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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
251–260 of 349 posts
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 I’ve been driving Claude as my primary coding interface the last three months at my job. Other than a different domain, I feel like I could have written this exact article. The project I’m on started as a vibe-coded prototype that quickly got promoted to a production service we sell. I’ve had to build the mental model after the fact, while refactoring and ripping out large chunks of nonsense or dead code. But the…
I’ve found that LLMs will frequently do extremely silly things that no person would do to make typescript code pass the typechecker.
Yeah, I've found LLMs cannot write good Typescript code period. The good news is that they are excellent at some other languages.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#253Earlier 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…
The thing, everything you describe may be easy for an average person in the future. But just having your single AI agent do all of that will be even easier and that seems like where things will go.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 som…
I don't think we disagree. We still have big mainframe systems from the 70s and beyond that a powering parts of society. I don't think all current software systems are just going to die or disappear, especially not the big ones. But I do think significant double digit percentages of software engineers are working on other types of software that are at risk of becoming first- or second- or third-order casualties in a world where ephemeral AI assistant-generated software and vibe coded bespoke software becomes increasingly popular.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#255Earlier 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…
I've learned a number of skills, and for me none of them worked in the way you're describing. I didn't learn to cut good miter joints by randomly vibe-sawing wood until I unlocked miter joints in the skill tree. I carefully studied the errors I made, and adjusted in ways I thought might correct them, some of which helped some of which did not. Then eventually I understood the relationship between my actions and the u…
Isn't that example pretty reductive, in that you have a directly-measurable output? I mean, the joint is either 45° (well, 90°) or it's not. Zoom out a bit, and the skill-set becomes much less definable: are my cabinets good - for some intersection of well-proportioned, elegantly-finished, and fit for purpose, with well-chosen wood and appropriate hardware.
Mind you, I don't think the process of improvement in those dimensions is fundamentally different, just much less direct and not easily (or perhaps even at all) articulable.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#256Earlier 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…
You're always free to stop at the level of abstraction at which you find a certain answer to be satisfying, but you can also keep digging. Why are flat shoes better? Well, it's to do with my gait. Ok, but why is my gait like that? Something-something musculoskeletal. Why is my body that way? Something-something genetic. OK, but why is that? And so on.
Pursued far enough, any line of thought will reach something non-deterministic - or, simply, That's The Way It Is - however unsatisfying that is to those of us who crave straightforward answers. Like it or not, our ground truth as human beings ultimately rests on intuition. (Feel free to say, "No, it's physics", or "No, it's maths", but I'll ask you if you're doing those calculations in your head as you run!)
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#257Earlier 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…
LISTEN/NOTIFY is not brittle, we use it for millions of events per day.
I agree! It should be very stable, IMO. If not, then please send a bug report and we'll look into it. Also, now it scales well with the number of listening connections (given clients listen on unique channel names): https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 I’ve been driving Claude as my primary coding interface the last three months at my job. Other than a different domain, I feel like I could have written this exact article. The project I’m on started as a vibe-coded prototype that quickly got promoted to a production service we sell. I’ve had to build the mental model after the fact, while refactoring and ripping out large chunks of nonsense or dead code. But the…
Fwiw, the article mirrors my experience when I started out too, even exactly with the same first month of vibecoding, then the next project which I did exactly like he outlined too. Personally, I think it's just the natural flow when you're starting out. If he keeps going, his opinion is going to change and as he gets to know it better, he'll likely go more and more towards vibecoding again. It's hard to say why, but…
> he'll likely go more and more towards vibecoding again
I think "more and more" is doing some very heavy lifting here. On the surface it reads like "a lot" to many people, I think, which is why this is hard to read without cringing a bit. Read like that it comes off as "It's very addictive and eventually you get lulled into accepting nonsense again, except I haven't realized that's what's happening".
But the truth is that this comment really relies entirely on what "more and more" means here.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#259Had a similar experience recently. AI-generated code that worked, tests passing, but I couldn't explain how half of it worked. Starting over with a clear mental model and using AI as an accelerator instead of a replacement made all the difference.
Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Strongly disagree with this thesis, and in fact I'd go completely the opposite: code quality is more important than ever thanks to AI. LLM-assisted coding is most successful in codebases with attributes strongly associa…
I agree entirely with your statement that structure makes things easier for both LLMs and humans, but I'd gently push back on the mutation. Exactly as mutation is fine for humans it also seems to be fine for LLMs in that structured mutation (we know what we can change, where we can change it and to what) works just fine.
Your example with the dataframes is completely unstructured mutation typical of a dynamic language and its sensibilities.
I know from experience that none of the modern models (even cheap ones) have issues dealing with global or near-global state and mutating it, even navigating mutexes/mutices, conds, and so on.