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Web development is fun again

ma.ttias.be

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Re: Web development is fun again

#581

Post by naasking »

b112 wrote: post #566
naasking wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing how to use LLMs is a skill. Just winging it without any practice or exploration of how the tool fails can produce poor results.

"You're holding it wrong" 99% of an LLM's usefulness vanishes, if it behaves like an addled old man. "What's that sonny? But you said you wanted that!" "Wait, we did that last week? Sorry let me look at this again" "What? What do you mean, we already did this part?!"

Wrong mental model. Addled old men can't write code 1000x faster than any human.

Re: Web development is fun again

#582

Post by qualifck »

mbirth wrote: post #415
chung8123 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it all the build stuff and scaffolding I have to get in place before I can even start tinkering on a project. I never formally learned all the systems and tools and AI makes all of that 10x easier. When I hit something I cannot figure out instead of googling for 1/2 hour it is 10 minutes in AI.

The difference is that after you’ve googled it for ½ hour, you’ve learned something. If you ask an LLM to do it for you, you’re none the wiser.

Not necessarily. The end result of googling a problem might be copying a working piece of code off of stack exchange etc. without putting any work into understanding it.

Some people will try to vibe out everything with LLMs, but other people will use them to help engage with their coding more directly and better understand what's happening, not do worse.

Re: Web development is fun again

#584

Post by oblio »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #542
oblio wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not gibberish. More than that, LLMs frequently write comments (some are fluff but some explain the reasoning quite well), variables are frequently named better than cdx, hgv, ti, stuff like that, plus looking at the reasoning while it's happening provides more clues. Also, it's actually fun watching LLMs debug. Since they're reasonably similar to devs while investigating, but they have a data bank the size of th…

they have a data bank the size of the internet so they can pull hints that sometimes surprise even experienced devs. That's a polite way of phrasing "they've stolen a mountain of information and overwhelmed resources that humans would use to other find answers." I just discovered another victim: the Renesas forums. Cloudflare is blocking me from accessing the site completely, the only site I've ever had this happen t…

> That's a polite way of phrasing "they've stolen a mountain of information and overwhelmed resources that humans would use to other find answers."

Yes, but I can't stop them, can you?

> But I'm glad you're able to have your fun.

Unfortunately I have to be practical.

> Doubtful. As the arms race continues AI DDoS bots will have less and less recent "training" material. Not a day goes by that I don't discover another site employing anti-AI bot software.

Almost all these BigCos are using their internal code bases as material for their own LLMs. They're also increasingly instructing their devs to code primarily using LLMs.

The hope that they'll run out of relevant material is slim.

Oh, and at this point it's less about the core/kernel/LLMs than it is about building ol' fashioned procedural tooling aka code around the LLM, so that it can just REPL like a human. Turns out a lot of regular coding and debugging is what a machine would do, READ-EVAL-PRINT.

I have no idea how far they're going to go, but the current iteration of Claude Code can generate average or better code, which is an improvement in many places.

Re: Web development is fun again

#585

Post by oblio »

Akronymus wrote: post #540
oblio wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which LLMs have you tried? Claude Code seems to be decent at not hallucinating, Gemini CLI is more eager. I don't think current LLMs take you all the way but a powerful code generator is a useful think, just assemble guardrails and keep an eye on it.

Mostly chatgpt because I see 0 value in paying for any llm, nor do I wish to gice up my data to any llm provider

They work better with project context and access to tools, so yeah, the web interface is not their best foot forward.

That doesn't mean the agents are amazing, but they can be useful.

Re: Web development is fun again

#586

Post by joshribakoff »

This author simultaneously admits, he cannot hold the system in his head, but then also claims he’s not vibecoding, and I assert that these are two conflicting positions and you cannot simultaneously hold both positions

I am also doing my pattern recognition. It seems that a common pattern is people claiming it sped me up by x! (and then there’s no AB test, n=1)

Re: Web development is fun again

#587

Post by mountain_peak »

codr7 wrote: post #572
dcre wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just not true. I have wasted many hours looking for answers to hard-to-phrase questions and learned very little from the process. If an LLM can get me the same result in 30 seconds, it's very hard for me to see that as a bad thing. It just means I can spend more time thinking about the thing I want to be thinking about. I think to some extent people are valorizing suffering itself.

Learning means friction, it's not going to happen any other way.

"What an LLM is to me is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equivalent of a e-bike for our minds"

Re: Web development is fun again

#588

Post by Akronymus »

oblio wrote: post #585
Akronymus wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly chatgpt because I see 0 value in paying for any llm, nor do I wish to gice up my data to any llm provider

They work better with project context and access to tools, so yeah, the web interface is not their best foot forward. That doesn't mean the agents are amazing, but they can be useful.

A simple "how do I access x in y framework in the intended way" shouldnt require any more context.

instead of telling me about z option it keeps hallucinating something that doesnt exist and even says its in the docs when it isnt.

Literally just wasting my time

Re: Web development is fun again

#589

Post by TuringTest »

jimbokun wrote: post #378
TuringTest wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. Sometimes they joy is in discovering what problem you are solving, by exploring the space of possibilities on features and workflows on a domain. For that, having elegant and simple software is not needed; getting features fast to try out how they work is the basis of the pleasure, so having to write every detail by hand reduces the fun.

Sounds like someone who enjoys listening to music but not composing or performing music.

Or someone who enjoys playing music but not building their own instrument from scratch.

Re: Web development is fun again

#590

Post by [deleted] »

wesammikhail wrote: post #461
sublinear wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so weird to see this take repeated over and over. I have to assume you have never written a large scale project for the web? The only part where I agree is that you don't need PHP or server-side rendering in general.

> I have to assume you have never written a large scale project for the web? Can I ask, what classifies as large scale project for the web? I previously created and exited a trading platform that did billions in transactions via our servers with thousands of users streaming real time data. It's certainly more complicated and "larger" than 99.9% of things you'll ever do. So does that qualify? If so, I can tell you tha…

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