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Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

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Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#461

Post by SchemaLoad »

lbreakjai wrote: post #370
caro_kann wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even scaffolding a new project is not easy work, especially a new stack or new versions of existing tools. For example, I have never been able to create a Vue 3 project with Vite and Tailwind setup correctly. I tried top SOTA models. Maybe my prompting skills are not good, but everytime it fails to set up a project correctly. Everytime it gives me some old configurations that's not relevant anymore.

LLMs are probably the worst tool for the job. Code generators have been a thing forever. Why use a LLM when you can do "npm create vite@latest my-vue-app -- --template vue" ?

It's always more tedious than that. You have to pick all these libraries, install and set them up, build login pages, etc. Stuff that is all simple work but takes ages. I've never used an LLM for it but it seems like the kind of work that should be easy enough to automate and would save a week of setting everything up if it worked.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#462

Post by dragonwriter »

isodev wrote: post #307
materielle wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is that AI isn’t actually the root of the problem here. It’s that we are heading towards a big recession. As in all recessions, people come up with all sorts of reasons why everything is fine until it can’t be denied anymore. This time, AI was a useful narrative to have lying around.

> we are heading towards a big recession Who is we? One country heading into a recession is hardly enough to nudge the trend of "all things code"

If that “one country” is the US and not, say, Burkina Faso, it is a major impact on financing, and software has an unusually high share of positions dependent on speculative investment for future return rather than directly related to current operations.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#463

Post by trenchpilgrim »

jplusequalt wrote: post #203
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. On many days 90% of my code output by lines is Claude generated and things that took me a day now take well under an hour. Also, a good chunk of my personal OSS projects are AI assisted. You probably can't tell from looking at them, because I have strict style guides that suppress the "AI style", and I don't really talk about how I use AI in the READMEs. Do you also expect I mention that I used Intellisense and…

>Do you also expect I mention that I used Intellisense and syntax highlighting too? No, but I expect my software to have been verified for correctness, and soundness by a human being with a working mental model of how the code works. But, I guess that's not a priority anymore if you're willing to sacrifice $2400 a year to Anthropic.

$2400? Mate, I have a free GitHub Copilot subscription (Microsoft hands them out to active OSS developers), and work pays for my Claude Code via our cloud provider backend (and it costs less per working day than my morning Monster can). LLM inference is _cheap_ and _getting cheaper every month_.

> No, but I expect my software to have been verified for correctness, and soundness by a human being with a working mental model of how the code works.

This is not exclusive with AI tools:

- Use AI to write dev tools to help you write and verify your handwritten code. Throw the one-off dev tools in the bin when you're done.

- Handwrite your code, generate test data, review the test data like you would a junior engineer's work.

- Handwrite tests, AI generate an implementation, have the agent run tests in a loop to refine itself. Works great for code that follows a strict spec. Again, review the code like you would a junior engineer's work.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#464

Post by guappa »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #369
safety1st wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I grew up below the poverty line. Everyone I knew was working class. Some of these people are still very dear to me. However, I did something which virtually none of them did. I wanted to get out. So I identified a skillset that the world desperately wanted, and I spent thousands of hours learning how to build and sell with that skillset. Frequently I was criticized or ridiculed or simply ignored, but it…

> Not really. I grew up below the poverty line. Everyone I knew was working class. Some of these people are still very dear to me. It wouldn't be false consciousness if you would be from wealthy family. Yes, working people should climb the ladder, but without government intervention and putting collars on wealthy necks there won't be any ladder for them. There would be no small business owners like you. This is why I…

Small business owners for some reason always think they are in the same class as the other business owners.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#465

Post by dangus »

ndriscoll wrote: post #381
dangus wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result. While you have decent points in your comment (essentially, the idea of tech industry growth slowing due to low hanging fruit being picked), if this statement going to be your barometer you’re going to end up looking stupendously wrong. You c…

I just tried it and no, you can't. I don't really even see how you could. Where is the form supposed to go? Is Grandma supposed to rent a server somewhere to do processing? Where? 25 years ago we had wysiwyg editors to build web pages, and she could just include a link to email her to have people ask her to "sign up" (the entire point of a sewing club is to socialize. You don't need an automated newsletter or whateve…

The thing is that you and grandma were only accomplishing static sites back then. You can still do that today with many more options than you had back then and you can even use many of the exact same methods.

But when it comes to actually accomplishing something with application logic on the web, Grandma could ask the AI agent literally all these questions and get solid answers. At any point you get confused you can just ask what to do. You can highlight a line of code and ask “what does this mean?” You can even say “I want this web page to be put online what do I do?”

Beats waiting for a human to answer you.

You’re also taking my example application way too literally. No I don’t know why Grandma needs a signup form, I just couldn’t think of a web app off the top of my head.

MS Access and WSYWIG tools like FrontPage and iWeb were not good. I know because I was there and I used FrontPage at work. A link to your email (get spammed forever) is not a replacement for an application or email form. The whole reason code is preferred over WYSIWYG is because you inevitably have issues with change management even for simple personal projects, which is why static site generators have gained popularity. I’m sure your grandma could have handled markdown + someone else’s Hugo template + Netlify.

Hell, if we want to talk about progress in WYSIWYG editors, Trix greatly improved and modernized the shortfalls of that process and that was launched in 2014, less than 10 years ago. So even in the world of WSYWIG we have better tools now than before.

IIS has not been removed from Windows home edition, by the way.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#466

Post by dangus »

ansgri wrote: post #441
ndriscoll wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried it and no, you can't. I don't really even see how you could. Where is the form supposed to go? Is Grandma supposed to rent a server somewhere to do processing? Where? 25 years ago we had wysiwyg editors to build web pages, and she could just include a link to email her to have people ask her to "sign up" (the entire point of a sewing club is to socialize. You don't need an automated newsletter or whateve…

100% this. At that time if one needed a simple custom database client with GUI and analytical reports, the go-to solution was MS Access and it was working well. Could even be placed on a shared drive. Now, as accepted solution, you either pay for different SaaSes, each with a fraction of functionality, or have to code a bespoke website using overcomplicated frameworks.

MS access still exists and is still maintained and offered for sale.

You should not look back on those solutions and neglect to acknowledge their limitations. Access can only handle small databases (maximum 2GB) and about 100 simultaneous connections.

Access is basically a product of the technological limitations of its time. It isn’t designed the way it is because that way is the best design.

The kind of business that relied on Access is going to find that solutions like Airtable are far easier and more powerful, and certainly less prone to data loss than mom and pop’s shared drive. There are even open source self-hosted alternatives like NocoDB and Baserow (or cloud hosted).

You’ll inevitably complain about the subscription cost of SaaS solutions but it’s not like MS Office business licenses were ever cheap.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#467

Post by dangus »

ModernMech wrote: post #428
dangus wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result. While you have decent points in your comment (essentially, the idea of tech industry growth slowing due to low hanging fruit being picked), if this statement going to be your barometer you’re going to end up looking stupendously wrong. You c…

Their point was that we don't need things like Heroku, Kubernetes, Slack, TensorFlow, etc. They're not creating value, they're propping up a tech stack, whose value is questionable, given the amount we've invested in it. It seems that over the past 15 years of tech, the end result is that a few companies and people became fabulously wealthy, and the rest of us are pretty much worse off. Tech isn't transforming our li…

I think you’re willfully ignorant if you’re going to claim that Slack and Kubernetes haven’t created any value. And of course these are just random examples that I happened to think of.

I would say that these technologies/products being so wildly popular puts burden of proof on you to show me some kind of evidence that these technologies aren’t productive. Like are you trying to say that something had better deployment velocity and reliablity than Kubernetes at handling high-complexity application infrastructure deployments for large enterprise companies? What was it? Why was it better than Kubernetes?

The analogy is that you’re basically saying that zippers aren’t really better than buttons but then literally everyone is overwhelmingly wearing pants and coats with zippers and very strongly prefer zippers. So really it’s on you to prove to me that I should be using pants with buttons instead.

Finally, there’s a lot of irony in your first paragraph complaining about a few tech oligarchs becoming fabulously wealthy and then suggesting that Grandma just use Facebook instead of building her own site. In any event, my web app example was just a poorly thought out example of a web app, I really just mean a website that has a little more utility than a static site.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#468

Post by dangus »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #414
dangus wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result. While you have decent points in your comment (essentially, the idea of tech industry growth slowing due to low hanging fruit being picked), if this statement going to be your barometer you’re going to end up looking stupendously wrong. You c…

Kind of missing the existence of Wordpress? A random theme + a "form builder" plugin and it would be done with hosting taken care off wherever you created the site.

I really just didn’t bring it up because it is older than 15 years old and just spans the evolution of the web.

I definitely agree that it’s a reasonable choice.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#470

Post by xenobeb »

larve wrote: post #16

In case the author is reading this, I have the receipts on how there's a real step function in how much software I build, especially lately. I am not going to put any number on it because that makes no sense, but I certainly push a lot of code that reasonably seems to work. The reason it doesn't show up online is that I mostly write software for myself and for work, with the primary goal of making things better, not…

What is even the point in having this argument?

At this point, one is gaining with each model release or they are not.

Lets see in 2035 who was right and who was wrong. My bet is the people who are not gaining right now are not going to like the situation in 2035.

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