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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#201

Post by csallen »

mjr00 wrote: post #95
csallen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take the other side of this. Professional software engineers like many of us have a big blind spot when it comes to AI coding, and that's a fixation on code quality. It makes sense to focus on code quality. We're not wrong. After all, we've spent our entire careers in the code. Bad code quality slows us down and makes things slow/insecure/unreliable/etc for end users. However, code quality is becoming less and l…

> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Strongly disagree with this thesis, and in fact I'd go completely the opposite: code quality is more important than ever thanks to AI. LLM-assisted coding is most successful in codebases with attributes strongly associa…

> LLM-assisted coding is most successful in codebases with attributes strongly associated with high code quality: predictable patterns, well-named variables, use of a type system, no global mutable state, very low mutability in general, etc.

That's all very true, but what you're missing is that the proportion of codebases that need this is shrinking relative to the total number of codebases. There's an incredible proliferation of very small, bespoke, simple, AI-coded apps, that are nonetheless quite useful. Most are being created by people who have never written a line of code in their life, who will do no maintenance, and who will not give two craps how the code looks, any more than the average YouTuber cares about the aperture of their lens or the average forum commenter care about the style of their prose.

We don't see these apps because we're professional software engineers working on the other stuff. But we're rapidly approaching a world where more and more software is created by non-professionals.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#202

Post by justonceokay »

akdev1l wrote: post #121
camdenreslink wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve found that LLMs will frequently do extremely silly things that no person would do to make typescript code pass the typechecker.

You need to very specific and also question the output if it does something insane

This decade’s version of “works on my box”

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#203

Post by lowsong »

csallen wrote: post #198
lowsong wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Democratizing is defined as "the process of making technology, information, or power accessible, available, or appealing to everyone, rather than just experts or elites." Your definition only supports my point. The transfer of skill from something you learn to something you pay to do is the exact and complete opposite of your stated definition. It turns the activity from something that requires you to learn it to o…

> It is quite literally making this technology, information, and power available to only the elite. I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening. > What payout? Zero AI companies are profitable. Because they're reinvesting profits into continue…

> I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening.

I don't know how I can explain this any more clearly.

If you need AI to create software, and the cost of AI is $200/month, then only people who can afford $200/month can create software.

Costs will increase. The current cost is substituted by investor funding. Sell at a loss to get people hooked on the product and then raise the price to make money, a "high-growth business model" as you say.

The cost to make a competitor to Anthropic or OpenAI is tens or hundreds of billions of dollars upfront. There will be few competitors and minimal market pressure to reduce prices, even if the unit costs of inference are low.

$200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population. Increases from here means only a small percentage of the richest people can afford it.

I don't know what definition of "elite" you're using but, "technology limited so that only a small percentage of the population can afford it" is... an elite group.

This is fun and all, but I think we've reached the end of the productive discussion to be had and I don't have much more to say. Charitably, we're leaving in completely different realities. I just hope when the bubble pops the fall isn't too hard for you.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#204

Post by vlovich123 »

csallen wrote: post #194
vlovich123 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If code quality only stops mattering in 400 years (whatever that definition happens to be) then the prediction that it makes is worthless in terms of what you should do today. You use it to argue it’s unimportant deal with it, but if it’s a 400 year payoff you’ve made the wrong bet.

Surely you don't think AI coding technology will be as slow to develop as guns were. We're obviously talking about 1-10 years here, not 100-1000 years.

It’s really hard to predict where exponential progress will freeze. I was reading the other day that the field seems to have stagnated again in terms of no really meaningful ideas to overcome the inherent bottlenecks we’ve hit now in terms of diminishing returns for scaling. I’m not a pessimist or unbridled optimist but I think it’s fundamentally difficult to predict and the law of averages suggests someone will end up crowing about being right

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#205

Post by MeetRickAI »

rokob wrote: post #13

> architecture is what happens when all those local pieces interact, and you can’t get good global behaviour by stitching together locally correct components This is a great article. I’ve been trying to see how layered AI use can bridge this gap but the current models do seem to be lacking in the ambiguous design phase. They are amazing at the local execution phase. Part of me thinks this is a reflection of software…

[dead]

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#206

Post by avadodin »

devmor wrote: post #199
cossray wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to hear your take on Copilot vs Claude. I have used Copilot (trial) in VS Code and I found it to mostly meet my needs. It could generate some plans and code, which I could review on the go. I found this very natural to me as I never felt 'left behind' in whatever code the AI was generating. However, most of the posts I see here are on Claude (I haven't tried it) and very few mentions of Copilot.…

Copilot isn’t really a competing product to Claude - in fact I use Claude through copilot. I have found in general that for the type of work I do (senior to staff level engineering, 90-10 research to programming) that Claude Opus is the only model really worth my time - but I just really like the Copilot CLI tooling.

So, are you using it for the 10%?

I do use LLMs to learn about new subjects but we already only bill 10% for "coding" and that's inflating it to cover other parts.

I can't imagine that slopping it up would be a great decision. Having alien code that no one ever understood between a bug report and a solution. Anthropic isn't going to give us money for our lost contracts, is it?

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#207

Post by mjr00 »

csallen wrote: post #201
mjr00 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Strongly disagree with this thesis, and in fact I'd go completely the opposite: code quality is more important than ever thanks to AI. LLM-assisted coding is most successful in codebases with attributes strongly associa…

> LLM-assisted coding is most successful in codebases with attributes strongly associated with high code quality: predictable patterns, well-named variables, use of a type system, no global mutable state, very low mutability in general, etc. That's all very true, but what you're missing is that the proportion of codebases that need this is shrinking relative to the total number of codebases. There's an incredible pro…

> That's all very true, but what you're missing is that the proportion of codebases that need this is shrinking relative to the total number of codebases. There's an incredible proliferation of very small, bespoke, simple, AI-coded apps, that are nonetheless quite useful. Most are being created by people who have never written a line of code in their life, who will do no maintenance, and who will not give two craps how the code looks, any more than the average YouTuber cares about the aperture of their lens or the average forum commenter care about the style of their prose.

I agree that there will be more small, single-use utilities, but you seem to believe that this will decrease the number or importance of traditional long-lived codebases, which doesn't make sense. The fact that Jane Q. Notadeveloper can vibe code an app for tracking household chores is great, but it does not change the fact that she needs to use her operating system (a massive codebase) to open Google Chrome (a massive codebase) and go to her bank's website (a massive codebase) to transfer money to her landlord for rent (a process which involves many massive software systems interacting with each other, hopefully none of which are vibe coded).

The average YouTuber not caring about the aperture of their lens is an apt comparison: the median YouTube video has 35 views[0]. These people likely do not care about their camera or audio setup, it's true. The question is, how is that relevant to the actual professional YouTubers, MrBeast et al, who actually do care about their AV setup?

[0] https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/research-youtube-stats/

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#208

Post by delusional »

snovv_crash wrote: post #98
ffsm8 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, the article mirrors my experience when I started out too, even exactly with the same first month of vibecoding, then the next project which I did exactly like he outlined too. Personally, I think it's just the natural flow when you're starting out. If he keeps going, his opinion is going to change and as he gets to know it better, he'll likely go more and more towards vibecoding again. It's hard to say why, but…

Given how addictive vibecoding is, I think it's very hard to be objective about the results if you are involved in the process.

It's a little like asking a cokehead how the addiction is going for him while he is high. Obviously he's going to say it's great because the consequences haven't hit him. Some percentage of addicts will never realize it was a problem at all.

Its not random that AI happens to be built by the very same people that turned internet forums into the most addictive communication technology ever.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#209

Post by irishcoffee »

figassis wrote: post #91
yojo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 I’ve been driving Claude as my primary coding interface the last three months at my job. Other than a different domain, I feel like I could have written this exact article. The project I’m on started as a vibe-coded prototype that quickly got promoted to a production service we sell. I’ve had to build the mental model after the fact, while refactoring and ripping out large chunks of nonsense or dead code. But the…

My process: start ideating and get the AI to poke holes in your reasoning, your vision, scalability, etc. do this for a few days while taking breaks. This is all contained in one Md file with mermaid diagrams and sections. Then use ideation to architect, dive into details and tell the AI exactly what your choices are, how certain methods should be called, how logging and observability should be setup, what language t…

I find it very interesting that you assume this method would branch out to other projects. I find it even more interesting that you assume all software codebases use a database, give a damn about async anything, and that these ideas percolate out to general software engineering.

Sounds like a solid way to make crud web apps though.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#210

Post by camdenreslink »

csallen wrote: post #195
pessimizer wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What relevance do either of those claims have to the claim of the comment you are responding to? Are you trying to imply that having more things means that each of them will be smaller? There are more people than there were 500 years ago - are they smaller, or larger? Also, the printing press did lead to much longer works. There are many continuous book series that have run for decades, with dozens of volumes and mil…

The average piece written and published today today is much shorter than the average piece from the past. Look at Twitter. Social media in general. Internet forums. Blog posts. Emails. Chats. Etc. The amount of this content DWARFS other content. The same is true of most things that get democratized. Look at video. TikTok, YouTube, YouTube shorts. Look at all the apps people are building are building for themselves wi…

> Look at all the apps people are building are building for themselves with AI.

The apps those people were making before LLMs became ubiquitous were no apps. So by definition they are now larger and more ambitious.

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