Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fuck it, make it anyway

joelotter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 613 posts

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#321

Post by bigstrat2003 »

hgoel wrote: post #209
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 get it, you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do. As if you'd be happy to just write anything as long as you were allowed to manually type everything out. On top of that there's the "did you enjoy the craft or did you enjoy the compliments" framing. Are people who use pre-existing l…

> I don't get it, you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do. As if you'd be happy to just write anything as long as you were allowed to manually type everything out.

Yes. I enjoy programming, and I don't care at all about the end result (unless it's something immoral which I wouldn't wish to be a part of). I don't think that should be so surprising to you.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#322

Post by borzi »

So, so tired of these doom posts. Almost always these feel like they are from developers that felt like they were superior to others because of their ability to code or simply identified too deeply with writing code instead of solving problems with code. As for the issues listed here, I can't relate to any of them - I've been creating scripts, skills, improving user experiences, creating monitoring dashboards etc. for many of my co-workers that have given me more appreciation than I ever experienced in my career and trust me, nobody gives a damn that I used AI or thinks my knowledge has been "obsoleted", most people are just happy these solutions exist and make their lives easier. Edit: imo, this is the real "fuck it, make it anyway" approach to agentic coding.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#323

Post by embedding-shape »

wanderlust123 wrote: post #185
embedding-shape wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What is this real difficult stuff you speak of that only you can do and LLMs can not?

Two recent examples I tried to get Sol/Opus to get help with, were they gave more misdirections than beinghelpful: Tracking down the root cause of a synchronization bug in a distributed platform using CRDTs, especially dumb around sequence CRDTs. Also had less fun using Sol/Opus for building and troubleshooting fractures and constraint networks in Houdini.

I'm sure these will be much better as soon as enough data is in the training set, as always. GPT models used to be horrible at electrical stuff as well, today Astra seems pretty OK at it. It changes as they keep extending what use cases are covered by training data and what they test for and so on.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#324

Post by Towaway69 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #283
eklavya wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how I read it at all. Why do you think the latter group likes free stuff made for them?

Right now the AI companies are selling their product at a loss to try to get us hooked. I think it's fair to describe the current situation as "unreasonably cheap", though free is a bit of a stretch.

It will be interesting to see what happens when human developers become cheaper than token maxxing AIs.

Interesting because by then codebases might have become so complex that these can no longer be modified, maintained nor understood by humans, so replacing AI with HI (human intelligence) will simply no longer possible.

That then represents a certain vendor lock-in or Mafia stand off: either keeping paying or have all the code go up in smoke.

Certainly not everyone will be facing this dilemma, but it certainly isn’t sci-fi considering the track-record of big tech.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#325

Post by rmast »

user43928 wrote: post #142
lelanthran wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter when you post it; some kid with a $200 claude sub (or cheaper) is going to clone it for far cheaper than you, and sell it for far cheaper than you. There's no friction to what you produced, so why do you think that you won't have 100s of clones, all cheaper? We're now in a market for lemons as far as software goes.

I spent hundreds of hours on this, so there is still some friction. If I told you the exact market and use case, I'd still have a decent head start, but indeed, someone without a job could invest more time than I do. People in a cheaper location can work for far cheaper than I can afford to. With head start I don't meant that the idea is so novel that I need to keep it a secret. However, I believe that if there is an…

A conundrum I see is that once someone releases a “solution” to a problem, it becomes much easier for someone else to come up with prompts to have AI make a clone of that solution.

Basically, the moat for many products is disappearing, and it would be relatively cheap for someone to make a clone that undercuts the cost of the first to market. The original product is charging $2? Cool, the clone will cost $1 - maybe it’s not as good due to less QA, but consumers will see the lower price and buy it.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#326

Post by watwut »

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…

Of course most creators actually enjoy craft, do enjoy compliments and find them motivating ... and need money and want money.

There is no special introspection requires, unless you are signing up for "all people are one-dimensional simpletons" theory of mind. Which ia simply incorrect theory of mind, useful only when one wants to score cheap rhetorical win.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#327

Post by mpbart »

springtimesun wrote: post #305
imdsm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. The feeling I get is that…

There has to be a changing economic undertone to it as well. For a lot of years, the craft that many people enjoyed also happened to pay well and had significant barriers to entry. It's easy to like the craft when it pays you well. The though experiment I would propose to programmers who only want to write the code is, would you do it if it was paid and regarded like an artist is? You pursue it for its own purpose kn…

As a career? Almost certainly not but I do think I (and probably many others on hn) would still do it as a hobby

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#328

Post by 59percentmore »

zer00eyz wrote: post #194
imdsm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. The feeling I get is that…

> Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. 30 years in tech, programing and I have the complete opposite take. My lawyer and writer friends asking me about containers and cron jobs is fascinating. These people are fulfilling the old promises of VB script, AppleScript, IFTT and all the…

It's interesting to hear that lawyers are coming to you with those questions, because my read was that there was almost universal contempt for AI within law (save for the few "dumb" enough to use it and get caught).

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#329

Post by herpdyderp »

NSUserDefaults wrote: post #173
lacedeconstruct wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are joking right ? renderer, audio, math, physics, animation, AI, asset streaming,.... in addition to the gameplay itself, and you compare it to a medium-sized mobile app ???

Apps usually have tons of boilerplate, so pure LoC may be similar. But in density, no contest. I recently dug up an old objc app of mine and was shocked how few lines it took to send a REST request, parse and process it. Nowadays it is split into multiple files, usecases, repositories, protocols to accomplish the same. All in the name of testability or architectural “correctness”. Write that in a game and you’re fire…

There's a different bar for maintenance though. Many games exist in a single point in time, they ship and are done, whereas the goal with SaaS is to support the code forever.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#330

Post by adrianwaj »

bradly wrote: post #255
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…

> I've been working on the project for four months now. I invested hundreds of hours, and I expect to publish my paid app in the AppStore this month. I wish you the best, but you have invested a considerable about of time and I'm guessing token budget for something with no revenue and no customers. That in itself is totally fine, but I'm not sure it gives you the authority to calling people clueless for having a diff…

I would be chasing altcoin revenue - those worthless things nobody wants. Hold those but encourage their spending too, with an app, is the road to riches in a world where one's IP can be immediately negated by a disgruntled robotic employee jumping ship.

Actually, I don't know if the premise works in the real world, but can't see why "crypto-enabled" isn't adopted at every turn.

Altcoins - the snowball lying in wake. Bitcoins were crap too at one point but they have stood the test of time and obscurity. It's about going from HODL'ing to spending for dear life. Something like that anyway. Maybe 3+ years to go before any serious price movement because of dumping pressure being so high from pre-miners and the like. No idea.

Post reply on HN