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Writing toy software is a joy

blog.jsbarretto.com

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151–160 of 318 posts

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#151

Post by n4r9 »

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.

Technology is a catalyser. It has a knack of turning things from "already a problem" to "now a catastrophe".

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#152

Post by cyberpunk »

lillecarl wrote: post #111
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…

I do this. But the killer usecase for me is writing all boilerplate and implementing some half-working stuff keeps my attention on the issue which makes me able to complete more complex things. A recent example is when I implemented a (Kubernetes) CSI driver that makes /nix available in a container so you can run an empty image and skip a lot of infra to manage. I talked to it a bit and eventually it wrote a Nix deri…

i’ve stopped writing “real” code for the most part, i just bang out some pseudo code like:

    read all files in directory ending in .tmpl
     render these as go templates 
    if any with kind: deployment
      add annotation blah: bar
    publish to local kubeapi using sa account foo
and tell it to translate it to x lang.

so i control the logic, it handles the syntax.

asking it to solve problems for you never seems to really work, but it remembers syntax and if i need some kinda reader interface over another or whatever.

can’t help me with code reviews tho, so i spent most of my time reading code instead of remembering syntax. i’m ok with it.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#153

Post by otikik »

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…

Best metaphor I have found to how I use them is as "a hunting dog".

They can get into small crevasses and the foliage and whatnot and they don't mind getting wet. They can fluster rabbits out. And are somewhat smart. But you still have to make the kill and you have to lead the dog, not the other way around.

"Copilot" is a great marketing name, but a bit deceiving.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#154

Post by hollowonepl »

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…

I also treat chatgpt as analogy to google. works relatively fine.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#155

Post by bloomca »

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…

You can get a VPS in any cloud provider and treat it as your server, just copy files to it. It depends on the scope of your projects, though, if you need a lot of resources it can get pretty pricey for just toy projects.

I pay $12 for a server on Digital Ocean, and I host multiple servers behind an Nginx. But I am primarily a frontend/Desktop developer, so they are simple.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#156

Post by spacechild1 »

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…

> Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine?

That's basically how I use them.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#157

Post by hollowonepl »

ngriffiths wrote: post #128
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…

I use it the same way. The feeling is that I'm back in ~2010 when Googling stuff felt like a superpower. I could find anything back then. Of course, it didn't last long, and trying to Google now is an exercise in pain and frustration. Lots of people have complained about the various things Google and marketers have done to get there, idk, I just don't like how it works now. Top LLMs feel amazingly good at rapidly sur…

I wonder when LMMs and services like chatgpt become as bloated as search engines are today, with their own equivalent of SEO/SEM tools and other unwanted stuff distracting and disturbing accuracy, even if one finally stops hallucinating.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#158

Post by smartaz42 »

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…

For me, one of the enjoyable aspects of toy projects is that there is no schedule to meet. Which means that I can take my time. And yes, that means I take much more time than the article implies. As an examine, I've been polishing my PEG-based Turing complete language (which features both AOT-to-C and a fully featured repl) since COVID was a daily aspect of life.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#159

Post by avgDev »

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…

I start with "I don't have any money, I need an open source library that does this" lol.....even at work.

Re: Writing toy software is a joy

#160

Post by heikkilevanto »

The first example in the article, a regex engine, clicked for me. I had read the book on beautiful code #, and the first short story was about a regex thing by none other than Dennis Ritchie. As Fate would have it, my job required me to make a tool for web scraping. Inspired by that book I created a pattern matching language for dom trees. And a click and point tool to create those patterns. At the best time or company had a full time person maintaining maybe 10k patterns to scrape days from library catalogs... It was not a toy project, but it did feel like, even if I got paid to do it.

# Andy Oran, Greg Wilson: "Beautiful code"

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