111–120 of 384 posts
I vibe coded a Kubernetes cluster in 2 days for a distributed compilation setup. I've never touched half this stuff before. Now I have a proof of concept that'll change my whole organization. That would've taken me 3 months a year ago, just to learn the syntax and evaluate competing options. Now I can get sccache working in a day, find it doesn't scale well, and replace it with recc + buildbarn. And ask the AI questi…
The only way I see out of this crisis (yes I'm not on the token-using side of this) is strict liability for companies making software products (just like in the physical world). Then it doesn't matter if the token-generator spits out code or a software engineer spits out code - the company's incentives are aligned such that if something breaks it's on them to fix it and sort out any externalities caused. This will pr…
This isn't what many of us probably would have wanted, but I think the public blowback when "AI-coded" systems start failing is going to drive us there. (Note to passing hype-men: I did not say they will fail at higher rates than human-coded systems! I happen to believe this, but it is not germane to the argument - only the public perception matters here.)
Lost me at "I’m building something right now. I won’t get into the details. You don’t give away the idea."
Fair enough. I know how that reads. But when anyone with a laptop and a subscription can ship production software in a weekend, the architecture and the idea start to matter a lot more. The technical details in the post are real. I just can't share the what yet. Take it or leave it.
Ideas are cheap and don't need to be protected. Your taste, execution, marketing, UX, support, and all the 1000 things that aren't the code still matter. The code will appear more quickly now: You still need to get people to use it or care about it.
I've found almost without fail that you have more to gain in sharing an idea and getting feedback (both positive and negative) before/while you build the thing than you do in protecting the idea with the fear that as soon as someone hears it they'll steal it and do it better than you.
(The exception I think is in highly competitive spaces where ideas have only a short lifetime -- eg High Frequency Trading / Wall Street in general. An idea for a trade can be worth $$ if done before someone else figures it out, and then it makes sense to protect the idea so you can make use of it first. But that's an extremely narrow domain.)
This is the first time that I feel a level of anxiety when I am not actively doing it. What a crazy shift that I am still so excited and enamored by the process after all of this time.
But there's also the double edged sword. I am also having a really hard time moderating my working hours, which I naturally struggle with anyway, even more. Partly because I am having so much fun and being so productive. But also because it's just so tempting to add 1 more feature, fix one more bug.
Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…
I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby. I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language d…
Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…
I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby. I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language d…
Personally I have been able to produce a very good output with Grok in relation to a video. However, it was insanely painful and very annoying to produce. In retrospect I would've much preferred to have hired humans.
Not to mention I used about 50 free-trial Grok accounts, so who knows what the costs involved were? Tens of thousands no doubt.
Not a day goes by that a fellow engineer doesn't text me a screenshot of something stupid an AI did in their codebase. But no one ever mentions the hundreds of times it quietly wrote code that is better than most engineers can write. The catch about the "guided" piece is that it requires an already-good engineer. I work with engineers around the world and the skill level varies a lot - AI has not been able to bridge…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think you know what taste is. Have you been cranking on real systems all these years, or have you been on the sidelines armchairing the theoretics? I'm not trying to come across as rude, but it may be unavoidable to some degree when indirect criticism becomes involved. A laboring engineer has precious little choice in the type of systems available on which to work on. Fundamentally, it's all going to be some vari…
Paragraphs, man. Paragraphs.