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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

#151

Post by cush »

Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

Good code will stand the test of time. No matter how great a project is, there’s no world in which I adopt anything written over a few months and just released, for maintenance reasons alone.

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

#152

Post by cassidy_co »

cossray wrote: post #141
devmor wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also just the negative association factor. I use LLMs in my every day work. I’m also a strong critic of LLMs and absolutely loathe the hype cycle around them. I have done some really cool things with copilot and Claude and I keep sharing them to within my working circle because I simply don’t want to interact that much with people who aren’t grounded on the subject.

I would be interested to hear your take on Copilot vs Claude. I have used Copilot (trial) in VS Code and I found it to mostly meet my needs. It could generate some plans and code, which I could review on the go. I found this very natural to me as I never felt 'left behind' in whatever code the AI was generating. However, most of the posts I see here are on Claude (I haven't tried it) and very few mentions of Copilot.…

(Context: I'm a different person, but have thoughts on this)

I started using Copilot at work because that's what the company policy was. It's a pretty strict environment, but it's perfectly serviceable and gets a lot of fresh, vetted updates. IDE integration with vs code was a huge plus for me.

Claude code is definitely a messier, buggier frontend for the LLM. It's clunkier to navigate and it has much more primitive context management tools. IDE integration is clunky with vs code, too.

However, if you want to take advantage of the Anthropic subscription services, I've found Claude Code is the way to go... Simply because Anthropic works hard to lock you into their ecosystem if you want the sweet discounts. I'm greedy, so I bit the bullet for all of the LLM coding stuff I do in my personal life.

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

#153

Post by smartmic »

zellyn wrote: post #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.

Correct[0]. This was also my first thought after reading

> Unfortunately, unlike many other languages, SQLite has no formal specification describing how it should be parsed. It doesn’t expose a stable API for its parser either. In fact, quite uniquely, in its implementation it doesn’t even build a parse tree at all9! The only reasonable approach left in my opinion is to carefully extract the relevant parts of SQLite’s source code and adapt it to build the parser I wanted

Did they made a proper problem research in the first place?

[0]: https://sqlite.org/lemon.html

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

#155

Post by beepbooptheory »

Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

I'm sorry, who is this for? Aren't you maybe a little tired of talking about this, if not totally bored??

There is something at this point kind of surreal in the fact that you know everyday there will be this exact blog post and these exact comments.

Like, its been literal years and years and yall are still talking about the thing thats supposed to do other things. What are we even doing anymore? Is this dead internet? It boggles the mind we are still at this level of discourse frankly.

Love 'em hate 'em I don't care yall need to freaking get a grip! Like for the love god read a book, paint a picture! Do something else! This blog is just a journey to snooze town and we all must at some level know that. This feels like literal brain virus.

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

#157

Post by sebastianconcpt »

In a not so far future, people will be amazed that these dense pieces of source code were done by hand and meant to be maintained by people. Same type of amazing you see when thinking in the internals of The Silver Swan or any other famous mechanical automaton.

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

#158

Post by afc »

smartmic wrote: post #153
zellyn wrote: post #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.

Correct[0]. This was also my first thought after reading > Unfortunately, unlike many other languages, SQLite has no formal specification describing how it should be parsed. It doesn’t expose a stable API for its parser either. In fact, quite uniquely, in its implementation it doesn’t even build a parse tree at all9! The only reasonable approach left in my opinion is to carefully extract the relevant parts of SQLite’…

I was also baffled. "No formal specification"? Two minutes of browsing is enough to find it: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/src%2Fparse.y

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

#159

Post by sunaurus »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #100
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

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?

I've been arguing that it's POSSIBLE to get a small (but meaningful) uplift in productivity on average if you are careful with how you use LLMs, but at the same time, it's also extremely easy to actually negatively impact your productivity.

In both cases, you feel super productive all the time, because you are constantly putting in instructions and getting massive amounts of output, and this feels like constant & fast progress. It's scary how easy it is to waste time on LLMs while not even realizing you are wasting time.

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

#160

Post by iamandoni »

Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

This is exactly why I built https://github.com/andonimichael/arxitect . I’ve found that agents by default produce tactical but brittle software. But if you teach agents to prioritize software architecture and design patterns, their code structure becomes much much better. Additionally, better structured code becomes more token efficient, requires less context to make changes, and coding agents become more accurate.
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