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Web development is fun again

ma.ttias.be

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Re: Web development is fun again

#611

Post by peteforde »

bonesss wrote: post #504
marcosdumay wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pick the ecosystem you'll use, the only one forced on you is the browser. If you decide to use one that makes your life harder, that's again not a communitary problem.

There’s also change over time to consider: web programming has become immensely more stable and simpler and more mature over time, thereby enabling classes of application and experience that traditionally meant a client application to be built on the web, hence modern web app development becoming a complex and complicated morass. Facebook and others have delivered a bunch of cross platform shizz that really should be…

It's freaking wild that the folks suggesting web development has gotten simpler are also talking about baking React "into the stack" with a straight face.

I don't know what planet y'all are living on, but React is most emblematic of the layers upon layers of BS that people have to deal with today that simply were not an issue 20 years ago.

Re: Web development is fun again

#612

Post by qudat »

_ikke_ wrote: post #442
qudat wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. I will spend 30 minutes having the LLM explain every line of code and why it's important, with context-specific follow-up questions. An LLM is one of the best ways to learn ...

As long as what it says is reliable and not made up.

That's true for internet searching. How many times have you gone to SO, seen a confident answer, tried it, and it failed to do what you needed?

Re: Web development is fun again

#613

Post by popalchemist »

codr7 wrote: post #573
popalchemist wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally shipping a vide-coded feature as my baby sleeps, while reading this comment thread. It's the wild west again. I love it.

Maybe you can tell us the name of the software so we can avoid it?

It's a personal project. No need to be a dick.

Re: Web development is fun again

#614

Post by kmoser »

anhner wrote: post #464
kmoser wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Providing boilerplate/template code for common use cases - Explaining what code is doing and how it works - Refactoring/updating code when given specific requirements - Providing alternative ways of doing things that you might not have thought of yourself YMMV; every project is different so you might not have occasion to use all of these at the same time.

I appreciate your reply. A lot of people just say how wonderful and revolutionary LLMs are, but when asked for more concrete stuff they give vague answers or even worse, berate you for being skeptical/accuse you of being a luddite. Your list gives me a starting point and I'm sure it can even be expanded. I do use LLMs the way you suggested and find them pretty useful most of the time - in chat mode. However, when usi…

"Agent mode" is vastly different in many ways. I suggest you read up on how people write things like CLAUDE.md files. But as I said earlier, every project is different, and one what one person was successful with won't necessarily make you successful, so you may find it more helpful to get somebody to coach you through prompting agents for your particular projects.

Re: Web development is fun again

#615

Post by kmoser »

kmoser wrote: post #150
llmslave2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even 2.5x is absurd. If they said 1.5x I might believe them.

I recently used AI to help build the majority of a small project (database-driven website with search and admin capabilities) and I'd confidently say I was able to build it 3 to 5 times faster with AI. For context, I'm an experienced developer and know how to tweak the AI code when it's wonky and the AI can't be coerced into fixing its mistakes.

Downvoted for...confidently saying how successful I was using an AI? I don't get it.

Re: Web development is fun again

#616

Post by inferiorhuman »

oblio wrote: post #584
inferiorhuman wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

  The hope that they'll run out of relevant material is slim.
If big corps are training their LLMs on their LLM written code…

Re: Web development is fun again

#617

Post by tomhow »

phplovesong wrote: post #76

[flagged]

Please stop posting these abusive comments or we'll ban the account. Thoughtful critique is fine. Fulmination and flamebait is not. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489151 and marked it off topic.

Re: Web development is fun again

#618

Post by polyamid23 »

9rx wrote: post #562
beaker52 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, when we write code it has a an absolute and specific meaning to the compiler. When we write words to an LLM they are written in a non-specific informal language (usually English) and processed non-deterministically too. This is an incredibly important distinction that makes coding, and asking the LLM to code, two completely different ball games. One is formal, one is not. And yes, this isn’t a new phenomenon.

It's different in some ways (such is evolution), but is not a distinction that matters. Kind of like the difference between imperative and declarative programming. Different language models, but all the same at the end of the day.

I hope you are joking.

Re: Web development is fun again

#619

Post by Anamon »

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

Speaking as someone who doesn't really like or do LLM-assisted coding either: at least try Gemini. ChatGPT is the absolute worst you could use. I was quite shocked when I compared the two on the same tasks. Gemini gets decent initial results you can build on. ChatGPT generates 99% absolutely unusable rubbish. The difference is so extreme, it's not even a competition anymore.

I now understand why Altman announced "Code Red" at OpenAI. If their tools don't catch up drastically, and fast, they'll be one for the history books soon. Wouldn't be the first time the big, central early mover in a new market suddenly disappears, steamrolled by the later entrants.

Re: Web development is fun again

#620

Post by Anamon »

qudat wrote: post #612
_ikke_ wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as what it says is reliable and not made up.

That's true for internet searching. How many times have you gone to SO, seen a confident answer, tried it, and it failed to do what you needed?

Then you write a comment, maybe even figure out the correct solution and fix the answer. If you're lucky, somebody already did. Everybody wins.

That's what LLMs take away. Nothing is given back to the community, nothing is added to shared knowledge, no differing opinions are exchanged. It just steals other people's work from a time when work was still shared and discussed, removes any indication of its source, claims it's a new thing, and gives you no way to contribute back, or even discuss it and maybe get confronted with different opinions of even discovering a better way.

Let's not forget that one of the main reasons why LLMs are useful for coding in the first place, is that they scraped SO from the time where people still used it.

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