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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#341

Post by theshrike79 »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #100
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

For me it’s just a matter of “does this actually save me time at all?” If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 more weeks to clean it up, could I have I just done it right the first time myself in 4 weeks instead? How much money have I wasted in tokens?

1. Make it work

2. Make it pretty

3. Make it fast.

If you have something that's pretty and fast but doesn't work, is that useful?

But if you have something that works, but is ugly and slow - you can still use it and fix it while you dogfood it. Maybe figure out other ways to improve it beyond making the code look pretty.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#342

Post by eszed »

devmor wrote: post #304
eszed wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're always free to stop at the level of abstraction at which you find a certain answer to be satisfying, but you can also keep digging. Why are flat shoes better? Well, it's to do with my gait. Ok, but why is my gait like that? Something-something musculoskeletal. Why is my body that way? Something-something genetic. OK, but why is that? And so on. Pursued far enough, any line of thought will reach something non-d…

It is very silly to treat zero grounding the same as accepting core, proven concepts. Your PoV here is no different than saying "It rains because god is sad and crying" is an appropriate thing to believe. If you want to say "god is responsible for creating the precipitation cycle", sure. But we don't disregard understanding that exists to substitute intuition.

We're talking past each other, and mixing up some concepts, most of which is my fault for not writing particularly clearly.

Yeah, "God did it" is the first of those answer layers at which some people stop interrogating the world around them, just like "that's just the way I am" is where some people stop developing their self-understanding. Neither of those answers advance civilization / ourselves any further than the status quo. They're terrible answers! Everyone should be digging deeper.

However, I would not use the word "understanding" in opposition to "intuition". Someone who can generate a ballistics chart understands trajectories, but so does someone who can reliably put a basketball through a hoop or a bullet on target. I would set "analysis" against "intuition" (or "instinct", if you prefer), but they're not in opposition: instead, they reinforce each other. We're all familiar with the scientists and mathematicians who ride a hunch to a ground-breaking discovery, which is then validated by exhaustive analysis. From the other direction, athletes and musicians analyze their technique in minute detail, and practice incessantly, in order to ingrain analytical insights into instinct. (Or, if you prefer a less physical example, programmers study algorithms so that they can intuit which to apply to a particular problem.)

My point - badly expressed in my earlier comment - is that as humans we exist moment-by-moment, and as such react, in each moment, by intuition. As important as analysis is, we cannot live in analytical mode: it lags too much! Furthermore, approximately none of us will ever make a groundbreaking discovery in any field, far less in all of the areas to which we can (and should!) direct our analytical energy. At some point we have to stop (even if we are a groundbreaking genius in one area, we'll have to in all of the others), and accept the answer that satisfys our purpose or exhausts our motivation.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#343

Post by mnsc »

csallen wrote: post #84
mnsc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But hindsight is 20/20 as they say. In 2020 people predicted that Facebook Horizon would only go one direction, always improve and become as pervasive as the internet. So when you predict that the design and architecture capabilities of models will continue to improve, thus making code quality irrelevant, you sound very confident. And if in five years you are right, you will brag about it here. If not, well I for one…

You're confusing betting on a company/product vs betting on technological improvement in general. It is absolutely the case that virtual reality technology will only get better over time. Maybe it'll take 5, or 10, or 20, or 40 years, but it's almost a certainty that we'll eventually see better AR/VR tech in the future than we have in the past. Would you bet against that? You'd be crazy to imo.

Well I wasn't talking about AR/VR tech. I was talking about a society where using VR like in the the visions the company Meta was drawing up. It hasn't manifested and since the company Meta is now downsizing their VR investments the progress of that AR/VR utopia is not _currently_ getting better, because people don't like it/use it. And I got a kid that was HOOKED on vr and spent so much time with his friends on VR, and now. They hang out on Discord and play CS2 on a very flat 2d screen. Will this change "In The Future(tm)"? I don't care but my point is that a statement like "code quality will be irrelevant" miiiight age poorly if in five years, taking into account model improvements, people still care about code quality and the agentic engineers still use extra effort to make certain the outputted code adhers to "good code" standards. I know I will but if ass code turns out to over time be objectively better than good code, I might change my mind or maybe start a new career in something tangible.

See https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#344

Post by 9rx »

darkstarsys wrote: post #335
9rx wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which I carefully review and correct So you do agree? If you are having to review and correct then it's not really the LLM writing it anymore. I have little doubt that you can write good Typescript, but that's not what I said. I said LLMs cannot write good Typescript and it seems you agree given your purported actions towards it. Which is quite unlike some other languages where LLMs write good code all the time — n…

I find correction is rarely necessary with Opus 4.6. Definitely not so much that "it's not really the LLM writing it anymore." More like it's the author and I'm the editor (in this limited case -- of course architecturally the ideas are all mine.) But I totally respect that my prompt style, the type of app I'm writing, and other factors could be influencing my success vs. others' lack of success.

> of course architecturally the ideas are all mine.

What else would you need to correct? I've never had trouble with LLMs generating basic syntax in any language. Architecture is exactly the aspect of language where LLMs seem to like to go to crazytown when in Typescript. It seems you've noticed too if the ideas in that area have had to come all from you.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#345

Post by senko »

deaux wrote: post #333
senko wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it a hyper or a doomer take? There seems to be a concencus among people I follow/read, that somewhere around that time was an inflexion point in coding LLMs, and this matches my personal experience. (My comment was in the context of LLMs being used to generate non-throwaway code, not general GenAI use - apologies if that was unclear.)

> There seems to be a concencus among people I follow/read, that somewhere around that time was an inflexion point in coding LLMs, and this matches my personal experience. LLMs have been a very useful tool to generate non-throwaway code for at least 2 years. It's a question of Overton Window, of mainstream acceptance, that has made you and the people you're talking about come to a "consensus" that there was an agenti…

> LLMs have been a very useful tool to generate non-throwaway code for at least 2 years.

I was in YC W24 (exactly two years ago) with an AI coding startup ("agentic" and "vibe" buzzwords weren't invented yet). LLMs were useful as smarter autocomplete, but were struggling (and us with them!) on anything nontrivial.

Comparing that state to the past few months and saying it's just a social change is a bit of a stretch :)

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#346

Post by csallen »

mnsc wrote: post #343
csallen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing betting on a company/product vs betting on technological improvement in general. It is absolutely the case that virtual reality technology will only get better over time. Maybe it'll take 5, or 10, or 20, or 40 years, but it's almost a certainty that we'll eventually see better AR/VR tech in the future than we have in the past. Would you bet against that? You'd be crazy to imo.

Well I wasn't talking about AR/VR tech. I was talking about a society where using VR like in the the visions the company Meta was drawing up. It hasn't manifested and since the company Meta is now downsizing their VR investments the progress of that AR/VR utopia is not _currently_ getting better, because people don't like it/use it. And I got a kid that was HOOKED on vr and spent so much time with his friends on VR,…

Well, I wouldn't say it's irrelevant. That's a high bar. But I think it's becoming less relevant. And I tried to explain this as a counterpoint to engineers who think AI coding won't catch on in a lasting way bc its code quality is garbage.

All else being equal, ofc you'd rather have good code than bad code.

But millions of non-developers who can suddenly build simple software for themselves (or use AI assistants that generate simple ephemeral software on the fly) aren't going to care about the underlying code quality so long as it works, which it does.

And hundreds of thousands of software engineers, who can suddenly build singlehandedly what in the past took a team of 5-10 to build, are going to be okay with the tradeoff of getting massive speed boosts but with quality not quite as high as if they were to build everything themselves. Same for software engineers who are now churning through their list of side project ideas, which has mostly sat dormant for the past 10 years.

Previously they lived in a world where the only axes were, "Build more things vs have good quality" or "Build ambitious things vs have good quality." Now they have a new axis which is, "Allow AI to help vs have total personal control of quality," which is quite similar to the pre-existing axis of, "Hire employees vs have total personal control of quality." But way cheaper and more accessible. Of course some will take advantage. Which means, de facto, a world where code quality (or at least personal control of code quality) is on average less important and prioritized than it used to be.

We're seeing all of this happen right now. People are making these choices in large numbers today.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#347

Post by csallen »

vlovich123 wrote: post #204
csallen wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely you don't think AI coding technology will be as slow to develop as guns were. We're obviously talking about 1-10 years here, not 100-1000 years.

It’s really hard to predict where exponential progress will freeze. I was reading the other day that the field seems to have stagnated again in terms of no really meaningful ideas to overcome the inherent bottlenecks we’ve hit now in terms of diminishing returns for scaling. I’m not a pessimist or unbridled optimist but I think it’s fundamentally difficult to predict and the law of averages suggests someone will end…

That's true, but even if progress on models freezes TODAY and there is zero progress, not even incremental progress, we'll still have substantial progress in terms of techniques and agents built on top of the models in the next few years. And even if that progress were to stop, it's still significantly advanced today, and there's an incredible gap between current and eventual adoption levels.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#349

Post by deaux »

senko wrote: post #345
deaux wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There seems to be a concencus among people I follow/read, that somewhere around that time was an inflexion point in coding LLMs, and this matches my personal experience. LLMs have been a very useful tool to generate non-throwaway code for at least 2 years. It's a question of Overton Window, of mainstream acceptance, that has made you and the people you're talking about come to a "consensus" that there was an agenti…

> LLMs have been a very useful tool to generate non-throwaway code for at least 2 years. I was in YC W24 (exactly two years ago) with an AI coding startup ("agentic" and "vibe" buzzwords weren't invented yet). LLMs were useful as smarter autocomplete, but were struggling (and us with them!) on anything nontrivial. Comparing that state to the past few months and saying it's just a social change is a bit of a stretch :…

Nope.

Source: Multiple successful prodiction applications with >90% LLM generated code already in Late 2024/Early 2025. Not slop, not note taking apps. Nothing ground-breaking but real-world valuable usecases. Both by myself and by others.

Aider came out May 2023. Augment Code (not very well known but best in class for a long time, hilariously poor at marketing/sales completely bungling this advantage) was April 2024.

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