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Web development is fun again

ma.ttias.be

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Re: Web development is fun again

#151

Post by marcellus23 »

llmslave2 wrote: post #117

> Even with refinement and back-and-forth prompting, I’m easily 10x more productive Developers notoriously overestimate the productivity gains of AI, especially because it's akin to gambling every time you make a prompt, hoping for the AI's output to work. I'd be shocked if the developer wasn't actually less productive.

> I'd be shocked if the developer wasn't actually less productive

I agree 10x is a very large number and it's almost certainly smaller—maybe 1.5x would be reasonable. But really? You would be shocked if it was above 1.0x? This kind of comment always strikes me as so infantilizing and rude, to suggest that all these developers are actually slower with AI, but apparently completely oblivious to it and only you know better.

Re: Web development is fun again

#152

Post by heliumtera »

it is fun again because we can remove ourselves completely from it? seems like web enthusiast are always the first to drop ship huh. "llms good because I no longer have to interface with this steaming pile of shit that web development has become", not because the web ecosystem has improved by any metric.

Re: Web development is fun again

#153

Post by yason »

simonw wrote: post #7

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make yourself stop.)

Re: Web development is fun again

#154

Post by llmslave2 »

turtlebits wrote: post #145
llmslave2 wrote: post #117

> Even with refinement and back-and-forth prompting, I’m easily 10x more productive Developers notoriously overestimate the productivity gains of AI, especially because it's akin to gambling every time you make a prompt, hoping for the AI's output to work. I'd be shocked if the developer wasn't actually less productive.

Numbers don't matter if it makes you "feel" more productive. I've started and finished way more small projects i was too lazy to start without AI. So infinitely more productive? Though I've definitely wasted some time not liking what AI generated and started a new chat.

> Numbers don't matter

Yes that's already been well established.

Re: Web development is fun again

#157

Post by geoffbp »

llmslave2 wrote: post #117

> Even with refinement and back-and-forth prompting, I’m easily 10x more productive Developers notoriously overestimate the productivity gains of AI, especially because it's akin to gambling every time you make a prompt, hoping for the AI's output to work. I'd be shocked if the developer wasn't actually less productive.

Username checks out

Re: Web development is fun again

#158

Post by llmslave2 »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #144
llmslave2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even 2.5x is absurd. If they said 1.5x I might believe them.

I'm building an AI agent for Godot, and in paid user testing we found the median speed up time to complete a variety of tasks[0] was 2x. This number was closer to 10x for less experienced engineers [0] tasks included making games from scratch and resolving bugs we put into template projects. There's no perfect tasks to test on, but this seemed sufficient

That sounds reasonable to me. AI is best at generating super basic and common code, it will have plenty of training on game templates and simple games.

Obviously you cannot generalize that to all software development though.

Re: Web development is fun again

#159

Post by satvikpendem »

yason wrote: post #153
simonw wrote: post #7

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…

> There are two sorts of projects (or in general, people): artisans, and entrepreneurs. The latter see code as a means to an end, possibly monetized, and the former see code as the end in itself.

Me from 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391392#46398917

Re: Web development is fun again

#160

Post by freedomben »

yason wrote: post #153
simonw wrote: post #7

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…

It's just fun in a different way now. I've long had dozens of ideas for things I wanted to build, and never enough time to really even build one of them. Over the last few months, I've been able to crank out several of these projects to satisfactory results. The code is not a beautiful work of art like I would prefer it to be, and the fun part is no longer the actual code and working in the code base like it used to be. The fun part now is being able to have an app or tool that gets the job I needed done. These are rarely important jobs, just things that I want as a personal user. Some of them have been good enough that I shipped them for other users, but the vast majority are just things I use personally.

Just yesterday for example, I used AI to build a GTK app that has a bunch of sports team related sound effects built into them. I could have coded this by hand in 45 minutes, but it only took 10 minutes with AI. That's not the best part though. The best part is that I was able to use AI to get it building into an app image in a container so I can distribute it to myself as a single static file that I can execute on any system I want. Dicking with builds and distribution was always the painful part and something that I never enjoyed, but without it, usage is a pain. I've even gone back to projects I built a decade ago or more and got them building against modern libraries and distributed as RPMs or app images that I can trivially install on all of my systems.

The joy is now in the results rather than the process, but it is joy nonetheless.

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