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Fuck it, make it anyway

joelotter.com

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Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#151

Post by xquce »

jenniferhooley wrote: post #131
srcreigh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for now, not everybody can make a private SaaS. Doing that requires skills and focus. Even with SOTA models, as of ~today, there are inflection points where the AI would not be able to make the right choice without a knowledgable human, or would cycle and waste time with things that don't matter, etc.

Not really true tbh. Plenty of 50 year old business guys with less than zero technical ability making saas startups over months of focused chats with LLMs. Of course they're slower at making stuff and the projects are worse than a smart engineer, but they can definitely ship and run to thousands of real customers.

Is every 50 year old business guy doing it? If not then OPs comment holds. He said not everyone can, not that only devs can use it, which is true.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#152

Post by CuriouslyC »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #35
Fraterkes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the big points of art is expressing something to other people . Tired of this sort of shallow dismissal where wanting recognition, or for your art to reach people is cast as a kind of vanity that real artists ought to get over.

Exactly. Motivation is rarely a question of either/or (art for art's sake / art for recognition). And for many practitioners, being part of a community of fellow artists who "know the struggle" is also part of the fun.

There will always be communities of people who want to handcraft everything, who will be available to commiserate about the struggle of their craft. We still have people doing crazy shit like collecting/smelting iron by hand and smithing it into swords (which will literally never be used).

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#153

Post by embedding-shape »

DidntUseIt wrote: post #92

Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good. With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a…

> so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore.

I think it's the opposite. When I'm on the edges of Real Difficult Stuff (TM), then LLMs are less of help compared to when I just need basic web applications or similar "beginner stuff". If what you're working on doesn't exists in the training data at all, the LLMs can sometimes be more in the way than helpful, as they don't seem to even "grasp" the problems correctly.

I still get tons of productivity boosts from LLMs, don't get me wrong, and I wouldn't stop working with them even though they aren't perfect for everything, they do with a lot of monotonous tasks, like all the stuff you outlined. But the moments I'm working without LLMs, that's the time I'm working very much on "not beginner stuff".

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#154

Post by user43928 »

Palomides wrote: post #143
user43928 wrote: post #4

I liked building apps and helpful tools before AI came around. I've been doing so for 15 years, 10 of them professionally. Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun. What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want. I stopped reviewing the code at all. People on here are often saying how that's…

AI has really revealed the programmers who were temporarily inconvenienced idea guys

Not the case here. When I was young I dabbled in reverse engineering and hacking games for example.

I don't think I am less of a 'hacker' or programmer than the next person on HN.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#155

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #61

For the last couple of years, I've been crafting and shipping a free app that Serves a particular narrow demographic. It works extremely well, but is a native iOS app (I don't write Android). When I first developed it, I worked with a professional graphic designer, and the app has a unique UX. In fact, with the latest release, I had to "walk back" a bit of the stuff the designer did, as I believe it interfered with u…

Have you considered setting up an agent environment like codex and having it work making on Android version for you? I know you said it's a very complex app and that probably makes it seem like it wouldn't be able to, but LLMs are really good when they have a very clearly defined end state to work toward, like an existing iOS app with code, screenshots etc.

I bet if you set Astra codex against this task on the $100 plan it would have it done at a speed that would shock you. Potentially even by the end of the day and mostly uninterrupted.

The SOTA models can reverse engineer whole codebases even from assembly now. If you have to specify with words what you want to do it's still hard but if you have a codebase to work from, you can pretty much arbitrarily convert apps and games into other languages / platforms now as if by transitive property.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#156

Post by bitwize »

runarberg wrote: post #133
anhyz wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people like _making_ things, and some people like making _things_.

Sound more like the latter group likes having things made for them, ideally without paying for it.

This is why I say that those who say "AI is a tool" don't quite have it right. AI is a service. Your power saw doesn't cut the wood for you while you go do something else, and then ask if you would like it planed next.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#157

Post by apetresc »

aniviacat wrote: post #66
MachineMan wrote: post #10

In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longe…

I don't think that fully captures the situation. My mother plants tomatoes in her garden. She invests a lot of work into them, only to get a few tomatoes a year. Clearly it is not an economic effort; clearly she is doing it out of passion, not for the actual value of the tomatoes. However, imagine the plants stopped yielding tomatoes, and would never do so again. Would my mother continue working on her tomatoes? I do…

I don’t see the analogy? AI is not preventing the craftsman programmer from coding. Your compiler hasn’t stopped “yielding fruit”, so to speak.

The correct analogy would be, your mom can also just go to the supermarket and get much cheaper mass-produced tomatoes; which is… exactly the current situation?

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#158

Post by api »

My take: AI doesn't replace art, and it doesn't replace the good parts of programming.

An art analogy:

Imagine that the AI doesn't paint the painting, and it certainly doesn't decide what to paint. Instead it washes the brushes, stretches the canvas, mixes the paints, and cleans your studio.

If you try to make it do the actual art, what you'll get -- the "slop" people talk about -- is a mathematical average of all art, or a skewed average if you try to prompt it out of that central attractor. That's why visual AI art looks "plastic" and weird and falls into a kind of uncanny valley.

The reason I love AI in coding is: with painting the stuff I listed (washing brushes, stretching canvas, cleaning the studio) is a small part of painting. With coding stuff like CRUD, glue, endless obvious tests, and re-implementation of "embarrassingly solved" algorithms ends up by like 90% of all manual coding by time spent.

Coding is like painting if the other stuff around painting took up 90% of the time, leaving only 10% of the time to paint.

For complex projects 10% is generous. In many cases glue and CRUD and CI scripts and detailed bulleted git commit messages and merges and tests and very boring sorts of documentation and and and and and takes up more like 99% of the time, leaving like 1% for actual creativity.

This has been a legitimate complaint of coders forever, especially when one is coding for a job. AI, properly deployed, shrinks the fraction of grunt work dramatically. What's left is the most interesting stuff, architecture, design, planning, and deep implementation work of parts that need that kind of focus.

And that's the actual painting as far as coding is concerned.

The role of AI in both art and coding should be to do the uncreative parts.

Edit:

The only caveat is: I get the idea that the whole thing can be craft. But I think most projects are not like this, and projects done for money are almost by definition not like this. If you want to some code purely for the craft and the art and not use AI that's fine and nobody will stop you.

I expect to see a kind of hand-made software niche or market the way there is for hand-crafted furniture, hand-forged metallurgy, hand-blown glass, and so on.

That will not be a report generator for an internal portal inside an insurance company or a SaaS backend for managing policy on other SaaS backends. That stuff's gonna be vibe coded almost 100%. Good.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#159

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

sicktriple wrote: post #138

Look, if I'm a cyclist, then it wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense for me to buy and ride an ebike, would it? Like, if I enjoy cycling, and I want to do it because it feels good, makes me happy and keeps me in shape, then why in the world would I buy and use a machine that does it for me? If I was a door dash driver or something, and I just wanted to get from A to B, then yeah, maybe I would ride an e-bike ins…

It would absolutely make sense for someone who enjoys cycling to buy a pedal-assist e-bike, especially if they e.g. moved to a hillier area, sustained an injury, or just started having their strength/stamina decline with age.

(incidentally, the proliferation of unregistered/unlicensed motorcycles marketed as "e-bikes" has done enormous damage to the viability of e-bikes as a general category)

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#160

Post by rikroots »

I made a web-based multi-target screen recorder with talking head and teleprompt functionality because I fancied making an obscure tool to prove that I could. Maybe if I marketed it harder more people would know about it, but I'm not that guy.

I also made a image filter builder, hosted on the web so it runs locally, even though I knew that it was an over-saturated market. I saw those apps and decided to do better. It scratched an itch. Do people use it, or talk about it? Of course not - see above.

For both tools I did the initial coding myself, then let LLMs look at (but not change) the code so they could suggest areas for improvements. Engaging LLMs at that point, in that way, is fun work for me.

Just because things can do things faster, sometimes better, than me doesn't mean I should stop doing themselves myself. That's not a fun approach to life, for me.

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