Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI and Home-Cooked Software

mrkaran.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 44 posts

Re: AI and Home-Cooked Software

#21

Post by [deleted] »

moomoo11 wrote: post #12
_aavaa_ wrote: post #2

“Every line of AI-generated code is a plausible-looking liability. It may pass basic tests, only to fail spectacularly in production with an edge case you never considered.” Every time I read something along the lines I have to wonder whose code these people review during code reviews. It’s not like the alternative is bulletproof code.

They set up a GitHub action that has AI do an immediate first pass (hallucinates high on drugs and not the good kind) and leave a review. Considering 80% of team mates are usually dead weight or mid at best (every team is carried by that 1 or 2 guys who do 2-3x), they will do the bare minimum review. Let’s be real.. PIP is real. Job hopping because bad is real. It’s a problem. I have dealt with this and had to fire.

[deleted]

Re: AI and Home-Cooked Software

#22

Post by dzink »

AI use on corporate code means exponentially compounding complexity. Even if carefully planned for, AI enables more features to be added and more will be added a-la-carte, and the tower inevitably becomes bigger than humans can manage, especially if they are allowed increasingly less time to maintain a fast growing pile of code. That means eventually large enough code bases will be manageable only by AI or not at all. Talk about lock-in.

Re: AI and Home-Cooked Software

#23

Post by evolighting »

infinitezest wrote: post #17

I find LLMs really useful on a daily basis but I keep wondering, what's going to happen when the VC money dries up and the real cost of inference kicks in? Its relatively cheap now but its also being heavily subsidized. The usual answer is to just jam ads into your product and slowly increase the price over time (see: Netflix) but I don't know how that'll work for LLMs.

you could localhost ollama, vLLM, or something like that; Open Models are good enough for simple task, With a bit of extra effort and learning, this is usually just works for most case.

But in that situation, there may be no further updates, the future remains uncertain.

Re: AI and Home-Cooked Software

#24

Post by sarchertech »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #19
bitwize wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is literally the exact promise of CASE tools in the 80s and the early 90s; UML code generation tools in the 2000s, and "low-code/no-code" platforms in the 2010s. It turned out to be a disaster every time, especially when the Idea Persons chucked their creations over the wall to SWEs to bash them into actual products because the Idea Persons had Far More Important Things To Do than maintain their coalesced brain…

I do think that there’s a difference in kind here - we’re not producing UML graphs that require programmer time to implement (or sending the diagrams to SE Asia and then code reviewing). The code ‘works’ - and the folks who are improving the prototype can also benefit from the tools that the Idea Person used.

The code worked for the examples the OP gave as well. They weren’t talking just about UML graphs, but about automated tools to turn those graphs into code.

And in the case of low code/no code, those produced working prototypes as well. And you could in most cases export them to raw code.

Re: AI and Home-Cooked Software

#26

Post by pickledonions49 »

infinitezest wrote: post #17

I find LLMs really useful on a daily basis but I keep wondering, what's going to happen when the VC money dries up and the real cost of inference kicks in? Its relatively cheap now but its also being heavily subsidized. The usual answer is to just jam ads into your product and slowly increase the price over time (see: Netflix) but I don't know how that'll work for LLMs.

I heard that photonic chip stuff might make running this stuff cheaper in data center environments.

Re: AI and Home-Cooked Software

#27

Post by pickledonions49 »

bitwize wrote: post #7

Ah, another "Now that we have AI, people can do [thing people could do for decades]" article. If there was something you wanted a computer to do, that it did not yet do, you programmed it. And if you didn't know how, you learned. BASIC was always there. But the industry as a whole moved away from the idea that end users are to program computers sometime in the 80s or 90s (the glorious point and click future was not e…

From what I can tell, some professionals seem to perceive it as a way to not write the easy stuff and only deal with the harder, more specific stuff that llms don't get (because they are incapable of new ideas). I don't know all the facts, but it seems as though this "home cooked software" boom will be really dull because of llm limitations. It always seems like I am actually learning something when copying code from books, maybe that is one reason why the 80s was interesting in terms of software, but what do I know, I wasn't alive.

Re: AI and Home-Cooked Software

#28

Post by seabombs »

bitwize wrote: post #7

Ah, another "Now that we have AI, people can do [thing people could do for decades]" article. If there was something you wanted a computer to do, that it did not yet do, you programmed it. And if you didn't know how, you learned. BASIC was always there. But the industry as a whole moved away from the idea that end users are to program computers sometime in the 80s or 90s (the glorious point and click future was not e…

In my experience, the people using AI to make programs are still programmers. As in, they were trained in programming pre-AI. Managers are using AI to output manager stuff - documents, spreadsheets, etc. Similarly, marketers are using AI to write ad copy, not the marketing manager.

This may change as tools become better known or adopted. But for know the same people who did the job before are now using AI in that job.

FWIW, in my IRL experience, all the work output of those using AI for whatever task has been of poorer quality than without.

Re: AI and Home-Cooked Software

#29

Post by ares623 »

jjmarr wrote: post #9

Long-term SWEs at non-tech companies will spend much of their time reviewing vibe coded features/prototypes/scripts from non-technical employees and scaling them once they become critical infrastructure. This'll eliminate jobs in the "develop CRUD app" industry but will create better jobs in security/scalability/quality expertise. But it'll take a few years as all these vibe coded business process scripts start to fa…

There better be new bootcamps on how to maintain these systems because without CRUD jobs how would someone new get the experience
Post reply on HN