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Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

danielvaughn.dev

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Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#101

Post by michaelmior »

lnrd wrote: post #100

This is a step in an interesting direction for many reasons. First of all it reduces the "conversation in english" aspect and goes back to kinda "writing code" which I think would reduce a lot of fatigue and bring back some joy in making software. But then it also gives more control over the output in a way that makes sense: I know how i want to code this, but I can save time not having to deal with the syntax/boiler…

> an advantage of agents in huge codebases is that they can find where to make the change and draft it, which wouldn't work with this system.

I think you could go meta here and ask the agent in English to modify your pseudocode for larger changes.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#102

Post by wccrawford »

cyanydeez wrote: post #97
reticulates wrote: post #47

I think you’re probably missing why it’s exhausting. The problem is not writing English, it’s the rate of change. Programming is meditative, it is a thinking process, the code you output is an artifact of your thinking. Agent-based development… there is no thinking, no meditation, you’re delegating the thinking to a machine, you’re just barking what you want at it, incessantly, endlessly. For businesses it makes sens…

If we really could develop in UML, that'd be a nice sweet spot. But everything I read about the rise and fall of UML is: it's great to start, but never keeps pace with day to day code changes and becomes almost useless out of the gate as real edges force different paradigms. Now, if you could wake my AI up in the middle of the night and by morning my UML is is perfectly aligned, or the reverse, my UML realigns the co…

The AIs can read images and charts. If you want to try programming with UML, you should absolutely try it. My guess is that you'll initially be absolutely gobsmacked, but then the problems will start to show and it'll be frustrating as well.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#103

Post by amiune »

I like the pseudocode approach I think there is some gold there. I been thinking a lot about it (https://www.generativenetworks.com/blog/do-we-still-need-to-...) but working on small apps I never need it only in bigger apps or when you need an extra level of precision in the prompt

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#104

Post by zuzululu »

reticulates wrote: post #47

I think you’re probably missing why it’s exhausting. The problem is not writing English, it’s the rate of change. Programming is meditative, it is a thinking process, the code you output is an artifact of your thinking. Agent-based development… there is no thinking, no meditation, you’re delegating the thinking to a machine, you’re just barking what you want at it, incessantly, endlessly. For businesses it makes sens…

i think this is a fascinating cognitive dissonance on display:

> there is no thinking, no meditation, you’re delegating the thinking to a machine, you’re just barking what you want at it, incessantly, endlessly.

why do you think software teams exist? it was exactly for that purpose for non developers to do what you described but perhaps varying degree of politeness and professionalism.

> For businesses it makes sense to abandon programming in favor of delegating to agents that can do more in less time,

business operators were never in the business of coding. code never had any value to them. code isn't what they interact with.

I think a lot of software engineers confuse intrinsic value of the thing they produce with the interface that ultimately drives them. It was never code.

And now AI agents replace a large portion of what software engineers used to do. I've already seen many shops with 20~30 full stack teams downsize by 80% . You just don't need that many people anymore. A competent engineer, AI budget can absolutely replace large teams because the size of the thing never really mattered beyond what they can intake in terms of natural language demands.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#105

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

darthcircuit wrote: post #69
reticulates wrote: post #47

I think you’re probably missing why it’s exhausting. The problem is not writing English, it’s the rate of change. Programming is meditative, it is a thinking process, the code you output is an artifact of your thinking. Agent-based development… there is no thinking, no meditation, you’re delegating the thinking to a machine, you’re just barking what you want at it, incessantly, endlessly. For businesses it makes sens…

I would disagree that there is no thinking. I think a strong understanding of the fundamentals of coding are still wildly important to get good quality code, and a big part of that is thinking or reasoning through a particular problem. It’s just now we have a way of using common language in order for that to happen instead of having to learn or keep up with every new tool and framework in order to do so. The new prog…

> I think a strong understanding of the fundamentals of coding are still wildly important to get good quality code

I don't think this is true any more; you need to ask the agent to inspect the system, draw up plans with the system's current shape in mind, then after it's done writing the code, ask for it to review the code, and make sure it's as minimal and high quality as possible a couple of times.

Creating programs really doesn't need deep understanding of the fundamentals any more. It needs a shallow understanding, and a willingness to manually test a lot.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#106

Post by zuzululu »

wyum wrote: post #75

I'm not sold on the pseudocode approach, but I agree with the declarative aspect. Declarative specs have become central to my process and I've built this tool to support it: https://github.com/spekk-ai/spekk-cli Rather than writing exhaustive specs, I preserve only the intent and what must be true as discrete assertions. This preserves the leverage you get from LLMs - anything it can reliably infer does not need to b…

I share the same sentiment here, pseudocode is just basically prompts all over the place, rather what I think is much more valuable are oracles that can only come after the LLM has written something not before it.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#107

Post by wccrawford »

leobg wrote: post #9

Dumb question: Why not just put an instruction into your favorite harness’ system prompt: “If I give you pseudo code, spell out my intent, and then write and test it in real code.”

I think that just adds another unnecessary level of abstraction that you then have to understand before you can approve. It feels like taking a half-step backwards before moving forwards again.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#108

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

pizzly wrote: post #82
reticulates wrote: post #47

I think you’re probably missing why it’s exhausting. The problem is not writing English, it’s the rate of change. Programming is meditative, it is a thinking process, the code you output is an artifact of your thinking. Agent-based development… there is no thinking, no meditation, you’re delegating the thinking to a machine, you’re just barking what you want at it, incessantly, endlessly. For businesses it makes sens…

Agree with programming is meditative but disagree that agent-based development means there is no thinking. Agent-based development means more thinking like a lower level manager. You spend more time making architecture decisions, making decisions on the user interface, trying to manage your time and your agents time to increase the amount of work produced in the same time, asking the agent about the code and making n…

You should probably be deferring to the agent on nearly all architecture decisions; it's trained on a lot more architectures than you'll ever see in your life, and it does a better job of designing architectures for common problems than many engineers at this point.

You have to ask it to consider the architecture, or it'll cut the shortest path to any solution, but if you ask it, it'll come up with likely a better approach than you would have invented.

Your job is mostly to ask it to think about all the aspects, and then do manual testing on the output. The agent can take care of the rest.

Re: Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

#109

Post by timcobb »

reticulates wrote: post #80
darthcircuit wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree that there is no thinking. I think a strong understanding of the fundamentals of coding are still wildly important to get good quality code, and a big part of that is thinking or reasoning through a particular problem. It’s just now we have a way of using common language in order for that to happen instead of having to learn or keep up with every new tool and framework in order to do so. The new prog…

I don’t mean to imply that making things with these tools is lesser, or that it doesn’t require some skill, but it is fundamentally different to programming. I’m glad you’re able to bring new things to life with these tools, that’s a great thing :) My broader philosophical take is that we, programmers, lived through a golden age where our skills used on our terms were some of the most valuable skills. The golden age…

What were programmers' terms?
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