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Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#41

Post by eterm »

ryandv wrote: post #20
63stack wrote: post #15

I so wish just one of these posts with these insane ~20-50x claims would include a narrated video of someone using it, or show us a repository with the code, or anything tangible.

Yes... I've asked for the same - show us the goods with a Destroy All Software style screencast; otherwise the default position is that this entire HN post is just more AI generated hallucination. Nobody's taken me up on this offer yet. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46325469

Do you have a legacy code-base in mind?

I'd happily demonstrate this kind of workflow on my day job if not for company trade-secrets.

That's as legacy as it gets, 20+ year old code base with several "strata" of different technologies and approaches.

Claude Opus handily navigates around it, and produces working bug fixes with minimal guidance.

I'm not going to claim it's 20x or 50x yet, there's still navigation and babysitting involved, but it's definitely capable of working on complex problems, I just don't trust it to run it in YOLO mode.

The key thing is, you need domain knowledge. You need to know where to correct it, and which direction to point it in.

It's not magic, and it will have bad ideas. The key picking out the good ideas from the bad.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#43

Post by ge96 »

SecretDreams wrote: post #14
SCdF wrote: post #13

To be clear you believe that you do a year's worth of work in one week? Every week? So halfway through this year you will have done 25 years of work?

OP has got 200 years of experience under their belt now.

That's a FAANG level resume right there

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#44

Post by woah »

vemv wrote: post #8

Most likely you are creating boilerplate at 20x/50x, as opposed to genuinely new concepts, mechanisms, etc. To be fair, most web/mobile frameworks expect you to do that. Ideally, codebases would grow by adding data (e.g. a json describing endpoints, UIs, etc), not repetitive code.

> Ideally, codebases would grow by adding data (e.g. a json describing endpoints, UIs, etc), not repetitive code.

The problem with this configuration based approach is that now the actual code that executes has to be able to change its functionality arbitrarily in response to new configuration, and the code (and configuration format) needs to be extremely abstracted and incomprehensible. In the real world, someone figures out that things get way easier if you just put a few programming language concepts into the configuration format, and now you're back where you started but with a much worse programming language (shoehorned into a configuration format) than you were using before.

Boilerplate may be cumbersome, but it effectively gives you a very large number of places to "hook into" the framework to make it do what you need. AI makes boilerplate much less painful to write.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#45

Post by corysama »

EGreg wrote: post #33

Wait how did this appear 3 hours ago, and also got flagged? I posted this many days ago! Something is wrong with HN timestamps.

Lots of good stuff in /newest gets missed. So, HN has an algo that selects some posts for a second chance. Looks like your post was selected for resurrection.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#46

Post by heathrow83829 »

vemv wrote: post #8

Most likely you are creating boilerplate at 20x/50x, as opposed to genuinely new concepts, mechanisms, etc. To be fair, most web/mobile frameworks expect you to do that. Ideally, codebases would grow by adding data (e.g. a json describing endpoints, UIs, etc), not repetitive code.

>> Ideally, codebases would grow by adding data (e.g. a json describing endpoints, UIs, etc), not repetitive code.

Be very careful with this approach. there are many ways it can go completely wrong. i've seen a codebase like this and it was a disaster to debug. because you can't set breakpoints in data. it was a disaster.

It may not look compact or elegant but I'd rather see debuggable and comprehensible boiler point even if it's repetitive rather than a mess

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#48

Post by corysama »

This is similar to the approach touted by Steve Yegge in this interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw

I really appreciate that he is up-front about "Yes. Vibe coding has lots of dangerous problems that you must learn to control if you are to go whole-hog like this."

Has anyone read his Vibe Coding book? The Amazon reviews make it sound like it's heavy on inspiration but light on techniques.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#49

Post by ninju »

HellDunkel wrote: post #5

I curious how you paste diffs into the Ai. And wouldnt a coding assistant in the IDE be a much more convenient solution?

If you have the changes as a GitHub PR you can add .diff to the end of the URL to get a single page of all the changes

Citation: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6188624

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