"The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned." -- Fred Brooks on project management
Some things just take time
171–180 of 295 posts
Re: Some things just take time
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
you fill the 3 liter bottle up to the top, and pour the contents into the 5 liter bottle then you fill 3 liter bottle again, and pour the contents into the 5 liter bottle until the 5 liter one is full empty the 5 liter bottle, and pour the 1 liter in the 3 liter bottle into the 5 liter bottle fill the 3 liter bottle again and pour that into the 1 liter already in the 5 liter bottle to get 4 liters of water
Then you bring the fox back, take the hen across the river, ...
Re: Some things just take time
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?"
Agreed was a bit rough. Yes they are not great at iterating and keeping long contexts, but you look at what he’s describing and you have to agree that’s exactly the type of problem llm excel at Shouldn’t have to baby step through the basics when the author is clearly not interested in learning himself
> Shouldn’t have to baby step through the basics when the author is clearly not interested in learning himself
I'd rather assume good faith, because when I first started using LLMs I was incredibly confused what was going on, and all the tutorials were grating on me because the people making the tutorials were clearly overhyping it.
It was precisely the measured and detailed HN comments that I read that convinced me to finally try out Claude, so I do my best to pay it forward :)
Re: Some things just take time
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, tell you what then. Help me learn. The problem is that I want something that listens on a TCP connection for GD92 packets, and when they arrive send appropriate handshaking to the other end and parse them into Go structs that can be stuffed into a channel to be dealt with elsewhere. And, of course, something to encode them and send them again. How would I do that with whatever AI you choose? I'm pretty certain…
GD92 packets? No idea what you’re talking about but if it has a spec then it doesn’t matter if it’s trained on it. Break the problem down into small enough chunks. Give it examples of expected input and output then any llm can reason about it. Use a planning mode and keep the context small and focused on each segment of the process. You’re describing a basic tcp exchange, learn more about the domain and how packets a…
One other thing, it might be worthwhile having the spec fresh in the LLM's context by downloading it and pointing the agent at it. I've heard that that's a fruitful way to get it to refresh its memory.
Re: Some things just take time
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There are projects where „real world feedback” will be actively harmful.
Re: Some things just take time
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
GD92 packets? No idea what you’re talking about but if it has a spec then it doesn’t matter if it’s trained on it. Break the problem down into small enough chunks. Give it examples of expected input and output then any llm can reason about it. Use a planning mode and keep the context small and focused on each segment of the process. You’re describing a basic tcp exchange, learn more about the domain and how packets a…
One other thing, it might be worthwhile having the spec fresh in the LLM's context by downloading it and pointing the agent at it. I've heard that that's a fruitful way to get it to refresh its memory.
Yep you can even extract the relevant parts and put them into local files the llm can scan
Re: Some things just take time
#177Mandatory read by Peter Norvig - even more relevant now
Re: Some things just take time
#178I've been working on a clone of Sid Meier's Pirates but with a princess theme (for my daughters). I've been using AI to help me write it and I've come to a couple conclusions: - AI can make working PoCs incredibly quickly - It can even help me think of story lines, decision paths etc - Given that, there is still a TON of decisions to be made e.g. what artwork to use, what makes sense from a story perspective - Playte…
I've tried a few game projects with coding agents - having never worked on a game before in my life - and the main thing I learned is that the hard part is designing it to be fun . Coming up with a genuinely interesting gameplay loop with increasing difficulty levels and progressively revealed gameplay mechanics is a fascinating and extremely difficult challenge, no matter how much AI you throw at the problem.
And that's why human work, not its "expression" or some other legalese should be protected by law.
If LLMs (or other "AI" or even AI tools) are able to exactly replicate the behavior of a program (game or otherwise) without access to its source code, that's technologically cool. However, that means it's possible to cheaply replicate immense amounts of human work in a way the law does not cover.
If you take a game and use LLMs to reimplement both its assets and code from scratch but players have the same movement, weapons do the same damage, have the same spread and projectile speed, and so on, then the "new" game is not really new, it's based on other people's work. And nobody should be allowed to profit from other people's work without their consent and without compensating them.
Obviously, work is hard to quantify but that doesn't mean we should give up.
Re: Some things just take time
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've tried a few game projects with coding agents - having never worked on a game before in my life - and the main thing I learned is that the hard part is designing it to be fun . Coming up with a genuinely interesting gameplay loop with increasing difficulty levels and progressively revealed gameplay mechanics is a fascinating and extremely difficult challenge, no matter how much AI you throw at the problem.
And that's why human work, not its "expression" or some other legalese should be protected by law. If LLMs (or other "AI" or even AI tools) are able to exactly replicate the behavior of a program (game or otherwise) without access to its source code, that's technologically cool. However, that means it's possible to cheaply replicate immense amounts of human work in a way the law does not cover. If you take a game and…
Does that argument also apply to https://www.freeciv.org/ and https://openxcom.org/ and similar projects?
Re: Some things just take time
#180One of my favorite ideas from Nietzsche [1] is that civilizations take millennia to “digest” or integrate concepts. It seems a little obvious, maybe, until you look at the modern world and realize the baseline assumption is something like, “every problem is just a question of resources.” An example being the common attitude that [advanced tech] is just a math problem to be solved, and not a process that needs to play…
I have no problem with people treating advanced tech like a math problem. I have a big goddamned problem with the tech world seeing things like creativity, expression, exploration, imagination, experience, companionship, empathy, sex, fun, beauty, inspiration, and all of that human-y sort of stuff as a goddamned math problem to be solved. It’s just so sad and most people resent it being shoved down their throats by t…
> I have a big goddamned problem with the tech world seeing things like creativity, expression, exploration, imagination, experience, companionship, empathy, sex, fun, beauty, inspiration, and all of that human-y sort of stuff as a goddamned math problem to be solved.
Resource to be exploited. That’s worse of course.