181–190 of 466 posts
The author's high-value flowcharts vs Steve Yegge's AI art is enough of a case-in-point for how confusing his posts and repos are. However this is a pervasive problem with AI coding tools. Unsurprisingly, the creators of these tools are also the most bullish about agentic coding, so the source code shows the consequences. Even Claude Code itself seems to experience an unusually high number of regressions or undocumen…
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Do you understand at a molecular level how cooking works? Or do you just do some rote actions according to instructions? How do you know if your cooking worked properly without understanding chemistry? Without looking at its components under a microscope? Simple: you follow the directions, eat the food, and if it tastes good, it worked. If cooks don't understand physics, chemistry, biology, etc, how do all the cooks…
That's a terrible analogy lol. 1. Chefs do learn the chemistry, at least enough to know why their techniques work. 2. Food scientist is a real job 3. The supply chain absolutely does have scientists involved in day to day operations lol. A better analogy is just shoving the entire contents of the fridge into a pot, plastic containers and all, and assuming it'll be fine.
Cooks are idiots (most are either illegal immigrants with no formal education, or substance-abusing degenerates who failed at everything else) who repeat what they're told. They think ridiculous things, like that searing a stake "seals in the juices", or that adding oil to pasta water "prevents sticking", that alcohol completely "cooks off", that salt "makes water boil faster", etc. They are the auto mechanics of food. A few may be formally educated but the vast majority are not. They're just doing what they were shown to do.
> A better analogy is just shoving the entire contents of the fridge into a pot, plastic containers and all, and assuming it'll be fine.
That would never result in a good meal. On the other hand, vibe coding is curently churning out not just working software, but working businesses. You're sleeping on the real effect this is having. And it's getting better every 6 months.
Back to the topic: most programmers actually suck at programming. Their code is full of bugs, and occasionally the code paths run into those bugs and make them noticeable, but they are always there. AI does the same thing, just faster, and it's getting better at it. If you still write code by hand in a few years you will be considered a dinosaur.
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The compiler is deterministic and the translation does not lose semantics. The meaning of your code is an exact reflection of what is produced.
We can tell you weren't around for the advent of compilers. To be fair, neither was I since the UNIX c compiler came out in '68 and was by far not the first compiler. Modern comilers you can make that claim about, but early compilers weren't.
I have not tried Gas Town yet, but Steve's beads https://github.com/steveyegge/beads (used by Gas Town) has been a game-changer, on the order of what claude code was when it arrived.
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The only people who think that are programmers already or programmer-adjacent. Your mother is never going to be able to use a Gas Town-like workflow to make software for her own needs, nor is she even going to want to spend her weekends trying. These tools still require a baseline minimum of technical knowledge, and a real time investment, and also a real money investment the way some people are using them. Moreover,…
> Your mother is never going to be able to use a Gas Town-like workflow to make software for her own needs, nor is she even going to want to spend her weekends trying. I'm going on a tangent here but what's with this constant deprecation of mothers to make a point? There are many people here whose mothers can develop software.
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Keep in mind that Steve has LLMs write his posts on that blog. Things said there may not reflect his actual thoughts on the subject(s) at hand.
> Keep in mind that Steve has LLMs write his posts on that blog. Ok, I can accept that, it's a choice. > Things said there may not reflect his actual thoughts on the subject(s) at hand. Nope, you don't get to have it both ways. LLMs are just tools, there is always a human behind them and that human is responsible for what they let the LLM do/say/post/etc. We have seen the hell that comes from playing the "They said t…
The same approach actually applies to Trump and other liars. You can't take anything they say as truth or serious intent on its own; they're not engaging in good faith. You can remove yourself one step and attempt to analyze why they say what they do, and from there get at what to take seriously and what to disregard.
In Steve's case, my interpretation is that he's extremely bullish on AI and sees his setup or something similar as the inevitable future, but he sprinkles in silly warnings to lampshade criticism. That's how the two messages of "this isn't serious" and "this is the future or software development" co-exist. The first is largely just a cover and an admission this his particular project is a mess. Note that this interpretation assumes that the contents of the blog post in question were largely written by him, even if LLM assistance was used.
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Yeah, it sounds like "you're holding it wrong" Like, why are you manually tidying and fixing things? The first pass is never perfect. Maybe the functionality is there but the code is spaghetti or untestable. Have another agent review and feed that review back into the original agent that built out the code. Keep iterating like that. My usual workflow: Agent 1 - Build feature Agent 2 - Review these parts of the code,…
I'm not trying to be rude here at all but are you manually verifying any of that? When I've had LLMs write unit tests they are quick to write pointless unit tests that seem impressive "2123/2123 tests passed!" but in reality it's testing mostly nothing of value. And that's when they aren't bypassing commit checks or just commenting out tests or saying "I fixed it all" while multiple tests are broken. Maybe I need a s…
This has not happened to me since Sonnet 4.5. Opus 4.5 is especially robust when it comes to writing tests. I use it daily in multiple projects and verify the test code.
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I agree, I’m one of the Very Serious Engineers and I liked Steve’s post when I thought it was sort of tongue in cheek but was horrified to come to the HN comments and LinkedIn comments proclaiming Gastown as the future of engineering. There absolutely is a large contingent of engineers who believe this, and it has a real world impact on my job if my bosses think you can just throw a dozen AI agents at our product roa…
It's a half-joke. No need to take it that seriously or that jokingly. It's mostly only grifters and cryptocurrency scammers claiming it's amazing. I think ideas from it will probably partially inspire future, simpler systems.
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I feel like it was doing what you're saying about 4-6 months ago. Especially the commenting out tests. Not always but I'd have to do more things step by step and keep the llm on track. Now though, the last 3-4 months, it's writing decent unit tests without much hand holding or refactors.
Hmm, my last experience was within the last 2 months but I'm trying not to write it off as "this sucked and will always suck", that's the #1 reason I keep testing and playing with these things, the capabilities are increasing quickly and what did/didn't work last week (especially "last model") might work this week. I'll keep testing it but that just hasn't been my experience, I sincerely hope that changes because an…
When I work on issues I create a new branch off of master, let the llm go to town on it, then I manually commit and push to remote for an MR/PR. If there are any errors on the commit hooks I just feed the errors back into the agent.
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> Keep in mind that Steve has LLMs write his posts on that blog. Ok, I can accept that, it's a choice. > Things said there may not reflect his actual thoughts on the subject(s) at hand. Nope, you don't get to have it both ways. LLMs are just tools, there is always a human behind them and that human is responsible for what they let the LLM do/say/post/etc. We have seen the hell that comes from playing the "They said t…
Do you read that as giving him a pass? I read it as more of a condemnation. If you have an LLM write "your" blog posts then of course their content doesn't represent your thoughts. Discussing the contents of the post then is pointless, and we can disregard it entirely. Separately we can talk about what the person's actual views might be, using the fact that he has a machine generate his blog posts as a clue. I'm not…
I agree with you on Steve's case, and I have no ill will towards him. Mostly it was just me trying to "stomp" on giving him a pass, but, as you point out, that may not have been what the original commenter meant.