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AI coding

geohot.github.io

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121–130 of 299 posts

Re: AI coding

#121

Post by spion »

bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

I don't think thats contrary to the article's claim: the current tools are so bad and tedious to use for repetitive work that AI is helpful with a huge amount of it.

Re: AI coding

#122

Post by ozim »

hereme888 wrote: post #95

I'm a 100% vibe-coder. AI/CS is not my field. I've made plenty of neat apps that are useful to me. Don't ask me how they work; they just do. Sure the engineering may be abysmal, but it's good enough to work. It only takes basic english to produce these results, plus complaining to the AI agent that "The GUI is ugly and overcrowded. Make it look better, and dark mode." Want specs? "include a specs.md" This isn't a 20%…

You made a forest hut and you are calling out people who build skyscrapers - gatekeepers.

Re: AI coding

#123

Post by simianwords »

onion2k wrote: post #48
bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the good parts. In some cases, especially with the more senior devs in my org, fear of the good parts is why they're against AI. Devs often want the inherent safety of the boring, easy stuff for a while. AI changes the job to be a constant struggle with hard problems. That isn't necessarily a good thing. If you're actually senior by virtue of tim…

This is exactly why people hate AI. It disrupts the comfort of easy coding.

Re: AI coding

#124

Post by mihaic »

matt3D wrote: post #70

This is a more extreme example of the general hacker news group think about AI. Geohot is easily a 99.999 percentile developer, and yet he can’t seem to reconcile that the other 99.999 percent are doing something much more basic than he can ever comprehend. It’s some kind of expert paradox, if everyone was as smart and capable as the experts, then they wouldn’t be experts. I have come across many developers that beha…

[flagged]

Re: AI coding

#125

Post by curl-up »

skydhash wrote: post #108
curl-up wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I tend to like Hotz, but by his description, every developer is also "a compiler", so it's a useless argument. My life quality (as a startup cofounder wearing many different hats across the whole stack) would drop significantly if Cursor-like tools [1] were taken away from me, because it takes me a lot of mental effort to push myself to do the boring task, which leads to procrastination, which leads to delay…

> Add logging throughout some code That's one of the thing that I wouldn't delegate to LLM. Logging is like a report of things that happens. And just like a report, I need relevant information and the most useful information. ... A lot of these use cases actually describes the what. But the most important questions is always the why. Why is it important to you? Or to the user? That's when things have a purpose and no…

Code with logging is "self reporting". Adding logging statements is not reporting itself. Adding `logger.error(f"{job} failed")` is not reporting itself, and LLMs are perfectly capable of adding such statements in applicable places.

As to why, it's because I'm building an app with a growing userbase and need to accommodate to their requirements and build new features to stay ahead of the competition. Why you decided I'm describing a toy project is beyond me.

Re: AI coding

#126

Post by Sammi »

hereme888 wrote: post #107
suddenlybananas wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What have you actually made?

What's the intent behind your question?

The Internet is awash with people making the same claims you are, but where are the actual results that we can see and use? Where are all these supposed new programs that were only possible to make because of generative ai? The number of new apps in the app store is flat. Still getting the same amount in 2025 as in 2022.

Re: AI coding

#127

Post by skydhash »

manx wrote: post #66

This pre-AI article makes a very similar argument: https://mortoray.com/programming-wont-be-automated-or-it-alr... Once we realize that what we actually want is turning specifications into software, I think that English will become the base for a new, high level specification language.

We are turning specifications into software precisely because English (and any natural languages) lacks the formality that makes it not reliable (necessary quality for a tool), but great for imagination (the source of invention).

We always start from natural language. RFC, docs, tickets,... are in natural language. But gaining formality (losing ambiguity) is what programming is (software engineering is doing programming well). People that struggled with programming struggle in fact with formality.

Re: AI coding

#128

Post by mystifyingpoi »

onion2k wrote: post #48
bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the good parts. In some cases, especially with the more senior devs in my org, fear of the good parts is why they're against AI. Devs often want the inherent safety of the boring, easy stuff for a while. AI changes the job to be a constant struggle with hard problems. That isn't necessarily a good thing. If you're actually senior by virtue of tim…

> Devs often want the inherent safety of the boring, easy stuff for a while

That's matches my experience. In my first job, every time a new webapp project has been starting it was fun. Not because of challenges or design, but simply because of the trivial stuff done for n-th time - user accounts, login, password reset, admin panel. Probably should have been automated at this point, but we got away with reinventing the wheel each time.

Re: AI coding

#129

Post by piker »

ako wrote: post #87
piker wrote: post #49

Pretty much nailed it. Once you’re at about 40k LOC you can just turn off the autocomplete features and use Claude or GPT to evaluate specific high-level issues. My sense is 40k LOC is the point at which the suggestions are offset by the rabbit holes they sometimes send you down, but, more importantly by obscuring from you the complexity of the thing you’re building—temporarily.

I expect much of this can be solved with better architecture: smaller, more independent components. Break large code bases up into independent libraries, and LLMs can work again because they need much less code in their context.

Suggesting I restructure my code base to work better with a non-deterministic black box feels like an instance of Conway’s law[1] that should be avoided.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Re: AI coding

#130

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

agentcoops wrote: post #109
bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

I have a similar relation to AI with programming -- and my sense is very many HN readers do as well, evidenced not least by the terrific experience report from antirez [1]. Yet it is rare to see such honest and open statements even here. Instead, HN is full of endless anti-AI submissions on the front page where the discussion underneath is just an echo chamber of ill-substantiated attacks on 'AI hype' and where anyth…

It’s hard to see how the current rate of progress is compatible with, 30 years from now, it being good business sense to pay human professionals six figure salaries. Opinions then split: the easiest option is pure denial, to assume that the current rate of progress doesn’t exist. Next easiest is to assume that progress will halt soon, then that we will be granted the lifestyle of well paid professionals when unsupervised AI can do our job for cheaper, then that Altman will at least deign to feed us.
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