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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

lalitm.com

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

#211

Post by leptons »

csallen wrote: post #165
camdenreslink wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apps are getting bigger and more ambitious in scope as developers try to take advantage of any boost in production LLMs provide them.

Every metric I've seen points to there being an explosion in (a) the number of apps that exist and (b) the number of people making applications.

There's already been an explosion of apps - and most of them suck, are spam, or worse, will steal your data.

We don't need more slop apps, we already have that and have for years.

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

#212

Post by cloche »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #177
cloche wrote: post #56

Really great to see a realistic experience sans hype about AI tools and how they can have an impact. > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious: the codebase was complete spaghetti...It was extremely fragile; it solved the immediate problem but it was never going to cope with my larger vision...I decided to throw away everything and start from scratch This part was interest…

> Fred Brooks "throw one away" philosophy Everybody remembers that soundbite but nobody remembers that he changed his mind about it later and switched to advocating iterative refinement.

Oh interesting, I hadn't heard that. Do you know where he said that? A quick Google search doesn't turn up anything.

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

#214

Post by joe_the_user »

Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

This blog post shows the journey that anyone not in one of those two vocal minorities is going through right now

Is there evidence these groups are a minority? I mean, the OP sounds like they are taking the right approach but I suspect it requires both skill/experience and an open mind to take their approach.

Just because an approach has good use-cases doesn't mean those are going predominate.

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

#216

Post by fn-mote »

csallen wrote: post #185
vlovich123 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you may want to clarify what your phrasing meant because I couldn’t find a more charitable interpretation

More and more software will be built by non-experts, software that has smaller user bases and simpler use cases and doesn't need to be maintained as much if at all. "Poor AI code quality" matters much less for these than for say, software written by developers at FAANG companies, since literally nobody will ever even look at the code. Where we're headed is toward a world where a ton of software is ephemeral , apps li…

Ephemeral in the same way the electrical wiring in an old house is ephemeral.

Which is to say, not at all.

Original wiring done by a professional, later changes by “vibe electrician” homeowners.

Every circuit might be a custom job, but they all accumulate into something a SWE calls “technical debt”.

Don’t like how the toaster and the microwave are on the same circuit even though they are in different parts of the kitchen? You’re lucky if you can even follow the wiring back to the circuit box to see how it was done. The electrical box is so much of a mess where would you even run a new circuit?

That’s the future we’re looking at.

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

#217

Post by lalitmaganti »

afc wrote: post #158
smartmic wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct[0]. This was also my first thought after reading > Unfortunately, unlike many other languages, SQLite has no formal specification describing how it should be parsed. It doesn’t expose a stable API for its parser either. In fact, quite uniquely, in its implementation it doesn’t even build a parse tree at all9! The only reasonable approach left in my opinion is to carefully extract the relevant parts of SQLite’…

I was also baffled. "No formal specification"? Two minutes of browsing is enough to find it: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/src%2Fparse.y

I'm very well aware of parse.y, if you look into the syntaqlite code, you'd find it's a critical part of how the whole "source extraction" mentioned in the article works [1]

To be clear when I say "formal specification", I'm not just talking about the formal grammar rules but also how those interpreted in practice. Something closer to the ECMAScript specification (https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...).

[1] https://github.com/LalitMaganti/syntaqlite/blob/93638c68f9a0...

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

#218

Post by lalitmaganti »

zellyn wrote: post #123

Does SQLite not have a lemon parser generated for its SQL? When I ported pikchr (also from the SQLite project) to Go, I first ported lemon, then the grammar, then supporting code. I always meant to do the same for its SQL parser, but pikchr grammar is orders of magnitude simpler.

When I refer to "extracting sources from the SQLite codebase" a big part of that was indeed referring to compiling Lemon and executing it against a custom implementation of parse.y [1].

The problem comes from how SQLite's upstream parse.y works. Becuase it doesn't actually generate the parse tree, instead generating the bytecode directly, the intepretation of any node labelled "id" or "nm" is buried inside the source code behind many layers of functions. You can see for yourself by looking at SQLite's parse.y [2]

[1] https://github.com/LalitMaganti/syntaqlite/tree/main/syntaql... [2] https://sqlite.org/src/file?name=src/parse.y&ci=trunk

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

#219

Post by csallen »

mjr00 wrote: post #207
csallen wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

This is where I get into much more speculative land, but I think people are underestimating the degree to which AI assistant apps are going to eat much of the traditional software industry. The same way smart phones ate so many individual tools, calculators, stop watches, iPods, etc.

It takes a long time for humanity to adjust to a new technology. First, the technology needs to improve for years. Then it needs to be adopted and reach near ubiquity. And then the slower-moving parts of society need to converge and rearrange around it. For example, the web was quite ready for apps like Airbnb in the mid 90s, but the adoption+culture+infra was not.

In 5, maybe 10, certainly 15 years, I don't think as many people are going to want to learn, browse, and click through a gazillion complex websites and apps and flows when they can easily just tell their assistant to do most of it. Google already correctly realizes this as an existential threat, as do many SaaS companies.

AI assistants are already good enough to create ephemeral applications on the fly in response to certain questions. And we're in the very, very early days of people building businesses and infra meant to be consumed by LLMs.

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

#220

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

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…

Just like everyone has a 3D printer at home?

People want convenience, not a way to generate an application that creates convenience.

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