Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fuck it, make it anyway

joelotter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 613 posts

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#241

Post by cat-snatcher »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #181
DidntUseIt wrote: post #92

Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good. With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a…

Yeah sure, let's go and vibe code your own e-signing solution with Claude. Sure you can do it, LLMs never say no but if someone with actual e-signing expertise would start probing the LLM about what it actually did I'm sure we would see a lof of "Actually you're right to push back", "You're right that was entirely wrong, that's on me!", "Fair point, I did not consider that"... LLMs are still a joke when it comes to i…

You did a wonderful job of constructing a strawman and DESTROYING it in your comment! AI can't build an e-signing solution, but you, the expert of experts, can do it! Good job!

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#242

Post by bluefirebrand »

socalgal2 wrote: post #128
whstl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once told me "Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book." People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI. There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete". But that was the reality before, with the str…

I just see it as tool. Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense. I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back. Construction w…

> LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project.

> I really don't get the hate

I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?"

It's not just you, your attitude is very common, what else am I supposed to do except hate it? Just shrug my shoulders and smile, like "hey I just wasted 25 years of my life on pursuit of mastery of a skill that now has zero value to anyone?"

I wish I could press a button and erase everyone who thinks that way from existence. How dare you devalue my experience and passion so offhandedly and treat it like I'm the asshole for being upset by it.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#244

Post by sicktriple »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #159
sicktriple wrote: post #138

Look, if I'm a cyclist, then it wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense for me to buy and ride an ebike, would it? Like, if I enjoy cycling, and I want to do it because it feels good, makes me happy and keeps me in shape, then why in the world would I buy and use a machine that does it for me? If I was a door dash driver or something, and I just wanted to get from A to B, then yeah, maybe I would ride an e-bike ins…

It would absolutely make sense for someone who enjoys cycling to buy a pedal-assist e-bike, especially if they e.g. moved to a hillier area, sustained an injury, or just started having their strength/stamina decline with age. (incidentally, the proliferation of unregistered/unlicensed motorcycles marketed as "e-bikes" has done enormous damage to the viability of e-bikes as a general category)

It's called metaphor. Please reserve your erm akshully's for someone else.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#245

Post by whstl »

wanderlust123 wrote: post #188
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing dependency on SaaS has so far been my favorite use of AI. I hope we kill it off entirely. Software is better off as a tool. Making it a product typically ruins it.

People pay for good tools. Tools help create value, and if they are good at creating value the toolmaker should be compensated.

If so, people can just pay Anthropic or OpenAI directly. They are great toolmakers.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#246

Post by bigmadshoe »

x3haloed wrote: post #164

This is 80% ego talking and 20% fear of change. The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this. OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.” The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in…

"But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared."

I think you (and almost everyone in this thread) are missing an important point here: even without relying on external input on our work, we feel less proud of the work we produce by hand when we know we could have prompted our way there orders of magnitude faster.

If I build something cool by hand, and I enjoy the process of building it, then why does AI affect anything? The problem lies in how I feel about the final result. It feels fundamentally bad to know that however hard I worked on this, it would have been better, faster, or both had I used AI to produce it. I think it really is that simple.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#247

Post by bigmadshoe »

aeon_ai wrote: post #206
x3haloed wrote: post #164

This is 80% ego talking and 20% fear of change. The comment about hobby vs. work is correct, and it’s the crux of this. OP is attempting to console themselves. “I shouldn’t have to change to avoid ‘falling behind.’ I like how I’m doing it. I’m good at what I do.” The fact of the matter is the LLMs can be used to produce effective work faster than you. Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in…

You're going to probably be downvoted because the truth is hard and the collective human ego is self-reinforcing, but I think you are correct. 'Quality' is a function of filling in the gaps of the new tools, not eschewing them entirely.

A point is coming very soon where coding agents are not tools but are just your replacement. If you prompt a coding agent to make you something then go have lunch, you didn't make anything, it did.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#248

Post by ReadMuch »

Chris2048 wrote: post #238
DidntUseIt wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think we’re saying the same thing. I very actively work using LLMs (no “agentic” stuff) and agree with you - they are only really worth tasking out tedium to. But a lot of - say a DM feature - is tedium. Something simple like adding reactions, adding read receipts. It’s not hard at all. The LLM easily excels at the task and yet I didn’t have to do it. There are 1000s of those tasks. Handling file uploads, filling out…

> The LLM easily excels The agents are building all these small features, up to a full SaaS; and all the code is excellent? How much time do you spend in code review?

You're not paying attention. There is no agentic. You use the LLM the way your tax man uses a calculator. It's back and forth all the time.

Ignore agentic stuff, that is marketing. Think about it anyway - why tf would it take all day, responses take seconds. There is no "leave it running" it's a fake concept

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#249

Post by spennant »

embedding-shape wrote: post #153
DidntUseIt wrote: post #92

Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good. With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a…

> so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. I think it's the opposite. When I'm on the edges of Real Difficult Stuff (TM), then LLMs are less of help compared to when I just need basic web applications or similar "beginner stuff". If what you're working on doesn't exists in the training data at all, the LLMs can sometimes be more in the way than helpful, as they don…

This is my experience as well. It gets worse when the LLMs have strong priors in subject matter adjacent to your novel work. The generated output will incorrectly pull towards things the LLM has seen in it’s training data.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#250

Post by xpct »

imdsm wrote: post #72
MachineMan wrote: post #10

In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longe…

This is eery to read, as I've been thinking something very similar recently whilst discussing gen AI with a close friend who works in tech but isn't a developer, who now uses AI to build everything he wished he could. Meanwhile I've seen other people, colleagues, friends, who are programmers get incredibly frustrated about AI and it's almost entirely that it lets non-developers make things. The feeling I get is that…

I'm not seeing the same kind of resentment towards non-technologists as you are claiming. Overall in my life I feel like I haven't seen as much gatekeeping as people claim there is in tech.
Post reply on HN