articles like these make me think that coding with AI is a little bit like writing Perl code: if you know what you’re doing, you can do brilliant things very quickly, but if you don’t, you can make spaghetti very quickly.
Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
351–360 of 505 posts
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#352I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…
Perhaps this is the wrong place to plant this thought. Maybe nobody will read it. These comments are now many hours old and HN has a way of walking away once they have had their turn shouting into the void.
I once received a "bonsai" seed kit from a former boss during a holiday dinner. I think it was meant as a joke, but even now I'm not so sure. I planted those seeds anyway. I told some people about it and they immediately mocked me saying it was a waste of time and going to take 30 years. This interaction immediately said everything to me about the expectations and attitudes of others.
Obviously, they grew like any other plants and actually quite nicely. Of course they're a commitment, but not a huge one.
I just wanted some plants for my apartment and they fit the bill. In a few years I had good looking plants. A decade later, I still have them and they're now more recognizably "bonsai". My home now looks nicer, I have a story to tell, and I learned a little bit from a very low stakes hobby.
My point is, I think it's nice when people have projects. I think it's nice to see what comes of it. I guess my only regret is ever saying "I planted bonsai" too soon just because that's what the box said. I didn't know how else to describe what I had done that weekend to those people who threw theirs in the trash.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
So we have to assume there’s good stuff being made by newbies that no one else is seeing? I didn’t have to take it on faith that people were actually making amazing things with digital cameras. I could look at them. I could reproduce it.
I mean, yeah. I've seen a network infrastructure monitoring system for an ISP, a router config generator tool, and a go-based BGP EVPN daemon in the past week. All are in production.
Were any of these created by people using AI who weren’t already capable of making them?
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, yeah. I've seen a network infrastructure monitoring system for an ISP, a router config generator tool, and a go-based BGP EVPN daemon in the past week. All are in production.
Were any of these created by people using AI who weren’t already capable of making them?
Not GP, but yes and yes.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get programs to work without knowing how to program. The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible , and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software -…
> the low cost of $20/month? At what threshold does this stop being true? AI firms are famously hemorrhaging money and it will not last.
It will keep being true. A few months ago the bar was Sonnet 4.0 performance. Literally just a few months ago. Now we have open weights models that reach that level.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#356building because its always the dopamine from the coding agents than the problem getting solved. Github contribution graph is rigged because higher number of commits doesnt make you a better engineer. We needed this blog, ty
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to sha…
In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and project…
> So it's difficult to see the value of LLMs that can generate even more software even faster. What value is left to provide for users?
I know a half dozen people who've created working software in the past month to solve a problem nothing else solved as well as what they made themselves. Software developers have finally automated themselves out of a job.
(I still think it's interesting that this requires pre-existing languages, libraries, etc, so this might not work in the future. But at least for now, we now have "Visual Basic" without the need for the visual part)
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes? When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely . But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediatel…
Vibe coding is actually "good" for small, bespoke things. The same way that Excel is "good" for small tasks, bad bad for larger things. Too easy to make mistakes, too hard to maintain. I could equally ask - where are all the Excel workbooks that are actually _good_? No-one needs to share their Excel workbooks. They don't need 10k github stars. They just achieve some small goal of the Excel user. These LLM agents just…
Wonderful analogy.
I still use spreadsheets regularly. Relieved of the pressure of making something "good", I can get basic things done quickly.
Is it sustainable or maintainable? Nope. Doesn't need to be. Not qualities I'm remotely concerned about when I'm writing a spreadsheet.
Vibe coding is similar in that you can solve a specific problem without much concern for generalization or future reuse.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#359I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…
Maybe it's more about a rush to share how awesome it is that you compressed your time-to-release down to days and not weeks or months - when in reality that's a good thing in the sense that you get to a failure state much FASTER, and failure states are good, because that means that you get to iterate and get past those failures FASTER.
I don't think people were releasing at this pace, so the failure states are fast and furious so there is just that much more viability. I think the microslop windos failures lately are just them being the same "them" that they've always been .. just MUCH faster. (they just need to stop monkeying with windows and stop adding more features on top of an already shaky foundation.) Maybe we just need more of the stories like Anthropic working with Mozilla to squash 5x the amount of bugs in a similar time frame first, AND THEN "vibe a browser together from nothing but specification files and an army of bots in a weekend".
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is technically true but also a bit naive. Established incumbents are very difficult to dislodge with merely a better version of their products. This becomes more true the larger the product and the average customer size. A good example is QuickBooks, which is a really janky accounting/bookkeeping software that is almost universally hated, but newer and better solutions haven't been able to capture much market sh…
It’s hard to actually build a better QuickBooks because to build a better QuickBooks you need 1000+ integrations that each took hundreds of man hours to build.
[dead]