191–200 of 344 posts
And still worth repeating that AI has net negative gain in team settings but is a booster for lone wolves like me.
* it cheats at verification. Even with specific instructions how to verify, it still cheats.
* generating UX(CLI tool) that is absolute garbage and inconsistent, even with specific instructions to minimize unnecessary flags, use convention over configuration ,etc.
* it absolutely will not go 'above and beyond' to solve problems - if task is hitting a permission or dependency barrier, it'll likely cheat or handwave the problem away. (gpt 5.5 xhigh)
There is maybe this hope/hubris that we can figure out just the right incantations or agent workflows to eliminate these issues - I was optimistic about this too but after trying for awhile and seeing them not only not go away but in some cases regress with newer models, I am less sure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well here's the million dollar question. It's a maintenance dead end for humans to read and edit. But for an LLM, is it a maintenance deadend? Could the LLM iterate on that same code base and be highly effective on it?
Yes it is a maintenance deadend for LLMs it's notorious codebases start accumulating enormous amount of tech debt and that it gets almost impossible to unravel it even with the best agent
This is talk and talk is cheap. Prove it, otherwise it's still a million dollar question... unanswered.
HN is notoriously mentally deficient when it comes to AI. They were wrong about self driving cars (I sit in AI cars daily), they were wrong about AI getting used for coding (I don't use an IDE or type code anymore as a SWE). So I have to say unless there's something evidence based or substantial here it's likely given HN track record that most people here will end up being another wrong, baseless and over confident answer.
I'm looking for legit answers not confidently biased statements with no evidence.
I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…
Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.
I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…
> The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly a maintenance dead end. In the Tailwind thread the other day I was explicitly told that the intended experience of many frameworks is "write-only code" so maybe this is just the way of the future that we have to learn to embrace. Don't worry how it's all hooked u…
Granted, the load bearing thing here is whether we’re actually getting good at rebuilding up to any sort of standard of quality. Or if the tooling is even structurally capable of doing that rather than just introducing new baskets of problems with each build.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could it be that the fact that the thing you’re an expert at looked like garbage to you, but the things you’re not an expert at, looked just fine, is not a coincidence? You can talk to a bunch of designers who will say the opposite. Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.
I think this is true, it's like a close relation of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#:~:text=%5B14...
The more time I spend accelerating my work with AI tools the more I realize how incredibly hard the craft of shipping useful software actually is. Sure, Claude Code and Codex can write (most of) the code for me - but the amount of technical knowledge I need to decide what and how to build remains enormous. As an example: I'm working on a system right now that works like Claude Artifacts, allowing custom HTML+JS apps…
1. Because the experience of interacting with AI is miserable. I like writing code. I don't like finding the magic incantation that gets the machine to write the correct code. I don't like correcting the machine when it gets things wrong. I don't like any of this, it's awful and I would never have gone into this field if someone had told me that it would be like this one day.
2. I cannot condone the means by which these tools were created, which is, as far as I am concerned, theft. I think it's unethical to use them at all, because they were created unethically. I dislike using stolen work, I think it's wrong, and I think everyone who uses it is making the world worse and normalizing theft. If continuing in my career means that I have to compromise my ethics, I wouldn't do it even if I loved this stuff, and see point (1).
3. Is anyone going to pay me more for my "more valuable" skills? Doesn't seem like it, engineering salaries on the whole are going down right now. You can believe they'll go up eventually if you like, but there's no evidence that will happen, or that it's happening. If my employer captures all the value, why should I care whether I'm creating more of it?
One is augmentation and the other is whack-a-mole.
Excellent read.
I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…
> The code it generated was awful. I suppose you could solve that in two ways. Manually rewrite it as you did. Or formalize an architecture and let the AI rewrite it with that in mind. I suspect that either works.