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Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

blog.matthewbrunelle.com

231–240 of 263 posts

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the skill that needs to be learned? I've been forced to vibe code everything at work, there's no skill required to ask Claude code to do something.

I've found that adapting my thinking to how LLMs work best is a real friction point. If you're not doing that, it spits out junk. Your job just has low standards, get used to it.

Yes, realizing the fact that most jobs have low standards, and adapting to LLMs being good enough for these low standards is certainly a friction point. Giving up caring is hard.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#233
post #7

My most abandoned type of projects are video games. I have a folder with tens of abandoned projects, I re-frame them as experiments at that point. This last week I decided to give Claude a go at one of these, and it's been a blast, it picked up the general path immediately. Since I said to CC they were abandon projects, he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop finished, then we can compound and have fun…

I think this is the first time I've seen someone refer to an LLM as "he" rather than "it". No judgement, but I definitely found it interesting (and disconcerting).

Perhaps this has been asked, but why is the speakers choice of pronoun for its LLM disconcerting?

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#234
I'm at peace with unfinished projects. My dev/ is a graveyard, only a few of those eventually make their way to a public forge. That's okay. Not every project needs to be finished; not every project needs to be published.

I had fun and learned something building those prototypes. I suppose the end result wasn't really the point. Throwing LLMs at doing the thing deprives me of that joy, kills most of the learning opportunities, and leaves you with a (usually half) baked product that you don't really own or understand.

Sometimes I just want a quick bespoke tool and using an LLM is fine. But I do not enjoy using something I don't understand.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is better. They are releasing open models, unlike Anthropic. Additionally other (non-chinese) companies run the open models, so if that is the issue you have options.

"If you don't pay for a product, you are the product". That's always been emphasized on HN threads related to FB, Google, etc. Are LLMs different?

This is more a form of commoditizing your compliment as they don't see the model as a product but more like a programming language or other tool that you build products with.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#236
post #106

It’s great. I have a stupendous amount of personal software now. Yesterday was a native text editor that was fully integrated into my mediawiki install and would autocomplete links and make syntax easier to use. No one could have built this software but me because it’s worth nothing to others. And I couldn’t build it because it takes too long. But when I’m using an agent to code the limited resource is my attention w…

Just curious, how long did you operate without AI? The burst in productivity I feel implies a time to accumulate these many small needs.

All my life, I suppose haha. But realistically, this will be my 25th year of any sort of programming.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#237
I love to use LLM to kill/archive old projects. I had some gems that i wrote back in the days, checked this week if its still relevant, if rails picked it up already, etc.. then i could just update README.md and archive them without any fear.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#238

> I still have fears around deskilling from relying on these tools too much I'm a millennial who builds furniture with hand tools and wood joinery from a century ago. Nobody taught me, although I did find resources online to learn from. I should not be able to do these things. Everyone should have forgotten this esoteric, obsolete, uncommon knowledge by now. Yet here I am, doing it anyway. It turns out you can just l…

> Just because you use AI doesn't mean your brain grows a black hole from which information can never return.

How do you know this? I’m not taking that risk

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, "Es hat in die Ecke gepinkelt". Which pronoun you use is just as dependent on the context as in english.

I have not met a single German that has ever uttered this sentence. (Relating to a dog, that is)

Neither have I, but mostly because either the person knows the gender of the animal or the situation just never came up. The closest that I would say is "Es scheißt gerne aufs Auto" when talking about pidgens (die Taube), but even then you generally talk about multiple, resulting in "Sie scheißen gerne aufs Auto"
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