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Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts

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Re: Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts

#341

Post by motorest »

petersellers wrote: post #330
motorest wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there's a huge huge space of software to build that isn't being touched today because it's not cost-effective to have an engineer build them. LLMs don't change that. If a business does not have the budget for a software engineer, LLMs won't make up budget headroom for it either. What LLMs do is allow engineers to iterate faster, and work on more tasks. This means less jobs.

If a business has the budget for 1 or 2 engineers though, they might be able to task them with work that previously required 5-10 engineers (in theory, anyways).

Right, but even the way you opted to frame this discussion is based on the idea that there is a drop in demand for software engineers. You need less engineers, not more. A few can get more done, but you need fewer to accomplish your tasks too.

Re: Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts

#342

Post by motorest »

petersellers wrote: post #328
motorest wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is exactly the direction I expect AI-assisted coding to go in. Not software engineers being kicked out and some business person pressing a few buttons to have a fully functional app (as is playing out in a lot of fantasies on LinkedIn & X), but rather experienced engineers using AI to generate bits of code and then meticulously reviewing and testing them. There is a middle ground: software engineers being kick…

I'm not so sure that would work well in practice. How would the inexperienced developer know that the code created by the AI was correct? What if subtle bugs are introduced that the inexperienced developer didn't catch until it went out into production? What if the developer didn't even know how to debug those problems correctly? Would they know that the code they are writing is maintainable and extensible, or are th…

> I'm not so sure that would work well in practice. How would the inexperienced developer know that the code created by the AI was correct?

Not a problem. The industry has evolved to tolerate buggy code that barely works. In fact, in some circles that's what's already expected from the baseline. LLMs change nothing in this regard. In fact, they arguably improve upon this problem as it becomes trivial to implement extensive automated test suites.

> What if subtle bugs are introduced that the inexperienced developer didn't catch until it went out into production?

That's what is happening in the real world without LLMs entering the picture.

Re: Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts

#343

Post by petersellers »

motorest wrote: post #341
petersellers wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a business has the budget for 1 or 2 engineers though, they might be able to task them with work that previously required 5-10 engineers (in theory, anyways).

Right, but even the way you opted to frame this discussion is based on the idea that there is a drop in demand for software engineers. You need less engineers, not more. A few can get more done, but you need fewer to accomplish your tasks too.

I didn't frame it that way - perhaps you are thinking of the person you replied to?

Nevertheless, I don't think they are trying to frame it that way, either. The point is that making software development easier can actually increase the demand of software engineers in some cases (where projects that were previously not considered due to budget constraints are now feasible).

Re: Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts

#344

Post by petersellers »

motorest wrote: post #342
petersellers wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure that would work well in practice. How would the inexperienced developer know that the code created by the AI was correct? What if subtle bugs are introduced that the inexperienced developer didn't catch until it went out into production? What if the developer didn't even know how to debug those problems correctly? Would they know that the code they are writing is maintainable and extensible, or are th…

> I'm not so sure that would work well in practice. How would the inexperienced developer know that the code created by the AI was correct? Not a problem. The industry has evolved to tolerate buggy code that barely works. In fact, in some circles that's what's already expected from the baseline. LLMs change nothing in this regard. In fact, they arguably improve upon this problem as it becomes trivial to implement ext…

I disagree strongly with this conclusion.

I've seen firsthand what happens to large software projects that collapse under their own weight of tech debt. The software literally could not function as intended - customers were lost, the product went under. Low quality being "expected" (which isn't true in my experience, either) is irrelevant when the software doesn't work at all.

The chances of all of that happening are a lot higher with a lone inexperienced engineer at the wheel. You still need experienced engineers to maintain your software, period.

> That's what is happening in the real world without LLMs entering the picture.

The difference is that most firms have experienced software engineers to fix those defects.

Re: Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts

#345

Post by motorest »

paxys wrote: post #65
spiderice wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there very well might be a time very soon where human's no longer offer economic value to the software engineering process. If you could (and currently you can't) pay an AI $10k/year to do what a human could do in a year, why would you pay the human 6 figures? Or even $20k? Nobody is claiming that human's won't have jobs simply because "we have accomplished everything this is to do". It's that humans will offer z…

And there might be a giant asteroid that strikes the earth a few years down the line ending human civilization. If there is some magic $10k AI that can fully replace a $200k software engineer then I'd love to see it. Until that happens this entire discussion is science fiction.

> If there is some magic $10k AI that can fully replace a $200k software engineer then I'd love to see it.

I think you have multiple offers of that very AI dangling in front of you, but you might be refusing to acknowledge them. One of the problems is the way you opt to frame the issue. Does "replacing" means firing the guy hoping to replace him with a Slack webhook? Or does it mean your team decides they don't need the same headcount of medior/senior engineers because a team of junior engineers mentored by someone focusing on quality ends up being more productive?

Re: Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts

#346

Post by motorest »

paxys wrote: post #98
spiderice wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If experts were saying the astroid will hit earth in the next 5 years, would it still be science fiction? You acting like those two scenarios are the same is disingenuous. Fuck that.

Remove all the "experts" who have a major conflict of interest (running AI startups, selling AI courses, wanting to pump their company's stock price by associating with AI) and you'll find that very few actual experts in the field hold this view.

> Remove all the "experts" who have a major conflict of interest (...) and you'll find that very few actual experts in the field hold this view.

You might seek comfort in your conspiracy theories, but back in the real world the likes of me were already quite capable of creating complete and fully working projects from scratch using yesterday's LLMs.

We are talking about afternoons where you grab your coffee, saying to yourself "let's see what this vibecode thing is all about", and challenging yourself to create projects from scratch using nothing but a definition of done, LLM prompts, and a free-tier LLM configured to run in agent mode.

What, then?

You then can proceed to nitpick about code quality and bugs, but I can also say the same thing about your work, which you take far longer to deliver.

Re: Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts

#347

Post by michelsedgh »

kentonv wrote: post #105
paxys wrote: post #10

This is exactly the direction I expect AI-assisted coding to go in. Not software engineers being kicked out and some business person pressing a few buttons to have a fully functional app (as is playing out in a lot of fantasies on LinkedIn & X), but rather experienced engineers using AI to generate bits of code and then meticulously reviewing and testing them. The million dollar (perhaps literally) question is – coul…

It took me a few days to build the library with AI. I estimate it would have taken a few weeks, maybe months to write by hand. That said, this is a pretty ideal use case: implementing a well-known standard on a well-known platform with a clear API spec. In my attempts to make changes to the Workers Runtime itself using AI, I've generally not felt like it saved much time. Though, people who don't know the codebase as…

The fascinating part is that each person is finding their own way of using these tools from kids to elders and everyone in between no matter what your background or language or whatever is

Re: Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts

#348

Post by jcims »

jes5199 wrote: post #54
diggan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s way more cognitively demanding than writing code the old-fashioned way How are you using it? I've been mainly doing "pair programming" with my own agent (using Devstral as of late) and find the reviewing much easier than it would been to literally type all of the code it produces, at least time wise. I've also tried vibe coding for a bit, and for that I'd agree with you, as you don't have any context if you en…

I’ve tried a bunch of things but now I’m mostly using Cursor in agent mode with Claude Sonnet 4, doing small-ish pull-request-sized prompts. I don’t have to review code as carefully as I did with Claude 3.7 but I’m finding the bottleneck now is architecture design. I end up having these long discussions with chatGPT-o3 about design patterns, sometimes days of thinking, and then relatively quick implementation session…

It will be interesting to see if and how all of this improves standards around how we document the architecture and concepts of software.

Re: Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts

#349

Post by aeneas_ory »

Very impressive, and at the same time very scary because who knows what security issues are hidden beneath the surface. Not even Claude knows! There is very reliable tooling like https://github.com/ory/hydra readily available that has gone through years of iteration and pentests. There are also lots of libraries - even for NodeJS - that have gone through certification.

In my view this is an antipattern of AI usage and „roll your own crypto“ reborn.

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