Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait till the VC tap gets shut off. You: Hey ChatGPT, help me center a div. ChatGPT: Certainly, I'd be glad to help! But first you must drink a verification can to proceed. Or: ChatGPT: I'm sorry, you appear to be asking a development-related question, which your current plan does not support. Would you like me to enable "Dev Mode" for an additional $200/month? Drink a verification can to accept charges.
Calling it now: AI withdrawal will become a documented disorder.
Web development is fun again
641–650 of 658 posts
Re: Web development is fun again
#642Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…
Now we ALL be project managers! Hooray!
I think this is probably the disconnect between me and heavy LLM-users. I find the process of asking them to generate code to be overall much more frustrating than just writing code myself.
Re: Web development is fun again
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wat? That is an classic quote from a very known clip about mongodb, thats probably a decade+ old. If you dont know it, thats on you. Thats programmer inside jokes, and seriously, the amount of slop posted here should be moderated, not some random comment about a 15 year old joke.
Other community members are flagging many of your posts and emailing us to complain because you're repeatedly breaking the guidelines. Whether or not I recognize a decade-old meme is irrelevant. The guidelines have been in place for most of HN's history and apply equally to everyone. Low-quality comments and projects are unwanted on HN whether they're generated by LLMs or humans. If your reaction to seeing bad stuff…
I can assure you im not using LLMs to generatare any post, comment or reply. But 7/10 posts here on HN are infact just that. Endless AI generated posts, or links to some prompted mess of a project. None of the above are moderated, and/or removed.
Im not avare of the flagging system, but it seems not to be working because the amount of slop increases each month, and thats a big shame as HN news is one of the last "oldschool" forums we have left.
Re: Web development is fun again
#644Earlier quoted context omitted.
$2000 will get you 30~50 tokens/s on perfectly usable quantization levels (Q4-Q5), taken from any one among the top 5 best open weights MoE models. That's not half bad and will only get better!
That doesn't sound realistic to me. What is your breakdown on the hardware and the "top 5 best models" for this calculation?
Look up AMD's Strix Halo mini-PC such as GMKtec's EVO-X2. I got the one with 128GB of unified RAM (~100GB VRAM) last year for 1900€ excl. VAT; it runs like a beast especially for SOTA/near-SOTA MoE models.
Re: Web development is fun again
#645Earlier 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…
Here's a concrete example of what can be done with Opus 4.5, and how to do it: https://burkeholland.github.io/posts/opus-4-5-change-everyth...
Re: Web development is fun again
#646Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…
A friend of mine dabbled in programming when they were younger, but ended up as a writer.
A few months ago they finally got annoyed enough about the janky manual way they need to get the dialog and scripts to a specific format and just went with the basic ChatGPT copy+paste route.
Within a weekend they had a full web UI that automated a good 50% of the manual work.
With a few nudges from yours truly they graduated into agentic coding and now we're at around 90-95% automation of the manual stuff + massive improvements in the actual writing process (proper previews, the system can "guess" what the layout is suposed to be), it can export to multiple formats required by different vendors etc.
All done by a copywriter with a programmer's mindset (the need to automate) and an LLM.
Re: Web development is fun again
#647Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, the invention of the printing press in 1450 created a similar disruption, economic panic and institutional fear similar to what we're experiencing now: For centuries, the production of books was the exclusive domain of professional scribes and monks. To them, the printing press was an existential threat. Job Displacement: Scribes in Paris and other major cities reportedly went on strike or petitioned for ba…
I've seen this argument a few times before and I'm never quite convinced by it because, well, all those arguments are correct. It was an existential threat to the scribes and destroyed their jobs, the majority of printed books are considered less aesthetically pleasing than a properly illuminated manuscript, and hand copying is considered a spiritual act by many traditions. I'm not sure if I say it's a correct argume…
The difference here is that printing presses were prohibitively expensive to buy, own and run.
Anyone with access to the internet can use an LLM to do things.
Re: Web development is fun again
#648Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worse, you’re doing code review of poorly written code with random failure modes no human would create, and an increasingly big ball of mud that is unmaintainable over time. It’s just the worst kind of reviewing imaginable. The AI makes an indecipherable mess, and you have to work out what the hell is going on.
There's been so much pressure to use AI at work. My codebase is a zen garden I've been raking for 6 years. I have concerns about what's going to happen after a few months of "we're using AI cause they told us to."
This is the time to define your zen gardening style with formal tools.
You know just the way you like it, right?
Create an .editorconfig that describes the style, create linters and AST parsers that define your style in a concrete way. (You can actually create these with AI from your existing codebase btw =P)
Then when the AI comes in, it has to use those tools to confirm whatever it produces conforms to the zen garden style you've defined. It's just tools in a loop. Give it the tools to determine what it did is up to par and it will do it.
Peace and harmony for all.
Re: Web development is fun again
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other community members are flagging many of your posts and emailing us to complain because you're repeatedly breaking the guidelines. Whether or not I recognize a decade-old meme is irrelevant. The guidelines have been in place for most of HN's history and apply equally to everyone. Low-quality comments and projects are unwanted on HN whether they're generated by LLMs or humans. If your reaction to seeing bad stuff…
I can assure you im not using LLMs to generatare any post, comment or reply. But 7/10 posts here on HN are infact just that. Endless AI generated posts, or links to some prompted mess of a project. None of the above are moderated, and/or removed. Im not avare of the flagging system, but it seems not to be working because the amount of slop increases each month, and thats a big shame as HN news is one of the last "old…
This kind of sermonizing and hyperbole is no better than LLM-generated content, as it takes no more effort to produce and contributes no more of value to conversations.
The Internet has always been an arms race between producers of generic dreck and those who put effort into crafting original thoughts and prose. Yes, it's changing, and that poses new challenges for us, which we're developing ways of addressing.
If you’re not going to bother to use the tools we’ve always provided to enable the community to alert us to low-quality content, and you’re not going to bother conversing curiously as has always been core to the site’s ethos, you’re not in a position to white-knight on this issue.
This site is only a place you think needs defending as one of the last "oldschool" forums we have left because others do their part to help.
We will keep working to raise the standards of content on HN. You need to decide if you want your role to be one of making things worse or better.
Let’s not forget, this whole exchange started when you introduced foul rage bait from a 15-year-old meme, so you’re not starting on solid ground here.
Re: Web development is fun again
#650I've tried vibe coding and hate it. I guess it's okay for people who are only interested in the result, but for me it takes all the fun out of programming. It doesn't feel like it has anything to do with programming at all. I will continue to "vibe code" out of necessity - saving time and achieving more than I can on my own. But I cannot possibly understand how someone could consider it fun.
There are two kinds of woodworkers/carpenters. Let's assume both need a table.
The other grabs some wood, runs it through electric planers, chops it with a circular saw and screws it together. Nice, sturdy fast, problem solved over a weekend because the glue had to dry, next time they might use biscuit joins to make it faster. This is the AI programmer.
The other enjoys working with wood, they pick the perfect pieces of a specific wood where the grain matches in a pleasing pattern. Each one is hand-planed to perfection. After that an intricate joinery method is carved into the relevant places and carefully glued together with a natural glue so that the woodgrain matches and the join is practically invisible. A work of art. It also took a month to complete. This is the non-AI programmer.
Both solve the same problem, there is now a table in the world where people can sit and eat.
But. If you were to sell the table and still get compensated fairly, the latter table will be VERY expensive. Same with code. How many projects are there were you can use "this code is hand-crafted and every line beautifully thought of" as a selling point when the competition is using AI and just churning out solutions, even though the code might be basic and not too maintainable - but passes all the relevant tests.