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Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

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Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#91

Post by peteforde »

satvikpendem wrote: post #86
peteforde wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, it depends on what you mean by "the same as". Both are (in my case, at least) running Opus 4.5 instances. After that, it's like using a CNC or a shop full of hand tools. They are both great, and people who know one often know both. The process is wildly different, however. Not busting my quota is simply not my top priority. I'm on their $200/month plan and I have it locked to a $1000/month overage limit, th…

What do you see as the difference between Claude Code and Cursor agent mode, since you said Claude Code doesn't work for your type of project so I'm curious why that is. Edit, I see you answered this in another response, thanks.

While I am vaguely aware that CC has started to move past its CLI-first roots, I still think of it as a process that you do in a terminal window vs something you do in an IDE like VSCode or Cursor.

I don't have any interest in yucking anyone's yum, but for me, I find working in and IDE to be vastly more productive than trying to remember dozens of vim and tmux shortcuts.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#92

Post by kazinator »

Suppose you keep this up for 15 years; how will you grapple with all the cruft you have generated?

Or just periodically throw it all away and start from scratch?

What if something becomes successful (has users) so that you can't just throw it away?

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#93

Post by fragmede »

kazinator wrote: post #92

Suppose you keep this up for 15 years; how will you grapple with all the cruft you have generated? Or just periodically throw it all away and start from scratch? What if something becomes successful (has users) so that you can't just throw it away?

Why wait 15 years? If it's becoming too big of a ball of mud, tell the AI that, and have it ultrathink a plan on what to refactor together and better follow DRY principles of clean code, or whatever you adhere to. Tell it hey, I noticed that we're reimplementing the same thing a couple of times, let's make it a class that can be reused instead. It'll happily generate cruft. The human in the loop should call that out so it doesn't get out of control. Maybe that's what we'll be paying the human to do still in 15 years.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#94

Post by tpmoney »

kazinator wrote: post #92

Suppose you keep this up for 15 years; how will you grapple with all the cruft you have generated? Or just periodically throw it all away and start from scratch? What if something becomes successful (has users) so that you can't just throw it away?

> Suppose you keep this up for 15 years; how will you grapple with all the cruft you have generated?

I can't speak for the OP but the worst software developer I ever worked with was myself from 1 year ago. Provided what "cruft" I'm generating meets my current code standards, it's unlikely to be any worse than anything else past me has done.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#95

Post by tpmoney »

chrisjj wrote: post #4
EGreg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could be said about compiling higher-level languages instead of rolling your own assembly and garbage collector. It's just working on a higher level. You're a lot more productive with, say, PHP than you are writing assembly. I architect of it and go through many iterations. The machine makes mistakes, when I test I have to come back and work through the issues. I often correct the machine about stuff it doesn't…

> That could be said about compiling higher-level languages You write the program as source code. Prompting an LLM to cobble together lines from other people's work is not writing a program.

Does a director make a movie? Serious question. Can we say that Steven Spielberg made Jurassic Park? Can we say the George Lucas made Star Wars? Directors rarely act in their own movies, write their own scripts, operate the cameras, operate the lights, operate the mics, edit the final cuts, write the scores, play the scores, create the VFX, do the film printing or the marketing. They prompt Biological Thought Models to do those things and cobble the results together. Really nothing a director traditionally does is actually physically making a film.

And yet, I don't see a problem with saying directors made their movies. Sure, it was the work of a lot of talented individuals contributing collectively to produce the final product, and most of those individuals probably contributed more physical "creation" to the film than the director did. But the director is a film maker. So I wouldn't be so confident asserting that someone who coordinates and architects an application by way of various automation tools isn't still a programmer or "writing software"

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#96

Post by kazinator »

tpmoney wrote: post #94
kazinator wrote: post #92

Suppose you keep this up for 15 years; how will you grapple with all the cruft you have generated? Or just periodically throw it all away and start from scratch? What if something becomes successful (has users) so that you can't just throw it away?

> Suppose you keep this up for 15 years; how will you grapple with all the cruft you have generated? I can't speak for the OP but the worst software developer I ever worked with was myself from 1 year ago. Provided what "cruft" I'm generating meets my current code standards, it's unlikely to be any worse than anything else past me has done.

But it's produced "20-50x" faster.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#97

Post by voidUpdate »

EGreg wrote: post #35
voidUpdate wrote: post #16

Out of interest, how did you arrive at the 20-50x speedup numbers?

Cherrypicking the most tedious parts, like boilerplate to get up and running, or porting code to other adapters (making mysqlite and postgres adapters for instance) This was done in about 3 hours for instance: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/tree/refactor/DbQuery/platf... You can see the speed for yourself. Here is my first speedrun livestreamed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY

So your actual output has not increased by 20-50x, just some parts of it? What's your speedup like over an entire project, not just cherrypicked parts?

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#98

Post by germandiago »

EGreg wrote: post #28
germandiago wrote: post #10

If you can do this and you do not build your own company you are wasting your time in some way, IMHO. It has lots of potential. Let me, though, have my own... doubts about it. Thanks for sharing anyway.

I already built 2 companies and building a third. https://linkedin.com/in/magarshak

Well, then if that has worked, you have not been wasting your time.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#99

Post by EGreg »

voidUpdate wrote: post #97
EGreg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cherrypicking the most tedious parts, like boilerplate to get up and running, or porting code to other adapters (making mysqlite and postgres adapters for instance) This was done in about 3 hours for instance: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/tree/refactor/DbQuery/platf... You can see the speed for yourself. Here is my first speedrun livestreamed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY

So your actual output has not increased by 20-50x, just some parts of it? What's your speedup like over an entire project, not just cherrypicked parts?

I think those parts were the big bottleneck, so technically, yes it has.

Re: Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago

#100

Post by EGreg »

stefanfisk wrote: post #74
EGreg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cherrypicking the most tedious parts, like boilerplate to get up and running, or porting code to other adapters (making mysqlite and postgres adapters for instance) This was done in about 3 hours for instance: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/tree/refactor/DbQuery/platf... You can see the speed for yourself. Here is my first speedrun livestreamed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY

That code has a lot of smell IMHO :/ What's the rationale behind writing PHP as if it was JS? Unless I am mistaken it's like someone just did a transliteration from JS to PHP without even converting the JSDoc to PHPDoc. And are there any tests for the code?

I actually based it on an existing PHP adapter for MySQL. Together with the AI, I went over all the features that needed refactoring, and what would work in Postgres and Sqlite the same way, etc. There were a ton of nuances.
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