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Web development is fun again

ma.ttias.be

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Re: Web development is fun again

#341

Post by dukeyukey »

yason wrote: post #153
simonw wrote: post #7

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…

Which is fine, because those things are what makes programming fun for you. Not for others.

Re: Web development is fun again

#342

Post by zarzavat »

Au contraire. Web development has always been fun, unless you add all the crap mentioned in TFA.

If you feel you need all that stuff to feel grown up, then I guess LLMs help a lot. But the barometer hasn't changed: make something that people love.

Re: Web development is fun again

#343

Post by johnfn »

zarzavat wrote: post #342

Au contraire. Web development has always been fun, unless you add all the crap mentioned in TFA. If you feel you need all that stuff to feel grown up, then I guess LLMs help a lot. But the barometer hasn't changed: make something that people love.

So you’re skipping any sort of a build pipeline? You’re not going to bundle, so no code minification? You’re going to skip tests? And everyone who uses these things just does them to “feel grown up” and not for any particular benefit or purpose beyond that?

Re: Web development is fun again

#344

Post by ImPleadThe5th »

I enjoy when: Things are simple. Things are a complicated, but I can learn something useful.

I do not enjoy when: Things are arbitrarily complicated. Things are a complicated, but I'm just using AI to blindly get something done instead of learning. Things are arbitrarily complicated and not incentivized to improve because now "everyone can just use AI"

It feels like instead of all stepping back and saying "we need to simplify things" we've doubled down on abstraction _again_

Re: Web development is fun again

#345

Post by int_19h »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #307
arjie wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of us just discovered that the actual programming isn't the fun part for us. It turns out I don't like writing code as much as I thought. I like solving my problems. The activation energy for a lot of things was much higher than it is now. Now it's pretty low. That's great for me. Baby's sleeping, 3d printer is rolling, and I get to make a little bit of progress on something super quick. It's fantastic.

This. Busy-beavering is why the desktop Linux is where it is - rewriting stuff, making it "elegant" while breaking backwards compatibility - instead of focusing on the outcome.

macOS breaks backwards compatibility all the time, and yet...

Re: Web development is fun again

#346

Post by themafia »

yason wrote: post #153
simonw wrote: post #7

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…

On top of that there's a not insignificant chance you've actually just stolen the code through an automated copyright whitewashing system. That these people believe they're adding value while never once checking if the above is true really disappoints me with the current direction of technology.

LLMs don't make everyone better, they make everything a copy.

The upwards transfer of wealth will continue.

Re: Web development is fun again

#347

Post by int_19h »

Marha01 wrote: post #316
apitman wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use LLMs for code at work, but I've been a bit hesitant to dive in for side projects because I'm worried about the cost. Is it necessary to pay $200/mo to actually ship things or will $20/mo do it? Obviously I could just try it myself and see how far I get bit I'm curious to hear from someone a bit further down the path.

You can use AI code editor that allows you to use your own API key, so you pay per-token, not a fixed monthly fee. For example Cline or Roo Code.

They all let you do that now, including Claude Code itself. You can choose between pay per token and subscription.

Which means that a sensible way to go about those things is to start with a $20 subscription to get access to the best models, and then look at your extra per-token expenses and whether they justify that $200 monthly.

Re: Web development is fun again

#348

Post by agumonkey »

baq wrote: post #303
agumonkey wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wonder what long term software engineering projects will become.

‘Why were they long term?’ is what you need to ask. Code has become essentially free in relative terms, both in time and money domains. What stands out now is validation - LLMs aren’t oracles for better or worse, complex code still needs to be tested and this takes time and money, too. In projects where validation was a significant percentage of effort (which is every project developed by more than two teams) the spe…

some long term projects were due to the tons of details in source code, but some were due to inherent complexity and how to model something that works, no matter what the files content will be

Re: Web development is fun again

#349

Post by int_19h »

munksbeer wrote: post #285
fragmede wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respect to you. I ran out of energy to correct people's dated misconceptions. If they want to get left behind, it's not my problem.

At some point no-one is going to have to argue about this. I'm guessing a bit here, but my guess is that within 5 years, in 90%+ jobs, if you're not using an AI assistant to code, you're going to be losing out on jobs. At that point, the argument over whether they're crap or not is done. I say this as someone who has been extremely sceptical over their ability to code in deep, complicated scenarios, but lately, claud…

> At that point, the argument over whether they're crap or not is done.

Not really, it just transforms into a question of how many of those jobs are meaningful anyway, or more precisely, how much output from them is meaningful.

Re: Web development is fun again

#350

Post by int_19h »

vntok wrote: post #234
master_crab wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This requires hardware in the tens of thousands of dollars (if we want the tokens spit out at a reasonable pace). Maybe in 3-5 years this will work on consumer hardware at speed, but not in the immediate term.

$2000 will get you 30~50 tokens/s on perfectly usable quantization levels (Q4-Q5), taken from any one among the top 5 best open weights MoE models. That's not half bad and will only get better!

That doesn't sound realistic to me. What is your breakdown on the hardware and the "top 5 best models" for this calculation?
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