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Building a Personal AI Factory

john-rush.com

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Re: Building a Personal AI Factory

#101

Post by sokoloff »

1dom wrote: post #100
simonw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the hardest problem in computer science right now may be coming up with an LLM demo that doesn't get called "pretty trivial".

I'm very pro LLM and AI. But I completely agree with the comment about how many pieces praising LLMs are doing so with trivial examples. Trivial might not be the right word, but I can't think of a better one that doesn't have a negative connotation, but this shouldn't be negative. Your examples are good and useful, and capture a bunch of tasks a software engineer would do. I'd say your mandelbrot debug and the LLVM p…

> ultimately it's just doing a day job that millions of people can do sleep deprived and hungover.

Doing for < $10 and under an hour what could be done in a few weeks by $10K+ worth of senior staff time is pretty valuable.

Re: Building a Personal AI Factory

#103

Post by jwpapi »

ozten wrote: post #24
jwpapi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve written a full stack monorepo with over 1,000 files alone now. I’ve started with AI doing a lot of the work, but the percentage goes down and down. For me a good codebase is not about how much you’ve written, but about how it’s architectured. I want to have an app that has the best possible user and dev experience meaning its easy to maintain and easy to extend. This is achieved by making code easy to understand…

What does the full stack monorepo do?

It’s nothing special. Not in the realm of anything technical outstanding. I just stated that to emphasize that it’s a slightly bigger project than default single-dev coded SAAS projects which are just a single wrapper. We have workers, multiple white-labeled applications sharing a common infrastructure, data scraping modules, AI-powered services, and email processing pipelines.

I’ve had an impossible learning curve the last year, but as I should rather be vibe-coded biased I still use less AI now to make sure it’s more consistent.

I think the two camps are different in terms of skill honestly, but also in terms of needs. Like of course you are faster vibe-coding a front-end then to write the code manually, but build a robust backend/processing system its a different kind of tier.

So instead of picking a side it’s usually best to stay as unbiased as possible and choose the right tool for the task

Re: Building a Personal AI Factory

#104

Post by mmarian »

hamstergene wrote: post #99
mmarian wrote: post #93

And here I am struggling to get Claude to create a nice-looking search bar a la booking.com , with some adjustments for my personal use case; it does ok, but never gets to the end result and once I refreshed my Tailwind knowledge it felt much slower than hand coding. I feel like I'm living in a different world.

I think coding assistants aren't great at UI/UX yet because they can't see, their understanding of left/right/lighter/darker is guessed from textual descriptions that accompanied CSS tutorials but they are never actually imagining the looks of what they are working with. I had Cursor repeatedly fix and mess up a CSS grid, over and over again, until I switched to HTML table so that browser would handle layout. Once sw…

Thx for sharing your experience, good to know I'm not the only one struggling ^_^ The advice makes sense as well.

Re: Building a Personal AI Factory

#105

Post by hamish-b »

This sounds great, and is similar to the workflow I get from a high level stand point with https://ampcode.com/ - albeit without the model wrangling.

To the author & anyone reading - publicly release your agent harnesses, even if its shit or vibe coded! I am constantly iterating on my meta and seeking to improve.

Re: Building a Personal AI Factory

#106

Post by cranium »

simonw wrote: post #53
low_common wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty trivial example for one of these IDEs to knock out. Assembly is certainly in their training sets, and obviously docker is too. I've watched cursor absolutely run amok when I let it play around in some of my codebase. I'm bullish it'll get there sooner rather than later, but we're not there yet.

I think the hardest problem in computer science right now may be coming up with an LLM demo that doesn't get called "pretty trivial".

Instead of "pretty trivial", I'd say it's "well-defined and generally understood".

The implicit decisions it had to make were also inconsequential, eg. selection of ASCII chars, color or not, bounds of the domain,...

However, it shows that agents are powerful translators / extractors of general knowledge!

Re: Building a Personal AI Factory

#108

Post by 1dom »

sokoloff wrote: post #101
1dom wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very pro LLM and AI. But I completely agree with the comment about how many pieces praising LLMs are doing so with trivial examples. Trivial might not be the right word, but I can't think of a better one that doesn't have a negative connotation, but this shouldn't be negative. Your examples are good and useful, and capture a bunch of tasks a software engineer would do. I'd say your mandelbrot debug and the LLVM p…

> ultimately it's just doing a day job that millions of people can do sleep deprived and hungover. Doing for < $10 and under an hour what could be done in a few weeks by $10K+ worth of senior staff time is pretty valuable.

If it's something a single senior staff member can do, then - personally - I'd consider it not complex, it's relatively trivial: it can be done by literally a single person.

I'm pro AI, I'm not saying it's not valuable for trivial things. But that's a distinct discussion to the trivial nature of many LLM examples/demos in relation to genuinely complex computer systems.

Re: Building a Personal AI Factory

#109

Post by sroussey »

simonw wrote: post #53
low_common wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty trivial example for one of these IDEs to knock out. Assembly is certainly in their training sets, and obviously docker is too. I've watched cursor absolutely run amok when I let it play around in some of my codebase. I'm bullish it'll get there sooner rather than later, but we're not there yet.

I think the hardest problem in computer science right now may be coming up with an LLM demo that doesn't get called "pretty trivial".

Convert react-stockcharts to react v19. I’ve tried Claude Code and Cursor but only ended up with hilariously bad results.

Re: Building a Personal AI Factory

#110

Post by derencius »

mmarian wrote: post #93

And here I am struggling to get Claude to create a nice-looking search bar a la booking.com , with some adjustments for my personal use case; it does ok, but never gets to the end result and once I refreshed my Tailwind knowledge it felt much slower than hand coding. I feel like I'm living in a different world.

I use Claude and Cursor in parallel. cursor is doing great on the ui, I took quick screenshots to instruct the changes I wanted and it got it right.
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