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Writing toy software is a joy

blog.jsbarretto.com

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Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#141

Post by joshgachnang »

neogodless wrote: post #74
roughly wrote: post #11

One of the best things that I’ve done for myself, career-wise, came during a 6-month sabbatical between jobs. I had a bunch of projects that I wanted to do, but I kept finding myself stymied by scope creep - when you don’t have any constraints, it’s hard to decide how big a project should be, and the projects would grow to these massive unfinishable beasts. I decided to constrain myself to one week per project - what…

In my younger years, classic ASP + SQL was easy, and I had IIS + SQL Server set up on a server at my house. And I could write HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Deployment was... run update scripts, push ASP files via FTP. Now I know there are newer ways to do things, and I'd love to set up CI/CD in my personal life, but every time I want to do a "toy project" I get hung up researching and thinking about my own personal software d…

For most of my toy projects, it's a systemd service file and rsync + restart command for deploys. Might have to SSH in and run an install command occasionally.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#142

Post by smohare »

snackbroken wrote: post #132
dakiol wrote: post #39

> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official document…

The few times I've used LLMs as question answering engines for anything moderately technical, they've given subtly-but-in-important-ways incorrect information such that taking them at face value would've likely lost me hours or days of pursuing something unworkable, even when I ask for references. Whether or not the "references" actually contain the information I'm asking for or merely something tangentially related…

[dead]

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#143

Post by whoisyc »

dakiol wrote: post #39

> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official document…

In the past you looking around documentation, SO answers etc would have hopefully helped you learn more about the tools and develop skills required to independently analyze the pros and cons. If you ask an LLM (or a search engine or a colleague) and take their words as the ground truth then you won’t develop the skills. Worst, sooner or later no one will have enough knowledge nor analytic skill to form an opinion on any sufficiently deep subject and they will all be dependent on corporate chatbots to spoon feed them information that may or may not be biased in a way against your interest. Now imagine if ChatGPT tells you to use azure and Gemini tells you to use GCP…

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#144

Post by bluefirebrand »

roughly wrote: post #109
tayo42 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the leet coding is key to getting the next job

For what it's worth, the two tricks I found for leet-code interviews were 1) do the simple stupid thing first - get something _working_, and then make it good and 2) explain what you're doing and what you're thinking about to your interviewers. I'm still not Great at the leet-code style, but you can get a lot of the way there with some basic knowledge about algorithmic design and complexity and data structures. In ge…

I actually just started telling interviewers that I'm happy to discuss code, problem solving, etc at a high level during an interview or walk them through problems I've solved in the past, but I won't do leetcode problems

It hasn't outright disqualified me yet. I also think it's a good "is this team a good fit for me" filter

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#146

Post by jeremyjh »

andruby wrote: post #130
Viliam1234 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now with LLMs, I simply prompt the same with a little bit more of context "pros and cons of using mysql vs mongodb when storing photos. Link references". In near future, companies will probably be able to pay lots of money to have their products come up better in the comparison. LLMs are smart enough to make the result seem "organic" -- all verifiable information will be true and supported by references, it will on…

I'm very grateful that we have a lot of players training LLM's, including several that are published as open models and open weights. I fully expect LLM results to start including ads, but because of the competition I hope/believe the incentives are much better than they are for, say Google's search monopoly. It could potentially be more insidious though. We'll probably start sending prompts to multiple models and co…

Open weights don’t solve it; the promotion will happen during post training and the results will be in the weights.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#147

Post by jeremyjh »

Toritori12 wrote: post #88
Viliam1234 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now with LLMs, I simply prompt the same with a little bit more of context "pros and cons of using mysql vs mongodb when storing photos. Link references". In near future, companies will probably be able to pay lots of money to have their products come up better in the comparison. LLMs are smart enough to make the result seem "organic" -- all verifiable information will be true and supported by references, it will on…

tbf, Google has pretty the monopoly on search engines, the rest is way behind (even after enshitification). LLMs seems to be a more competitive space.

Kagi is already far better than Google. It doesn’t effect me if Google gets all the traffic.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#148

Post by groby_b »

eliasdorneles wrote: post #93

I quite enjoy the spirit of the article, and I believe joy in programming has become even more important in the AI agent coding age we're leaving. However, am I the only one finding those time estimates way too short? I'm not the fastest programmer on Earth, but I'm not the slowest either, and I think most of those projects would take me a lot more time than those estimates, specially if I'd be working only 2-3 hours…

I mean, all of those depend on how much was imported as third party dependency, how much was not addressed at all, and what was actually solved manually.

They're all doable if you focus on the core problems. He's got a github with many of the examples up, it's instructive on how to keep things small.

And I think it's important that (based on the code) he had a solid understanding of the problem space before starting to write code. You don't write that tight when you explore a new space.

Edit: https://github.com/ssloy?tab=repositories for the shortcut link :)

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#149

Post by josefresco »

snarf21 wrote: post #87
josefresco wrote: post #80

Vibe coding via Claude has re-ignited my passion for fun, side programming projects. After a few false starts, I figured out the tooling, processes and in just a few weeks I've built several apps and I'm having new ideas consistently: -Family calendar/weather dashboard -Bluesky reader that allows you to hide posts you've "seen" -Work PM dashboard to make time tracking more gamified and dare I say... fun? -Chrome Redd…

I struggle with Claude fixing a bug and not giving me the updated output. Like explicitly having to ask it for the fix 6 times while it insists the update is in the output. Did you ever have that happen?

I read some good advice: give Claude 3 bites at the apple and then burn the session and start over. I find if Claude doesn't get it ready the first or second time the chances of a successful outcome drop considerably. Also "Projects" was a nice low setup way of giving context.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#150

Post by SpaceNoodled »

pietmichal wrote: post #86
Viliam1234 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now with LLMs, I simply prompt the same with a little bit more of context "pros and cons of using mysql vs mongodb when storing photos. Link references". In near future, companies will probably be able to pay lots of money to have their products come up better in the comparison. LLMs are smart enough to make the result seem "organic" -- all verifiable information will be true and supported by references, it will on…

This was already a problem in a world without LLMs. Reputation is the only human mechanism that mitigates this.

It's seriously exacerbated by smug LLMs.
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