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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

lalitm.com

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#121
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 I’ve been driving Claude as my primary coding interface the last three months at my job. Other than a different domain, I feel like I could have written this exact article. The project I’m on started as a vibe-coded prototype that quickly got promoted to a production service we sell. I’ve had to build the mental model after the fact, while refactoring and ripping out large chunks of nonsense or dead code. But the…

I’ve found that LLMs will frequently do extremely silly things that no person would do to make typescript code pass the typechecker.

You need to very specific and also question the output if it does something insane

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that he used Claude instead of gemini for this. Idk if his company is happy with free advertisement of a competitor

Google owns 14% of Anthropic: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/11/google-has-given-anthropic... They don't care. They want software engineers replaced by any means necessary. They know generative AI isn't a big business, that is why they slowwalk it themselves. Replacement won't work of course, that is why marketing blog posts are needed.

But they own 100% of Google, correct?

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#123
Does SQLite not have a lemon parser generated for its SQL?

When I ported pikchr (also from the SQLite project) to Go, I first ported lemon, then the grammar, then supporting code.

I always meant to do the same for its SQL parser, but pikchr grammar is orders of magnitude simpler.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm deeply convinced that there's 2 reasons we don't see real takes like this: 1) is because these people are quietly appreciating the 2-50% uplift you get from sanely using LLMs instead of constantly posting sycophantic or doomer shit for clout and/or VC financing. 2) is because the real version of LLM coding is boring and unsexy. It either involves generating slop in one shot to POC, then restarting from scratch fo…

> because the real version of LLM coding is boring and unsexy Some people do find it unfun, saying it deprives them of the happy "flow" of banging out code. Reaching "flow" when prompting LLMs arguably requires a somewhat deeper understanding of them as a proper technical tool, as opposed to a complete black box, or worse, a crystal ball.

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#125

I appreciate these kind of fact-based posts. Thank you for this. Unfortunately, AI seems to be divisive. I hope we will find our way back eventually. I believe the lessons from this era will reverberate for a long time and all sides stand to learn something. As for me, I can’t help but notice there is a distinct group of developers that does not get it. I know because they are my colleagues. They are good people and…

> because they are such laggards

I am a technologist. But I am seriously concerned about the ecological consequences of the training and usage of AI. To me, the true laggards are those, who have not understood yet, that climate change requires a prudent use of our resources.

I don't mind people having fun or being productive with AI. But I do mind it when AI is presented as the only way of doing things.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#126
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this project, even if somewhat spaghettified, will likely take orders of magnitude less time to perfect than it would for someone to create the whole thing from scratch without AI That's a big leap of faith and... kinda contradicts the article as I understood it. My experience is entirely opposite (and matches my understanding of the article): vibing from the start makes you take orders of magnitude more time to pe…

vibing is different from... steering AI as it goes so it doesn't make fundamentally bad decisions

Both of these are not really the right way to use AI to code with. There are two basic ways to code with AI that work:

1. Autocomplete. Pretty simple; you only accept auto-completes you actually want, as you manually write code.

2. Software engineering design and implementation workflow. The AI makes a plan, with tasks. It commits those plans to files. It starts sub-agents to tackle the tasks. The subagents create tests to validate the code, then writes code to pass the tests. The subagents finish their tasks, and the AI agent does a review of the work to see if it's accurate. Multiple passes find more bugs and fix them in a loop, until there is nothing left to fix.

I'm amazed that nobody thinks the latter is a real thing that works, when Claude fucking Code has been produced this way for like 6 months. There's tens of thousands of people using this completely vibe-coded software. It's not a hoax.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#127

> Tests created a similar false comfort. Having 500+ tests felt reassuring, and AI made it easy to generate more. But neither humans nor AI are creative enough to foresee every edge case you’ll hit in the future; there are several times in the vibe-coding phase where I’d come up with a test case and realise the design of some component was completely wrong and needed to be totally reworked. This was a significant con…

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#128
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Strong disagree. I just watched a team spend weeks trying to make a piece of code work with AI because the vibe coded was spaghetti garbage that even the AI couldn’t tell what needed to be done and was basically playing…

Okay, so you observed one team that had an issue with AI code quality. What's your point? In 1998, I'm sure there were newspaper companies who failed at transitioning online, didn't get any web traffic, had unreliable servers crashed, etc. This says very little about what life would be like for the newspaper industry in 1999, 2000, 2005, 2010, and beyond.

Im arguing that code quality very much still matters and will only continue to matter.

AI will get better at making good maintainable and explainable code because that’s what it takes to actually solve problems tractably. But saying “code quality doesn’t matter because AI” is definitely not true both experientially and as a prediction. Will AI do a better job in the future? Sure. But because their code quality improves not because it’s less important.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#129
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it’s just a matter of “does this actually save me time at all?” If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 more weeks to clean it up, could I have I just done it right the first time myself in 4 weeks instead? How much money have I wasted in tokens?

> does this actually save me time at all? Soooooo.... As one who hasn't taken the plunge yet -- I'm basically retired, but have a couple of projects I might want to use AI for -- "time" is not always fungible with, or a good proxy for, either "effort" or "motivation" > How much money have I wasted in tokens? This, of course, may be a legitimate concern. > If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 m…

Well for me, the amount of time/effort as a function my of my motivation has acted as a natural gatekeeper to bad ideas. Just because I can do something with AI now doesn’t necessarily mean that I should. I am also weary of trading time and effort for outright money right out of my own pocket to find out, especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible. I don’t live somewhere where developers make a lot of money. I’m not poor in any stretch but not rich enough that I can waste money on slop for funsies. But I can spend a month on validating a side project because I find coding as a hobby enjoyable in and of itself, and I don’t care if I throw out a few thousand lines of code after a little while and realize I’m wasting my time.

Cleaning up agent slop code by hand is also a miserable experience and makes me hate my job. I do it already because at $DAYJOB because my boss thinks “investing” in third worlders for pennies on the dollar and just giving them a Claude subscription will be better than investing in technical excellence and leadership. The ROI on this strategy is questionable at best, at least at my current job. Code Review by humans is still the bottleneck and delivering proper working features has not accelerated because they require much more iteration because of slop.

Would much rather spend the time making my own artisanal tradslop instead if it’s gonna take me the same amount of time anyway - at least it’s more enjoyable.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#130
post #96
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you're missing is that fewer and fewer projects are going to need a ton of technical depth. > I have friends who'd never written a line of code in their lives who now use multiple simple vibe-coded apps at work daily. Again it's the opposite. A landscape of vibe coded micro apps is a landscape of buggy, vulnerable, points of failure. When you buy a product, software or hardware, you do more than buy the functi…

> Again it's the opposite. A landscape of vibe coded micro apps is a landscape of buggy, vulnerable, points of failure. When you buy a product, software or hardware, you do more than buy the functionality you buy the assurance it will work. AI does not change this. Vibe code an app to automate your lightbulbs all you like, but nobody is going to be paying millions of dollars a year on vibe coded slop apps and apps li…

> This is what everyone says when technology democratizes something that was previously reserved for a small number of experts.

What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run.

Over the past 20 years software engineering has become something that just about anyone can do with little more than a shitty laptop, the time and effort, and an internet connection. How is a world where that ability is rented out to only those that can pay "democratic"?

> When the printing press was invented, scribes complained that it would lead to a flood of poorly written, untrustworthy information. And you know what? It did. And nobody cares.

A bad book is just a bad book. If a novel is $10 at the airport and it's complete garbage then I'm out $10 and a couple of hours. As you say, who cares. A bad vibe coded app and you've leaked your email inbox and bank account and you're out way more than $10. The risk profile from AI is way higher.

Same is even more true for businesses. The cost of a cyberattack or a outage is measured in the millions of dollars. It's a simple maths, the cost of the risk of compromise far oughtweights the cost of cheaper upfront software.

> You cut out the part where I said it only popped economically, but the technology continued to improve.

The improvement in AI models requires billions of dollars a year in hardware, infrastructure, end energy. Do you think that investors will continue to pour that level of investment into improving AI models for a payout that might only come ten to fifteen years down the road? Once the economic bubble pops, the models we have are the end of the road.

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