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Automatic Programming

antirez.com

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Re: Automatic Programming

#71

Post by catdog »

user3939382 wrote: post #44
AdamN wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waterfall can work great when: 1/ the focus is long-term both in terms of knowing that she company can take a few years to get the thing live but also that it will be around for many more years, 2/ the people writing the spec and the code are largely the same people. Agile was really pushing to make sure companies could get software live before they died (number 1) and to remedy the anti-pattern that appeared with nu…

I spent my career building software for executives that wanted to know exactly what they were going to get and when because they have budgets and deadlines i.e. the real world. Mostly I’ve seen agile as, let’s do the same thing 3x we could have done once if we spent time on specs. The key phrase here is “requirements analysis” and if you’re not good at it either your software sucks or you’re going to iterate needless…

> The key phrase here is “requirements analysis” and if you’re not good at it either your software sucks or you’re going to iterate needlessly and waste massive time including on bad architecture. You don’t iterate the foundation of a house.

This depends heavily on the kind of problem you are trying to solve. In a lot of cases requirements are not fixed but evolve over time, either reacting to changes in the real word environment or by just realizing things which are nice in theory are not working out in practice.

You don’t iterate the foundation of a house because we have done it enough times and also the environment the house exists in (geography, climate, ...) is usually not expected to change much. If that were the case we would certainly build houses differently than we usually do.

Re: Automatic Programming

#72

Post by logicprog »

lou1306 wrote: post #58
slim wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is knowledge, it can't be stolen. It is stolen only in the sense of someone gatekeeping knowledge. Which is as a practice, the least we can say, dubious. because is math stolen ? if you stole math to build your knowledge on top of it, you own nothing and can claim to have been stolen yourself

If you are so adamant about this, why don't you release all your own code in the public domain? Aren't you gatekeeping knowledge too?

I agree with GP, and so, yes, I release everything I do — code and the hundreds of thousands of painstakingly researched, drafted, deeply thought through words of writing that I do — using a public domain equivalent license (to ensure it's as free as possible), the zero clause BSD.

Re: Automatic Programming

#73

Post by rcarmo »

dugmartin wrote: post #21

I have 30+ years of industry experience and I've been leaning heavily into spec driven development at work and it is a game changer. I love programming and now I get to program at one level higher: the spec. I spend hours on a spec, working with Claude Code to first generate and iterate on all the requirements, going over the requirements using self-reviews in Claude first using Opus 4.5 and then CoPilot using GPT-5.…

Yep. I've been into spec-driven development for a long time (when we had humans as agents) and it's never really failed me. We just have literally more attention (hah!) from LLMs than from humans.

Re: Automatic Programming

#74

Post by yobbo »

dugmartin wrote: post #21

I have 30+ years of industry experience and I've been leaning heavily into spec driven development at work and it is a game changer. I love programming and now I get to program at one level higher: the spec. I spend hours on a spec, working with Claude Code to first generate and iterate on all the requirements, going over the requirements using self-reviews in Claude first using Opus 4.5 and then CoPilot using GPT-5.…

Agile solves the problem of discovering a workable set of requirements while the environment is changing.

If you already know the requirements, it doesn't need to come into play.

Re: Automatic Programming

#75

Post by treetalker »

xixixao wrote: post #6

This is a classic false dichotomy. Vibe coding, automatic coding and coding is clearly on a spectrum. And I can employ all the shades during a single project.

Distilled:

> Users should claim the output of LLMs as their own, for the following reason. LLMs are tools; tools can be used with varying degrees of skill; the output of tools (including LLMs) is a function of the user's skill; and therefore the output is attributable to and belongs to the user.

> Furthermore, we should use tools, including LLMs, actively and mindfully. We shouldn't switch off our brains and accept the output uncritically. We should iterate and improve as we go along.

I agree with you that the author seems to inappropriately convert differences in degree of skill into differences of kind.

Re: Automatic Programming

#76

Post by catdog »

norir wrote: post #61

> I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate in this way is mine. My code, my output, my production. I, and you, can be proud. I disagree. The code you wrote is a collaboration with the model you used. To frame it this way, you are taking credit for the work the model did on your behalf. There is a difference between I wrote this code entirely by myself and I wrote the code with a partner.…

Also it's not only the work of "the model" it's the work of human beings the model is trained on, often illegally.

Re: Automatic Programming

#77

Post by radu_floricica »

rtpg wrote: post #16

Every time I hear someone mention they vibed a thing or claude gave them something, it just reads as a sort of admission that I'm about to read some _very_ "first draft"-feeling code. I get this even from people who spend a lot of time talking about needing to own code you send up. People need to stop apologizing for their work product because of the tools they use. Just make the work product better and you don't hav…

Yep. And they should also raise their expectations and work on delivering better vibecoded apps. Likely also with automation.

Re: Automatic Programming

#78

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

jpnc wrote: post #27
dang wrote: post #194

[stub for offtopicness]

How does it feel to see all your programming heroes turn into Linkedin-style influencers?

You either die as a programmer hero or live long enough to be a Linkedin-style influencer.

On a more serious note, the technology & its use cases of AI are pretty dividing especially within software engineering. I would consider the fact that the financial incentives driving it and the what ~3 TRILLION $ invested in AI driving up some of this divide too.

Re: Automatic Programming

#79

Post by manmal »

dugmartin wrote: post #21

I have 30+ years of industry experience and I've been leaning heavily into spec driven development at work and it is a game changer. I love programming and now I get to program at one level higher: the spec. I spend hours on a spec, working with Claude Code to first generate and iterate on all the requirements, going over the requirements using self-reviews in Claude first using Opus 4.5 and then CoPilot using GPT-5.…

My experience is that such one-shotted projects never survive the collision with reality. Even with extremely detailed specs, the end result will not be what people had in mind, because human minds cannot fully anticipate the complexity of software, and all the edge cases it needs to handle. "Oh, I didn't think that this scheduled alarm is super annoying, I'd actually expect this other alarm to supersede it. It's great we've built this prototype, because this was hard to anticipate on paper."

I'm not saying I don't believe your report - maybe you are working in a domain where everything is super deterministic. Anyway, I don't.

Re: Automatic Programming

#80

Post by sneak »

jakkos wrote: post #18

> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift I feel like this wording isn't great when there are many impactful open source programmers who have explicitly stated that they don't want their code used to train these models and licensed their work in a world where LLMs didn't exist. It wasn't their "gift", it was unwillingly taken from them. > I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate i…

If you publish your code to others under permissive licenses, people using it to do things you do not want is not something being unwillingly taken from you.

You can do whatever you want with a gift. Once you release your code as free software, it is no longer yours. Your opinions about what is done with it are irrelevant.

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