331–340 of 424 posts
Especially with junior engineers it is helpful to ask them to provide a Loom video or other proof that they have verified a feature or bug works as intended. I have tried setting up Claude Code with playwright to verify it's work, but so far am not very satisfied with the results. Any tools that are helpful with this end to end testing for web apps using Claude Code and other AI assistants? Feel free to share your pr…
I would love to see an anti-AI take that doesn't hinge on the idea that technology forces people to be lazy/careless/thoughtless. The plan-build-test-reflect loop is equally important when using an LLM to generate code, as anyone who's seriously used the tech knows: if you yolo your way through a build without thought, it will collapse in on itself quickly. But if you DO apply that loop, you get to spend much more ti…
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I see a lot of comments like this and it reflects strongly negatively on the engineers who write it imho. As in I've been a staff level engineer at both Meta and Google and a lead at various startups in my time. I post open source projects here on HN from time to time that are appreciated. I know my shit. If someone tells me that LLMs aren't useful i think to myself "wow this person is so unable to learn new tools th…
this comment states that you have posted a plurality of projects, but there is only one which received two votes (hardly well-received); the unawareness of your own posts (or lack thereof) implies this may not have been written by a human.
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> No it isn't. There's literally nothing about the process that forces you to skip understanding. Any such skips are purely due to the lack of will on the developer's side This is the whole point. The marginal dev will go to the path of least resistance, which is to skip the understanding and churn out a bunch of code. That is why it's a problem. You are effectively saying "just be a good dev, there's literally nothi…
I don't think that is a problem with AI, it is a problem with the idea that pure vibe-coding will replace knowledgeable engineers. While there is a loud contingent that hypes up this idea, it will not survive contact with reality. Purely vibe-coded projects will soon break in unexplainable ways as they grow beyond trivial levels. Once that happens their devs will either need to adapt and learn coding for real or be P…
That's just it. You can only use AI usefully for coding* once you've spent years beating your head against code "the hard way". I'm not sure what that looks like for the next cohort, since they have AI on day 1.
* That is, assuming it's nontrivial.
A friend of mine who is newer to coding than me is worried that by using AI so much, he's losing his ability to code, and its also killing his motivation because using AI to generate code is just not fun. We do "analog coding sessions" together where we code together without LLM assistance. Its much more enjoyable!
With classic coding the feedback loop is very straigth forward and fast. More so with and IDE, you get instant feedback as you write.
With LLMs the loop is not as clear.
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Reminds me of critisms of python decades ago. that you wouldn't understand what the "real code" was doing since you were using a scripting language. But then over the years it showed tremendous value and many unicorns were built by focusing on higher level details and not lower level code
That's not the same thing. LLMs don't just obscure low-level technical implementation details like Python does, they also obscure your business logic and many of its edge cases. Letting a Python interpreter manage your memory is one thing because it's usually irrelevant, but you can't say the same thing about business logic. Encoding those precise rules and considering all of the gnarly real-world edge cases is what…
One-shotting anything like this is a non-starter for any remotely complex task. The reason is that fuzzy language is ambiguous and poorly defined. So even in this scenario you enter into a domain where it's going to require iterative cycling and refinement. And I'm not even considering the endless meta-factors that further complicate this, like performance considerations depending on how you plan to deploy.
And even if language were perfectly well defined, you'd end up with 'prompts' that would essentially be source codes in their own right. I have a friend who is rather smart, but not a tech type - and he's currently working on developing a very simple project using LLMs, but it's still a "real" project in that there are certain edge cases you need to consider, various cross-functionality in the UI that needs to be carried out, interactions with some underlying systems, and so on.
His 'prompt' is gradually turning into just a natural language program, of comparable length and complexity. And with the amount of credits he's churning through making it, in the end he may well have been much better off just hiring some programmers on one of those 'gig programming' sites.
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And beyond all of this, even if you can surmount these issues - which I think may be inherently impossible - you have another one. The reason people hire software devs is not because they can't do it themselves, but because they want to devote their attention to other things. E.g. - most of everybody could do janitorial work, yet companies still hire millions of janitors. So the 'worst case' scenario would be that you dramatically lower the barriers to entry to software development, and wages plummet accordingly.
This article is a great example of how the human is struggling to extrapolate what happens next. There won't be any humans anywhere near this part of the tech stack, just like no one building a SAAS writes assembly code; or has to put together their own server cluster a datacenter (remember pre-cloud?) for their company anymore. He's dead Jim. No one is telling anyone to ship the ML code without any testing. Human co…
Pm and qa people would go before devs. Llms are already better pms than the best pms.
They can code your startup...
Like the LLM was a person, lol.
I don't understand why some people are so upset with AI coding - no one forces them to use it. Now, if you say the problem is that you don't want to be inflicted with other people's AI code, just enforce more meaningful tests. There has always been bad code in the past, and there always will be. I, for one, am doing great with AI coding - and my feeling is that more emphasis on project structure is the way forward fo…
> I don't understand why some people are so upset with AI coding - no one forces them to use it. You might be a little bit out of touch with the current zeitgeist -- and what's happening in a lot of corporations.
It's a fine post, but two canards in here: First, skilled engineers using LLMs to code also think and discuss and stare off into space before the source code starts getting laid down. In fact: I do a lot, lot more thinking and balancing different designs and getting a macro sense of where I'm going, because that's usually what it takes to get an LLM agent to build something decent. But now that pondering and planning…
> the LLM may not be learning anything, but I am Regardless of that, personally i'd really like it if they could actually learn from interacting with them. From a user's perspective what i'd like to do is to be able to "save" the discussion/session/chat/whatever, with everything the LLM learned so far, to a file. Then later be able to restore it and have the LLM "relearn" whatever is in it. Now, you can already do th…
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if you're spending anywhere near as many engineering hours "getting code to work" as you're spending "thinking" then something is wrong in your process
Take that up with the author of this article!