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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

#221

Post by csallen »

fn-mote wrote: post #216
csallen wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kit…

No ephemeral as in: I'll ask the AI to check my email, and it'll create a bespoke table UI on the fly right inside my AI assistant, and populate it with relevant email data. And I'll use it, and then it will disappear. Software created and destroyed in a moment.

Not all software is meant to be some permanent building block upon which other software sits.

When new technology arrives that makes earlier ways of doing things obsolete, the consistent pattern throughout history has been that existing experts and professionals significantly underestimate the changes to come, in large part because (a) they don't like those changes, and (b) they're too used to various constraints and priorities that used to be important but no longer are. In other words, they're judging the new tech the lens of an older world, rather than through the lens of a newer world created by the new tech.

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

#222

Post by zephen »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #129
zephen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does this actually save me time at all? Soooooo.... As one who hasn't taken the plunge yet -- I'm basically retired, but have a couple of projects I might want to use AI for -- "time" is not always fungible with, or a good proxy for, either "effort" or "motivation" > How much money have I wasted in tokens? This, of course, may be a legitimate concern. > If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 m…

Well for me, the amount of time/effort as a function my of my motivation has acted as a natural gatekeeper to bad ideas. Just because I can do something with AI now doesn’t necessarily mean that I should . I am also weary of trading time and effort for outright money right out of my own pocket to find out, especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible. I don’t live somewhere where develope…

Your position makes an immense amount of sense for your described situation.

As I said, I'm retired, and so I've never had to clean up AI slop at $DAYJOB.

Since the whole AI thing would be a learning experience for me, it would include trying to toilet train the AI itself, as others have intimated can be done in some cases, rather than dealing with a bunch of already-checked-into-the-repo-slop.

And that may be a losing proposition. I don't know; haven't tried it yet.

> Would much rather spend the time making my own artisanal tradslop instead if it’s gonna take me the same amount of time anyway - at least it’s more enjoyable.

Although I haven't had the AI experience you describe, I have had a similar experience with coworkers who moved fast and broke all kinds of shit. That was similarly no fun. It's like trying to work on your wife's minivan, but she won't pull over and let you properly fix it.

Given sufficient time, I enjoy polishing/perfecting/refactoring code. My final output often looks radically different from my prototype. It is clear to me that I would hate the situation you describe. It is not clear to me that starting with prompted slop and wrangling it into submission would be much less enjoyable to me than writing my own slop and then wrangling it into submission.

> especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible.

This is a bit of a concern, but I'm pretty sure that, at the moment, every token you burn costs them more than you.

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

#223

Post by prpl »

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…

I find the people who end up with spaghetti code did so because they didn’t translate their normal processes over.

Being completely methodical about development really helps. obra/superpowers, for example, gets close but I think it overindexes on testing and doesn’t go far enough with design document templates, planning, code style guides, code reviews, and more.

Being methodical about it takes more time, but prevents a good bit of the tech debt.

Planning modes help, but they are similarly not methodical enough.

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

#224

Post by vehementi »

csallen wrote: post #55
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…

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…

Nothing you wrote seems to support what you said at the start there. Why is the importance of code quality decreasing?

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

#225

Post by danielmarkbruce »

devmor wrote: post #99
ffsm8 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really? have you ever learned a skill? Like carving, singing, playing guitar, playing a video game, anything? It's easy to get better at it without understanding why you're better at it. As a matter of fact, very very few people master the discipline enough to be able to grasp the reason for why they're actually better Most people just come up with random shit which may or may not be related. Which I just abstained f…

You can get better at something without understanding why, but you should be able to think about it and determine why fairly easily. This is something everyone who cares about improving in a skill does regularly - examine their improvement, the reasons behind it, and how to add to them. That’s the basis of self-driven learning.

This is an absurd statement. There are many complex undertakings in sport where even the very best get better with practice and can't tell you why. In fact, the ones who think they can tell you why are the one's to be most skeptical of.

You are just making stuff up or regurgitating material from a pop science book.

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

#226

Post by ianhorn »

prpl wrote: post #223
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…

I find the people who end up with spaghetti code did so because they didn’t translate their normal processes over. Being completely methodical about development really helps. obra/superpowers, for example, gets close but I think it overindexes on testing and doesn’t go far enough with design document templates, planning, code style guides, code reviews, and more. Being methodical about it takes more time, but prevent…

That works until you make a plan/tests/etc, set the thing loose, and then when it has trouble it decides "actually the pragmatic thing would be [diverge from the plan/change the tests/etc]" and goes off the rails. I'm so frustrated by these things right now.

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

#227

Post by [deleted] »

devmor wrote: post #142
ffsm8 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I can obviously say something, like you learn which features the models are able to actually implement, and you learn how to phrase and approach trickier features to get the model too do what you want. And that's not really explainable without exploring specific examples. And now we're in thousands of words of explanation territory, hence my decision to say it's hard to put it into words.

I think you’re handwaving away vague, ungrounded intuition and calling it learning. For instance, if I say “I noticed I run better in my blue shoes than my red shoes” I did not learn anything. If I examine my shoes and notice that my blue shoes have a cushioned sole, while my red shoes are flat, I can combine that with thinking about how I run and learn that cushioned soles cause less fatigue to the muscles in my fee…

[deleted]

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

#228

Post by danielmarkbruce »

csallen wrote: post #55
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…

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…

Maybe, but how exactly are you defining "code quality" ?

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

#229

Post by klardotsh »

irishcoffee wrote: post #209
figassis wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GP is clearly providing examples of categories of tasks. Sure, not all languages do “async fn foo()”, but almost all problem domains involve some sort of making sure the right things happen at the right times, which is in a similar ballpark.

Holier than thou “yeah well I work on stuff that doesn’t use databases, checkmate!” doesn’t really land - data still gets moved around somehow, and often over a network!

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

#230

Post by mjr00 »

csallen wrote: post #219
mjr00 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

And how do you think their assistant will interact with external systems? If I tell my AI assistant "pay my rent" or "book my flight" do you think it's going to ephemerally vibe code something on the banks' and airlines' servers to make this happen?

You're only thinking of the tip of the iceberg which is the last mile of client-facing software. 90%+ of software development is the rest of the iceberg, unseen beneath the surface.

I agree there will be more of this but again, that does not preclude the existence of more of the big backend systems existing.

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