from my experience, good documentation and guardrails prevent your ai from going crazy. I have a code-map.md, and it doesn't spend a fortune looking for things each time. I have main-pipelines.md and it knows what to do where. I have lots of tests, so many bugs are self-revealing.
AI coding at home without going broke
241–250 of 321 posts
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solar panel breakage doesn't depend on a graphics card.
Solar power is not free. You can decide to not fix the panel that was being used to power a GPU. Or you could sell the power back. Or you could put it in a battery bank for when the sun is down. Or, if none of those are the case and you just have excess power that's useless for anything but a GPU, then you prepaid for the GPU. I love that we have solar panels, but we weren't gifted them. Using power has a cost.
It's actually common to be in that situation where the grid is paying pennies on the dollar and you have extra generation. Most grid-tie systems are in that boat.
Suddenly you find yourself looking for something to spend power on so it doesn't go to waste.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#243I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…
Next time you build a large build try asking the LLM to make it as an AFK build and tell it that you need it to do everything in it's power to complete the build without your intervention. It's going to need a few tiers of tests from unit to smoke and screen tests. Now, I'm not saying this is easy to do. It requires an insane amount of up front thinking BUT if you (for the heck of it) want to make an overnight build this is one way.
FWIW While I have had created and run this kind of build a few times... I did not like the results! In the end, I personally like to be in the loop to test and feel how stuff is turning out as it goes.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must say I am not quite just venting. I have been struggling severely with burnout for a couple of years and as I work to fix it by myself ultimately, and get back who I was, the awful thing is finding out that the industry is so utterly and completely different anyway. So in my fight back I decided that I needed to re-centre myself; learn how these tools can help me personally return to productivity, try to get th…
I'm younger, but not by much and I too feel instinctively sad by how abruptly the entire industry has changed. And there's no going back. It's because I'm a craftsmen, I care about the code. And you learn in your career that it's a bad idea to care about the code, especially in a business context, which one's career is very much trapped in the business context. I care about the code because the code is the product in…
I don't know if this will bring you any comfort, but I think
> And you learn in your career that it's a bad idea to care about the code, especially in a business context, which one's career is very much trapped in the business context.
It's always been this case -- well before LLMs hard pivoted the field. You (theoretically) get paid to create net business value, you don't really get paid "to code". If the product you are creating is code, then yes the priority of code quality can be much higher. Especially in higher IC roles like Staff+, coding is just one of the ways to add that value.
At work I just have to solve the problem at hand with the minimal amount of effort to reach the first acceptable solution. After work while at play, I can explore 10 versions of something at my leisure, just to learn if I want. I can focus on working the thing until it's polished and elegant, because I decide what the priorities are. I can be as selfish as I want.
It's common in art circles that you have a series that you can churn out for money, and you have ideas you explore just for you (that often are far less appealing to non-artists). Pixar used to have a tick-tock cycle like this, "one for them, one for us". They would alternate a sequel bc it would make money and new IP because it would keep the studio fresh.
I don't think accepting this should be depressing. A good life is all about finding balance so that you can sustain it for the long haul!
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#245I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…
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Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more power to power-users. And more dumbness for dumbos
It's gasoline. Whether you put it in the tank of a race car or pour it all over the floor while handling lit matches is up to the user
At least with fire, you know when you are getting burned.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#247I invested about $4,000 in an NVIDIA DGX Spark several months ago. 128 GB of unified RAM, and the NVIDIA GB10 chip. With the RAM, the several CPU cores, and the 4 TB NVMe SSD, it's a very capable ARM64 Linux computer even without the GPU, and so far I've mostly been using it as such. But I wonder, what's the most capable model, specifically for coding, that can run well on that hardware?
DeepSeek V4 Flash is a very capable coding model that runs well on the hardware you described. Look up the optimized version specifically designed for local use.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#248Please use a more readable variable-width font.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#249The solution in the article is, "Pay for a max plan and then buy the extra tokens you need by API." How is that noteworthy? Isn't that exactly what Anthropic and OpenAI recommend?
I feel like I must be missing something.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because you're treating the problem as an engineer instead of an "influencer" or "10xer" or whatever. You're treating it as a problem to be solved with engineering and AI is merely a tool to do so. It is, in my experience, vanishingly rare for an engineer to have a problem that needs to be solved with multiple hours of unattended AI code generation. I've only found one single application where it makes even th…
I'll add another use case for letting an AI go ham: many small, atomic refactors where the name of the game is never breaking anything. My personal OSS projects don't have the scale to necessarily make this worth it, but at work I run three pipelines using Barnum ( https://barnum-circus.github.io/ ). First, one that ingests files, identifies refactors (from a pre-approved list), and places a precise description of th…
It's amazing at reverse, see what they do on GTA San Andreas now, they started the reverse before AI existed, since AI is in their hands, reversed sped up so much that they can finally understand the game deeper, create bigger mods, added Vice City inside the game in an Arcade, they created specific tools made with AI to convert GTA 5 models to GTA SA. Pretty crazy and great.