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Automating myself out of development

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Re: Automating myself out of development

#71

Post by zeroonetwothree »

mattmanser wrote: post #66
girvo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently using it to do a large migration from one Relay environment to another, but this is possible because 1. We've done it by hand for another route already, which the LLM uses as reference 2. Theres a strong validation setup/harness I've setup for it with storybooks, and component tests 3. It's a _mostly_ mechanical transform. Not entirely, as the two environments/APIs are not 1:1, but it's close enough But…

I think a problem here is you're overestimating how hard it is to rewrite something when you have one example of how to do it right. Even in the 2000s, I remember a junior essentially rewriting our entire codebase from old school asp vbscript to .Net in a few months. A 100 or so pages back then. Your team could have done it pre-AI, but you just thought it was hard so you didn't try. I remember migrating a code base f…

Yes if you know exactly how something should work it is fairly quick to implement. The hard and slow parts are when you only have vague requirements or have to experiment and iterate.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#72

Post by girvo »

mattmanser wrote: post #66
girvo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently using it to do a large migration from one Relay environment to another, but this is possible because 1. We've done it by hand for another route already, which the LLM uses as reference 2. Theres a strong validation setup/harness I've setup for it with storybooks, and component tests 3. It's a _mostly_ mechanical transform. Not entirely, as the two environments/APIs are not 1:1, but it's close enough But…

I think a problem here is you're overestimating how hard it is to rewrite something when you have one example of how to do it right. Even in the 2000s, I remember a junior essentially rewriting our entire codebase from old school asp vbscript to .Net in a few months. A 100 or so pages back then. Your team could have done it pre-AI, but you just thought it was hard so you didn't try. I remember migrating a code base f…

No, I'm not. Because, as I said, we've literally done it first for the first half of our application, and it took us eight engineers for ~5 months.

Its genuinely weird to have you say that so confidently lol

Re: Automating myself out of development

#73

Post by classified »

pydry wrote: post #21

>Automating myself out of development >I want to start by saying that I’m neither an AI-fanatic Kind of like saying you are a fanatic before saying you aren't. I don't think theres too much here (e.g. "spec driven development") I haven't seen elsewhere.

> I don't think theres too much here I haven't seen elsewhere.

Isn't that the rhyme here. I can't think of any article or discussion on AI here that contains anything new or noteworthy. And yet all those articles we've read before and all those "discussions" we've had before keep coming and coming. I have gotten bored and I'm just waiting for anything decisive to happen.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#74

Post by wunderlotus »

davidcann wrote: post #8
noelwelsh wrote: post #2

I wish people would describe in more detail the tasks they use LLMs to code. My experience is that simple components in an existing architecture are fine, but anything requiring architectural considerations quickly becomes a mess. On my projects (e.g. a ui framework), running multiple agents in parallel would just increase the speed at which it can stuff up the project.

I built this with 94% written by coding agents: https://buildermark.dev/ The complete log of all prompts and commits is here: https://demo.buildermark.dev/projects/u020uhEFtuWwPei6z6nbN

This demo tool is really cool, kudos on that!

I clicked that link first even though it’s listed second bc I wanted to see the prompts. I didn’t expect the level of detail or mapping to each commit. It is rad!

That being said the landing page is soooo obviously “vibe coded” (read: AI generated).

It has that design style that Claude likes to ~ab~use. & if I’m being honest, had I clicked on the website link first, I would never have gotten to the demo bc I would’ve just dismissed it as AI slop.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#75

Post by general1465 »

duggan wrote: post #61
general1465 wrote: post #23

I am completely calm regarding AI and development. First nobody sane want to give their domain IP to OpenAI/Anthropic. That's why local AI will eventually prevail and flourish because people who actually have some IP will have no problem to buy 10k+ EUR machine to run some pretty good models on it. However if your main job is just doing CRUD stuff, then you are screwed. Secondly hallucination is really Achilles heel…

> First nobody sane want to give their domain IP to OpenAI/Anthropic. That's why local AI will eventually prevail and flourish because people who actually have some IP will have no problem to buy 10k+ EUR machine to run some pretty good models on it. However if your main job is just doing CRUD stuff, then you are screwed Replace OpenAI/Anthropic with AWS and this is not too dissimilar to the arguments in 2009 about c…

> It’s not that there's nobody for whom this is true, it’s just that there’s enough of everyone else to build an empire with.

But those everyone else are racing to the bottom because all their ideas are being soaked up by AI and then being given to their competitors on a silver platter as AI output.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#76

Post by general1465 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #55
general1465 wrote: post #23

I am completely calm regarding AI and development. First nobody sane want to give their domain IP to OpenAI/Anthropic. That's why local AI will eventually prevail and flourish because people who actually have some IP will have no problem to buy 10k+ EUR machine to run some pretty good models on it. However if your main job is just doing CRUD stuff, then you are screwed. Secondly hallucination is really Achilles heel…

Did you try this by giving it access to the materials? Human programmers also don't memorize all this stuff. If this is the reason for your calmness it's quite shortsighted. There are problems when you rely too much on AI generated code, but these shallow dismissals are quite annoying.

I did, the problem is that

1. There can be massive differences between chips which sounds plausibly same and thanks to the way how LLM is working, models are mangling these variations together

2. Registers are often named in very way similar across different manufacturers so models are making up registers in MPC5555 which are coincidentally registers in Renesas processors doing same thing.

3. There are no standard in reference manuals, sometimes there are literally missing chunks of knowledge thanks to translation to English or there are pieces which you can only get from Application Notes which has code as a screenshot.

And then you will find out that all those descriptions are wrong and through trial and error you will get it working in 2 weeks time.

Bonus point: Random people having public Git repositories for obscure processors, but with bad or completely non working implementation of drivers for them. However LLM will just output variation of this garbage on you, because there are 3 public repositories on the whole internet. Sometimes I have a feeling that this must be on purpose to poison the well.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#77

Post by andrekandre »

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #24
yieldcrv wrote: post #3

I don't know if I’m overly critical but there’s gotta be a middle ground between totally AI pilled people that otherwise have no talents, and control freak veteran developers who cant let go My current process is also using Github projects in a normal scrum style way, with many tickets written or fleshed out and state managed by the LLM, and it doubling as the memory system Completely leapfrogging all these other ope…

All these people saying UI/UX is dead, then I see their designs and they're absolutely the worst (but they're always swearing by how incredible it is). Sorry access to an LLM (even if it could center a div reliably and make a responsive designs, it can't) does not give you taste, intuition or make you good at building user interfaces. You people/sloppers have no idea the amount of sweat that gets poured into great UX…

  > I actually think UI/UX designers and devs will be the last to fall. I will want beautiful products that were built by beautiful minds
as an aside, i do find it interesting how people around me are more reluctant to have an ai design the look of an app vs a human, yet having an ai design the more important parts (how it works) is totally fine to them...

  > You people/sloppers have no idea the amount of sweat that gets poured into great UX.
i could say the same about code though... why is ui/ux some sacred cow but code isn't? its just as important no?

  > Its insulting when you people say these things and Im not even a designer or frontend dev.
playing devils advocate, but again, why is code any different?

Re: Automating myself out of development

#78

Post by ai_fry_ur_brain »

andrekandre wrote: post #77
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these people saying UI/UX is dead, then I see their designs and they're absolutely the worst (but they're always swearing by how incredible it is). Sorry access to an LLM (even if it could center a div reliably and make a responsive designs, it can't) does not give you taste, intuition or make you good at building user interfaces. You people/sloppers have no idea the amount of sweat that gets poured into great UX…

> I actually think UI/UX designers and devs will be the last to fall. I will want beautiful products that were built by beautiful minds as an aside, i do find it interesting how people around me are more reluctant to have an ai design the look of an app vs a human, yet having an ai design the more important parts (how it works) is totally fine to them... > You people/sloppers have no idea the amount of sweat that get…

Its not, I dont think LLMs should be writing code for anything important.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#79

Post by LtWorf »

girvo wrote: post #72
mattmanser wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a problem here is you're overestimating how hard it is to rewrite something when you have one example of how to do it right. Even in the 2000s, I remember a junior essentially rewriting our entire codebase from old school asp vbscript to .Net in a few months. A 100 or so pages back then. Your team could have done it pre-AI, but you just thought it was hard so you didn't try. I remember migrating a code base f…

No, I'm not. Because, as I said, we've literally done it first for the first half of our application, and it took us eight engineers for ~5 months. Its genuinely weird to have you say that so confidently lol

He's talking about exercises for school. So very limited size, scope, and extremely well specified.

Completely different from a real world scenario.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#80

Post by andai »

dmortin wrote: post #54
andai wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

n=1 but, a friend of mine spent the last few months working on an experimental music software with Claude. What he built is amazing and far beyond my abilities (I have been programming for 20 years). He doesn't know any programming. In fact, it's far beyond what I would even attempt, because I've just spent two decades building up a data bank of how hard things are supposed to be. He doesn't know it's supposed to be…

Is his code maintainable, though? Or is it just a pile of code which happens to work? What if he wants to change something? Does he generate again the whole thing from scratch? Or does he tell Claude to make the changes and doesn't even know when something breaks when a new thing is added? (Assuming the software is complex, having multiple non trivial features.)

Well, maintainable by who?

Claude Code does not regenerate an entire project when you ask it to make one change. It just makes the change.

He's been working on it for several hours per day for several months.

He has occasionally complained to me about the stupidity of AI. Nevertheless, his achievement is remarkable. He simply persisted despite the stupidity.

It does occasionally break things when adding new features. I think it does it less often than I do, though.

(My "random error" rate is quite high, and scales with the complexity of the code base. Fortunately, the Transformer has a slightly higher working memory than I do.)

I will grant though, that he shipped it with zero thought for performance. "Damn, it works so well on my machine though", he said, having the best machine in the world! I'm not sure that's the LLM's fault though. I ran into disregard for performance often, before LLMs!

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