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Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

blog.matthewbrunelle.com

171–180 of 263 posts

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#171
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, both in English and in german, that's how you would talk to a dog. "Er hat in die Ecke gepinkelt"/"He peed in the corner" (or "she", if it's a female dog). I don't know what is jarring talking about the chatbot like that. It may be creepier if you said "she wrote that program for me" as you now assign a specific gender to the chatbot.

It's how you'd talk about a dog that you know the sex of, but if you didn't know you'd probably use "it". An LLM doesn't have a sex or gender, so I think the natural way to refer to them is "it".

in English, maybe. In German, not really. "Der Bot", "der Robot", "der Computer".

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#172
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's how you'd talk about a dog that you know the sex of, but if you didn't know you'd probably use "it". An LLM doesn't have a sex or gender, so I think the natural way to refer to them is "it".

in English, maybe. In German, not really. "Der Bot", "der Robot", "der Computer".

However, "die AI", "Kuenstliche Intelligenz".

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#173
post #17
post #7

My most abandoned type of projects are video games. I have a folder with tens of abandoned projects, I re-frame them as experiments at that point. This last week I decided to give Claude a go at one of these, and it's been a blast, it picked up the general path immediately. Since I said to CC they were abandon projects, he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop finished, then we can compound and have fun…

Isn't Godot a little ill-designed to work well with LLMs? for example I ended up a couple of times with incorrect tres files, and letting the llm generate IDs feel a little fragile.

I don’t think Godot is any worse than other engines inherently, other than it moving forwards pretty quickly and the latest versions not being in the training data.

I wanted to evaluate which engines would be the best for working with LLMs in and it seems like Flax and Stride kind of come out on top - the former has a lot of stuff out of the box (including terrain) and the latter is all C# basically which is great for debugging. But either way, the source code for both of those makes the functionality a bit easier to track down compared to Godot (which is a lot more complex internally).

So what I do now is have both the engine source code locally alongside the docs and when I want to implement something with AI I just tell it - look at the docs, then at the source if needed, write tests for our code, if something doesn’t work then edit the engine source code in our branch and use the provided convenience script to rebuild the engine (both of those are also pretty fast, I ended up settling on Flax, plus the component model is closer to Unity which I like).

I don’t ask the AI to create scene files though, or any sort of visual assets, but rather stuff like RTS/simulation code. I don’t think any AI is that well optimized for the 3D work outside of simple proof of concept setups.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#176
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're coding for the sake of coding, maybe. If you have itches to scratch and ambitions, but can't summon the motivation or the time, then how is that "working in your free time"? A project that used to take up my entire weekend or vacation can now be knocked up in 15 minutes. That's the exact opposite of working.

What is coding for the sake of coding? I don't think anyone does that. Its about solving puzzles, using your brain, learning by doing, creating things- none of that happens when you use llm coding tools. Instead all you're doing is creating more cheap mediocre throwaway crap just because you can.

> What is coding for the sake of coding? I don't think anyone does that. Its about solving puzzles, using your brain, learning by doing, creating things- none of that happens when you use llm coding tools.

Why do you think that? I do regular ol' coding at my day job and have been vibe coding some side projects. They both require using my brain and both require my input for something to be created. They are different, though.

> Instead all you're doing is creating more cheap mediocre throwaway crap just because you can.

It probably is these things but since I'm just building stuff for myself, it hardly matters.

I've written a lot of code and a lot of that has been doing roughly the same thing. It's not a mental challenge; it's a chore. Sometimes it is really gratifying to code and try to figure stuff out. Often times it is not. So when it comes to building something in my free time, I'd prefer to avoid that sort of mental friction and banal tasks just to start working on the actual problem. More so than that, I'm building tools for myself to make my life easier so I can spend it more on something else.

I ride an electric bike with pedal assist. Does that mean I'm not really bicycling? Some might say yes and that it defeats the point. To me it ensures that I pick the bicycle more because it reduces friction to do so. I know that if I encounter a hill that the pedal assist will help me up it and thus I use it more and the net benefit outweighs the downsides. I think it's the same thing here.

I don't take pride in the work that an LLM does for me but I will happily benefit from it. It's a tool.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#177
post #106

It’s great. I have a stupendous amount of personal software now. Yesterday was a native text editor that was fully integrated into my mediawiki install and would autocomplete links and make syntax easier to use. No one could have built this software but me because it’s worth nothing to others. And I couldn’t build it because it takes too long. But when I’m using an agent to code the limited resource is my attention w…

Just curious, how long did you operate without AI? The burst in productivity I feel implies a time to accumulate these many small needs.

Not the person you are replying to but I have, in version control, around 80 projects dating back to about 2008 that are in various states of completion and Claude has been able to resurrect a lot of them and get them from their "half finished but will never complete" state up to "pull in modern dependencies and implement (me giving a list of what remains to be done)" to the point that they are now usable. I'm more focused on the things that are 7 or less years old because anything older than that I'm not sure I have a need for anymore.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you perch comfortably in your Throne of Purity, it's worth remembering that the average software developer sits on top of 10+ layers of abstraction (not counting hardware).

LLMs are not a level of abstraction, can we let the meme die already? For the same reason why literature summaries are not an abstraction over reading.

The generated code is an abstraction, as you do not need to concern yourself with how it was made, only the surface API. Saying "can we let the meme die already" is not an argument.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#179
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is coding for the sake of coding? I don't think anyone does that. Its about solving puzzles, using your brain, learning by doing, creating things- none of that happens when you use llm coding tools. Instead all you're doing is creating more cheap mediocre throwaway crap just because you can.

> What is coding for the sake of coding? I don't think anyone does that. Its about solving puzzles, using your brain, learning by doing, creating things- none of that happens when you use llm coding tools. Why do you think that? I do regular ol' coding at my day job and have been vibe coding some side projects. They both require using my brain and both require my input for something to be created. They are different,…

Bicycle is a surprisingly good analogy. If you cycle for the exercise or the challenge, an ebike sucks. If you cycle to get from point A to point B and be healthier than a car, it's great.

And just like with bikes, people who take pride in doing things the hard way can continue to do so. And they shouldn't belittle people who choose to use assistance.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#180
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the first time I've seen someone refer to an LLM as "he" rather than "it". No judgement, but I definitely found it interesting (and disconcerting).

I've heard it quite a bit before, but mostly from second-language speakers whose first language don't have impersonal third-person pronouns - e.g. French uses "il" or "elle" for all of "he", "she" or "it". It doesn't help that the marketing leans heavily on anthropomorphizing LLMs either, IMHO.

That makes sense, thanks. English is my only language so I hadn't considered that
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