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Automating myself out of development

thoughtfultechnologist.com

81–90 of 97 posts

Re: Automating myself out of development

#81
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…

UI/UX or dev isn't dead.

It will be shrinking. Less grunt work.

Internal projects can get done with less of either.

Nobody really cares about great UX or about how great someone can implement a CRUD app.

So there will be less need/fighting over such resources.

If I can just generate a usable UI for a hobby project I don't need to find some company to build it out. Sure, it will miss out on a lot of stuff but it's a trade off.

If someone else can build a product and needed a basic web shop / crud app, they don't need to find someone to implement that at a massive overcharge.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#83
post #80
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

[flagged]

Re: Automating myself out of development

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok but it takes weeks of trial and error for expert humans. If you allow the llm to run the code and see the results and do trial and error, it will also likely figure it out, no?

Re: Automating myself out of development

#85
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…

I just do turn based development with Cline. I design my UIs in the browser first then let something like Claude wire it up, correcting it as I go. Way faster than before, easy to correct mistakes, doesn't require self-sacrifice or submission.

I shudder when I hear about some people's (wildly overcomplicated) setups. I get the allure but there's something nice about pair programming with an LLM in a singular chat.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#86
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is untrue and a conspiracy theory. Enterprise deals have specific data retention and disclosure policies.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#87

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.

In the last week we have done a complete analytics dashboard overhaul with Fable/Opus. The baseline was really bad, for we have no front-end engineers, so we largely felt comfortable not reading anything but the auth code (where we did find one subtle edge case handled incorrectly).

The pipelines and data serving design was all human since it did have to deal with some data scale but the javascript/api layer was all slop, and it seems fine and good.

If you have a really high quality piece of code that needs to meet a high bar of quality/reliability, then I think the risk of letting the AI loose on it is very high and I wouldn't do it. If you have a pile of code you already know is a pile of garbage despite being human written, well, it can't get much worse :)

I also built an agent orchestration meta harness that runs on k8s and uses the k8s agents sandbox for running codex/claude code in the cloud. This was almost entirely just handed over to Fable and I have not asked a single architectural detail. The quality of this product is mediocre, but the fact that it largely works after I went through a few iterations of clicking around is impressive. I would have preferred to buy something off the shelf, but nothing even really came close (though maybe now I would have forked Omnigent)

Re: Automating myself out of development

#88

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.

Pretty much the whole industry has zero problem giving OpenAI/Anthropic full access to their systems and codebases.

You're putting way more thoughts into it than the vast majority, most companies seem to go with the momentum

Re: Automating myself out of development

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok but it takes weeks of trial and error for expert humans. If you allow the llm to run the code and see the results and do trial and error, it will also likely figure it out, no?

That's not how it works in embedded world. If you set your registers wrong, you can have i.e. double the clock, then your quanta on CAN is not correct (they are half) and you have double the baudrate or set point off. The thing is that LLM does not have implementation of target processor, so it can't run the code nor it has implementation of peripherals so it can't know if CAN driver is implemented correctly or incorrectly.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is untrue and a conspiracy theory. Enterprise deals have specific data retention and disclosure policies.

These companies were/are blatantly breaking copyright, going as far as downloading data from illegal torrents. Only differentiator between these AI companies is who has access to more data and create better models from them. Please don't be naive that some disclosure policy or retention agreement would stop them from getting more data and thus getting edge above competition.
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