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

AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

blundergoat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 382 posts

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#101

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #79
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because hardware costs never goes down and energy efficiency never go up overtime? Whatever the value/$ is now, do you really think it is going to be constant?

If hardware industry news is any indication, hardware costs aren't going to be going down for GPUs, RAM, or much of anything over the next 3-5 years.

Maybe, but I seriously doubt that new DRAM and chip FABs aren't being planned and built right now to push supply and demand to more of an equilibrium. NVIDIA and Samsung and whoever else would love to expand their market than to wait for a competitor to expand it for them.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#102

Post by BobbyJo »

Nition wrote: post #59
zjp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call these "embarrassingly solved problems". There are plenty of examples of emulators on GitHub, therefore emulators exist in the latent spaces of LLMs. You can have them spit one out whenever you want. It's embarrassingly solved. There are no examples of what you tried to do.

In a way it shows how poorly we have done over the years in general as programmers in making solved problems easily accessible instead of constantly reinventing the wheel. I don't know if AI is coming up with anything really novel (yet) but it's certainly a nice database of solved problems. I just hope we don't all start relying on current[1] AI so much that we lose the ability to solve novel problems ourselves. [1]…

> In a way it shows how poorly we have done over the years in general as programmers in making solved problems easily accessible instead of constantly reinventing the wheel.

I just don't think there was a great way to make solved problems accessible before LLMs. I mean, these things were on github already, and still got reimplemented over and over again.

Even high traffic libraries that solve some super common problem often have rough edges, or do something that breaks it for your specific use case. So even when the code is accessible, it doesn't always get used as much as it could.

With LLMs, you can find it, learn it, and tailor it to your needs with one tool.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#104

Post by 8note »

0000000000100 wrote: post #47
isodev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what if the foundation was made by the AI itself? What’s the excuse then?

Then you are boned unless it was architected well. LLMs tend to stack a lot of complexity at local scopes, especially if the neighboring pages are also built poorly. E.g pumping out a ton of logic to convert one data structure to another. Like a poorly structured form with random form control names that don’t match to the DTO. Or single properties for each form control which are then individually plugged into the req…

you could also use some code styling agent scripts that make todo lists of everywhere where there's bad architecture, and have it run through fixing those issues until its to your liking.

theyre reasomable audit tools for finding issues, if you have ways to make sure they dont give up early, and you force them to output proof of what they did

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#105

Post by kingraoul »

dustingetz wrote: post #77
socketcluster wrote: post #27

I think AI is just a massive force multiplier. If your codebase has bad foundation and going in the wrong direction with lots of hacks, it will just write code which mirrors the existing style... And you get exactly was OP is suggesting. If however, your code foundations are good and highly consistent and never allow hacks, then the AI will maintain that clean style and it becomes shockingly good; in this case, the p…

how do you know there is such thing as good code foundations, and how do you know you have it? this is an argument from ego

Induction always sneaks in!

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#106

Post by esafak »

uoaei wrote: post #30

Training is the process of regressing to the mean with respect to the given data. It's no surprise that it wears away sharp corners and inappropriately fills recesses of collective knowledge in the act of its reproduction.

There is no reason that must be; it could be better than the sum of its parts by taking the best part of each. Humans can do that.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#108

Post by mattgreenrocks »

ekidd wrote: post #36
socketcluster wrote: post #27

I think AI is just a massive force multiplier. If your codebase has bad foundation and going in the wrong direction with lots of hacks, it will just write code which mirrors the existing style... And you get exactly was OP is suggesting. If however, your code foundations are good and highly consistent and never allow hacks, then the AI will maintain that clean style and it becomes shockingly good; in this case, the p…

The wrinkle is that the AI doesn't have a truly global view, and so it slowly degrades even good structure, especially if run without human feedback and review. But you're right that good structure really helps.

Yet it still fumbles even when limiting context.

Asked it to spot check a simple rate limiter I wrote in TS. Super basic algorithm: let one action through every 250ms at least, sleeping if necessary. It found bogus errors in my code 3 times because it failed to see that I was using a mutex to prevent reentrancy. This was about 12 lines of code in total.

My rubber duck debugging session was insightful only because I had to reason through the lack of understanding on its part and argue with it.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#110

Post by api »

Nition wrote: post #59
zjp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call these "embarrassingly solved problems". There are plenty of examples of emulators on GitHub, therefore emulators exist in the latent spaces of LLMs. You can have them spit one out whenever you want. It's embarrassingly solved. There are no examples of what you tried to do.

In a way it shows how poorly we have done over the years in general as programmers in making solved problems easily accessible instead of constantly reinventing the wheel. I don't know if AI is coming up with anything really novel (yet) but it's certainly a nice database of solved problems. I just hope we don't all start relying on current[1] AI so much that we lose the ability to solve novel problems ourselves. [1]…

It’s 2026 and code reuse is still hard. Our code still has terrible modularity. Systems have terrible to nonexistent composability. Attempts to fix this like pure OOP and pure FP have never caught on.

To some extent AI is an entirely different approach. Screw elegance. Programmers won’t adhere to an elegant paradigm anyway. So just automate the process of generating spaghetti. The modularity and reuse is emergent from the latent knowledge in the model.

Post reply on HN