl »

sampullman wrote: post #195
lelanthran wrote: post #186

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 doesn't require some skills. People have posted showing their 7 year old turning out some game using AI; if your software requires the literacy of the average 7 year old to produce some target, trust me - it doesn't require skills.

It requires a different but somewhat overlapping set of skills, and the barrier to entry is much lower. It's neat that 7 year olds can make games, but they're probably not publishing polished and marketable products.

barrier to entry what? to entry having some (seemingly) working code has lowered. But barrier to enter software marketplace with that has not -- that may have been only increased due to the supply pressure. Having working code was always the easier part, but knowing what to write, and what to do with that later is not solved by whatever coding improvements.

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

#219

Post by sampullman »

jaakl wrote: post #218
sampullman wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It requires a different but somewhat overlapping set of skills, and the barrier to entry is much lower. It's neat that 7 year olds can make games, but they're probably not publishing polished and marketable products.

barrier to entry what? to entry having some (seemingly) working code has lowered. But barrier to enter software marketplace with that has not -- that may have been only increased due to the supply pressure. Having working code was always the easier part, but knowing what to write, and what to do with that later is not solved by whatever coding improvements.

That's exactly what I mean.

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

#220

Post by bah9 »

nharziro wrote: post #217
bah9 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The new programming language is just in your native tongue." False. Engineering was about implementation, not about result. "How to get there"? Now "thinking" is to check that model actually understood what you want. We are much closer to product manager who's testing new product with his hands and giving feedback to engineers, rather than to engineers who's thinking "how we implement that"? "but AI has opened up an…

When I read stuff like this people I feel like people haven't yet accepted reality. I think knowing how to write code made a lot of people feel very special. Like the could do something magical, and now feel like that's being taken a way from them. I've been writing code since I was a child and spent my entire career as a software engineer, so I understand where these people are coming from, but the reality is AI has…

What is your point? That coding was easy and nothing special? It wasn't. That programming changed forever? No one arguing. That all of us should enjoy new world order? Nah, this work isn't fun for me anymore. I will do something else for the living
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