Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI coding

geohot.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 299 posts

Re: AI coding

#81

Post by [deleted] »

haute_cuisine wrote: post #30
bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

Would love to see a project you built with the help of AI, can you share any links?

[deleted]

Re: AI coding

#82

Post by Yoric »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #74
onion2k wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the good parts. In some cases, especially with the more senior devs in my org, fear of the good parts is why they're against AI. Devs often want the inherent safety of the boring, easy stuff for a while. AI changes the job to be a constant struggle with hard problems. That isn't necessarily a good thing. If you're actually senior by virtue of tim…

That makes me think of https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/ which is a version of Minesweeper where instead of clicking on squares you define (parametric!) rules that propagate information around the board automatically. Your own rules skip all the easy parts for you. As a result, every challenge you get is by definition a problem that you've never considered before. It's fun, but also exhausting.

Oooohhh....

That looks like plenty of hours of fun! Thanks for the link :)

Re: AI coding

#83

Post by runningmike »

Great short read. But this “ It’s why the world wasted $10B+ on self driving car companies that obviously made no sense.”

Not everything should make sense. Playing , trying and failing is crucial to make our world nicer. Not overthinking is key, see later what works and why.

Re: AI coding

#84

Post by sothatsit »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #74
onion2k wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the good parts. In some cases, especially with the more senior devs in my org, fear of the good parts is why they're against AI. Devs often want the inherent safety of the boring, easy stuff for a while. AI changes the job to be a constant struggle with hard problems. That isn't necessarily a good thing. If you're actually senior by virtue of tim…

That makes me think of https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/ which is a version of Minesweeper where instead of clicking on squares you define (parametric!) rules that propagate information around the board automatically. Your own rules skip all the easy parts for you. As a result, every challenge you get is by definition a problem that you've never considered before. It's fun, but also exhausting.

I remember listening to a talk about Candy Crush and how they designed the game to have a few easy levels in between the hard ones, to balance feeling like you're improving while also challenging players. If all the levels get progressively harder, then a lot of people lose motivation to keep playing.

Re: AI coding

#85

Post by sunir »

Code has a lot of bits of information the compiler users to construct the program. But not all because software needs iteration to get right both in bugs and in solving the intended problem.

The llm prompt has even fewer bits of information specifying the system than code. The model has a lot more bits but still finite. A perfect llm cannot build a perfect app in one shot.

However AIs can research, inquire, and iterate to gain more bits than when you started.

So the comparison to a compiler is not apt because the compiler can’t fix bugs or ask the user for more information about what the program should be.

Most devs are using ai at the autocomplete level which is like this compiler analogy which makes sense in 2025 but that isn’t where we will be in 2030.

What we don’t know is how good the technology will be in the future and how cheap and how fast. But it’s already very different than a compiler.

Re: AI coding

#86

Post by Agraillo »

ur-whale wrote: post #14

I agree that most natural languages are a very poor tool to write code specification in. Specifically, natural language is: - ambiguous (LLMs solve this to a certain extent) - extremely verbose - doesn't lend itself well to refactoring - the same thing can be expressed in way too many different ways, which leads to instability in specs -> code -> specs -> code -> specs loops (and these are essential to do incremental…

> Maybe LLMs can be sued to design such a thing

nice misspelling (or a joke?), related to all the lawsuits around LLMs.

Joking aside, it’s already there in a sense. Several times I started with a brief outline of what the prototype should do (an HTML/CSS/JS app), and sure enough, refinements and corrections followed. When the final version worked more or less as expected, I asked the LLM to create a specification (a reproducing prompt) of everything we made together. Even if the vibe-coded prototype is dropped, the time wasn’t wasted, I probably would never have come to the same bullet list specification without having an actual working app at my disposal to test and evaluate. So paradoxically this specification even might be used by a human later

Re: AI coding

#87

Post by ako »

piker wrote: post #49

Pretty much nailed it. Once you’re at about 40k LOC you can just turn off the autocomplete features and use Claude or GPT to evaluate specific high-level issues. My sense is 40k LOC is the point at which the suggestions are offset by the rabbit holes they sometimes send you down, but, more importantly by obscuring from you the complexity of the thing you’re building—temporarily.

I expect much of this can be solved with better architecture: smaller, more independent components. Break large code bases up into independent libraries, and LLMs can work again because they need much less code in their context.

Re: AI coding

#88

Post by mindwok »

These articles are beyond the point of exhausting. Guys, just go use the tools and see if you like them and feel more capable with them. If you do, great, if you don’t, then stop.

Re: AI coding

#89

Post by hereme888 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #2

> AI makes you feel 20% more productive but in reality makes you 19% slower. How many more billions are we going to waste on this? Adderall is similar. It makes people feel a lot more productive, but research on its effectiveness[0] seems to show that, at best, we get only a mild improvement in productivity, and marked deterioration of cognitive abilities. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6165228/

You have to realize that ADD meds are meant only for people with ADD, not healthy people at the prime of their life. Excess neurochemicals can have the opposite effect.

Their benefits when used as intended are solidly documented in research literature.

Post reply on HN