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My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

matthewrocklin.com

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Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#191

Post by sph »

emseetech wrote: post #15
CharlesW wrote: post #5

I get vibe-coders not having a good experience once the honeymoon is over. But I'm fascinated that a professional software developer could have such a different experience than I do. • LLMs generate junk • LLMs generate a lot of junk

My question is why use AI to output javascript or python? Why not output everything in C and ASM for 500x performance? Why use high level languages meant to be easier for humans? Why not go right to the metal? If anyone's ever tried this, it's clear why: AI is terrible at C and ASM. But that cuts into what AI is at its core: It's not actual programming, it's mechanical reproduction. Which means its incapabilities in…

I don't get this. AI coders keep saying they review all the code they push, and your suggestion is to use even harder languages the average vibe coder is unable to understand, all in name of "performance"? Faster code maybe, and exponentially increasing the tech debt and amount of bugs that slips through.

It wasn't even long ago that we thought developer experience and capacity for abstraction (which is easier to achieve in higher level languages) was paramount.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#192

Post by nl »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #167
nl wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compilers are deterministic, making their generated assembly code verifiable People keep saying this like it is an absolute fact, whereas in reality it is a scale. Compilers are more deterministic than LLMs in general, but no they are not completely deterministic. That's why making reproducible builds is hard! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52974259/what-are-some-e... and https://github.com/mgrang/non-determin…

> This leads to the point: in general do we care about this non-determinism? > Most of the time, no we don't. well that’s a sweeping generalisation. i think this is a better generalised answer to your question. > It depends on the problem we’re trying solve and the surrounding conditions and constraints. software engineering is primarily about understanding the problem space. are 99% of us building a pacemaker? no. b…

> are 99% of us building a pacemaker? no. but that doesn’t mean we can automatically make the leap to assuming a set of tools known for being non-deterministic are good enough for our use case.

This seems irrelevant?

Either way hopefully you test the pacemaker code comprehensively!

That's pretty much the best case for llm generated code: comprehensive tests of the desired behaviour.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#193

Post by sph »

deergomoo wrote: post #2

I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun. If you want to argue that you’re more capable or whatever, fine. I disagree but I don’t have any data to disprove you. But saying that AI development is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer” is, to me, the same as saying you’re really into painting but you’re not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone…

> I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun

AI is more fun for programmers that should've gone into management instead, and prefer having to explain things in painstaking detail in text, rather than use code. In other words, AI is for people that don't like programming that much.

Why would you even automate the most fun part of this job? As a freelance consultant, I'd rather have a machine to automate the whole boring business side so I could just sit in front of my computer and write stuff with my own hands.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#194

Post by nl »

emseetech wrote: post #15
CharlesW wrote: post #5

I get vibe-coders not having a good experience once the honeymoon is over. But I'm fascinated that a professional software developer could have such a different experience than I do. • LLMs generate junk • LLMs generate a lot of junk

My question is why use AI to output javascript or python? Why not output everything in C and ASM for 500x performance? Why use high level languages meant to be easier for humans? Why not go right to the metal? If anyone's ever tried this, it's clear why: AI is terrible at C and ASM. But that cuts into what AI is at its core: It's not actual programming, it's mechanical reproduction. Which means its incapabilities in…

I had it write a new stdlib implementation (wasmJS) for a custom web based fantasy console I'm writing.

It did ok at that.

We'll - Doom runs so ok enough for what I wanted anyway.

No, it's not a copy of other WASM stdlib implementations.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#195

Post by nl »

bdauvergne wrote: post #189

Seems people read the blog but not the code, I looked at the stated rewrite of Numpy in Rust: > As an introductory project, I rewrote Numpy in Rust. It was great fun. That's not a rewrite at all it's just a wrapping of an existing linear algebra Rust library (faer, blas, etc..) with a more Numpy like API. It seems to me that every AI project I look at is just a mashup/wrapper over existing things. Where are the real…

No true Scotsman would ever do the kind of programming that 95% of the programming in the world is right?

Anyway https://www.reddit.com/r/osdev/comments/1opsicd/just_how_far...

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#196

Post by throwup238 »

bdauvergne wrote: post #189

Seems people read the blog but not the code, I looked at the stated rewrite of Numpy in Rust: > As an introductory project, I rewrote Numpy in Rust. It was great fun. That's not a rewrite at all it's just a wrapping of an existing linear algebra Rust library (faer, blas, etc..) with a more Numpy like API. It seems to me that every AI project I look at is just a mashup/wrapper over existing things. Where are the real…

> Anecdotally, we use Opus 4.5 constantly on Zed's code base, which is almost a million lines of Rust code and has over 150K active users, and we use it for basically every task you can think of - new features, bug fixes, refactors, prototypes, you name it. The code base is a complex native GUI with no Web tech anywhere in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522437

Zed is open source so you can look at their PRs and commit history. They even rolled their own Rust GUI framework for the project so it’s a decent case study of working on code that is barely in the training data (if at all).

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#197

Post by djeastm »

bdauvergne wrote: post #189

Seems people read the blog but not the code, I looked at the stated rewrite of Numpy in Rust: > As an introductory project, I rewrote Numpy in Rust. It was great fun. That's not a rewrite at all it's just a wrapping of an existing linear algebra Rust library (faer, blas, etc..) with a more Numpy like API. It seems to me that every AI project I look at is just a mashup/wrapper over existing things. Where are the real…

>Are so much people in programming implementing middleware / wrapping existing API all day that it gives them a feeling of liberation to be able to delegate those tasks ?

Yes. A lot of jobs are providing the glue between other pieces like this and not inventing new algorithms and such.

Perhaps this is why there is such a divide in sincere opinions about AI.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#198

Post by djeastm »

vlod wrote: post #129
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also just.. boring code. Like I'm probably more anti-AI than most, but even I'll acknowledge it's nice to just be like... "hey this array of objects I have, I need sorted by this property" and just have it work. Or how to load strings from exotic character encodings. Or dozens of other bitchy little issues that drag software dev speed down, don't help me "grow" as a developer, and/or are not interesting to solve, ful…

I've always believed that the dozens of 'bitchy little issues' are the means to grow as a developer. Once you've done it, you'll hopefully never have to do it again (or at worse be derivatives). Over time you'll have a collection of 'how to do stuff'. I think this is the path to growth. Letting a LLM do it for you is equivalent to it solving a hard leetcode problem. You're not really taxing your brain.

>Letting a LLM do it for you is equivalent to it solving a hard leetcode problem. You're not really taxing your brain.

But things like "hey this array of objects I have, I need sorted by this property" are not hard leetcode problems

They're precisely the kind of tedious, but not taxing, problems that we prefer to farm out to someone else. Like asking a junior to do it.

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#199

Post by davely »

arach wrote: post #146

> My personal favorite hooks though are these: "Stop": [ { "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "afplay -v 0.40 /System/Library/Sounds/Morse.aiff" }]}], "Notification": [ { "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "afplay -v 0.35 /System/Library/Sounds/Ping.aiff" }]}] These are nice but it's even nicer when Claude is talking when it needs your attention Easy to implement -> can talk to ElevenLabs or OpenAI an…

Hah! I’ve done something similar. I created a bunch of pre-defined voice messages with Eleven Labs and then have a script that randomly calls them via the same hooks.

https://github.com/daveschumaker/homebrew-claude-sounds

Re: My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

#200

Post by jascha_eng »

bdauvergne wrote: post #189

Seems people read the blog but not the code, I looked at the stated rewrite of Numpy in Rust: > As an introductory project, I rewrote Numpy in Rust. It was great fun. That's not a rewrite at all it's just a wrapping of an existing linear algebra Rust library (faer, blas, etc..) with a more Numpy like API. It seems to me that every AI project I look at is just a mashup/wrapper over existing things. Where are the real…

https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearch

BM25 index for postgres, mostly written by a single (very smart) guy and Claude Code.

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