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Some things just take time

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Re: Some things just take time

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to pull the skill issue card here, but that is a trivial problem that can be one shotted with almost any model with

tbh that's not a helpful thing to say. I think a more productive thing would be to ask "What model are you using?" "Are you using it in chat mode or as a dedicated agent?" "Do you have an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md?" I've also been underwhelmed with its ability to iterate, as it tends to pile on hacks. So another useful question is "did you try having it write again with what you/it learned?"

> I think a more productive thing would be to ask "What model are you using?" "Are you using it in chat mode or as a dedicated agent?" "Do you have an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md?"

In my case I'd have to say "Don't know, whatever VS Code's bot uses", and "no idea what those are or why I have to care".

Re: Some things just take time

#152

"Nobody is going to mass-produce a 50-year-old oak." Mass production of engineered structural lumber.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCYn3xQ0yS8

A 50-year-old oak is not just lumber. The fact that you think these are equivalent is a hilarious, classic HN take.

Re: Some things just take time

#153
post #131
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but only if you have an ax to sharpen. With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress. You can take this pretty up high too - sometimes it takes building multiple products or companies to get it right

> With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress Way too often that is used as an excuse for various forms of laziness; to not think about the things you can already know. And that lack of thinking repeats in an endless cycle when, after your trial and error, you don't use what you learned because "let's look forward not backward", "let's fail fast and often" and similar platitudes. Catchy slogans and…

Without commenting about the frequency of negligence myself, I suspect at least that you and GP are in agreement.

I doubt GP is suggesting ‘go ahead and be negligent to feedback and guardrails that let you course correct early.’

Plugging the Cynefin framework as a useful technique for practitioners here. It doesn’t have to be hard to choose whether or not rigorous planning is appropriate for the task at hand, versus probe-test-backtrack with tight iteration loops.

Re: Some things just take time

#154

With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be. I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of bot…

Ah, metaphors. Abstract concepts are not moving objects. You don't actually need to "turn it around" or "sail past it". You can break the laws of physics (because they don't apply). You can teleport around. Speed actually just wins, because we are usually constrained by time.

Speed actually just wins, because we are usually constrained by time.

Sorry, but I don’t understand what you mean here. What do we win by being faster at producing the wrong things?

Re: Some things just take time

#156
My current project is the culmination 15 years of software development.

I started out building a full stack framework like Meteor framework (though I started before Meteor framework was created in 2012 and long before Next.js).

Then I ported it to to Node.js because I saw an advantage to having the same language on the frontend and backend.

Then I noticed that developers like to mix and match different libraries/modules and this was a necessity. The whole idea of a cohesive full stack framework didn't make sense for most software. So I extracted the most essential part of it that people liked and this became SocketCluster. It got a fair amount of traction in the early days.

At the time, some people might have thought SocketCluster was trying to be a more scalable copycat of Socket.io but actually I had been working on it for several years by that point. I just made the API similar when I extracted it for better compatibility with Socket.io but it had some additional features.

A few years ago, I ended up building a serverless low-code/no-code CRUD platform which removes the need for a custom backend and it can be used with LLMs directly (you can give them the API key to access the control panel). It can define the whole data schema for you. I've built some complex apps with it to fully prove the concept with advanced search functionality (including indexing with a million records).

I've made some technical decisions which will look insane to most developers but are crucial and based on 15 years of experience, carefully evaluating tradeoffs and actual testing with complex applications. For example my platform only has 3 data types. String, Number and Boolean. The string type supports some additional constraints to allow it to be used to store any kind of data like lists, binary files (as base64)... Having just 3 types greatly simplifies spam prevention and schema validation. Makes it much easier for the user (or LLM) to reason about and produce a working, stable, bug-free solution.

That said I've been struggling to sell it because there are some popular well funded solutions on the market which look superficially similar or better. Of course they can't handle all the scenarios, they're more complex, less secure, don't scale, require far more LLM tokens, lead to constant regressions when used with AI. It's just impossible to communicate those benefits to people because they will value a one-shotted pretty UI over all these other aspects.

You can check out https://saasufy.com/ if interested.

Re: Some things just take time

#157
post #11

On the contrary, you can solve the tree problem with money. There are nurseries that sell mature trees -- most people though will not choose to spend $20k on a tree.

You won't find a 50 year old American Chestnut in a nursery, lol.

And forget about 20k. If you find someone willing to sell their tree you're looking at at least 10x that for the logistics of moving a 20 ton root system.

Re: Some things just take time

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working on a side project for ~10 years (very intermittently) that involves a tricky combination of mathematics, classical AI algorithms, and programming language design, and I've gone though this very slow but rewarding journey to work out how all of the pieces should fit together properly. In the last year or so I've been able to prototype it and accelerate the development quite significantly using Claude…

10 years of thinking before shipping is actually the move. The AI just becomes a power tool — useless if you don't know what you're building, unstoppable if you do

You're missing out on 10 years of real world feedback if you do this.

Re: Some things just take time

#160
I love this piece and read to the end. Currently working on an idea. Started with Claude and it made a mess. Now enjoying doing it by hand. It just feels easier! AI is assisting on blockers now noy writing code.

Anyway 2 areas I slightly disagree on.

Open source abandonware is fine. Sometimes people give up because they realize it is not a good idea. Or they get busy or sick.

And 10 years at a startup is great but that relies on it being a good startup. Entropy at companies means I have never made it to 10yrs even though I wanted to.

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