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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

#261

Post by bytefish »

suzzer99 wrote: post #114
bytefish wrote: post #103

This resonates with my experience. I have several Open Source projects and wanted to refactor them for a decade. A week ago I sat down with Google Gemini and completely refactored three of my libraries. It has been an amazing experience. What’s a game changer for me is the feedback loop. I can quickly validate or invalidate ideas, and land at an API I would enjoy to use.

Did you already have good integration tests?

I had, yes. But those had also been rewritten with Gemini from ground up, because it caught way more edge cases, than I did. Which is fascinating and frightening at the same time.

I think my vibe-coding success also has to do with the problem being not that “novel” and prior art exists.

Nevertheless still impressive.

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

#262

Post by throwaway47001 »

vaylian wrote: post #125
throwaway47001 wrote: post #111

I appreciate these kind of fact-based posts. Thank you for this. Unfortunately, AI seems to be divisive. I hope we will find our way back eventually. I believe the lessons from this era will reverberate for a long time and all sides stand to learn something. As for me, I can’t help but notice there is a distinct group of developers that does not get it. I know because they are my colleagues. They are good people and…

> because they are such laggards I am a technologist. But I am seriously concerned about the ecological consequences of the training and usage of AI. To me, the true laggards are those, who have not understood yet, that climate change requires a prudent use of our resources. I don't mind people having fun or being productive with AI. But I do mind it when AI is presented as the only way of doing things.

I get that, I do. I hate to say it, but our entire civilization is about not giving a damn about resources. Cars, flying on holidays, industrialization in general I guess. Many things are a ridiculous waste of resource if you think about it.

The counter here would be, what if AI could be made efficient? Suddenly OK then? Is it truly about the resources?

Walking to the nearest farm with my horse is much, much more sustainable than maintaining a sprawling toxic civilizational level infrastructure so I can go into my car to the supermarket. I get your point, but nearly every aspect of our world is filled to the brim with mind boggling complexity and corresponding resource usage and we get used to it.

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

#263

Post by jamiemallers »

figassis wrote: post #91
yojo wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

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…

[dead]

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

#264

Post by duggan »

lowsong wrote: post #203
csallen wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is quite literally making this technology, information, and power available to only the elite. I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening. > What payout? Zero AI companies are profitable. Because they're reinvesting profits into continue…

> I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening. I don't know how I can explain this any more clearly. If you need AI to create software, and the cost of AI is $200/month, then only people who can afford $200/month can create software. Costs wil…

> $200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population.

1. You can build small applications with the $20/month sub, much more with the $100/month. Competition and technology improvements will inevitably improve the price to value ratio.

2. Cable sports subscriptions are in a similar price range. Expensive, but not exclusive to “the elites”.

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

#265

Post by strokirk »

csallen wrote: post #221
fn-mote wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Yeah, I’ve built many one-off scripts in my day, and these days they take 100x less time.

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

#266

Post by DANmode »

ang_cire wrote: post #54

It's a huge mistake to start building with Claude without mapping out a project in detail first, by hand. I built a pretty complex device orchestration server + agent recently, and before I set Claude to actually coding I had ~3000 lines of detailed design specs across 7 files that laid out how and what each part of the application would do. I didn't have to review the code for understanding what Claude did, I review…

Do you write anywhere else?

Really enjoy your style.

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

#267

Post by ang_cire »

DANmode wrote: post #266
ang_cire wrote: post #54

It's a huge mistake to start building with Claude without mapping out a project in detail first, by hand. I built a pretty complex device orchestration server + agent recently, and before I set Claude to actually coding I had ~3000 lines of detailed design specs across 7 files that laid out how and what each part of the application would do. I didn't have to review the code for understanding what Claude did, I review…

Do you write anywhere else? Really enjoy your style.

Thank you! Not anywhere but forums. I used to have a blog, but I haven't posted anything in years.

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

#268

Post by nektro »

> I’ve long been puzzled that no one has invested in building a really good developer experience for it.

https://sqlitebrowser.org/

> Unfortunately, unlike many other languages,

what

> SQLite has no formal specification describing how it should be parsed.

https://sqlite.org/syntax.html

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

#270

Post by duskdozer »

csallen wrote: post #171
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That list cherry picks all the successful cases where the technology improved while ignoring the many, many others where it didn't and the technology improved no further. That's dishonest. It isn't even a good job of cherry picking: we never got mainstream supersonic passenger aircraft after the Concorde because aerospace technology hasn't advanced far enough to make it economically viable and the decrease in progres…

You're not factoring in the list of constraints I provided. There's no broad social acceptance of supersonic flight because it creates incredibly loud sonic booms that the public doesn't want to deal with. And despite that, it's still a bad counterexample, as companies continue to innovate in this area e.g. Boom Supersonic. At best you can say, "It's taking longer than expected," but my point was never that it will h…

In contrast to AI/AI companies, which have no negative externalities?
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