Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

blog.alaindichiappari.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 611 posts

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#551

Post by g947o »

james_marks wrote: post #407
robhlt wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice that AI can fix bugs fast, but it's better to not even have bugs in the first place. By using someone else's battle tested code (like a framework) you can at least avoid the bugs they've already encountered and fixed.

Because frameworks don’t have bugs? Or unpredictable dependency interactions? This is generous, to the say the least.

Frameworks that are (relatively) buggy and slow to address bugs lose popularity, to the point that people will spontaneously create alternatives. This happened too many times.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#552

Post by g947o »

MrDarcy wrote: post #342
robhlt wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice that AI can fix bugs fast, but it's better to not even have bugs in the first place. By using someone else's battle tested code (like a framework) you can at least avoid the bugs they've already encountered and fixed.

In practice using someone else’s framework means you’re accepting the risk of the thousands of bugs in the framework that have no relevance to your business use case and will never be fixed.

Yet people still use frameworks, before and after the age of LLMs. Frameworks must have done something right, I guess. Otherwise everyone will vibe their own little React in the codebase.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#553

Post by g947o »

simonw wrote: post #118
abcde666777 wrote: post #25

It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part. Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing. 'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his s…

Have you really never found writing code painful? CI is failing. It passed yesterday. Is there a flaky API being called somewhere? Did a recent commit introduce a breaking change? Maybe one of my third-party dependencies shipped a breaking change? I was going to work on new code, but now I have to spend between 5 minutes and an hour+ - impossible to predict - solving this new frustration that just cropped up. I love…

Not everyone thinks this way. For sure, I don't enjoy every repetitive/tedious tasks or having to put out fires under time pressure, but I happen to be someone who enjoys solving problems. Many times, I helped others find and understand the root causes of bugs after they spend hours cluelessly debugging. (And often LLMs are completely lost as well, provide terrible suggestions or fixes) In an extreme case, I helped fix a bug an entire team of people (of several people) failed to address. And I always learn from such experiences, try to come up with solutions that would prevent it from happening in the first place, and think through the whole thing to be even more efficient at Debugging.

The point is that, LLMs can't always do all of this, they don't necessarily help you think about the root causes or address the human part of the causes, they don't help you build technical skills that you can use in the future. They fix it and it's done (possibly with a terrible, short time solution), unless the human wants to dive deep. For sure this happens all the time, in fact probably more than not, but LLMs are not going to help the situation.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#554

Post by g947o »

karel-3d wrote: post #297
abcde666777 wrote: post #25

It's strange to me when articles like this describe the 'pain of writing code'. I've always found that the easy part. Anyway, this stuff makes me think of what it would be like if you had Tolkein around today using AI to assist him in his writing. 'Claude, generate me a paragraph describing Frodo and Sam having an argument over the trustworthiness of Gollum. Frodo should be defending Gollum and Sam should be on his s…

Sometimes you are not writing Lord of the Rings. Sometimes you are writing a marketing copy for a new Nissan that's basically the same as last year Nissan, yet you need to sell it somehow. Nobody will REALLY read it more than 2 seconds and your words will be immediately forgotten. Maybe some AI is good then.

Copy & paste will do the job as well. Just remember to update the year number with a tool we have had for decades named "find/replace". Since nobody reads it, nobody knows it's almost the same thing, and there is no chance you get fired because LLM made things up that you didn't review/catch.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#555

Post by skydhash »

exe34 wrote: post #535
skydhash wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never found something that was impossible to implement in any framework or SDK. Even in Android SDK land, you can easily get access to an OpenGL surface and import the whole world via the NDK. There's nothing limiting other than the OS itself and its mechanism. Same with Web framework. Even React (a library) has its escape hatches to let in the rest of the world.

okay, push notification without going through firebase. go!

Where is your copy of the android source code for the device you’re manufacturing? Because that’s how you can get the full feature set. Otherwise you will be restricted by Android aggresive suspending and killing policy.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#556

Post by KronisLV »

I kinda like the idea, decreasing the friction of doing things yourself to near 0.

I recently migrated from my YOURLS install to just having an Apache2 config with some scripts to append to it: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/sometimes-dropbox-is-just-ftp-b...

Sometimes you don't need "serious" bullshit like Spring Boot either but something more minimalist is more than enough. Though I think it can only work well when you have enough usable primitives, e.g. I've written software in Go that has minimal dependencies and it only worked so well thanks to both the language being relatively simple AND also having a really strong standard library.

The moment when someone tries to write a web server from scratch in a collaborative environment (e.g. project at work with deadlines), I'm peacing the fuck out of there. And in my experience, trying to make design systems or frameworks from scratch leads to a pretty bad mess, because people miss all sorts of inherent complexity until it comes around to bite them later.

I guess what I'm saying is that there's quite the difference between what you do for your own projects, vs what is most likely to lead to long term success in a group setting, especially in 1-2 pizza teams - evaluate the benefits vs risks when considering using vs building.

I'm also a bit blind to this when it comes to certain things, look at this funny video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40SnEd1RWUU I would still prefer to use self-hostable software so I know more of the stack and have control and possibly some cost savings vs someone who'd just fork over a bunch of cash to a SaaS / PaaS vendor.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#557

Post by scotty79 »

coldtea wrote: post #497
scotty79 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen moltbook? One dude coded reddit clone for bots in less the a week. How is it not at least 10x of what was achievable in pre-ai world? Granted he left the db open to public, but some meat powered startups did exactly the same few years ago.

Any semi-capable coder could build a Reddit clone by themselves in a week since forever. It's a glorified CRUD app. The barrier to creating a full blown Reddit the huge scaling, not the functionality. But with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and backends like S3, CF etc, this hasn't been a barrier since a decade or more, either.

What I could do in a week is maybe set up an open source clone of reddit (that was written by many people for many months) and customize it a little bit.

And I have a pretty decent career behind me as a aoftware developer and my peers percieved me as kinda good.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#558

Post by scotty79 »

bodge5000 wrote: post #490
scotty79 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen moltbook? One dude coded reddit clone for bots in less the a week. How is it not at least 10x of what was achievable in pre-ai world? Granted he left the db open to public, but some meat powered startups did exactly the same few years ago.

I mean as has already been pointed out the fact that its a clone is a big reason why, but then I also think I could probably churn out a simple clone of reddit in less than a week. We've been through this before with twitter, the value isnt the tech (which is relatively straightforward), its the userbase. Of course Reddit has some more advanced features which would be more difficult, but I think the public db probabl…

Double your estimate and switch the unit or time to next larger one. That's how programmers time estimate tend to be. So two months and I'm right there with you.

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#559

Post by simonw »

g947o wrote: post #553
simonw wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you really never found writing code painful? CI is failing. It passed yesterday. Is there a flaky API being called somewhere? Did a recent commit introduce a breaking change? Maybe one of my third-party dependencies shipped a breaking change? I was going to work on new code, but now I have to spend between 5 minutes and an hour+ - impossible to predict - solving this new frustration that just cropped up. I love…

Not everyone thinks this way. For sure, I don't enjoy every repetitive/tedious tasks or having to put out fires under time pressure, but I happen to be someone who enjoys solving problems. Many times, I helped others find and understand the root causes of bugs after they spend hours cluelessly debugging. (And often LLMs are completely lost as well, provide terrible suggestions or fixes) In an extreme case, I helped f…

I enjoy the kind of problem solving you are describing there too. That's why I like being able to point LLMs at them first - if they can find the fix I get to save a bunch of time and spend it on more interesting problems, and if they can't find the fix then I know I'm going to have a great time digging into a really gnarly problem myself!

Re: Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

#560

Post by graemep »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #378
scoofy wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent Dry January working on a new coding project and since all my nerd friends have been telling me to try to code with LLM's I gave it a shot and signed up to Google Gemini... All I can say is "holy shit, I'm a believer." I've probably got close to a year's worth of coding done in a month and a half. Busy work that would have taken me a day to look up, figure out, and write -- boring shit like matplotlib illustra…

What kind of project / prompts - what’s working for you? /I spent a good 20 years in the software world but have been away doing other things professionally for couple years. Recently was in the same place as you, with a new project and wanting to try it out. So I start with a generic Django project in VSCode, use the agent mode, and… what a waste of time. The auto-complete suggestions it makes are frequently wrong,…

Try Claude as others have said.

For Django try generating tests and test data. This works reasonably well for me even with fairly small local LLMs on my laptop.

Post reply on HN