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AI, Tools and Transformation

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Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#71

Post by yoz-y »

novok wrote: post #68
yoz-y wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am honestly _astonished_ that the current crop of agents are not all written natively for every platform. I tried porting a moderately complex workout app that I’ve built over years (and which includes a whole agentic loop) from web to iOS native. It took me a couple of evenings. There is now no excuse to not offer a native experience for every supported platform when you are a bigger company. Make one of the platf…

If you actually try to implement the same app in multiple platforms from the same spec, you'll notice very quickly that AI makes the best quality UIs out of typescript electron or direct web. It accomplishes it's task the fastest, with the least lines of code and with the least bugs. Also hot patching updates works best with web. And I say this as a person who isn't a web dev, but a mobile dev. This is why. AIs are a…

As I said. I did a large migration from a PWA to iOS, with a pretty custom UI. It took a while, but it only took days. A full rewrite would be months of work the old way.

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#72

Post by yoz-y »

testdelacc1 wrote: post #20
yoz-y wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am honestly _astonished_ that the current crop of agents are not all written natively for every platform. I tried porting a moderately complex workout app that I’ve built over years (and which includes a whole agentic loop) from web to iOS native. It took me a couple of evenings. There is now no excuse to not offer a native experience for every supported platform when you are a bigger company. Make one of the platf…

I have a question about web to iOS native. How do you distribute that app? I’m assuming you’re paying $99 yearly to distribute through the App Store? Is this app meant just for you or for anyone to find? Reason I’m asking is because I’d like to make native iOS apps just for myself rather than progressive web apps. But I haven’t understood the best way to distribute.

Just for myself and friends. Using local deployment and internal TestFlight.

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#73

Post by ebbi »

My thoughts on AI and how it's going to disrupt jobs is evolving.

I was very much in the doomer category last year, but less so now. For someone working in Accounting/Finance/Revenue roles, who has always had a keen interest on tech and software development (but never dedicated enough time to really learn a language to build something of my own), I had many ideas on tools that could be useful in my job - just never had the skill to build it.

Now that I have AI, I'm experimenting with building some of these solutions, but I must say: software development is hard. Yes, it would be a lot easier if I had others to work with, especially for things like UI/UX, understanding some of the more complex backend decisions etc. I imagine if I find it hard, people that haven't really been following tech trends would find it even harder.

Yes, you could get away with vibe coding a tool that only you would use, but once it goes beyond that, and it needs to be shared with colleagues, or if the aspiration is to market it, there are so many decisions one needs to make to be at least close to world class quality.

Things may change as more advanced models come about, but at this stage, I still think unless you're a seasoned developer with good design taste and UX experience, you need a team of people with various skills to build something that you hope to GTM with.

It's fun, though. I've created a few tools internally that has saved me so much time and developed functionality I would never have even entertained the idea of pre-agentic coding. I hope my career moves toward building solutions in this domain.

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#74

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #19
Fordec wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of those four, I think accountability is truly the only moat. The other three are varying amounts of both testable and iterated on via adversarial agents steel-manning the implementations. Accountability will not come before AIs achieve legal personhood, and that probably will not happen in my lifetime. And if it does in some jurisdictions (which I am not betting money on, this is a full full AGI scenario after multi…

Why would the AI need to be accountable? Make the org that sells the tokens accountable.

The AI is going to be running the org that sells the tokens.

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#75

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

pydry wrote: post #25
Fordec wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of those four, I think accountability is truly the only moat. The other three are varying amounts of both testable and iterated on via adversarial agents steel-manning the implementations. Accountability will not come before AIs achieve legal personhood, and that probably will not happen in my lifetime. And if it does in some jurisdictions (which I am not betting money on, this is a full full AGI scenario after multi…

This is like saying "writing code is solved, all we need now is somebody to blame because it doesnt work"

That's really where we're heading, though. We're mostly at the point that, for a lot of code, the humans are there for manual testing and not creating the code.

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#76

Post by beecasthurlbow »

jaynetics wrote: post #67
beecasthurlbow wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I expect the gruesome writing style of LLMs to be fixed relatively soon, seeing how it can already be prevented with just a few lines of stylistic instructions What instructions do you use to prevent the gruesome writing style? I have… not found this to be the case.

Currently I append the snippet below to prompts where I care about the resulting text. Just putting it in the context up front isn't as effective, and I assume if the overall prompt is large, or the context window is full, it will also be less effective. > Use plain, clear, everyday language with a linear deductive flow; avoid hyperbole, juxtapositions, metaphors, analogies, punchlines.

I’ll try it thanks! I just got good mileage out of “don’t use ‘X, never Y’ format” on a document too, but I think linear deductive flow Covers it

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#77

Post by saulpw »

Kuyawa wrote: post #46

> It’s very tempting to imagine that AI turns everyone into a tool-builder It is not imagination, it is the undeniable truth. The quality of the tool is proportional to the competency of the builder, it always has been that way, AI makes the building process shorter by a magnitude

I have a friend who writes, she has certain needs, I've shown her how to start building tools, she has no interest in building tools. She's focused on writing and does not think about her personal process that way. Not every is a tool-builder, in fact most aren't!

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#78

Post by Xirdus »

raincole wrote: post #48
Xirdus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not all AIs, but LLMs benefit immensely from abstraction. They are trained on human code, and human code usually uses very high abstraction - so high abstraction is overrepresented in training data compared to low level implementations. It also drastically reduces number of tokens, and that has downstream effect of better utilization of context window and whatnot. We are not yet at the point where AI can use lo…

I've never encountered a case where I tell AI just uses plain JavaScript instead of React and it doesn't result in much cleaner code.

Note that even "plain" JavaScript is very high-level with tons of abstractions. Most website features are one-liners that call into browser APIs where the actual implementation lives.

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#79

Post by pydry »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #75
pydry wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying "writing code is solved, all we need now is somebody to blame because it doesnt work"

That's really where we're heading, though. We're mostly at the point that, for a lot of code, the humans are there for manual testing and not creating the code.

At some point it will become a strong competitive advantage to zag where others zig.

If you understand the codebase deeply and have trust in it can roll out changes quickly without manual testing you can run circles around the people scratching their heads wondering if this vibe coded 2,500 pull request is going to be the one that takes down the system for a day.

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#80

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

pydry wrote: post #79
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really where we're heading, though. We're mostly at the point that, for a lot of code, the humans are there for manual testing and not creating the code.

At some point it will become a strong competitive advantage to zag where others zig. If you understand the codebase deeply and have trust in it can roll out changes quickly without manual testing you can run circles around the people scratching their heads wondering if this vibe coded 2,500 pull request is going to be the one that takes down the system for a day.

Have you ever written significant changes by hand without testing?
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