815 points by vaylian 1 day ago | 261 comments | View on ycombinator
Chris_Newton 1 day ago |
ChrisMarshallNY 1 day ago |
But I am not just dispatching to agents. I work interactively with a chat interface, and sometimes, I will just bin a whole hour's worth of back-and-forth, because we're not getting anywhere (in fact, I did exactly that, about 30 minutes ago).
But that hour is peanuts, compared to the ten hours that I would have spent, trying to figure it out on my own. With an LLM (and git), I can "run something up the flagpole, and see who salutes." I can afford to experiment with very large code bases, and toss out a whole bunch of stuff, if need be.
That said, I know damn well, that quite a few folks here, would sneer at my methodology, as "awkward, stodgy, and slow." Nevertheless, I am pretty chuffed with the results. Yeah, it's slower than some folks would do it, but the Quality is really high, and I'm happy with the results.
My favorite thing to do, is (for example) toss all 5 of my SDK files into the LLM, paste in the JSON server interaction, describe the bug, and ask it to help me figure it out.
Nine times out of ten, it finds the bug quickly. The real bug. I am not always happy with the proposed solutions, but finding the root cause is always the time-consuming part.
alexpotato 1 day ago |
I've been using AI to help me write it and I've come to a couple conclusions:
- AI can make working PoCs incredibly quickly
- It can even help me think of story lines, decision paths etc
- Given that, there is still a TON of decisions to be made e.g. what artwork to use, what makes sense from a story perspective
- Playtesting alone + iterating still occurs at human speed b/c if humans are the intended audience, getting their opinions takes human time, not computer time
I've started using this example more and more as it highlights that, yes, AI can save huge amounts of time. However, as we learned from the Theory of Constraints, there is always another bottleneck somewhere that will slow things down.
imilev 1 day ago |
Really like the article I think it is awesome, and I strongly believe AI for coding will stay, but I also beleive that we need to still have a strong understanding of why we are building things and what they look like.
Swizec 1 day ago |
You fill a jar with sand and there is no space for big rocks.
But if you fill the jar with big rocks, there is plenty of space for sand. Remove one of the rocks and the sand instantly fills that void.
Make sure you fit the rocks first.
keiferski 1 day ago |
An example being the common attitude that [advanced tech] is just a math problem to be solved, and not a process that needs to play itself out in the real world, interacting with it and learning, then integrating those lessons over time.
Another way to put this is: experience is undervalued, and knowledge is overvalued. Probably because experience isn’t fungible and therefore cannot be quantified as easily by market systems.
1. Probably not his original idea, and now that I think about it this is kind of more Hegelian. I’m not familiar enough with Hegel to reference him though.
titanomachy 1 day ago |
Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to zero.
ChuckMcM 1 day ago |
Agentic coding very much feels like a "video game" in the sense of you pull the lever and open the loot box and sometimes it's an epic +10 agility sword and sometimes its just grey vendor trash. Whether or not it generates "good" or even "usable" code fades to the background as the thrill of "I just asked for a UI to orchestrate micro services and BLAMMO there it was!" moves to the fore.
wazHFsRy 1 day ago |
vaylian 1 day ago |
bytefish 1 day ago |
Yes, you cannot build years of community and trust in a weekend. But sometimes it's totally sufficient to plant a seed, give it some small amounts of water and leave it on its own to grow. Go ask my father having to deal with a huge maple tree, that I’ve planted 30 years ago and never cared for it.
Open Source projects sometimes work like this. I've created a .NET library for Firebase Messaging in a weekend a few years ago… and it grew on its own with PRs flowing in. So if your weekend project generates enough interest and continues to grow a community without you, what’s the bad thing here? I don’t get it.
Sometimes a tree dies and an Open Source project wasn’t able to make it.
That said, I’ve just finished rewriting four libraries to fix long standing issues, that I haven’t been able to fix for the past 10 years.
It's been great to use Gemini as a sparring partner to fix the API surface of these libraries, that had been problematic for the past 10 years. I was so quick to validate and invalidate ideas.
Once being one of the biggest LLM haters I have to say, that I immensely enjoy it right now.
thn-gap 1 day ago |
I feel this new world sucks. We have new technology that boosts the productivity of the individual engineer, and we could be doing MUCH better work, instead of just rushed slop to meet quotas.
I feel I'm just building my replacement, to bring the next level of profits to the c-suite. I just wish I wasn't burning out while doing so.
snthpy about 20 hours ago |
Btw the earendil.com website is gorgeous.
XCSme about 23 hours ago |
What's funny, is that I had many other projects attempted over the years, but many rise and die quickly, yet the one that lasted the longest is also the one that is likely to last longest from now.
[0]: https://uxwizz.com
samiv about 17 hours ago |
I expect these tools will quickly let people to ramp up several orders of magnitude of more complexity and lines of code to any software project.
The your 100kloc JS electron app will become a 10m loc JS electron app running on a 500m loc browser runtime.
Repeat this across the stack for every software component and application and library. If you think things are bloated now just wait a few years and your notepad will be a 1m line behemoth with runtime performance of a glacier.
socketcluster 1 day ago |
I started out building a full stack framework like Meteor framework (though I started before Meteor framework was created in 2012 and long before Next.js).
Then I ported it to to Node.js because I saw an advantage to having the same language on the frontend and backend.
Then I noticed that developers like to mix and match different libraries/modules and this was a necessity. The whole idea of a cohesive full stack framework didn't make sense for most software. So I extracted the most essential part of it that people liked and this became SocketCluster. It got a fair amount of traction in the early days.
At the time, some people might have thought SocketCluster was trying to be a more scalable copycat of Socket.io but actually I had been working on it for several years by that point. I just made the API similar when I extracted it for better compatibility with Socket.io but it had some additional features.
A few years ago, I ended up building a serverless low-code/no-code CRUD platform which removes the need for a custom backend and it can be used with LLMs directly (you can give them the API key to access the control panel). It can define the whole data schema for you. I've built some complex apps with it to fully prove the concept with advanced search functionality (including indexing with a million records).
I've made some technical decisions which will look insane to most developers but are crucial and based on 15 years of experience, carefully evaluating tradeoffs and actual testing with complex applications. For example my platform only has 3 data types. String, Number and Boolean. The string type supports some additional constraints to allow it to be used to store any kind of data like lists, binary files (as base64)... Having just 3 types greatly simplifies spam prevention and schema validation. Makes it much easier for the user (or LLM) to reason about and produce a working, stable, bug-free solution.
That said I've been struggling to sell it because there are some popular well funded solutions on the market which look superficially similar or better. Of course they can't handle all the scenarios, they're more complex, less secure, don't scale, require far more LLM tokens, lead to constant regressions when used with AI. It's just impossible to communicate those benefits to people because they will value a one-shotted pretty UI over all these other aspects.
You can check out https://saasufy.com/ if interested.
Lerc 1 day ago |
Consider the idea of trying to determine how quickly an unknown number of timers will go ping, It could be 10,000 timers that go ping when finished or 1,000,000 timers that go ping when finished. I don't know when they are going to go ping, just that they all the timers are running at different speeds spread over some distribution.
After one time period, 5,000 pings have been detected. Should you conclude that timers are pinging fairly quickly?
You cannot tell the overall duration of timers if you don't know the number of timers there are out there. Your only data that the timer exists is the ping, consequently you cannot tell if a small population is at high speed or a large population is at a moderate speed. In both cases the data you receive are the fastest of the population.
In other words we haven't yet seen what the 10 year project made using these tools is like (or even if it exists/will exist), because they haven't been around for 10 years.
andai about 23 hours ago |
The desire to make life faster instead of better was identified as a neurosis of civilization in the 19th century.
w10-1 1 day ago |
What's slower now are threats to production - even minor regulations take years or decades, and often appear only when workarounds have surfaced.
So what changed in the last 40+ years are the many tools for businesses to shape the conditions of their business -the downstream market, upstream suppliers, and regulatory support/constraints. This is extremely patient work over generations of players, sometimes by individuals, but usually by coalitions of mutual corporate self-interest, where even the largest players couldn't refuse to participate.
It's evolution.
skybrian about 22 hours ago |
mememememememo 1 day ago |
Anyway 2 areas I slightly disagree on.
Open source abandonware is fine. Sometimes people give up because they realize it is not a good idea. Or they get busy or sick.
And 10 years at a startup is great but that relies on it being a good startup. Entropy at companies means I have never made it to 10yrs even though I wanted to.
zelphirkalt about 17 hours ago |
This website does not resonate with the message I got earlier from the article. It does not give the impression of someone taking appropriate time to make it.
QuadrupleA 1 day ago |
I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?
ngburke about 18 hours ago |
dminor 1 day ago |
jFriedensreich about 10 hours ago |
undefined about 5 hours ago |
ivanjermakov 1 day ago |
andai about 23 hours ago |
This has been on my mind for a long time.
I used to be all about frictionlessness. Speed! Convenience! Make it smoother!
Then I found... actually, paper based systems work way better for me. Digital systems just turn into big piles of bloat. It's too easy to add stuff. So they grow until they collapse under their own weight.
(Take a look at your contacts list. How many should still be in there? How many did you add for a one time thing and then keep forever? Should there be a temporary folder? Shouldn't it be the default? That's how it works in nature!)
Ended up using paper as a temporary improvisation, then realized it solved all the problems I had with digital systems.
Friction is good.
With communication, it used to cost money to communicate. Now it's free, and we now have a sea of noise where most messages are "adding negative value", because they steal your time and energy.
Same with the app stores. Do any search and you find an ocean of slop! The gems drown in the sea of slop.
Friction is good.
rednafi 1 day ago |
fuzzy_biscuit 1 day ago |
lapcat 1 day ago |
Imagine a world in which the promise of AI was that workers could keep their jobs, at the same compensation as before, but work fewer hours and days per week due to increased productivity.
What could you do with those extra hours and days? Sleep better. Exercise more. Prepare healthy meals. Spend more time with family and friends. The benefits to physical and mental well-being are priceless. Even if you happened to earn extra money for the same amount of work, your time can be infinitely more valuable than money.
Unfortunately, that's not this world. Which is why the "increased productivity" promise doesn't seem to benefit workers at all.
If you look at the technological utopias that people imagined 50, 60+ years ago, they involved lives of leisure. If you would have told them that advances in technology would not reduce our working hours at all, maybe they would have started smashing the machines back then. Now we're supposed to be happy with more "stuff", even if there's no more time to enjoy stuff.
waynerisner about 23 hours ago |
Maybe the response is to slow down a bit—revisit what matters, and use it with some sense of proportion and coherence.
arcadianalpaca 1 day ago |
gz5 1 day ago |
absolutely although i wonder how different 'trust' is in the culture of tomorrow? will it 'matter' as much, be as cherished, as earned over the fullness of time?
i suspect it is a pendulum - and we are back to oak trees at some point - but which way is the pendulum swinging right now?
vincentabolarin 1 day ago |
Some things truly just take time.
You may speed them up when you start, but eventually, you will likely get to pay back the time. That is not necessarily a bad thing; it is just what it is.
AI makes us move faster, but if one is not careful, they may only be moving faster in the wrong direction, and they will eventually spend time moving back.
xivzgrev 1 day ago |
It's valued because it's more dense. It grew slowly. Now wood grows fast and it's less dense.
Like this article, that's fine for many things - you just need wood - but not always.
triwats 1 day ago |
That's a mantra I learned when getting into technology.
Asking questions about how things work, why it is a certain way, or why a shortcut was made often give you far better insights than anything else.
Slowing down and understandng is great. With AI this is even easier. But choose wisely, brains get full.
lifeisstillgood 1 day ago |
And time takes money
Enough money to pay one’s bills while one tends the growing tree
And if we have a society that ensures everyone is given the dignity of time
We also get a society that reaps what some create with that time
But if we have a society that only rewards pushing money back up the hierarchy
Then we all lose our time and our nest eggs to those who have the most.
Animats 1 day ago |
Mass production of engineered structural lumber.[1]
nchmy 1 day ago |
Things take the time they take.
Don't worry.
How many roads did St. Augustine follow
before he became St. Augustine?
locusofself 1 day ago |
sltr 1 day ago |
MPSimmons 1 day ago |
Refactoring decent sized components are an order of magnitude easier than it was, but the more important signal is still, why are you refactoring? What changed in your world or your world-view that caused this?
Good things still take time, and you can't slop-AI code your way to a great system. You still need domain expertise (as the EXCELLENT short story from the other day explained, Warranty Void if Regenerated (https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated) ). The decrease in friction does definitely allow for more slop, but it also allows for more excellence. It just doesn't guarantee excellence.
tbrownaw 1 day ago |
Oh, I thought it was because they're a way to show off about being rich.
> We require age minimums for driving, voting, and drinking because we believe maturity only comes through lived experience.
Even if she could reach the pedals, my 4yo doesn't have the attention span to drive. This isn't a "lived experience" thing, it's a physical brain development thing. IIRC the are effects with learning math, where starting earlier had limited impact on being able to move to certain more advanced topics earlier; ie there's more going on than just hours of experience.
The standard age for voting is also the age for being a legal adult. There are sound logical reasons that these ages should match.
The standard drinking age is due to pressure by activists, and AIUI is lower in other countries.
rando77 about 20 hours ago |
pmavrodiev about 14 hours ago |
"I keep coming back to the trees. I’ve been maintaining Open Source projects for close to two decades now. The last startup I worked on, I spent 10 years at. That’s not because I’m particularly disciplined or virtuous. It’s because I or someone else, planted something, and then I kept showing up, and eventually the thing had roots that went deeper than my enthusiasm on any given day. That’s what time does! It turns some idea or plan into a commitment and a commitment into something that can shelter and grow other people."
Good luck _creating_ this by trying to predict the next best word in the sentence.
sledgehammers 1 day ago |
andwaal 1 day ago |
What AI allow us is to do those things we would not have been able to prioritize before. To "write" those extra tests, add that minor feature or to solve that decade old bug. Things that we would never been able to prioritize are we noe able to do. It's not perfect, it's sometimes sloppy, but at least its getting shit done. It does not matter if you solve 10% of your problem perfect if you never have time for the remaining 90.
I do miss the coding, _a lot_, but productivity is a drug and I will take it.
bambax 1 day ago |
This is a bad start. Louis XIV at Versailles and Marly famously made while forests appear or disappear overnight, to the utter dismay of Saint-Simon, the memorialist, who thought this was an unacceptable waste of money and energy.
And this was before the industrial revolution. Today I'm sure many more miracles happen every day.
ICodeSometimes 1 day ago |
Vibe slop-ing at supersonic speeds and waiting years to grow aren't the only options, there's something in between where you have enough signal to keep going and enough speed to not waste years on the wrong thing.
I feel that today's VCs have completely disregarded the middle and are focused on getting as big as possible as fast as possible without regard to the effect it's having on the ecosystem.
atrealadam about 4 hours ago |
jsisto 1 day ago |
erelong 1 day ago |
no we don't want to miss genuine ways to speed things up to improve our productivity so we can do other or more things
fullstackchris 1 day ago |
whateveracct 1 day ago |
bushido 1 day ago |
They have spent the last decade building processes and guardrails for getting consistent average performance from people. But now, some talented people who worked at those companies are building their own new companies without the overhead and moving much, much more quickly.
I think what we assume is "vibe slop at inference speed" is not as simple as people make it out to be. From a perspective, I think generally it might be people trying to save jobs.
I'm seeing more slop come out of larger, older companies than the new ones (with experienced operators).
And the speed is somewhat scary. For smaller team it doesn't take as much effort to build deep, beautiful product anymore.
The bottleneck was never the ability for a engineer to code. It was the 16 layers between the customer and the programmer which has vanished in smaller companies and is forcing larger ones to produce slop.
felubra 1 day ago |
I'm reading Against The Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, and now reading this blog piece is hard not to make connections with the points of the book: the usage of the tree as a counter-argument for the machine's automation credo exposed in the blog post very much aligns with I've read so far.
mocamoca 1 day ago |
DeathArrow about 15 hours ago |
scuff3d 1 day ago |
Undoubtedly a lot of that comes down to production cost and safety. A plane is far more likely to kill people and it costs a shitload more to produce then an app (though plenty of software is mission critical). But now in software we can move quick enough up front that if we don't start applying some discipline it's going to bite us in the ass in the long run.
cdevries 1 day ago |
contingencies about 17 hours ago |
presentation about 16 hours ago |
aantix 1 day ago |
But no one wants to go out of their house.
Social connections. Trust. Facetime. All matter more than ever.
Want a moatable software business? Know your customers on a personal level. Have a personal relationship. Know the people that sign the contracts, know their kids names, where they vacationed last winter, their favorite local restaurant.
Get out of the house.
mayukh 1 day ago |
undefined 1 day ago |
analog8374 1 day ago |
NetMageSCW 1 day ago |
jspaetzel 1 day ago |
pugchat about 11 hours ago |
lzhgusapp about 20 hours ago |
machuz about 19 hours ago |
algolint about 17 hours ago |
steveharing1 about 19 hours ago |
tusuegra 1 day ago |
devnotes77 1 day ago |
le5051 1 day ago |
alexsdev about 16 hours ago |
ashwinnair99 1 day ago |
LeeannaOns384 about 21 hours ago |
rkwtr1299 1 day ago |
andyhedges 1 day ago |
Not true, we do this because the 99% of the time it's true, however there are people who would be perfectly competent and responsible to drive without living to the age of 16-18. Same with voting, there are humans who have a deep understanding and intelligence about politics at a younger age than suffrage. Equally there are people who will be reckless drivers at 40 and vote on whim at 60.
We have these rules not because sophistication only comes through lived experience, we have them because it's strongly correlated and covers of most error cases.
To take this to AI, run the model enough times with a higher enough temperature, then perhaps it can solve your challenges with a high enough quality - just a thought.
I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of both the good and the bad that I hear about LLM-based coding tools. Using AI for research or to spin up a quick demo or prototype is using it to help plot a course. A lot of the multi-stage agentic workflows also come down to creating guard rails before doing the main implementation so the AI can’t get too far off track. Most of the success stories I hear seem to be in these areas so far. Meanwhile, probably the most common criticism I see is that an AI that is simply given a prompt to implement some new feature or bug fix for an existing system often misunderstands or makes bad assumptions and ends up repeatedly running into dead ends. It moves fast but without knowing which direction to move in.