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Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

worksonmymachine.substack.com

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Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#221

Post by [deleted] »

Loic wrote: post #164
theferret wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we've been here before, and there was a time when if you're going to be an engineer, you needed to know core equations, take a lot of derivatives, perform mathematical analysis on paper, get results in an understandable form, and come up with solutions. That process may be analogous to what we used to think of as beginning with core data structures and algorithms, design patterns, architecture and infrast…

Exactly right now, I am helping a big oil and gas company have a process simulation software to correctly converge on a big simulation. Full access to the source code, need to improve the Newton method in use with the right line search, validate the derivatives, etc. I do think that for most of the people, you are right, you do not need to know a lot, but my philosophy was to always understand how the tool you use wo…

[deleted]

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#222

Post by skydhash »

lordnacho wrote: post #15

I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now. I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding. It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to…

> Now that I have that, I can implement a strategy against it. This is super tedious. I know how it works, but when I implement it, it takes me a lot of time that isn't really fulfilling. Stuff like making a typo, or forgetting to add the dependency. Not big brain stuff, but it takes time.

Are people implementing stuff from start to finish in one go? For me, it's always been iterative. Start from scaffolding, get one thing right,then the next. It's like drawing. You start with a few shapes, then connect them. After you sketch on top, then do a line art, and then you finish with values (this step is also iterative refinements). With each step, you become more certain of what you want to do, while also investing the minimum possible effort.

So for me coding is more about refactoring. I always type the minimal amount of code to get something to work. And it usually means shortcuts which I annotate with a TODO comment. Then I iterate over, making it more flexible, adds more flexibility, makes the code more clean.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#223

Post by yoyohello13 »

saadatq wrote: post #177

this isn’t vibe coding. This is something completely new. I call it “flex coding.” heck I built a full app in an afternoon AND I was a good dad? > I'd wander into my office, check what Claude had built, test it real quick. If it worked, great! Commit and push. "Now build the server connection UI," I'd say, and wander back out. Made breakfast. Claude coded. Played with my son. Claude coded. Watched some TV. Claude cod…

So like, why would I pay someone to work like this? Or why would I pay for software at all when I could just do this myself?

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#224

Post by dclowd9901 »

nirvanatikku wrote: post #9

This article is spot on. I had stumbled upon Kidlin’s Law—“If you can write down the problem clearly, you’re halfway to solving it”. This is a powerful guiding principle in today’s AI-driven world. As natural language becomes our primary interface with technology, clearly articulating challenges not only enhances our communication but also maximizes the potential of AI. The async approach to coding has been most fasc…

I think about this a lot. Early on, as a self taught engineer, I spent a lot of time simply learning the vernacular of the software engineering world so that I could explain what it was that I wanted to do.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#225

Post by hooverd »

nojs wrote: post #14
jvanderbot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's not faster to develop with AI if you watch it work. It's faster to develop with AI if you parallelize. Typing was never the bottleneck, but is is a now-parallelizeable part of the pipeline.

> Yes, it's not faster to develop with AI if you watch it work. It’s actually a lot faster. You read the diffs as soon as they start coming in, and immediately course correct or re-prompt when you see bad mistakes.

presumably you've done the work enough pre-AI to notice those mistakes?

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#226

Post by booleandilemma »

ikerino wrote: post #78
lordnacho wrote: post #15

I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now. I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding. It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to…

Hot take: Junior devs are going to be the ones who "know how to build with AI" better than current seniors. They are entering the job market with sensibilities for a higher-level of abstraction. They will be the first generation of devs that went through high-school + college building with AI.

Do you think that kids growing up now will be better artists than people who spent time learning how to paint because they can prompt an LLM to create a painting for them?

Do you think humanity will be better off because we'll have humans who don't know how to do anything themselves, but they're really good at asking the magical AI to do it for them?

What a sad future we're going to have.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#227

Post by ysofunny »

skydhash wrote: post #222
lordnacho wrote: post #15

I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now. I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding. It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to…

> Now that I have that, I can implement a strategy against it. This is super tedious. I know how it works, but when I implement it, it takes me a lot of time that isn't really fulfilling. Stuff like making a typo, or forgetting to add the dependency. Not big brain stuff, but it takes time. Are people implementing stuff from start to finish in one go? For me, it's always been iterative. Start from scaffolding, get one…

this is how I interact with the coding assistant.

one thing at a time. slowly adding features and fighting against bug regressions, same as when I was writting the code myself.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#228

Post by yoyohello13 »

gronglo wrote: post #220
wiremine wrote: post #138

I've been experimenting with model-based development lately, and this resonated strongly with me. The section "What Even Is Programming Anymore?" hit on a lot of the thoughts and feels I've been going through. I'm using all my 25+ years of experience and CS training, but it's _not_ programming per se. I feel like we're entering an era where we're piloting a set of tools, not hand crafting code. I think a lot of peopl…

> I think a lot of people (who love crafting) will be leaving the industry in the next 5 years, for better or worse. I think you're spot on. It was once necessary to acquire knowledge in order to acquire productivity. This made knowledge valuable and worth attaining. Now, with LLMs, we we can skip the middle man and go straight to the acquisition of productivity. I'd call it the democratisation of knowledge, but it's…

This kind of makes sense. I love acquiring knowledge, just for knowledges sake. That’s why I got into math and programming in the first place. I just like learning stuff. It was a happy accident that the stuff I like doing happens to also be lucrative. Kind of sucks that all that stuff I spent my life doing is losing value by the day. I love programming because there are an endless amount of things to learn. I actually care very little about the productivity.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#229

Post by twelve40 »

criley2 wrote: post #12
jvanderbot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's not faster to develop with AI if you watch it work. It's faster to develop with AI if you parallelize. Typing was never the bottleneck, but is is a now-parallelizeable part of the pipeline.

It can still be faster to develop with AI watching it work. It can legitimately introduce an entire simple fullstack change across multiple projects in my monorepo including graphql queries/mutations, typeorm repository, a service layer, and a reactnative frontend using apollo client, etc. It can do that in about 10 minutes in my local. I can't. If I turned it into a speed run event and practiced, maybe I could get i…

> I'm able to quickly stop it and fix any mistake it makes

I would think that's the process too, but according to the article the dude is almost completely hands off:

> You come back to ten thousand lines of code. You spend 5 minutes reading. One sentence of feedback. Another ten thousand lines appear while you're making lunch.

You can't humanly review 10 thousand lines of code in 5 minutes. This is either complete bullshit or it really writes flawless code for them and never makes any mistakes.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#230

Post by daveguy »

> The Story Breakdown - Everything in 15-30 minute chunks. Why? Because that's roughly how long before Claude starts forgetting what we discussed ten minutes ago. Like a goldfish with a PhD.

This is interesting. Does Claude have a memory? Is this just a limit on the number of input tokens? It sounds like a fundamental misappropriation of cause, but maybe I just don't understand the latest whizbang feature of Claude. Can anyone clarify?

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