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Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

worksonmymachine.substack.com

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Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#281

Post by jansan »

heavyset_go wrote: post #276
ikerino wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take: Junior devs are going to be the ones who "know how to build with AI" better than current seniors. They are entering the job market with sensibilities for a higher-level of abstraction. They will be the first generation of devs that went through high-school + college building with AI.

This is the same generation that falls for online scams more than their grandparents do[1]. [1] https://www.vox.com/technology/23882304/gen-z-vs-boomers-sca...

It may be the same generation, but it's probably not the same people.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#282

Post by weatherlite »

lordnacho wrote: post #15

I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now. I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding. It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to…

> So for me, career-wise, it has come at the exact right time. A few years after I reached a level where the little things were getting tedious, a time when all the architectural elements had come together and been investigated manually.

Wish I had your confidence in this. I can easily see how this nullifies my hard earned experience and basically puts me in the same sport as a more mid level or even junior engineer.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#283

Post by doug_durham »

asadotzler wrote: post #112

I seem to have missed the part where he successfully prompted for security, internationalizability, localizability, accessibility, usability, etc., etc. This is a core problem with amateurs pretending to be software producers. There are others, but this one is fundamental to acceptable commercial software and will absolutely derail vibe coded products from widespread adoption. And if you think these aspects of qualit…

what makes you think that the writer omitted these? Any good developer would include these parts of the requirements. That's why we make the money we do. We know what is involved. That is orthogonal to the use of LLMs for coding.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#284

Post by NitpickLawyer »

lelanthran wrote: post #275
dangero wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you had the realization that you could never go back to dealing with all the minutia again? LLMs have changed me. I want to go outside while they are working and I am jealous of all the young engineers that won’t lose the years I did sitting in front of a screen for 12 hours a day while sometimes making no progress on connecting two black boxes.

Serious question: have you considered that dealing with all that minutiae and working through all that pain has made you capable to have the LLM write code? Those young engineers, in 10 years, won't be able to fix what the LLM gave them,because they have not learned anything about programming. They have all learned how to.micromanage an LLM instead.

> Those young engineers, in 10 years, won't be able to fix what the LLM gave them,because they have not learned anything about programming.

I have heard a version of this plenty of times, and it was never correct. In the early 90s it was the "electronics" people that were saying "I come from an electronics background, these young'uns will look at a computer and don't know what to do if it breaks". Well, bob, we did, the whole field moved to color coded anti-stupid design, and we figured it out.

Then I heard it about IDEs. Oh, you young people are so spoiled with your IDEs and whatnot, real men code in a text editor.

Then it was about frameworks. BBbbut what if your framework breaks, what do you do then, if you don't know the underlying whatever?

... same old, same old.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#285

Post by pluc »

chamomeal wrote: post #167
lordnacho wrote: post #15

I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now. I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding. It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to…

I also am enjoying LLMs, but I get no joy out of just prompting them again and again. I get so incredibly bored, with a little side of anxiety that I don’t really know how my program works. I’ll probably get over it, but I’ve been realizing how much fun I get out building something as opposed to just having be built . I used to think all I cared about was results, and now I know that’s not true, so that’s fun! Of cou…

I've always felt building something was close to artistry. You create something out of your thoughts, you shape it how you want and you understand how it works to the most minute detail. The amount of times I've shown something seemingly simple to someone and went "but wait this is what is actually happening in the background!" and started explaining something I thought was cool or clever are great memories to me. AI is turning renaissance paintings into mass-market printing. There's no pride, no joy, just productivity. It's precisely those repetitive, annoying tasks that lead you to create a faster alternative, or to think outside the box and find different ways. I just don't get the hype.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#286

Post by nairadithya »

doug_durham wrote: post #278
yoyohello13 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So like, why would I pay someone to work like this? Or why would I pay for software at all when I could just do this myself?

Because you can't do this yourself. You don't have the decades of experience to know how to ask the questions and when to steer the tool into a different direction.

This is something I've been thinking about. What should students do? How do they build experience? Do they swear off all forms of LLM assisted coding?

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#287

Post by Daniel_sk »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #184

Yawn. I wish HN would just ban AI skip articles until someone writes about an actual product that provides actual value to paying customers. In fact what I really want to see is a successful product that no one realizes was built by AI vibes until after it was successful. Customers don’t give a shit how something was built.

I don't think it's either "vibe coding or nothing" choice you have to make with AI. I am part of a team working on a complex Kotlin backend. I have been experimenting with Claude recently and I have been amazed how well it can pick up the existing patterns used in the project and create new code if given reasonable instructions. And it writes great tests too (something that would take me a lot of time and kill my motivation). It has been a great productivity boost for me. Of course we review the code in PRs, we test it but in the end it does the job in less time and saves me from doing tedious work.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#288

Post by gjadi »

Benjammer wrote: post #173
vishvananda wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really baffled why the coding interfaces have not implemented a locking feature for some code. It seems like an obvious feature to be able to select a section of your code and tell the agent not to modify it. This could remove a whole class of problems where the agent tries to change tests to match the code or removes key functionality. One could even imagine going a step further and having a confidence level ass…

Why are engineers so obstinate about this stuff? You really need a GUI built for you in order to do this? You can't take the time to just type up this instruction to the LLM? Do you realize that's possible? You can just write instructions "Don't modify XYZ.ts file under any circumstances". Not to mention all the tools have simple hotkeys to dismiss changes for an entire file with the press of a button if you really w…

Or, you know, chmod -w XYZ.ts

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#289

Post by terhechte »

cedws wrote: post #245

I’m feeling limited by the tools right now. The software for using LLMs is an incongruent mess. For example, how can I have a global system prompt shared across all the apps I use my OpenRouter key with? I can’t, I have to set it in each application. How can I carry a conversation over from one app to another? How can I give all my apps access to the same set of MCP tools? Most of the apps I use don’t even properly s…

I have this small project that lets you use Claude code (because their terminal UI is really smart) with any OpenRouter model:

https://github.com/terhechte/CCORP

Works fine on macOS / Linux, untested on Windows. Still working on improving it.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#290

Post by LtWorf »

mbesto wrote: post #234
ivanjermakov wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Search has just become Chat I think chat-like LLM interfacing is not the most efficient way. There has to be a smarter way.

Search wasn't just "search". It was "put a prompt in a form and then spend minutes/hours going through various websites until I get my answer". LLMs change that. I don't have to go through 20 different people's blog posts on "Which 12v 100Ah LifePO4 battery tests for the highest watt hours", the LLM simply just gives me answer that is most relevant across those 20 blog posts. It just distilled what I would have taken…

> LLMs change that

Yup. Now you get a quick reply and have to then do the same job as before to validate it. Except all websites are deploying crawler countermeasures so it takes even longer now.

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