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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

lalitm.com

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

#271

Post by lalitmaganti »

nektro wrote: post #268

> 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

> https://sqlitebrowser.org/

sqlitebrowser.org is cool but it's not the sort of developer tools I'm talking about. As I clarify in the side notes, I'm looking for a formatter, linter, LSP, not an IDE.

> https://sqlite.org/syntax.html

As I replied to some other comment, I'm very aware that there is a syntax diagram but that really only tells half the story. If you actually look at those diagrams into detail, or you look into the the actual parse.y grammar (https://sqlite.org/src/file?name=src/parse.y&ci=trunk), you'll find that they're missing a lot of information which is required for you to actually interpret the SQL into an AST.

When I say "formal specification", I'm not just talking about the formal grammar rules but also how those interpreted in practice. Something closer to the ECMAScript specification (https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...).

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

#272

Post by lyricalstring »

simondotau wrote: post #6

This essay perfectly encapsulates my own experience. My biggest frustration is that the AI is astonishingly good at making awful slop which somehow works. It’s got no taste, no concern for elegance, no eagerness for the satisfyingly terse. My job has shifted from code writer to quality control officer. Nowhere is this more obvious in my current projects than with CRUD interface building. It will go nuts building thes…

This is the thing that gets me. The code compiles. Passes tests. So you stop reading it. Why wouldn't you.

Then three weeks later you're tracing some control flow that makes no sense and nobody knows why it's structured that way. Not you, not the model. I've been treating it like code from a contractor now, review every line same as a junior dev's PR. Gets tedious but the alternative is worse.

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

#273

Post by lalitmaganti »

eviks wrote: post #236

> spent weeks in the early days following AI down dead ends, exploring designs that felt productive in the moment but collapsed under scrutiny > I paid for that with a total rewrite. With so much waste and not a single example of the "brilliant at giving you the right answer to a specific technical question" > The takeaway for me is simple: AI is an incredible force multiplier Seems more like a feel multiplier, rathe…

> With so much waste and not a single example of the "brilliant at giving you the right answer to a specific technical question"

In my opinion, "giving me a better understanding for the architecture of the project" is reasonable technical compensation.

> Indeed, feeling is the only saving grace for a mountain of random unreviewed tests

I think I say a line or two above that this was after a review of the codebase so I did review these tests.

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

#274

Post by mtrifonov »

simondotau wrote: post #6

This essay perfectly encapsulates my own experience. My biggest frustration is that the AI is astonishingly good at making awful slop which somehow works. It’s got no taste, no concern for elegance, no eagerness for the satisfyingly terse. My job has shifted from code writer to quality control officer. Nowhere is this more obvious in my current projects than with CRUD interface building. It will go nuts building thes…

The "no taste" thing is real when AI is in generate-for-me mode. It's trying to fulfill your request, and won't evaluate it unsolicited. But if you change the relationship and let it react to what you're building instead of building it for you, aesthetic judgment shows up immediately. It'll tell you something is ugly or overengineered or missing the point. The taste was always in the model, it just can't express it while it's busy being obedient.

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

#275

Post by lalitmaganti »

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…

> It's a huge mistake to start building with Claude without mapping out a project in detail first, by hand.

I agree with you in theory but in my opinion, it doesn't work so well when you don't even know what exactly you are looking for at the start. Yes I knew I wanted a formatter, linter, parse but which language should those be written in, should they be one project or many, how the pieces should fit together, none of that was clear to me.

As I pointed out in the article, in these sort of "greenfield projects" I work a lot better with concrete prototypes and code in front of me I can dissect instead of trying to endlessly play with designs in my head.

> It's also nuts to me that he had to go back in later to build in tests and validation.

I think this is a little misleading. Yes I did do some testing retroactively (i.e. the upstream validation testing) but I was using TDD + verifying outputs immediately, even during the vibe coding phase. The problem as I point out is that this is not enough. Even when I had unit tests written at the same time as they code, they had lots of holes and over time, I kept hitting SQL statements which failed which the testing did not cover.

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

#276

Post by eviks »

lalitmaganti wrote: post #273
eviks wrote: post #236

> spent weeks in the early days following AI down dead ends, exploring designs that felt productive in the moment but collapsed under scrutiny > I paid for that with a total rewrite. With so much waste and not a single example of the "brilliant at giving you the right answer to a specific technical question" > The takeaway for me is simple: AI is an incredible force multiplier Seems more like a feel multiplier, rathe…

> With so much waste and not a single example of the "brilliant at giving you the right answer to a specific technical question" In my opinion, "giving me a better understanding for the architecture of the project" is reasonable technical compensation. > Indeed, feeling is the only saving grace for a mountain of random unreviewed tests I think I say a line or two above that this was after a review of the codebase so…

How many of 500 tests were actually reviewed/tested and found good? The code review results were: don't understand code and/or it's pretty bad. Then 0 of those 500 tests were used due to the full rewrite. So nothing to extrapolate usefulness from, all that's left is a feel...

> giving me better understanding

Examples of that would also be nice (I don't doubt the personal feel that waste was justified)

> JOURNAL before: ...

> JOURNAL after: ... > was wrong here, learned this

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

#278

Post by ElFitz »

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…

> After done, review the code. You will notice there is always something to fix. Hardcoded variables, a sql migration with seed data that should actually not be a migration, just generally crazy stuff. > > The worst is that the AI is always very loose on requirements. You will notice all its fields are nullable, records have little to no validation, you report an error when testing and it tried to solve it with an brittle async solution, like LISTEN/NOTIFY or a callback instead of doing the architecturally correct solution. Things that at scale are hell to debug, especially if you did not write the code.

For that I usually get it reviewed by LLMs first, before reviewing it myself.

Same model, but clean session, different models from different providers. And multiple (at least 2) automated rounds of review -> triage by the implementing session -> addressing + reasons for deferring / ignoring deferred / ignored feedbacks -> review -> triage by the implementing session -> …

Works wonders.

Committing the initial spec / plan also helps the reviewers compare the actual implementation to what was planned. Didn’t expect it, but it’s worked nicely.

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

#279

Post by lowsong »

duggan wrote: post #264
lowsong wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”.

The median per capita income in the United States is $37,683/year.[0] Depending on your state, after taxes, that's something like ~$2,600/month. You're asking almost 10% of their post-tax income to this just for the opportunity to create software. With rent, food, and other living expenses many households at that income level simply cannot afford this.

This is the median income. If it's a struggle for someone on this income then it's worse for half of all Americans, and American incomes are higher than most of the rest of the world.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_...

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

#280

Post by nsvd2 »

jaccola wrote: post #87
jillesvangurp wrote: post #41

This is the hardest it's ever going to be. That's been my mode for the last year. A lot of what I did in the last month was complete science fiction as little as six months ago. The scope and quality of what is possible seems to leap ahead every few weeks. I now have several projects going in languages that I've never used. I have a side project in Rust, and two Go projects. I have a few decades experience with backe…

But why are you making projects in so many languages? The language is very rarely the barrier to performance, especially if you don't even understand the language.

In my experience Rust and Go are both opinionated languages with strong types which makes them work well with agentic coding.
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