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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

#301

Post by twixfel »

JSteph22 wrote: post #100
aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As search gives the answer rather than the path to it, the job of finding things out properly and writing it down for others is lost. If we let that be lost, then we will all be lost. If we cannot find a way to redirect income from AI back to the creators of the information they rehash (such as good and honest journalism), a critical load-bearing pillar of democratic society will collapse. The news industry has been…

I am looking forward to the "news industry" breathing its last breath. They're the ones primarily responsible for the distrust and division.

The news industry of the future will be Joe Rogan and friends. Arguably it already is. Hard to see how that’s an improvement on what came before.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#302

Post by grey-area »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #211
baxter001 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you think it was suggested _by_ them is I think where your mental model is misleading you. LLMs can be thought of metaphorically as a process of decompression, if you can give it a compressed form for your scenario 1 it'll go great - you're actually doing a lot of mental work to arrive at that 'compressed' request, checking technical feasibility, thinking about interactions, hinting at solutions. If you…

I don't think that the suggestions in the prompt box are being automatically generated on the fly for everyone. At least I don't see why they would be. Why not just have some engineers come up with 100 prompts, test them to make sure they work, and then hard-code those?

Why do that when you can be lazy and get ‘AI’ to do the work.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#303

Post by [deleted] »

Loic wrote: post #27
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…

> What junior devs will do, I'm not so sure. They somehow have to jump to the top of the mountain, but the stairs are gone. Exactly my thinking, nearly 50, more than 30 years of experience in early every kind of programming, like you do, I can easily architect/control/adjust the agent to help me produce great code with a very robust architecture. By I do that out of my experience, both in modelling (science) and prog…

[deleted]

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#304

Post by throw1235435 »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #223
saadatq wrote: post #177

this isn’t vibe coding. This is something completely new. I call it “flex coding.” heck I built a full app in an afternoon AND I was a good dad? > I'd wander into my office, check what Claude had built, test it real quick. If it worked, great! Commit and push. "Now build the server connection UI," I'd say, and wander back out. Made breakfast. Claude coded. Played with my son. Claude coded. Watched some TV. Claude cod…

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?

That's the real question IMO. Especially when everything that isn't deflationary with AI for the most part is getting much more expensive due to inflation globally. Save money on software, buy more blue collar goods.

If its an easy skill to learn, with little consequences if you get it wrong especially for small scale apps why pay for it? Don't know why seniors (of which I'm one) think they are immune to this.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#305

Post by Terr_ »

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…

> What junior devs will do, I'm not so sure

I see it as a worrying extension of a pre-LLM problem: No employer wants to train, they just want to hire employees after someone else trains them.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#306

Post by Terr_ »

lelanthran wrote: post #292
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Have you also heard about calculators? Every single finance person uses a calculator. How effective do you think a person in any aspect of finance would be if they had never learned what multiplication is? Would they perform their job adequately if they don't know that `X * Y` is `X repeated Y times`? IOW, if you gave a finance person (accountant, asset manager, whatever) a non-deterministic calculator for multiplica…

Yeah, there are qualitative differences.

I might offload multiplying some numbers to a calculator, but Kids These Days™ are trying to offload executive function, like "what should I do next" or "is there anything I've forgotten".

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#307

Post by globular-toast »

Building with LLMs is a bit like driving with GPS. You ever get that feeling the GPS is wrong or leading you along a difficult route? But for some reason you follow the GPS anyway? Maybe there's a name for the phenomenon. I notice it more and more.

The decision making parts of people's brains will atrophy. It will be interesting to see what will happen.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#308

Post by Terr_ »

alternatex wrote: post #298
jansan wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the argument is that growing up with something doesn't necessarily make you good at it. I think it rings especially true with higher level abstractions. The upcoming generation is bad with tech because tech has become more abstract, more of a product and less something to tinker with and learn about. Tech just works now and requires little in assistance from the user, so little is learned.

Yeah, I have a particular rant about this with respect to older generations believing "kids these days know computers." (In this context, probably people under 18.)

The short version is that they mistake confidence for competence, and the younger consumers are more confident poking around because they grew up with superior idiot-proofing. The better results are because they dare to fiddle until it works, not because they know what's wrong.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#309

Post by nosianu »

roxolotl wrote: post #200
nirvanatikku wrote: post #9

This article is spot on. I had stumbled upon Kidlin’s Law—“If you can write down the problem clearly, you’re halfway to solving it”. This is a powerful guiding principle in today’s AI-driven world. As natural language becomes our primary interface with technology, clearly articulating challenges not only enhances our communication but also maximizes the potential of AI. The async approach to coding has been most fasc…

The challenge is that clearly stating things is and always has been the hard part. It’s awesome that we have tools which can translate clear natural language instructions into code but even if we get AGI you’ll still have to do that. Maybe you can save some time in the process by not having to fight with code as much but you’re still going to have to create really clear specs which, again, is the hard part.

Anecdote

Many years ago, in another millennium, before I even went to university but still was an apprentice (the German system, in a large factory), I wrote my first professional software, in assembler. I got stuck on a hard part. Fortunately there was another quite intelligent apprentice colleague with me (now a hard-science Ph.D.), and I delegated that task to him.

He still needed an explanation since he didn't have any of my context, so I bit the bullet and explained the task to him as well as I could. When I was done I noticed that I had just created exactly the algorithm that I needed. I just wrote it down easily myself in less than half an hour after that.

Re: Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

#310

Post by gngoo »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #270

Instead of walking away, I have worked on multiple projects at the same time. Prompt one project, let it run, prompt another project, let it run and go back to the first. Maybe walking away is a better choice hah.

Yep! I work on multiple client projects. And while one agent is running in one project, I’m reviewing and writing down the task for another. Generally I just do this 2-3 hours per day; trying to block this time. And then go outside and enjoy free time.
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