331–340 of 344 posts
I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…
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It's not confusing. It makes sense.
no, it is confusing. the llm produced something the operator thought was garbage for the design too, and the operator iterated it from garbage to good. they could also have the llm iterate the underlying code from garbage to good, if they wanted. most likely a specialist would say its neither good nor bad, since its not considering the right things, and hasnt collected the right useability feedback, but making straig…
I had an Iron Man moment last week where I was “vibe coding” a UI design with component tests live on the other screen. Iterating by asking it to move things, reduce emphasis of an element, exploring layout options, etc. The loop was near realtime and felt amazing. The code it generated was awful. The kind of garbage that people who don’t know any better would ship: it looked right and it worked. But it was instantly…
This isn't an indictment of how good AI is but how poor our tools are. We had gui makers in 1996 that made slop which allowed you to iterate in real time. They didn't need a datacenter worth of compute and a nuclear reactors worth of power to run.
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I mean, if you don’t like refactoring, which is my absolute favorite, it’s hard to believe you understand software engineering and software architecture. Tedium absolutely exists in coding. And is usually a sign of bad interfaces and/or architecture. For most of us it wasn’t really about getting the user to do X. It’s getting the user to do X at 1/10th of the price, 10x the speed, and the user is left absolutely amaz…
> it’s hard to believe you understand software engineering and software architecture. I made over $500k TC writing active-active high availability services that moved billions of dollars a day. I've been around the block. > Magic is for the user to experience. Not for the user of the programming language. Why are you treating our primitive technology as holy? It's all temporary fucking garbage that is a limitation of…
Obviously and literally everything is temporary and will be replaced by something better. And those who are born into it will call it “temporary garbage.”
Thanks for the bonus ad hominems. Made it all more convincing.
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The problem is that people keep saying this, but the code keeps being bad. Every time I commit myself to trying to build something with AI, I end up wasting a ton of time and backing it out or completely rewriting it without the AI. The code it generates just isn't where it needs to be. And people have been saying this exact thing for years now. Someone said this very thing two years ago. And we're still at the "main…
> If you don't agree, how many years into the future do we need until you would agree? Respectfully, I asked first. ;) > before we realize its a dead end (at best) You've declared the future, which doesn't leave much room for a conversation. So, cheers!
I just flipped your own rhetorical devices back on you. If you don't think they left much room for conversation, then that's a chance for you to look at yourself in the mirror and examine your own behavior ;)
To honestly answer your question in good faith, it's not about years, it's about results. I don't see AI improving exponentially or even linearly. I see it's capability gains logarithmically flattening out. And it's still a ways out from actually writing maintainable code.
I honestly don't believe we are going to reach this point you are saying is "a few years out" with the current architecture. We're throwing an obscene amount of resources at it and we're just not getting there.
And all of this is just about the practical "does it work?" question. We're not even touching on the ethical, environmental, resource use, or societal impact questions at work here.
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I feel the same but the question I struggle most with is this: "Does it matter when the people who are going to come along and maintain this are just going to use AI to fix or adjust this maintenance nightmare?"
At that point the code becomes a compile target, and then you need a new source of truth. Which I think is perfectly worthy of exploration. Some people want to check in the prompts. Or even better, check in a plan.md or evenest betterest: some set of very well-defined specifications. I'm not sure what the answer will be. Probably some mix of things. But today it is absolutely imperative that the code I write for the…
The problem is that there won't be a single source of truth left. Everything will have to be reverse engineered each time, which is extremely wasteful in my opinion.
Even early stage startups have folks slapping together PoCs / MVPs, etc. that most would consider trash after seeing it years later. The trash creates some technical debt (and job security maybe) but you actually have something that can ship and be validated as being worth further investment sooner than later.
One can always go back and do better V2. In fact, surely in a few years models would be good enough to even do that V1->V2 as well.
> I want to talk a bit about AI and the related shifts in the tech industry. I know this is top-of-mind for lots of y’all, and you might be wondering if it even makes sense to learn new programming skills in this environment. Y’all sound the same: > Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth: AI models have become shockingly good at completing a wide variety of programming tasks. They’re certainly not perfect, but in ma…
> More Inevitabilism posting with the “not happy with” but is-what-it-is washing of your hands OK so, _realistically_, what can you do that will make any meaningful difference?