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Web development is fun again

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Re: Web development is fun again

#181

Post by plagiarist »

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…

I do have productivity goals! I want to spend the half hour I have on the part I think is fun. Not on machine configuration, boilerplate, dependency resolution, 100 random errors with new frameworks that are maybe resolved with web searches.

Re: Web development is fun again

#182

Post by freedomben »

llmslave2 wrote: post #118
yomismoaqui wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little shameful but I still struggle when centering divs on a page. Yes, I know about flexbox for more than a decade but always have to search to remember how it is done. So instead of refreshing that less used knowledge I just ask the AI to do it for me. The implications of this vs searching MDN Docs is another conversation to have.

Surely searching "centre a div" takes less time than prompting and waiting for a response...

If only it were that easy. I got really good at centering and aligning stuff, but only when the application is constructed in the way I expect. This is usually not a problem as I'm usually working on something I built myself, but if I need to make a tweak to something I didn't build, I frequently find myself frustrated and irritated, especially when there is some higher or lower level that is overriding the setting I just added.

As a bonus, I pay attention to what the AI did and its results, and I have actually learned quite a bit about how to do this myself even without AI assistance

Re: Web development is fun again

#183

Post by freedomben »

llmslave2 wrote: post #168
bitwize wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till the VC tap gets shut off. You: Hey ChatGPT, help me center a div. ChatGPT: Certainly, I'd be glad to help! But first you must drink a verification can to proceed. Or: ChatGPT: I'm sorry, you appear to be asking a development-related question, which your current plan does not support. Would you like me to enable "Dev Mode" for an additional $200/month? Drink a verification can to accept charges.

Calling it now: AI withdrawal will become a documented disorder.

I can absolutely see that happening. It's already kind of happened to me a couple of times when I found myself offline and was still trying to work on my local app. Like any addiction, I expect it to cost me some money in the future

Re: Web development is fun again

#184

Post by simonw »

llmslave2 wrote: post #116
simonw wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rate at which I'm learning new skills has accelerated thanks to LLMs. Not learning anything while you use them is a choice. You can choose differently!

How are you using AI to learn? I see a lot of people say this but simply reading AI generated overviews or asking it questions isn't really learning.

I'm using it to build things.

Here's an example from the other day. I've always been curious about writing custom Python C extensions but I've never been brave enough to really try and do it.

I decided it would be interesting to dig into that by having Codex build a C extension for Python that exposed simple SQLite queries with a timeout.

It wrote me this: https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/sqlite-time-lim... - here's the shared transcript: https://chatgpt.com/s/cd_6958a2f131a081918ed810832f7437a2

I read the code it produced and ran it on my computer to see it work.

What did I learn?

- Codex can write, compile and test C extensions for Python now

- The sqlite3_progress_handler mechanism I've been hooking into for SQLite time limits in my Python code works in C too, and appears to be the recommended way to solve this

- How to use PyTuple_New(size) in C and then populate that tuple

- What the SQLite C API for running a query and then iterating though the results looks like, including the various SQLITE_INTEGER style constants for column types

- The "goto cleanup;" pattern for cleaning up on errors, including releasing resources and calling DECREF for the Python reference counter

- That a simple Python extension can be done with ~150 lines of readable and surprisingly non-threatening C

- How to use a setup.py and pyproject.toml function together to configure a Python package that compiles an extension

Would I have learned more if I had spent realistically a couple of days figuring out enough C and CPython and SQLite and setup.py trivia to do this without LLM help? Yes. But I don't have two days to spend on this flight of curiosity, so actually I would have learned nothing.

The LLM project took me ~1 minutes to prompt and then 15 minutes to consume the lessons at the end. And I can do dozens of this kind of thing a day, in between my other work!

Re: Web development is fun again

#185

Post by Defletter »

xav_authentique wrote: post #176
yason wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is showing the difference between people who like to /make/ things and those that like to make /things/. People that write software because they see a solution for a problem that can be fixed with software seem to benefit the most of LLM technology. It's almost the inverse for the people that write software because they like the process of writing software.

Surely there has to be some level of "getting stuff done"/"achieving a goal" when /making/ things, otherwise you'd be foregoing for-loops because writing each iteration manually is more fun.

Re: Web development is fun again

#186

Post by boca_honey »

oliwarner wrote: post #79

> I feel like I can manage the entire stack again - with confidence. By not managing anything? Ignorance is bliss, I guess. I understand it. I've found myself looking at new stacks and tech, not knowing what I didn't know, and wondering where to start. But if you skip these fundamentals of the modern dev cycle, what happens when the LLM fails?

Then it fails and the world doesn't end. You fix it or delegate it and move on. Most people aren't working on code for power grids and fighter jets. There's room for failure. This same argument was used by the old timers when younger programmers couldn't code assembly or C on bare metal systems.

Re: Web development is fun again

#187

Post by 6r17 »

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…

Ultimately it's up to the user to decide what to do with his time ; it's still a good bargain that leaves a lot of sovereignty to the user. I like to code a little too much ; got into deep tech to capacities I couldn't imagine before - but at some point you hit rock bottom and you gotta ship something that makes sense. I'm like a really technical "predator" - in a sense where to be honest with myself - it has almost become some way of consumption rather than pure problem solving. For very passionate people it can be difficult to be draw the line between pleasure and work - especially given that we just do what we like in the first place - so all that time feel robbed from us - and from the standpoint of "shipper" who didn't care about it in the first place it feels like freedom.

But I'd argue that if anyone wants to jump into technical stuff ; it has never been so openly accessible - you could join some niche slack where some competent programmers were doing great stuff. Today a solo junior can ship you a key-val that is going to be fighting redis in benchmarks.

It really is not a time to slack down in my opinion - everything feels already existing and mostly already dealt with. But again - for those who are frustrated with the status-quo ; they will always find something to do.

I get you however that this has created a very different space where past acquired skill-sets don't necessarily translate as well today - maybe it's just going to be different to find it's space than it was 10 years ago.

I like that the cards have be re-dealt though - it's arguably way more open than the stack-overflow era and pre-ai where knowledge was much more difficult to create.

Re: Web development is fun again

#188

Post by simonw »

bgwalter wrote: post #149
dang wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please stop posting cynical and/or curmudgeonly comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, and it destroys the intended spirit of this site. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

How can I express in a non cynical way that I think LLMs are theft? Even if courts decide in the future that they think it is not, it is still a protected opinion in the same manner that some people do not recognize the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

You could save those opinions for discussions about the legality and ethics of training LLMs on unlicensed data, which crop up here pretty often.

Re: Web development is fun again

#189

Post by [deleted] »

101008 wrote: post #108
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 was very anti AI (mainly because I am scared that I'll take my job). I did a side project that would have took me weeks in just two days. I deployed it. It's there, waiting for customers now. I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and de…

[deleted]

Re: Web development is fun again

#190

Post by simonw »

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…

If you only get one or two half-hours a week it's probably more fun to use those to build working software than it is to inch forward on a project that won't do anything interesting for several more months.
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