I recently discovered that some of the Raspberry Pi models support the Linux Kernel's "Gadget Mode". This allows you to configure the Pi to appear as some type of device when plugged into a USB port, i.e. a Mass Storage/USB stick, Network Card, etc. Very nifty for turning a Pi Zero into various kinds of utilities.
When I realized this was possible, I wanted to set up a project that would allow me to use the Pi as a bridge from my document scanner (has the ability to scan to a USB port) to a SMB share on my network that acts as the ingest point to a Paperless-NGX instance.
Scanner -> USB "drive" > Some of my code running on the Pi > The SMB Share > Paperless.
I described my scenario in a reasonable degree of detail to Claude and asked it to write the code to glue all of this together. What it produced didn't work, but was close enough that I only needed to tweak a few things.
While none of this was particularly complex, it's a bit obscure, and would have easily taken a few days of tinkering the way I have for most of my life. Instead it took a few hours, and I finished a project.
I, too, have started to think differently about the projects I take on. Projects that were previously relegated to "I should do that some day when I actually have time to dive deeper" now feel a lot more realistic.
What will truly change the game for me is when it's reasonable to run GPT-4o level models locally.
Fun fact: Gadget mode also works on Android phones, if you want a programmable USB device that you can easily program and carry around
I made a PoC of a 2FA authenticator (think Yubikey) that automatically signs you in. I use it for testing scenarios when I have to log out and back in many times, it flies through what would otherwise be a manual 2FA screen with pin entry, or navigating 2FA popups to select passkey and touching your fingerprint reader.
This answers a question I didn't realize I had. I had already been thinking about some kind of utility gadget made up of a Pi Zero with a tiny screen and battery, but an Android phone solves a lot of problems in one go.
They have some examples that emulate an USB keyboard and mouse, and the app shows how to configure the Gadget API to turn the phone into whatever USB device you want.
The repo is unfortunately inactive, but the underlying feature is exposed through a stable Linux kernel API (via ConfigFS), so everything will continue working as long as Android leaves the feature enabled.
You do need to be root, however, since you will essentially be writing a USB device. Then all you have to do is open `/dev/hidg0`, and when you read from this file you will be reading USB HID packets. Write your response and it is sent on the cable.
I always wondered if we could convert an old andoid phone or tablet into a USB/wireless graphics-tablet for drawing input -- or as a live annotator for screen presentations where I can mirror the PC slideshow on the tablet and use the tablet to make annotations during a lecture say.
If there are any such projects already -- I would e very keen to take a look.
> Instead it took a few hours, and I finished a project.
Did you?
If you wanted to expand on it, or debug it when it fails, do you really understand the solution completely? (Perhaps you do.)
Don't get me wrong, I've done the same in the last few years and I've completed several fun projects this way.
But I only use AI on things I know I don't care about personally. If I use too much AI on things I actually want to know, I feel my abilities deteriorating.
> do you really understand the solution completely?
Yes; fully. I'd describe what I delegated to the AI as "busy work". I still spent time thinking through the overall design before asking the AI for output.
> But I only use AI on things I know I don't care about personally.
Roughly speaking, I'd put my personal projects in two different categories:
1. Things that try to solve some problem in my life
2. Projects for the sake of intellectual stimulation and learning
The primary goal of this scanner project was/is to de-clutter my apartment and get rid of paper. For something like this, I prioritize getting it done over intellectual pursuits. Another option I considered was just buying a newer scanner with built-in scan-to-SMB functionality.
Using AI allowed me to split the difference. I got it done quickly, but I still learned about some things along the way that are already forming into future unrelated project ideas.
> If I use too much AI on things I actually want to know, I feel my abilities deteriorating.
I think this likely comes down to how it's used. For this particular project, I came away knowing quite a bit more about everything involved, and the AI assistance was a learning multiplier.
But to be clear, I also fully took over the code after the initial few iterations of LLM output. My goal wasn't to make the LLM build everything for me, but to bootstrap things to a point I could easily build from.
I could see using AI for category #2 projects in a more limited fashion, but likely more as a tutor/advisor.
For category #2 it’s very useful as well and ties in with the theme of the article in that it reduces the activation energy required to almost zero. I’ve been using AI relentlessly to pursue all kinds of ideas that I would otherwise simply write down and file for later. When they involve some technology or theory I know little about I can get to a working demo in less than an hour and once I have that in hand I begin exploring the concepts I’m unfamiliar with by simply asking about them: what is this part of the code doing? Why is this needed? What other options are there? What are some existing projects that do something similar? What is the theory behind this? And then also making modifications or asking for changes or features. It allows for much wider and faster exploration and let’s you build things from scratch instead of reaching for another library so you end up learning how things work at a lower level. The code does get messy but AI is also a great tool for refactoring and debugging, you just have to adjust to the faster pace of development and remember to take more frequent pauses to clean up or rebuild from a better starting point and understanding of the problem.
I think this effect of losing your abilities is somewhat overblown.
Especially when AI has saved me on actually explaining specific lines of code that would have been difficult to look up with a search engine or reference documentation and know what I was looking for.
At some point understanding is understanding, and there is no intellectual "reward" for banging your head against the wall.
Regex is the perfect example. Yes, I understand it, but it takes me a long time to parse through it manually and I use it infrequently enough that it turns into a big timewaster. It's very helpful for me to just ask AI to come up with the string and for me to verify it.
And if I were the type of person who didn't understand the result of what I was looking at, I could literally ask that very same AI to break it down and explain it.
This summarizes my feelings pretty well. I've been writing code in a dozen languages for 25+ years at this point. Not only do I not gain anything from writing certain boilerplate for the nth time, I'm also less likely to actually do the work unless it reaches some threshold of importance because it's just not interesting.
With all of this said, I can see how this could be problematic with less experience. For this scanner project, it was like having the ability to hand off some tasks to a junior engineer. But having juniors around doesn't mean senior devs will atrophy.
It will ultimately come down to how people use these tools, and the mindset they bring to their work.
Please, I would be delighted if you published that code... Just yesterday I was thinking that a two-faced Samba share/USB Mass Storage dongle Pi would save me a lot of shuttling audio samples between my desktop and my Akai MPC.
The tool itself would be of a lot of use in school science and design labs where a bunch of older kit lands from universities and such. I used to put a lot of floppy to usb converters on things like old ir spectrometers that were good enough still for school use.
I was also writing a SANE-to-Paperless bridge to run on an RPi recently, but ran into issues getting it to detect my ix500. Would love to see the code!
Well, R1 is runnable locally for under $2500; so I guess you could pool money and share the cost with other people that think they need that much power, rather than a quantized model with fewer parameters (or a distil).
I set up ollama on our work ‘AI server’ (well, grunty headless workstation running Ubuntu) and then got Dolphin-Mixtral to help me figure out why it wasn’t using the GPUs. :)
I ended up having to figure it out myself (a previous install attempt meant the running instance wasn’t the one I’d compiled with GPU support) but it was an interesting exercise.
One of my more effective uses of AI is for rubber duck debugging. I tell it what I want the code to do, iterate over what it comes back with, adjust the code ( 'now rewrite foo() so 'bar' is is passed in'). What comes back isn't necessarily perfect and I don't blindly copy and paste but that isn't the point. At the end I've worked out what I want to do and some of the tedious boiler-plate code is taken care of.
I had some results last week that I felt were really good - on a very tricky problem, using AI (Claude 3.7) helped me churn through 4 or 5 approaches that didn't work, and eventually, working in tandem, "we" found an approach that would. Then the AI helped write a basic implementation of the good approach which I was able to use as a reference for my own "real" implementation.
No, the AI would not have solved the problem without me in the loop, but it sped up the cycle of iteration and made something that might have taken me 2 weeks take just a few days.
It would be pretty tough to convince me that's not spectacularly useful.
I've tried it, and ended up with the completely wrong approach, which didn't take that long to figure out, but still wasted a good half hour. Would have been horrible if i didn't know what I was doing though.
> some of the tedious boiler-plate code is taken care of.
For me that is the bit which stands out, I'm switching languages to TypeScript and JSX right now.
Getting copilot (+ claude) to do things is much easier when I know exactly what I want, but not here and not in this framework (PHP is more my speed). There's a bunch of stuff you're supposed to know as boilerplate and there's no time to learn it all.
I am not learning a thing though, other than how to steer the AI. I don't even know what SCSS is, but I can get by.
The UI hires are in the pipeline & they should throwaway everything I build, but right now it feels like I'm making something they should imitate in functionality/style better than a document, but not in cleanliness.
My experience with ChatGPT is underwhelming. It does really basic language questions faster and easier than google now. Questions about a function signature or questions like, "how do I get the first n characters of a string". Things like that. Once I start asking it more complex questions not only does it get it wrong often, if you tell it the answer is wrong and ask to do it again it will often give you the same answer. I have no doubt it will get there, but I continue to be surprised at all the positives I hear about it.
Agreed, its always nicer for me to have something to work with, even if by the end of it its entirely rewritten.
It helps to have it generate code sometimes to just explore ideas and refine the prompt. If its obviously wrong, thats ok, sometimes I needed to see the wrong answer to get to the right one faster. If its not obviously wrong, then its a good enough starting point we can iterate to the answer.
I love throwing questions at it where previously it would have been daunting because you don't even know the right questions to ask, and the amount of research you'd need to do to even ask the proper question is super high.
Its great for ideating in that way. It does produce some legendary BS though.
> although the AI gave me crap code it still inspired the answer
This is exactly my experience using AI for code and prose. The details are like 80% slop, but it has the right overall skeleton/structure. And rewriting the details of something with a decent starting structure is way easier than generating the whole thing from scratch by hand.
What model? What wrapper? There's just a huge amount of options on the market right now, and they drastically differ in quality.
Personally, I've been using Claude Code for about a week (since it's been released) and I've been floored with how good it is. I even developed an experimental self-developing system with it.
As a mostly LLM-skeptic I reluctantly agree this is something AI actually does well. When approaching unfamiliar territory, LLMs (1) use simple language (improvement over academia but also much professional intentionally obfuscated literature), (2) use the right abstraction (they seem good at ”zooming out” to big picture of things, and (3) you can move both laterally between topics and ”zoom in” quickly. Another way of putting it is ”picking the brain” of an expert in order to build a rough mental model.
It’s downsides, such as hallucinations and lack of reasoning (yeah) aren’t very problematic here. Once you’re familiar enough you can switch to better tools and know what to look for.
My experience is instead that LLMs (those I used) can be helpful there where solutions are quite well known (e.g. a standard task in some technology used by many), and terrible where the problem has not been tackled much by the public.
About language (point (1)), I get a lot of "hypnotism for salesmen to non technical managers and roundabout comments" (e.g. "which wire should I cut, I have a red one and a blue one" // "It is mission critical to cut the right wire; in order to decide which wire to cut, we must first get acquainted with the idea that cutting the wrong wire will make the device explode..." // "Yes, which one?" // "Cutting the wrong one can have critical consequences...")
> and terrible where the problem has not been tackled much by the public
Very much so (I should have added this as a downside in the original comment). Before I even ask a question I ask myself "does it have training data on this?". Also, having a bad answer is only one failure mode. More commonly, I find that it drifts towards the "center of gravity", i.e. the mainstream or most popular school of thought, which is like talking to someone with a strong status-quo bias. However, before you've familiarized yourself with a new domain, the "current state of things" is a pretty good bargain to learn fast, at least for my brain.
> My experience is instead that LLMs (those I used) can be helpful there where solutions are quite well known
Yes, that's a necessary condition. If there isn't some well known solution, LLMs won't give you anything useful.
The point though, is that the solution was not well known to the GP. That's where LLMs shine, they "understand" what you are trying to say, and give you the answer you need, even when you don't know the applicable jargon.
I'm old enough to remember when they first said that about the Internet. We were going to enter a new enlightened age of information, giving everyone access to the sum total of human knowlege, no need to get a fancy degree, universities will be obsolete, expertise will be democratized.... See how that turned out.
The motivated will excel even further, for the less motivated nothing will change. The gap is just going to increase between high-agency individuals and everyone else.
Is it really that much worse today? When I was a kid, my great aunt died of skin cancer. She was a Christian Scientist and rejected medical treatment in favour of prayer.
As a teenager, I remember being annoyed that the newspapers had positive articles on the rejuvenating properties of nonsense like cupping and reiki. At least a few of my friends' parents had healing crystals.
People have always believed in whatever nonsense they want to believe.
It feels like the friction to get un-science has been completely removed now. Before you had to get lagged content and physically fetch it somehow. Now you can have it in the palm of your hands 24-7 with the bonus of the content being designed to enrage you to get you sucked in.
LLMs and the internet both make it easier for us to access more information, which also means we can reach dumber conclusions quicker. It does go both ways though.
In practice, not so much. Not in my experience. I have a drive littered with failed AI projects.
And by that I mean projects I have diligently tried to work with the AI (ChatGP, mostly in my case) to get something accomplished, and after hours over days of work, the projects don’t work. I shelve them and treat them like cryogenic heads. “Sometime in the future I’ll try again.”
It’s most successful with “stuff I don’t want to RTFM over”. How to git. How to curl. A working example for a library more specific to my needs.
But higher than that, no, I’ve not had success with it.
It’s also nice as a general purpose wizard code generator. But that’s just rote work.
It's true that once you have learned enough to tell the LLM exactly what answer you want, it can repeat it back to you verbatim. The question is how far short of that you should stop because the LLM is no longer an efficient way to make progress.
From a knowledge standpoint an LLM can give you pointers at any point.
Theres no way it will "fall short".
You just have to improve your prompt. In the worst case scenario you can say "please list out all the different research angles I should proceed from here and which of these might most likely yield a useful result for me"
My skepticism flares up with sentences like "Theres no way it will "fall short"." Especially in the face of so many first hand examples of LLMs being wrong, getting stuck, or falling short.
First, rote work is the kind I hate most and so having AI do it is a huge win. It’s also really good for finding bugs, albeit with guidance. It follows complicated logic like a boss.
Maybe you are running into the problem I did early. I told it what I wanted. Now I tell it what I want done. I use Claude Code and have it do its things one at a time and for each, I tell it the goal and then the steps I want it to take. I treat it as if it was a high-level programming language. Since I was more procedural with it, I get pretty good results.
They seem pretty good with human language learning. I used ChatGPT to practice reading and writing responses in French. After a few weeks I felt pretty comfortable reading a lot of common written French. My grammar is awful but that was never my goal.
I spent a couple weekends trying to reimplement microsoft's inferencing for phi4 multimodal in rust. I had zero experience messing with ONNX before. Claude produced a believably good first pass but it ended up being too much work in the end and I've put it down for the moment.
I spent a lot of time fixing Claude's misunderstanding of the `ort` library, mainly because of Claude's knowledge cutoff. In the end, the draft just wasn't complete enough to get working without diving in really deep. I also kind of learned that ONNX probably isn't the best way to approach these things anymore. Most of the mindshare is around the python code and torch apis.
LLMs don't reason the way we do, but there are similarities at the cognitive pre-conscious level.
I made a challenge to various lawyers and the Stanford Codex (no one took the bait yet) to find critical mistakes in the "reasoning" of our Legal AI. One former attorney general told us that he likes how it balances the intent of the law. Sample output (scroll and click on stats and the donuts on the second slide):
I built the AI using an inference-time=scaling approach that I evolved over a year's time, and it is based on Llama for now, but could be replace with any major foundational model.
"One former attorney general told us that he likes how it balances the intent of the law."
In a common law system you generally want actionable legal advice based on predictions on how a judge would rule in a case not "balances the intent of the law" whatever the heck that means.
The sensitivity can be turned up or down. It's why we are asking for input. If you're talking about the Disney EULA, it has the context that it is a browsewrap agreement. The setting for material omission is very greedy right now, and we could find a happy middle.
A former attorney general is taking it for a spin, and has said great things about it so far. One of the top 100 lawyers in the US. HN has turned into a pit of hate. WTF all this hate for? People just really angry at AI, it seems. JFC, Grow up.
I know you’re being disparaging by using language like “bake into their identity” but everyone is “something” about “something”.
I’m “indifferent” about “roller coasters” and “passionate” about “board games”.
To answer the question (but I’m not OP), I’m skeptical about LLMs. “These words are often near each other” vastly exceeds my expectation at being fairly convincing that the machine “knows” something, but it’s dangerously confident when it’s hilariously incorrect.
Whatever we call the next technological leap where there’s actual knowledge (not just “word statistics” I’ll be less skeptical about.
Your framing is extrapolative, mendacious and is adding what could charitably be called your interpersonal problems to a statement which is perfectly neutral, intended as an admission against general inclination to lend credibility to the observation that follows.
Someone uncharitable would say things about your cognitive abilities and character that are likely true but not useful.
Very probably not somebody who blindly picked a position, easily somebody who is quite wary of the downsides of the current state of the technology, as expressed already explicitly in the post:
> It’s downsides, such as hallucinations and lack of reasoning
With an extra 23 months of experience under my belt since then I'm comfortable to say that the effect has stayed steady for me over time, and even increased a bit.
100% agree with this, sometimes I feel I'm becoming too reliant on it - but I step back and see how much more ambitious of projects I take on, and finish quickly still, due to it.
Claude 3.7 basically one-shot a multiplayer game's server-authority rollback netcode with client-side prediction and interpolation.
I spent months of my life in my 20s trying to build a non-janky implementation of that and failed which was really demoralizing.
Over the last couple weekends I got farther than I was able to get in weeks or months. And when I get stumped, I have the confidence of being able to rubber-duck my way through it with an LLM if it can't outright fix it itself.
Though I also often wonder how much time I have left professionally in software. I try not to think about that. :D
You know the 80/20 "rule"? Well, that last 20% is what I believe will keep us around.
AI is going to be a great multiplier but if the base is 0, you can multiply it by whatever you want.
I feel ChatGPT-like products are like outsourcing to cheaper countries, it might work for some but for anyone else, now they have to hire more expensive people to fix/redo the work done by the cheaper labor. This seems to be exactly the same but using AI.
The exciting thing about AI is it let's you go back to any project or idea you've ever had and they are now possibly doable, even if they seemed impossible or too much work back then. Some of the key pieces missing have become trivial, and even if you don't know how to do something AI will help you figure it out or just let you come up with a solution that may seem dirty, but actually works, whereas before it was impossible without expert systems and grinding out so much code. It's opened so many doors. It's hard to remember ideas that you have written off before, there are so many blind spots that are now opportunities.
It doesn’t do that for things rarely done before though. And it’s poisoned with opinions from the internet. E.g. you can convince it that we have to remove bullshit layers from programming and make it straightforward. It will even print a few pages of vague bullet points about it, if not yet. But when you ask it to code, it will dump a react form.
I’m not trying to invalidate experiences itt, cause I have a similar one. But it feels futile as we are stuck with our pre-AI bloated and convoluted ways of doing things^W^W making lots of money and securing jobs by writing crap nobody understands why, and there’s no way to undo this or to teach AI to generalize.
I think this novelty is just blindness to how bad things are in the areas you know little about. For example, you may think it solves the job when you ask it to create a button and a route. And it does. But the job wasn’t to create a route, load and validate data and render it on screen in a few pages and files. The job was to take a query and to have it on screen in a couple of lines. Yes it helps writing pages of our nonsense, but it’s still nonsense. It works, but feels like we have fooled ourselves twice now. It also feels like people will soon create AI playbooks for structuring and layering their output, cause ability to code review it will deteriorate in just a few years with less seniors and much more barely-coders who get into it now.
I want to expand on your sentiment about our pre-AI mindset. Programming has made it easy to do things of essentially no value, while getting lots of money for it. Programming is additive and creative; we can always go further in modelling the world and creating chunks of it to use. But I don't see the value in the newest CRUD fullstack application or website. I don't see the intellectual stimulation or even a reasonable amount of user benefit. Programming allows us to produce a lot, but we should be scrutinizing what that lot is. "AI" that enhances what we've been doing will just continue this dull industry. Greed and a nebulous sense of progress are the primary drivers, but they're empty behind it all. Isn't progress supposed to be about good change? We should be focusing on passion projects and/or genuinely helping, or better yet elevating, users (that is to say, everyone).
> And it’s poisoned with opinions from the internet.
This is the scary part. What current AI's are very effectively doing is surfacing the best solution (from a pre-existing blog/SO answer) that I might have been able to Google 10 years ago when search was "better" and there was less SEO slop on the internet - and pre-extract the relevant code for me (which is no minor thing).
But I repeatedly have been in situations where I ask for a feature and it brings in a new library and a bunch of extra code and only 2 weeks later as I get more familiar with that library do I realize that the "extra" code I didn't understand at first is part of a Hello World blog post on that framework and I suddenly understand that I have enabled interfaces and features on my business app that were meant for a toy example.
Where are the LLM leaderboards for software estimation accuracy?
I have been using Claude Code and Aider and I do think they provide incredibly exciting potential. I can spin up new projects with mind boggling results. And, I can start projects in domains where I previously had almost no experience. It is truly exciting.
AND...
The thing I worry most about is that now non-technical managers can go into Claude and say "build me XYZ!" and the AI will build a passable first version. But, any experienced software person knows that the true cost of software is in the maintenance. That's 90% of the cost. Reducing that starting point to zero cost only reduces the total cost of software by 10%, but people are making it seem like you no longer need a software engineer that understands complex systems. Or, maybe that is just my fears vocalized.
I have seen LLMs dig into old and complex codebases and fix things that I was not expecting them to handle. I tend to write a lot of tests in my code, so I can see that the tests pass and the code compiles. The barbarians have come over the walls, truly.
But, IMHO, there is still a space where we cannot ask any of the AI coding tools to review a spec and say "Will you get this done in 2 months?" I don't think we are there, yet. I don't see that the context window is big enough to jam entire codebases inside it, and I don't yet see that these tools can anticipate a project growing into hundreds of files and managing the interdepedencies between them. They are good at writing tests, and I am impressed by that, so there is a pathway. I'm excited to understand more about how aider creates a map of the repository and effectively compresses the information in ways similar to how I keep track of high level ideas.
But, it still feels very early and there are gaps. And, I think we are in for a rude awakening when people start thinking this pushes the cost and complexity of software projects to zero. I love the potential for AI coding, but it feels like it is dangerously marketing and sales driven right now and full of hype.
I've been programming for 20 years, just so y'all know I have at least some level of competence.
I tried Vibe Coding for the first time on Friday and was blown away. It was awesome. I met some people (all programmers) at a party on Friday and excitedly told them about it. One of them tried, he loved.
Then yesterday I read a LinkedIn (Lunatic?) post about "Vibe Design", where PMs will just tell the computer what to do using some sort of visual language, where you create UI elements and drop them on a canvas, and AI makes your vision come true, etc, etc...
And my first thought was: "Wait a minute, I've seen this movie before. Back on late 90s / early 2000s it was the 4th generation programming language, and Visual Basic would allow anyone to code any system"...
And while it's true Visual Basic did allow a BUNCH of people to make money building and selling systems to video rental shops and hair saloons, programmers never went away.
I welcome anyone building more software. The tools will only get better. And programmers will adapt them, and it will make us better too, and we will still be needed.
This largely fits with a pattern I've been seeing with LLM coding. The models are often helpful, sometimes extremely so, when it comes to creating prototypes or other small greenfield projects. They can also be great at producing a snippet of code in an unfamiliar framework or language. But when it comes to modifying a large, messy, complicated code base they are much less helpful. Some people find them a useful as a beefed up autocomplete, while others don't see enough gains to offset the time/attention to use them.
I think a lot of arguments about LLM coding ability stem from people using them for the former or the latter and having very different experiences.
This morning I created a new project. I provided a postgres database URL to a remote service (with a non-standard connection string, includes a parameter "?sslmode=require"). Then, I said:
* "Write me a fastapi project to connect to a postgres database using a database url."
* "Retrieve the schema from the remote database." It used psql to connect, retrieves the schema. That was unexpected, it figured out not only a coding task, but an external tool to connect to a database and did it without anything more than me providing the DATABASE_URL. Actually, I should say, I told it to look inside the .env file, and it did that. I had that URL wrong initially, so I told it to reload once I corrected it. It never got confused by my disorganization.
* It automatically added sqlalchemy models and uses pydantic once it figured out the schema.
* "Create a webpage that lets me review one table."
* "Rewrite to use tailwindcss." It adds the correct tailwindcss CDN imports.
* It automatically adds a modal dialog when I click on one of the records.
* It categorized fields in the database into groupings inside the modal, groupings that do indeed make sense.
I know the devil is in the details, or in the future. I'm sure there are gaping security holes.
And, the update is that in the last hour claude somehow removed the rendering of the actual items. It is clever in troubleshooting: it created mocks if the data could not be loaded, it added error messages with the number of items retrieved. But, it does not have access to my browser console nor the DOM, and therein lies the problem. It is slow to copy and paste back and forth from the browser into the terminal. But, this feels like a great opportunity for a browser extension.
But, my takeaway is that I could have fixed this exact problem in five minutes if I had written the JS code. But, I have not looked at anything other than glancing at the diffs that fly by in the session.
I used claude to create a piece of software that can render gerber files (essentially vector files used in electronics manufacturing), overlay another gerber file on top of it with exact alignment, and then provide a GUI for manually highlighting components. The program then calculates the centroid, the rotation, and prompts for a component designator. This all then gets stored in a properly formatted Place file, which is used for automating assembly.
The day before this I was quote $1000/yr/user for software that could do this for us.
I used Claude + aider to create a webhook forwarding service (receives webhooks, forwards them to multiple destinations, and handles retries, errors, etc). Included a web interface for creating new endpoints and monitoring errors, and made it fully dockerized and ready to be deployed into a kubernetes cluster.
Took me like 3 hours and a few dollars in api credits to build something that would have taken me multiple days on my own. Since it's just an internal tool for our dev environments that already does what we need, I don't care that much about maintainability (especially if it takes 3 hours to build from scratch). That said, the code is reasonably usable (there was one small thing it got stuck on at the end that I assisted with).
I wanted a whiteboard app - simple, infinite, zoomable, scrollable svg-based area with custom shapes and elements. It just needed prompts like "add zoom", "add a rect shape", "add control points for resize", "add text shape", "make position attributes able to reference another objects properties, + basic arithmetic" (for example to make line connect 2 objects, or size of one mirror size of another, etc.). It made all of these with so little effort from me. I would never undertake such a project without an LLM.
> I'm excited to understand more about how aider creates a map of the repository and effectively compresses the information in ways similar to how I keep track of high level ideas.
Ok, I meant to say, I know about /map, but there is so much to explore here with an open source coding tool and LSP. It feels like you could build some very powerful ways to represent connections using a lot of cool tools that are in use inside our editors. More structured and more relevant that the poor representations I can keep inside my crappy head.
I have been using AI coding tools since the first GitHub co-pilot. One thing has not changed: garbage in = garbage out.
If you know what you are doing the tools can improve output a lot - but while you might get on for a little bit without that experience guiding you, eventually AI will code you into a corner if it's not guided right.
I saw mention of kids learning to code with AI and I have to say, that's great, but only if they are just doing it for fun.
Anyone who is thinking of a career in generating code for a living should first and foremost focus on understanding the principles. The best way to do that is still writing your own programs by hand.
The AUC of learning to program remains the same before and after AI, both for hobbyist and professionals. What changes is the slope of the on-ramp – AI makes it easier to get started, achieve first wins and learn the table-stakes for your field.
For me, it isn't just about complexity, but about customization.
I can have the LLMs build me custom bash scripts or make me my own Obsidian plugins.
They're all little cogs in my own workflow. None of these individual components are complex, but putting all of them together would have taken me ages previously.
Now I can just drop all of them into the conversation and ask it for a new script that works with them to do X.
Here's an example where I built a custom screenshot hosting tool for my blog:
I feel like I'm straddling the fence a bit on this topic.
When it comes to some personal projects, I've written a slew of them since AI coding tools got quite good. I'm primarily a backend developer, and while I've done quite a bit of frontend dev, I'm relatively slow at it, and I'm especially slow as CSS. AI has completely removed this bottleneck for me. Often times if I'm coding up a frontend, I'll literally just say "Ok, now make it pretty with a modern-looking UI", and it does a decent job, and anything I need to fix is an understandable change that I can do quickly. So now I'll whip up nice little "personal tool" apps in literally like 30 mins, where in the past I would have spent 30 mins just trying to figure out some CSS voodoo about why it's so hard to get a button centered.
But in my job, where I also use AI relatively frequently, it is great for helping to learn new things, but when I've tried to use it for things like large scale, repo-wide refactorings it's usually been a bit of a PITA - reviewing all of the code and fixing it's somewhat subtle mistakes often feels like it's slower than doing it myself.
It that sense, I think it's reasonable to consider AI like a competent junior developer (albeit at "junior developer" level across every technology ever invented). I can give a junior developer a "targeted" task, and they usually do a good job, even if I have to fix something here or there. But when I give them larger tasks that cross many components or areas of concern, that's often where they struggle mightily as well.
This article is strangely timed for me. About a year ago a company reached out to me about doing an ERP migration. I turned it away because I thought it’d just be way, way too much work.
This weekend, I called my colleague and asked him to call them back and see if they’re still trying to migrate. AI definitely has changed my calculus around what I can take on.
Found the same thing.
I was toying with a Discord bot a few weeks ago that involved setting up and running a node server, deployed to Fly via docker. A bunch of stuff a bit out of my wheelhouse. All of it turned out to be totally straightforward with LLM assistance.
Can you describe how you used LLMs for deployment? I'm actually doing this exact thing but I'm feeling annoyed by DevOps and codebase setup work. I wonder if I'm just being too particular about which tools I'm using rather than just going with the flow
Being able to write code that compiled into assembly, instead of directly writing assembly, meant you could do more. Which soon meant you had to do more, because now everyone was expecting it.
The internet meant you could take advantage of open source to build more complex software. Now, you have to.
Cloud meant you could orchestrate complicated apps. Now you can't not know how it works.
LLMs will be the same. At the moment people are still mostly playing with it, but pretty soon it will be "hey why are you writing our REST API consumer by hand? LLM can do that for you!"
And they won't be wrong, if you can get the lower level components of a system done easily by LLM, you need to be looking at a higher level.
> LLMs will be the same. At the moment people are still mostly playing with it, but pretty soon it will be "hey why are you writing our REST API consumer by hand? LLM can do that for you!"
Not everyone wants to be a "prompt engineer", or let their skills rust and be replaced with a dependency on a proprietary service. Not to mention the potentially detrimental cognitive effects of relegating all your thinking to LLMs in the long term.
I recall hearing a lot of assembly engineers not wanting to let their skills rust either. They didn't want to be a "4th gen engineer" and have their skills replaced by proprietary compilers.
Same with folks who were used to ftp directly into prod and used folders instead of source control.
Look, I get it, it's frustrating to be really good at current tech and feel like the rug is getting pulled. I've been through a few cycles of all new shiny tools. It's always been better for me to embrace the new with a cheerful attitude. Being grumpy just makes people sour and leave the industry in a few years.
This is a different proposition, really. It’s one thing to move up the layers of abstraction in code. It’s quite another thing to delegate authoring code altogether to a fallible statistical model.
The former puts you in command of more machinery, but the tools are dependable. The latter requires you to stay sharp at your current level, else you won’t be able to spot the problems.
Although… I would argue that in the former case you should learn assembly at least once, so that your computer doesn’t seem like a magic box.
> It’s quite another thing to delegate authoring code altogether to a fallible statistical model.
Isnt this what a compiler is really doing? JIT optimizes code based on heuristics, it a code path is considered hot. Sure, we might be able to annotate it, but by and large you let the tools figure it out so that we can focus on other things.
But the compiler’s heuristic optimization doesn’t change the effects of the code, does it? Admittedly I’m no compiler expert, but I’ve always been able to have 100% trust that my compiled code will function as written.
I agree that not everyone wants to be. I think OPs point though is the market will make “not being a prompt engineer” a niche like being a COBOL programmer in 2025.
I’m not sure I entirely agree but I do think the paradigm is shifting enough that I feel bad for my coworkers who intentionally don’t use AI. I can see a new skill developing in myself that augments my ability to perform and they are still taking ages doing the same old thing. Frankly, now is the sweet spot because the expectation hasn’t raised enough to meet the output so you can either squeeze time to tackle that tech debt or find time to kick up your feet until the industry catches up.
Even the example in the post seemed closely related to other advances in consumer-level computing:
I re-created this system using an RPi5 compute module and a $20 camera sensor plugged into it. Within two hours I wrote my first machine learning [application], using the AI to assist me and got the camera on a RPi board to read levels of wine in wine bottles on my test rig. The original project took me six weeks solid!
Undoubtedly this would have taken longer without AI. But I imagine the Raspberry Pi + camera was easier to set up out-of-the-box than whatever they used 14 years ago, and it's definitely easier to set up a paint-by-numbers ML system in Python.
I use Cursor to write Python programs to solve tasks in my daily work that need to be completed with programming. It's very convenient, and I no longer need to ask the company's programmers for help. Large language models are truly revolutionary productivity tools.
1. Lower learning curve, for new or revived skills (weaving - gather and summarize)
2. Lower incremental cost: almost always faster at choosing the next step (scouting)
3. Faster time-to-maturity: when building test suites, faster both at first-pass coverage and at gap-filling (zoo-keeping)
But the huge, gaping pitfall -- now coming down the tracks even faster -- is the same as without AI: once you build a complex system, committing to its invariants, you quickly find it difficult to change in the direction you want, because each choice triggers a tangle of incommensurable choices. Sometimes heroic re-factorings (beyond AI now) can extend life a bit, but usually the only people who can avoid abrupt stasis are those with deep experience and the insight into how to change things (incrementally). I'd guess with AI such pitfalls become more common and more difficult to escape.
So: yes, think bigger for projects with relatively definitive and complete requirements, but take care with foundational code you expect to grow.
I definitely felt this. I thought "If I have to redo this in Flutter or in Swift, I can". I don't know either, so have to move with some caution (but it's all very exciting).
At first glance, it seems like _porting_ code to another language / api .. is probably a good sweet spot for these code LLMs ..
.. and even automating the testing to check results match, coming up with edge cases etc.
... and if thats true, then they could be useful for _optimizing_ by porting to other apis / algos, checking same-ness of behavior, then comparing performance.
The whole "vibe coding" doesn't grab me - as I feel the bottleneck is with my creativity and understanding rather than generating viable code - using a productive expressive language like javascript or lisp and working on a small code base helps that.
eg. I would like to be able to take an algo and port it to run on GPU for example... without having to ingest much arcane api quirks. JAX looks like a nice target, but Ive held off for now.
> At first glance, it seems like _porting_ code to another language / api .. is probably a good sweet spot for these code LLMs ..
I recently ported skatevideosite.com from svelte/python to ruby on rails. I leaned on AI heavily to translate the svelte files to ERB templates and it did a wonderful job.
My experiene generally with these systems is that they are good with handling things you _give_ it, but less so when coming up with stuff from scratch.
For example I've tried to use it to build out additional features and the results are subpar.
It seems like the emphasis on getting results in one shot reduces the maximum potential quality of the output as compared to a more incremental approach. For example, create an initial prompt to generate a structured description of the features in the program you've described. You can then iterate on this and follow up with a prompt that generates a structured description of a system architecture based on the feature description, and iterate on that. You could build up other informational layers as well, before aggregating all that structural data into the generation of the actual code. This can feed into the generation of tests as well.
If you look at things like LLM party for comfyui, it's the same basic concept.
Agree, let’s build direct democratic simulated multiverse.
Or at least make a digital back up of Earth.
Or at least represent an LLM as a green field with objects, where humans are the only agents:
you stand near a monkey, see chewing mouth nearby, go there (your prompt now is “monkey chews”), close by you see an arrow pointing at a banana, father away an arrow points at an apple, very far away at the horizon an arrow points at a tire (monkeys rarely chew tires).
So things close by are more likely tokens, things far away are less likely, you see all of them at once (maybe you’re on top of a hill to see farther). This way we can make a form of static place AI, where humans are the only agents
Yes -- LLMs can write a lot of code and after some reviewing it can also go to prod -- but I have not nearly enough applications of LLMs on the post-prod phase; like dealing with evolution in requirements, ensuring security as zero days get discovered, etc.
Would love to hear folks' experience around "managing" all this new code.
The method could not be performed on the resource because the server is unable to store the representation needed to successfully complete the request. There is insufficient free space left in your storage allocation.
Additionally, a 507 Insufficient Storage error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
bugger! More than two visitors to my web site and it falls apart, I might fork out the $10 for the better CPU and more memory option before I post something in future.
We really need to get nuanced about the discussion around LLMs in programming. My experience is that LLMs work great for producing glue code. Join together a bunch of well documented APIs? LLMs will make enough progress that I can finish it myself. Produce a pile of HTML and CSS for a nondescript design? I'll get at least a mostly working result that I can easily fix up. But try to, say, design a cross platform GUI library and the results are underwhelming. LLMs know a heck of a lot of stuff, but they are not very good at working with concepts.
The missing piece in your view here is that eventually nearly all code is or eventually becomes gibberish glue code, or it stops being used. LLMs just speed up the cycle.
Claude gave me the confidence to setup a router using the relatively obscure VyOS network stack. It was a lot of back and forth. The syntax has changed quite a bit between versions and Claude kept giving me out of date code. I would reply with the error message and snippets of the current documentation and it would try again. Things eventually worked. Perhaps it was a bit of a "stone soup" situation, but I would not have attempted the project without the assistance of an LLM.
What psychedelic/mind-altering/weird coaching prompts do you use?
I have separate system prompts for taboo-teaching, excessive-pedanticism, excessive-toxicity, excessive-praise, et cetera.
My general rules is anything & everything humans would never ever do, but that would somehow allow me to explore altered states of consciousness, ways of thinking, my mind, the world, better. Something to make me smarter from the experience of the chat.
it's interesting, it feels like less needing to think much bigger and more so that we're now able to accept that much bigger ideas we've been thinking about are far more feasible.
that's so cool. all those grand ideas that felt so far away are right here ready to grasp and realize.
You don't want to use AI for complex things that you might not fully understand. These are the cases where you'll miss the hallucinations and get fucked
> I am now at a real impasse, towards the end of my career and knowing I could happily start it all again with a new insight and much bigger visions for what I could take on. It feels like wining the lottery two weeks before you die
I envy this optimistic. I am not the opposite (im a sr engineer with more than 15 years of experience), but I am scared about my future. I invested too much time in learning concepts, theory, getting a Master degree, and in a few years all of my knowledge can be useless in the market.
IT is never static. I have had to take several forks in my career with languages and technologies often leading to dead-ends and re-training. It is amazing how much you learn doing one thing directly translates to another, it can often lead to you not having a specific/narrow mindset too.
Having an LLM next to you means there is never a stupid question, I ask the AI the same stupid questions repeatedly until I get it, that is not really possible with a smart human, even if they have the patience, you are often afraid to look dumb in their eyes.
I'm worried about being replaced by LLM. If it keeps evolving to the point where a CTO can ask LLM to do something and deploy it, why he would pay for a team of engineers?
Forking to different technologies and languages is one thing (I've been there, I started with PHP and I haven't touch it for almost a decade now), but being replaced by a new tech is something different. I don't see how I could pivot to still be useful.
I see it more as “if an LLM can do that, why would I need an employer?”
This coin has two sides. If a CTO can live without you, you can live without an expensive buffer between you and your clients. He’s now just a guy like you, and adds little value compared to everyone else.
I think the replacement for developers won't be CTOs but program managers -- folks with business degrees (or none at all) but who understand the company's needs for the software and can translate them into prompts to build the product without any understanding of how to code. (Some places call these folks 'software anthropologists'.) They'll hone the product iteratively though development almost like a genetic algorithm would, by trial and error -- rejecting or revising the output verbally (and eventually by interacting with components seen on the screen). Vibe programming by business types will replace today's software engineers.
Where in reality can a CTO talk to a human and deploy it? It takes engineers to understand the requirements and to iterate with the CTO. The CTO has better things to do with their time than wrestle with an LLM all day.
I could not disagree more. Those concepts, theories and all that knowledge is what makes it so powerful. I feel successful with AI because I know what to do (I’m older than you by a lot). I talk to younger people and they don’t know how to think about a big system or have the ability to communicate their strategies. You do. I’m 72 and was bored. Now that Claude will do the drudgery, I am inspired.
I understand your point of view and I do agree that with the current state of affairs I am kind of OK. It's useful for me, and I am still needed.
But seeing the progress and adoption, I wonder what will happen when that valuable skill (how to think about a big system, etc) will also be replicated by AI. and then, poof.
I certainly feel uneasy. To whatever extent “AI” fulfills its promise of enabling regular people to get computers to do exactly what needs doing, that’s the extent that the “priest class” like me who knows how to decide what’s feasible and design a good system to do it, will be made redundant. I guess I hope it moves slowly enough that I can get enough years in on easy mode (this current stage where technical people can easily 5-10x their previous output by leveraging the AI tools ourselves).
But if the advancement moves too slowly, we will have some serious pipeline problems filling senior engineer positions, caused by the destruction that AI (combined with the end of ZIRP) has caused to job prospects for entry level software engineers.
An undergrad using the hottest tech right of the bat? Cooked.
What if I tell you there is an undergrad that just flunked a class and is depressed and cries about it? Considers changing their major? This is pre-AI. We have a chance that undergrads will never feel that way again. Not intimidated by anything.
Using AI has changed everything for me and made my ambition swell. I despise looking up the details of frameworks and api’s, transmitting a change of strategy through a system, typing the usual stupid loops and processes that are the foundation of all programs. Hell, the amount of time I save on typing errors is worth it.
I have plans for many things I didn’t have the energy for in the past.
I recently discovered that some of the Raspberry Pi models support the Linux Kernel's "Gadget Mode". This allows you to configure the Pi to appear as some type of device when plugged into a USB port, i.e. a Mass Storage/USB stick, Network Card, etc. Very nifty for turning a Pi Zero into various kinds of utilities.
When I realized this was possible, I wanted to set up a project that would allow me to use the Pi as a bridge from my document scanner (has the ability to scan to a USB port) to a SMB share on my network that acts as the ingest point to a Paperless-NGX instance.
Scanner -> USB "drive" > Some of my code running on the Pi > The SMB Share > Paperless.
I described my scenario in a reasonable degree of detail to Claude and asked it to write the code to glue all of this together. What it produced didn't work, but was close enough that I only needed to tweak a few things.
While none of this was particularly complex, it's a bit obscure, and would have easily taken a few days of tinkering the way I have for most of my life. Instead it took a few hours, and I finished a project.
I, too, have started to think differently about the projects I take on. Projects that were previously relegated to "I should do that some day when I actually have time to dive deeper" now feel a lot more realistic.
What will truly change the game for me is when it's reasonable to run GPT-4o level models locally.
Fun fact: Gadget mode also works on Android phones, if you want a programmable USB device that you can easily program and carry around
I made a PoC of a 2FA authenticator (think Yubikey) that automatically signs you in. I use it for testing scenarios when I have to log out and back in many times, it flies through what would otherwise be a manual 2FA screen with pin entry, or navigating 2FA popups to select passkey and touching your fingerprint reader.
Obviously not very secure, but very useful!
This answers a question I didn't realize I had. I had already been thinking about some kind of utility gadget made up of a Pi Zero with a tiny screen and battery, but an Android phone solves a lot of problems in one go.
Interesting !
I have a bunch of older android phones that could be repurposed for some tinkering.
The touchscreen display and input would open a lot more interactive possibilities.
Is there a community or gallery of ideas and projects that leverage this?
There is this repository: https://github.com/tejado/android-usb-gadget
They have some examples that emulate an USB keyboard and mouse, and the app shows how to configure the Gadget API to turn the phone into whatever USB device you want.
The repo is unfortunately inactive, but the underlying feature is exposed through a stable Linux kernel API (via ConfigFS), so everything will continue working as long as Android leaves the feature enabled.
You do need to be root, however, since you will essentially be writing a USB device. Then all you have to do is open `/dev/hidg0`, and when you read from this file you will be reading USB HID packets. Write your response and it is sent on the cable.
Excellent - Thanks!
I always wondered if we could convert an old andoid phone or tablet into a USB/wireless graphics-tablet for drawing input -- or as a live annotator for screen presentations where I can mirror the PC slideshow on the tablet and use the tablet to make annotations during a lecture say.
If there are any such projects already -- I would e very keen to take a look.
There is also support for doing this without being root:
https://developer.android.com/develop/connectivity/usb
> Instead it took a few hours, and I finished a project.
Did you?
If you wanted to expand on it, or debug it when it fails, do you really understand the solution completely? (Perhaps you do.)
Don't get me wrong, I've done the same in the last few years and I've completed several fun projects this way.
But I only use AI on things I know I don't care about personally. If I use too much AI on things I actually want to know, I feel my abilities deteriorating.
> Did you?
Yes.
> do you really understand the solution completely?
Yes; fully. I'd describe what I delegated to the AI as "busy work". I still spent time thinking through the overall design before asking the AI for output.
> But I only use AI on things I know I don't care about personally.
Roughly speaking, I'd put my personal projects in two different categories:
1. Things that try to solve some problem in my life
2. Projects for the sake of intellectual stimulation and learning
The primary goal of this scanner project was/is to de-clutter my apartment and get rid of paper. For something like this, I prioritize getting it done over intellectual pursuits. Another option I considered was just buying a newer scanner with built-in scan-to-SMB functionality.
Using AI allowed me to split the difference. I got it done quickly, but I still learned about some things along the way that are already forming into future unrelated project ideas.
> If I use too much AI on things I actually want to know, I feel my abilities deteriorating.
I think this likely comes down to how it's used. For this particular project, I came away knowing quite a bit more about everything involved, and the AI assistance was a learning multiplier.
But to be clear, I also fully took over the code after the initial few iterations of LLM output. My goal wasn't to make the LLM build everything for me, but to bootstrap things to a point I could easily build from.
I could see using AI for category #2 projects in a more limited fashion, but likely more as a tutor/advisor.
For category #2 it’s very useful as well and ties in with the theme of the article in that it reduces the activation energy required to almost zero. I’ve been using AI relentlessly to pursue all kinds of ideas that I would otherwise simply write down and file for later. When they involve some technology or theory I know little about I can get to a working demo in less than an hour and once I have that in hand I begin exploring the concepts I’m unfamiliar with by simply asking about them: what is this part of the code doing? Why is this needed? What other options are there? What are some existing projects that do something similar? What is the theory behind this? And then also making modifications or asking for changes or features. It allows for much wider and faster exploration and let’s you build things from scratch instead of reaching for another library so you end up learning how things work at a lower level. The code does get messy but AI is also a great tool for refactoring and debugging, you just have to adjust to the faster pace of development and remember to take more frequent pauses to clean up or rebuild from a better starting point and understanding of the problem.
I think this effect of losing your abilities is somewhat overblown.
Especially when AI has saved me on actually explaining specific lines of code that would have been difficult to look up with a search engine or reference documentation and know what I was looking for.
At some point understanding is understanding, and there is no intellectual "reward" for banging your head against the wall.
Regex is the perfect example. Yes, I understand it, but it takes me a long time to parse through it manually and I use it infrequently enough that it turns into a big timewaster. It's very helpful for me to just ask AI to come up with the string and for me to verify it.
And if I were the type of person who didn't understand the result of what I was looking at, I could literally ask that very same AI to break it down and explain it.
This summarizes my feelings pretty well. I've been writing code in a dozen languages for 25+ years at this point. Not only do I not gain anything from writing certain boilerplate for the nth time, I'm also less likely to actually do the work unless it reaches some threshold of importance because it's just not interesting.
With all of this said, I can see how this could be problematic with less experience. For this scanner project, it was like having the ability to hand off some tasks to a junior engineer. But having juniors around doesn't mean senior devs will atrophy.
It will ultimately come down to how people use these tools, and the mindset they bring to their work.
Please, I would be delighted if you published that code... Just yesterday I was thinking that a two-faced Samba share/USB Mass Storage dongle Pi would save me a lot of shuttling audio samples between my desktop and my Akai MPC.
I've been thinking about writing up a blog post about it. Might have to do a Show HN when time allows.
This guide was a huge help: https://github.com/thagrol/Guides/blob/main/mass-storage-gad...
Please do-I think this is a great example of how AI can be helpful.
We see so many stories about how terrible AI coding is. We need more practical stories of how it can help.
The tool itself would be of a lot of use in school science and design labs where a bunch of older kit lands from universities and such. I used to put a lot of floppy to usb converters on things like old ir spectrometers that were good enough still for school use.
Yep!
I’m teaching kids in Bayview how to code using AI tools. I’m trying to figure out the best way to do it without losing anything in between.
With my pilot students I’ve found the ones I gave cursor are outperforming the ones who aren’t using AI.
Not just with deliverables, but with fundamental knowledge(what is a function?).
Small sample size so I don’t want to make proclamations… but I think a generation learning how to code with these tools is going to be unstoppable.
> Not just with deliverables, but with fundamental knowledge(what is a function?)
Are you testing this knowledge in a situation where they don't have access to AI tools?
If not, then I seriously wonder if this claim means anything
I was also writing a SANE-to-Paperless bridge to run on an RPi recently, but ran into issues getting it to detect my ix500. Would love to see the code!
Well, R1 is runnable locally for under $2500; so I guess you could pool money and share the cost with other people that think they need that much power, rather than a quantized model with fewer parameters (or a distil).
That gives me ideas.
I think a lot of the reason linux isn't used for lots of things is that you have to basically be a sysadmin to set up some things.
for example, setting up a local LLM.
I wonder what you would call getting a "remote" AI to help set up a local AI?
Something like but not exactly emancipation or emigration or ...
I set up ollama on our work ‘AI server’ (well, grunty headless workstation running Ubuntu) and then got Dolphin-Mixtral to help me figure out why it wasn’t using the GPUs. :)
I ended up having to figure it out myself (a previous install attempt meant the running instance wasn’t the one I’d compiled with GPU support) but it was an interesting exercise.
Uncertain if AI doesn't understand it will get more resources, or it DOES understand and a recompile is an existential nightmare. :)
would you have paid someone to do it over solving the challenge yourself?
I had a minor desire to make a feature that had a slightly higher effort than reward, so although I knew I could struggle it out I didn't bother.
After years of this I decided to give an AI a shot at the code. It produced something plausible looking and I was excited. Was it that easy?
The code didn't work. But the approach made me more motivated to look into it and I found a solution.
So although the AI gave me crap code it still inspired the answer, so I'm calling that a win.
Simply making things feel approachable can be enough.
One of my more effective uses of AI is for rubber duck debugging. I tell it what I want the code to do, iterate over what it comes back with, adjust the code ( 'now rewrite foo() so 'bar' is is passed in'). What comes back isn't necessarily perfect and I don't blindly copy and paste but that isn't the point. At the end I've worked out what I want to do and some of the tedious boiler-plate code is taken care of.
I had some results last week that I felt were really good - on a very tricky problem, using AI (Claude 3.7) helped me churn through 4 or 5 approaches that didn't work, and eventually, working in tandem, "we" found an approach that would. Then the AI helped write a basic implementation of the good approach which I was able to use as a reference for my own "real" implementation.
No, the AI would not have solved the problem without me in the loop, but it sped up the cycle of iteration and made something that might have taken me 2 weeks take just a few days.
It would be pretty tough to convince me that's not spectacularly useful.
I've tried it, and ended up with the completely wrong approach, which didn't take that long to figure out, but still wasted a good half hour. Would have been horrible if i didn't know what I was doing though.
Yes, that's one of the bigger traps. In my case I knew what needed to be done and could've done it on my own if I really needed to.
A novice with no idea could blunder through but get lost quickly.
> some of the tedious boiler-plate code is taken care of.
For me that is the bit which stands out, I'm switching languages to TypeScript and JSX right now.
Getting copilot (+ claude) to do things is much easier when I know exactly what I want, but not here and not in this framework (PHP is more my speed). There's a bunch of stuff you're supposed to know as boilerplate and there's no time to learn it all.
I am not learning a thing though, other than how to steer the AI. I don't even know what SCSS is, but I can get by.
The UI hires are in the pipeline & they should throwaway everything I build, but right now it feels like I'm making something they should imitate in functionality/style better than a document, but not in cleanliness.
The idea of untangling AI generated typescript spaghetti fills me with dread.
It’s as bad as untangling the last guy’s typescript spaghetti. He quit, so I can’t ask him about it either.
When you ask AI to do a thing, you at least have some minimal amount of intent — you just need to retain the prompt.
Most of the time, programmers don’t record all of the assumptions and design decisions in code or documentation.
Weird argument, but I’m down to bikeshed a bit.
most of the time there’s an old ticket in the work tracker.
I’d bet those tickets contain at least as much info as any prompt.
My experience with ChatGPT is underwhelming. It does really basic language questions faster and easier than google now. Questions about a function signature or questions like, "how do I get the first n characters of a string". Things like that. Once I start asking it more complex questions not only does it get it wrong often, if you tell it the answer is wrong and ask to do it again it will often give you the same answer. I have no doubt it will get there, but I continue to be surprised at all the positives I hear about it.
What language are you writing? I mostly write go these days, and have often wondered if it is uniquely good in that language given its constraints.
Agreed, its always nicer for me to have something to work with, even if by the end of it its entirely rewritten.
It helps to have it generate code sometimes to just explore ideas and refine the prompt. If its obviously wrong, thats ok, sometimes I needed to see the wrong answer to get to the right one faster. If its not obviously wrong, then its a good enough starting point we can iterate to the answer.
I love throwing questions at it where previously it would have been daunting because you don't even know the right questions to ask, and the amount of research you'd need to do to even ask the proper question is super high.
Its great for ideating in that way. It does produce some legendary BS though.
it looks like a variation of Stone soup story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup
> although the AI gave me crap code it still inspired the answer
This is exactly my experience using AI for code and prose. The details are like 80% slop, but it has the right overall skeleton/structure. And rewriting the details of something with a decent starting structure is way easier than generating the whole thing from scratch by hand.
> I decided to give an AI
What model? What wrapper? There's just a huge amount of options on the market right now, and they drastically differ in quality.
Personally, I've been using Claude Code for about a week (since it's been released) and I've been floored with how good it is. I even developed an experimental self-developing system with it.
I prefer open source models.
I had a similar experience but found that with a little prodding, I was even able to get it to finish the job.
Then it was a little messy, so I asked it to refactor it.
Of course, not everything lends itself to this: often I already know exactly the code I want and it's easier to just type it than corral the AI.
As a mostly LLM-skeptic I reluctantly agree this is something AI actually does well. When approaching unfamiliar territory, LLMs (1) use simple language (improvement over academia but also much professional intentionally obfuscated literature), (2) use the right abstraction (they seem good at ”zooming out” to big picture of things, and (3) you can move both laterally between topics and ”zoom in” quickly. Another way of putting it is ”picking the brain” of an expert in order to build a rough mental model.
It’s downsides, such as hallucinations and lack of reasoning (yeah) aren’t very problematic here. Once you’re familiar enough you can switch to better tools and know what to look for.
My experience is instead that LLMs (those I used) can be helpful there where solutions are quite well known (e.g. a standard task in some technology used by many), and terrible where the problem has not been tackled much by the public.
About language (point (1)), I get a lot of "hypnotism for salesmen to non technical managers and roundabout comments" (e.g. "which wire should I cut, I have a red one and a blue one" // "It is mission critical to cut the right wire; in order to decide which wire to cut, we must first get acquainted with the idea that cutting the wrong wire will make the device explode..." // "Yes, which one?" // "Cutting the wrong one can have critical consequences...")
> and terrible where the problem has not been tackled much by the public
Very much so (I should have added this as a downside in the original comment). Before I even ask a question I ask myself "does it have training data on this?". Also, having a bad answer is only one failure mode. More commonly, I find that it drifts towards the "center of gravity", i.e. the mainstream or most popular school of thought, which is like talking to someone with a strong status-quo bias. However, before you've familiarized yourself with a new domain, the "current state of things" is a pretty good bargain to learn fast, at least for my brain.
> My experience is instead that LLMs (those I used) can be helpful there where solutions are quite well known
Yes, that's a necessary condition. If there isn't some well known solution, LLMs won't give you anything useful.
The point though, is that the solution was not well known to the GP. That's where LLMs shine, they "understand" what you are trying to say, and give you the answer you need, even when you don't know the applicable jargon.
Agreed. LLMs pull you towards the average knowledge, and they suck when you're trying to find a creative solution that challenges the status quo.
Yes. LLMs are the perfect learning assistant.
You can now do literally anything. Literally.
Going to take a while for everyone to figure this out but they will given time.
I'm old enough to remember when they first said that about the Internet. We were going to enter a new enlightened age of information, giving everyone access to the sum total of human knowlege, no need to get a fancy degree, universities will be obsolete, expertise will be democratized.... See how that turned out.
The motivated will excel even further, for the less motivated nothing will change. The gap is just going to increase between high-agency individuals and everyone else.
I'm old enough to remember when they first said that about the Internet.
(Shrug) It was pretty much true. But it's like what Linus says in an old Peanuts cartoon: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1969/07/20
I’d suggest we are much closer to that reality now than we were in the 90s, in large part thanks to the internet.
Since the Internet became ubiquitous, more people believe the moon landing, climate change, and vaccines are hoaxes.
Is it really that much worse today? When I was a kid, my great aunt died of skin cancer. She was a Christian Scientist and rejected medical treatment in favour of prayer.
As a teenager, I remember being annoyed that the newspapers had positive articles on the rejuvenating properties of nonsense like cupping and reiki. At least a few of my friends' parents had healing crystals.
People have always believed in whatever nonsense they want to believe.
It feels like the friction to get un-science has been completely removed now. Before you had to get lagged content and physically fetch it somehow. Now you can have it in the palm of your hands 24-7 with the bonus of the content being designed to enrage you to get you sucked in.
LLMs and the internet both make it easier for us to access more information, which also means we can reach dumber conclusions quicker. It does go both ways though.
As an aside, internet hasn’t officially been a proper noun since 2016 or so.
In practice, not so much. Not in my experience. I have a drive littered with failed AI projects.
And by that I mean projects I have diligently tried to work with the AI (ChatGP, mostly in my case) to get something accomplished, and after hours over days of work, the projects don’t work. I shelve them and treat them like cryogenic heads. “Sometime in the future I’ll try again.”
It’s most successful with “stuff I don’t want to RTFM over”. How to git. How to curl. A working example for a library more specific to my needs.
But higher than that, no, I’ve not had success with it.
It’s also nice as a general purpose wizard code generator. But that’s just rote work.
YMMV
You just aren’t delving deep enough.
For every problem that stops you, ask the LLM. With enough context it’ll give you at least a mediocre way to get around your problem.
It’s still a lot of hard work. But the only person that can stop yourself is you. (Which it looks like you’ve done.)
List the reasons you’ve stopped below and I’ll give you prompts to get around them.
It's true that once you have learned enough to tell the LLM exactly what answer you want, it can repeat it back to you verbatim. The question is how far short of that you should stop because the LLM is no longer an efficient way to make progress.
From a knowledge standpoint an LLM can give you pointers at any point.
Theres no way it will "fall short".
You just have to improve your prompt. In the worst case scenario you can say "please list out all the different research angles I should proceed from here and which of these might most likely yield a useful result for me"
My skepticism flares up with sentences like "Theres no way it will "fall short"." Especially in the face of so many first hand examples of LLMs being wrong, getting stuck, or falling short.
First, rote work is the kind I hate most and so having AI do it is a huge win. It’s also really good for finding bugs, albeit with guidance. It follows complicated logic like a boss.
Maybe you are running into the problem I did early. I told it what I wanted. Now I tell it what I want done. I use Claude Code and have it do its things one at a time and for each, I tell it the goal and then the steps I want it to take. I treat it as if it was a high-level programming language. Since I was more procedural with it, I get pretty good results.
I hope that helps.
They seem pretty good with human language learning. I used ChatGPT to practice reading and writing responses in French. After a few weeks I felt pretty comfortable reading a lot of common written French. My grammar is awful but that was never my goal.
I don't know. I wouldn't trust a brain surgeon who has up til now only been messing around on LLMs.
Edit: and for that matter I also would not trust a brain surgeon who had only read about brain surgery in medical texts.
I spent a couple weekends trying to reimplement microsoft's inferencing for phi4 multimodal in rust. I had zero experience messing with ONNX before. Claude produced a believably good first pass but it ended up being too much work in the end and I've put it down for the moment.
I spent a lot of time fixing Claude's misunderstanding of the `ort` library, mainly because of Claude's knowledge cutoff. In the end, the draft just wasn't complete enough to get working without diving in really deep. I also kind of learned that ONNX probably isn't the best way to approach these things anymore. Most of the mindshare is around the python code and torch apis.
LLMs don't reason the way we do, but there are similarities at the cognitive pre-conscious level.
I made a challenge to various lawyers and the Stanford Codex (no one took the bait yet) to find critical mistakes in the "reasoning" of our Legal AI. One former attorney general told us that he likes how it balances the intent of the law. Sample output (scroll and click on stats and the donuts on the second slide):
Samples: https://labs.sunami.ai/feed
I built the AI using an inference-time=scaling approach that I evolved over a year's time, and it is based on Llama for now, but could be replace with any major foundational model.
Presentation: https://prezi.com/view/g2CZCqnn56NAKKbyO3P5/ 8-minute long video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rib4gU1HW8&t=233s
info sunami ai
"One former attorney general told us that he likes how it balances the intent of the law."
In a common law system you generally want actionable legal advice based on predictions on how a judge would rule in a case not "balances the intent of the law" whatever the heck that means.
.
The sensitivity can be turned up or down. It's why we are asking for input. If you're talking about the Disney EULA, it has the context that it is a browsewrap agreement. The setting for material omission is very greedy right now, and we could find a happy middle.
A former attorney general is taking it for a spin, and has said great things about it so far. One of the top 100 lawyers in the US. HN has turned into a pit of hate. WTF all this hate for? People just really angry at AI, it seems. JFC, Grow up.
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I know you’re being disparaging by using language like “bake into their identity” but everyone is “something” about “something”.
I’m “indifferent” about “roller coasters” and “passionate” about “board games”.
To answer the question (but I’m not OP), I’m skeptical about LLMs. “These words are often near each other” vastly exceeds my expectation at being fairly convincing that the machine “knows” something, but it’s dangerously confident when it’s hilariously incorrect.
Whatever we call the next technological leap where there’s actual knowledge (not just “word statistics” I’ll be less skeptical about.
Your framing is extrapolative, mendacious and is adding what could charitably be called your interpersonal problems to a statement which is perfectly neutral, intended as an admission against general inclination to lend credibility to the observation that follows.
Someone uncharitable would say things about your cognitive abilities and character that are likely true but not useful.
They didn’t say that they were invested in it.
> invested
Very probably not somebody who blindly picked a position, easily somebody who is quite wary of the downsides of the current state of the technology, as expressed already explicitly in the post:
> It’s downsides, such as hallucinations and lack of reasoning
Probably all the hype and bs.
I wrote something similar about this effect almost two years ago: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen... "AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects"
With an extra 23 months of experience under my belt since then I'm comfortable to say that the effect has stayed steady for me over time, and even increased a bit.
100% agree with this, sometimes I feel I'm becoming too reliant on it - but I step back and see how much more ambitious of projects I take on, and finish quickly still, due to it.
Claude 3.7 basically one-shot a multiplayer game's server-authority rollback netcode with client-side prediction and interpolation.
I spent months of my life in my 20s trying to build a non-janky implementation of that and failed which was really demoralizing.
Over the last couple weekends I got farther than I was able to get in weeks or months. And when I get stumped, I have the confidence of being able to rubber-duck my way through it with an LLM if it can't outright fix it itself.
Though I also often wonder how much time I have left professionally in software. I try not to think about that. :D
You know the 80/20 "rule"? Well, that last 20% is what I believe will keep us around.
AI is going to be a great multiplier but if the base is 0, you can multiply it by whatever you want.
I feel ChatGPT-like products are like outsourcing to cheaper countries, it might work for some but for anyone else, now they have to hire more expensive people to fix/redo the work done by the cheaper labor. This seems to be exactly the same but using AI.
Around that time you highlighted the threat of prompt injection attacks on AI assistants. Have you also been able to make progress in this area?
Frustratingly I feel we've made very little progress towards a fix for that problem in nearly 2.5 years!
The exciting thing about AI is it let's you go back to any project or idea you've ever had and they are now possibly doable, even if they seemed impossible or too much work back then. Some of the key pieces missing have become trivial, and even if you don't know how to do something AI will help you figure it out or just let you come up with a solution that may seem dirty, but actually works, whereas before it was impossible without expert systems and grinding out so much code. It's opened so many doors. It's hard to remember ideas that you have written off before, there are so many blind spots that are now opportunities.
It doesn’t do that for things rarely done before though. And it’s poisoned with opinions from the internet. E.g. you can convince it that we have to remove bullshit layers from programming and make it straightforward. It will even print a few pages of vague bullet points about it, if not yet. But when you ask it to code, it will dump a react form.
I’m not trying to invalidate experiences itt, cause I have a similar one. But it feels futile as we are stuck with our pre-AI bloated and convoluted ways of doing things^W^W making lots of money and securing jobs by writing crap nobody understands why, and there’s no way to undo this or to teach AI to generalize.
I think this novelty is just blindness to how bad things are in the areas you know little about. For example, you may think it solves the job when you ask it to create a button and a route. And it does. But the job wasn’t to create a route, load and validate data and render it on screen in a few pages and files. The job was to take a query and to have it on screen in a couple of lines. Yes it helps writing pages of our nonsense, but it’s still nonsense. It works, but feels like we have fooled ourselves twice now. It also feels like people will soon create AI playbooks for structuring and layering their output, cause ability to code review it will deteriorate in just a few years with less seniors and much more barely-coders who get into it now.
I want to expand on your sentiment about our pre-AI mindset. Programming has made it easy to do things of essentially no value, while getting lots of money for it. Programming is additive and creative; we can always go further in modelling the world and creating chunks of it to use. But I don't see the value in the newest CRUD fullstack application or website. I don't see the intellectual stimulation or even a reasonable amount of user benefit. Programming allows us to produce a lot, but we should be scrutinizing what that lot is. "AI" that enhances what we've been doing will just continue this dull industry. Greed and a nebulous sense of progress are the primary drivers, but they're empty behind it all. Isn't progress supposed to be about good change? We should be focusing on passion projects and/or genuinely helping, or better yet elevating, users (that is to say, everyone).
> And it’s poisoned with opinions from the internet.
This is the scary part. What current AI's are very effectively doing is surfacing the best solution (from a pre-existing blog/SO answer) that I might have been able to Google 10 years ago when search was "better" and there was less SEO slop on the internet - and pre-extract the relevant code for me (which is no minor thing).
But I repeatedly have been in situations where I ask for a feature and it brings in a new library and a bunch of extra code and only 2 weeks later as I get more familiar with that library do I realize that the "extra" code I didn't understand at first is part of a Hello World blog post on that framework and I suddenly understand that I have enabled interfaces and features on my business app that were meant for a toy example.
Where are the LLM leaderboards for software estimation accuracy?
I have been using Claude Code and Aider and I do think they provide incredibly exciting potential. I can spin up new projects with mind boggling results. And, I can start projects in domains where I previously had almost no experience. It is truly exciting.
AND...
The thing I worry most about is that now non-technical managers can go into Claude and say "build me XYZ!" and the AI will build a passable first version. But, any experienced software person knows that the true cost of software is in the maintenance. That's 90% of the cost. Reducing that starting point to zero cost only reduces the total cost of software by 10%, but people are making it seem like you no longer need a software engineer that understands complex systems. Or, maybe that is just my fears vocalized.
I have seen LLMs dig into old and complex codebases and fix things that I was not expecting them to handle. I tend to write a lot of tests in my code, so I can see that the tests pass and the code compiles. The barbarians have come over the walls, truly.
But, IMHO, there is still a space where we cannot ask any of the AI coding tools to review a spec and say "Will you get this done in 2 months?" I don't think we are there, yet. I don't see that the context window is big enough to jam entire codebases inside it, and I don't yet see that these tools can anticipate a project growing into hundreds of files and managing the interdepedencies between them. They are good at writing tests, and I am impressed by that, so there is a pathway. I'm excited to understand more about how aider creates a map of the repository and effectively compresses the information in ways similar to how I keep track of high level ideas.
But, it still feels very early and there are gaps. And, I think we are in for a rude awakening when people start thinking this pushes the cost and complexity of software projects to zero. I love the potential for AI coding, but it feels like it is dangerously marketing and sales driven right now and full of hype.
The "coding benchmarks" like "SWE-verified" are actually of very low quality and the answer riddled with problems.
Good Explainer: "The Disturbing Reality of AI Coding" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnOc_kKKuac
I've been programming for 20 years, just so y'all know I have at least some level of competence.
I tried Vibe Coding for the first time on Friday and was blown away. It was awesome. I met some people (all programmers) at a party on Friday and excitedly told them about it. One of them tried, he loved.
Then yesterday I read a LinkedIn (Lunatic?) post about "Vibe Design", where PMs will just tell the computer what to do using some sort of visual language, where you create UI elements and drop them on a canvas, and AI makes your vision come true, etc, etc...
And my first thought was: "Wait a minute, I've seen this movie before. Back on late 90s / early 2000s it was the 4th generation programming language, and Visual Basic would allow anyone to code any system"...
And while it's true Visual Basic did allow a BUNCH of people to make money building and selling systems to video rental shops and hair saloons, programmers never went away.
I welcome anyone building more software. The tools will only get better. And programmers will adapt them, and it will make us better too, and we will still be needed.
This largely fits with a pattern I've been seeing with LLM coding. The models are often helpful, sometimes extremely so, when it comes to creating prototypes or other small greenfield projects. They can also be great at producing a snippet of code in an unfamiliar framework or language. But when it comes to modifying a large, messy, complicated code base they are much less helpful. Some people find them a useful as a beefed up autocomplete, while others don't see enough gains to offset the time/attention to use them.
I think a lot of arguments about LLM coding ability stem from people using them for the former or the latter and having very different experiences.
> I can spin up new projects with mind boggling results
Boggle a skeptical mind
Meaning, give you an example?
This morning I created a new project. I provided a postgres database URL to a remote service (with a non-standard connection string, includes a parameter "?sslmode=require"). Then, I said:
I know the devil is in the details, or in the future. I'm sure there are gaping security holes.But, this saved me a lot of time and it works.
And, the update is that in the last hour claude somehow removed the rendering of the actual items. It is clever in troubleshooting: it created mocks if the data could not be loaded, it added error messages with the number of items retrieved. But, it does not have access to my browser console nor the DOM, and therein lies the problem. It is slow to copy and paste back and forth from the browser into the terminal. But, this feels like a great opportunity for a browser extension.
But, my takeaway is that I could have fixed this exact problem in five minutes if I had written the JS code. But, I have not looked at anything other than glancing at the diffs that fly by in the session.
I used claude to create a piece of software that can render gerber files (essentially vector files used in electronics manufacturing), overlay another gerber file on top of it with exact alignment, and then provide a GUI for manually highlighting components. The program then calculates the centroid, the rotation, and prompts for a component designator. This all then gets stored in a properly formatted Place file, which is used for automating assembly.
The day before this I was quote $1000/yr/user for software that could do this for us.
I used Claude + aider to create a webhook forwarding service (receives webhooks, forwards them to multiple destinations, and handles retries, errors, etc). Included a web interface for creating new endpoints and monitoring errors, and made it fully dockerized and ready to be deployed into a kubernetes cluster.
Took me like 3 hours and a few dollars in api credits to build something that would have taken me multiple days on my own. Since it's just an internal tool for our dev environments that already does what we need, I don't care that much about maintainability (especially if it takes 3 hours to build from scratch). That said, the code is reasonably usable (there was one small thing it got stuck on at the end that I assisted with).
Claude Code and Aider, or aider using claude sonnet as the model? If you are using both claude code and aider I would love to know why.
Aider + Claude sonnet as the model.
I wanted a whiteboard app - simple, infinite, zoomable, scrollable svg-based area with custom shapes and elements. It just needed prompts like "add zoom", "add a rect shape", "add control points for resize", "add text shape", "make position attributes able to reference another objects properties, + basic arithmetic" (for example to make line connect 2 objects, or size of one mirror size of another, etc.). It made all of these with so little effort from me. I would never undertake such a project without an LLM.
> I'm excited to understand more about how aider creates a map of the repository and effectively compresses the information in ways similar to how I keep track of high level ideas.
Run /map. It's nothing fancy, really.
Ok, I meant to say, I know about /map, but there is so much to explore here with an open source coding tool and LSP. It feels like you could build some very powerful ways to represent connections using a lot of cool tools that are in use inside our editors. More structured and more relevant that the poor representations I can keep inside my crappy head.
There is a tool cool lovable that is basically targeted at that exact thing having designers and product managers get something that kinda works
I have been using AI coding tools since the first GitHub co-pilot. One thing has not changed: garbage in = garbage out.
If you know what you are doing the tools can improve output a lot - but while you might get on for a little bit without that experience guiding you, eventually AI will code you into a corner if it's not guided right.
I saw mention of kids learning to code with AI and I have to say, that's great, but only if they are just doing it for fun.
Anyone who is thinking of a career in generating code for a living should first and foremost focus on understanding the principles. The best way to do that is still writing your own programs by hand.
The AUC of learning to program remains the same before and after AI, both for hobbyist and professionals. What changes is the slope of the on-ramp – AI makes it easier to get started, achieve first wins and learn the table-stakes for your field.
For me, it isn't just about complexity, but about customization.
I can have the LLMs build me custom bash scripts or make me my own Obsidian plugins.
They're all little cogs in my own workflow. None of these individual components are complex, but putting all of them together would have taken me ages previously.
Now I can just drop all of them into the conversation and ask it for a new script that works with them to do X.
Here's an example where I built a custom screenshot hosting tool for my blog:
https://sampatt.com/blog/2025-02-11-jsDelivr
I feel like I'm straddling the fence a bit on this topic.
When it comes to some personal projects, I've written a slew of them since AI coding tools got quite good. I'm primarily a backend developer, and while I've done quite a bit of frontend dev, I'm relatively slow at it, and I'm especially slow as CSS. AI has completely removed this bottleneck for me. Often times if I'm coding up a frontend, I'll literally just say "Ok, now make it pretty with a modern-looking UI", and it does a decent job, and anything I need to fix is an understandable change that I can do quickly. So now I'll whip up nice little "personal tool" apps in literally like 30 mins, where in the past I would have spent 30 mins just trying to figure out some CSS voodoo about why it's so hard to get a button centered.
But in my job, where I also use AI relatively frequently, it is great for helping to learn new things, but when I've tried to use it for things like large scale, repo-wide refactorings it's usually been a bit of a PITA - reviewing all of the code and fixing it's somewhat subtle mistakes often feels like it's slower than doing it myself.
It that sense, I think it's reasonable to consider AI like a competent junior developer (albeit at "junior developer" level across every technology ever invented). I can give a junior developer a "targeted" task, and they usually do a good job, even if I have to fix something here or there. But when I give them larger tasks that cross many components or areas of concern, that's often where they struggle mightily as well.
This article is strangely timed for me. About a year ago a company reached out to me about doing an ERP migration. I turned it away because I thought it’d just be way, way too much work.
This weekend, I called my colleague and asked him to call them back and see if they’re still trying to migrate. AI definitely has changed my calculus around what I can take on.
Found the same thing. I was toying with a Discord bot a few weeks ago that involved setting up and running a node server, deployed to Fly via docker. A bunch of stuff a bit out of my wheelhouse. All of it turned out to be totally straightforward with LLM assistance.
Thinking bigger is a practice to hone.
Can you describe how you used LLMs for deployment? I'm actually doing this exact thing but I'm feeling annoyed by DevOps and codebase setup work. I wonder if I'm just being too particular about which tools I'm using rather than just going with the flow
This is much like other advances in computing.
Being able to write code that compiled into assembly, instead of directly writing assembly, meant you could do more. Which soon meant you had to do more, because now everyone was expecting it.
The internet meant you could take advantage of open source to build more complex software. Now, you have to.
Cloud meant you could orchestrate complicated apps. Now you can't not know how it works.
LLMs will be the same. At the moment people are still mostly playing with it, but pretty soon it will be "hey why are you writing our REST API consumer by hand? LLM can do that for you!"
And they won't be wrong, if you can get the lower level components of a system done easily by LLM, you need to be looking at a higher level.
> LLMs will be the same. At the moment people are still mostly playing with it, but pretty soon it will be "hey why are you writing our REST API consumer by hand? LLM can do that for you!"
Not everyone wants to be a "prompt engineer", or let their skills rust and be replaced with a dependency on a proprietary service. Not to mention the potentially detrimental cognitive effects of relegating all your thinking to LLMs in the long term.
I recall hearing a lot of assembly engineers not wanting to let their skills rust either. They didn't want to be a "4th gen engineer" and have their skills replaced by proprietary compilers.
Same with folks who were used to ftp directly into prod and used folders instead of source control.
Look, I get it, it's frustrating to be really good at current tech and feel like the rug is getting pulled. I've been through a few cycles of all new shiny tools. It's always been better for me to embrace the new with a cheerful attitude. Being grumpy just makes people sour and leave the industry in a few years.
This is a different proposition, really. It’s one thing to move up the layers of abstraction in code. It’s quite another thing to delegate authoring code altogether to a fallible statistical model.
The former puts you in command of more machinery, but the tools are dependable. The latter requires you to stay sharp at your current level, else you won’t be able to spot the problems.
Although… I would argue that in the former case you should learn assembly at least once, so that your computer doesn’t seem like a magic box.
> It’s quite another thing to delegate authoring code altogether to a fallible statistical model.
Isnt this what a compiler is really doing? JIT optimizes code based on heuristics, it a code path is considered hot. Sure, we might be able to annotate it, but by and large you let the tools figure it out so that we can focus on other things.
But the compiler’s heuristic optimization doesn’t change the effects of the code, does it? Admittedly I’m no compiler expert, but I’ve always been able to have 100% trust that my compiled code will function as written.
I agree that not everyone wants to be. I think OPs point though is the market will make “not being a prompt engineer” a niche like being a COBOL programmer in 2025.
I’m not sure I entirely agree but I do think the paradigm is shifting enough that I feel bad for my coworkers who intentionally don’t use AI. I can see a new skill developing in myself that augments my ability to perform and they are still taking ages doing the same old thing. Frankly, now is the sweet spot because the expectation hasn’t raised enough to meet the output so you can either squeeze time to tackle that tech debt or find time to kick up your feet until the industry catches up.
Even the example in the post seemed closely related to other advances in consumer-level computing:
Undoubtedly this would have taken longer without AI. But I imagine the Raspberry Pi + camera was easier to set up out-of-the-box than whatever they used 14 years ago, and it's definitely easier to set up a paint-by-numbers ML system in Python.I use Cursor to write Python programs to solve tasks in my daily work that need to be completed with programming. It's very convenient, and I no longer need to ask the company's programmers for help. Large language models are truly revolutionary productivity tools.
Think bigger in 3 distinct ways:
1. Lower learning curve, for new or revived skills (weaving - gather and summarize)
2. Lower incremental cost: almost always faster at choosing the next step (scouting)
3. Faster time-to-maturity: when building test suites, faster both at first-pass coverage and at gap-filling (zoo-keeping)
But the huge, gaping pitfall -- now coming down the tracks even faster -- is the same as without AI: once you build a complex system, committing to its invariants, you quickly find it difficult to change in the direction you want, because each choice triggers a tangle of incommensurable choices. Sometimes heroic re-factorings (beyond AI now) can extend life a bit, but usually the only people who can avoid abrupt stasis are those with deep experience and the insight into how to change things (incrementally). I'd guess with AI such pitfalls become more common and more difficult to escape.
So: yes, think bigger for projects with relatively definitive and complete requirements, but take care with foundational code you expect to grow.
I definitely felt this. I thought "If I have to redo this in Flutter or in Swift, I can". I don't know either, so have to move with some caution (but it's all very exciting).
At first glance, it seems like _porting_ code to another language / api .. is probably a good sweet spot for these code LLMs ..
.. and even automating the testing to check results match, coming up with edge cases etc.
... and if thats true, then they could be useful for _optimizing_ by porting to other apis / algos, checking same-ness of behavior, then comparing performance.
The whole "vibe coding" doesn't grab me - as I feel the bottleneck is with my creativity and understanding rather than generating viable code - using a productive expressive language like javascript or lisp and working on a small code base helps that.
eg. I would like to be able to take an algo and port it to run on GPU for example... without having to ingest much arcane api quirks. JAX looks like a nice target, but Ive held off for now.
> At first glance, it seems like _porting_ code to another language / api .. is probably a good sweet spot for these code LLMs ..
I recently ported skatevideosite.com from svelte/python to ruby on rails. I leaned on AI heavily to translate the svelte files to ERB templates and it did a wonderful job.
My experiene generally with these systems is that they are good with handling things you _give_ it, but less so when coming up with stuff from scratch.
For example I've tried to use it to build out additional features and the results are subpar.
Agree, yeah "vibe coding" is super cringe haha
It seems like the emphasis on getting results in one shot reduces the maximum potential quality of the output as compared to a more incremental approach. For example, create an initial prompt to generate a structured description of the features in the program you've described. You can then iterate on this and follow up with a prompt that generates a structured description of a system architecture based on the feature description, and iterate on that. You could build up other informational layers as well, before aggregating all that structural data into the generation of the actual code. This can feed into the generation of tests as well.
If you look at things like LLM party for comfyui, it's the same basic concept.
Agree, let’s build direct democratic simulated multiverse.
Or at least make a digital back up of Earth.
Or at least represent an LLM as a green field with objects, where humans are the only agents:
you stand near a monkey, see chewing mouth nearby, go there (your prompt now is “monkey chews”), close by you see an arrow pointing at a banana, father away an arrow points at an apple, very far away at the horizon an arrow points at a tire (monkeys rarely chew tires).
So things close by are more likely tokens, things far away are less likely, you see all of them at once (maybe you’re on top of a hill to see farther). This way we can make a form of static place AI, where humans are the only agents
A simulation in a simulation... Neat!
Thanks, I wrote extensively about it) If interested, you can find a link in my profile or ask anything here
Thanks I will take my time reading it, you certainly could never be criticized for thinking too small.
Humans are inherently greedy.
Once we get a feel for what the AI can and cannot do, bigger bets will occur.
Currently, companies seem tight - team counts are held low, and hiring is frozen. Very much a position of "let's see how much AI efficiency gains us".
But eventually, the money sitting on the sidelines will look attractive again - attractive for taking bigger, more ambitious bets.
More hiring has to take place.
Yes -- LLMs can write a lot of code and after some reviewing it can also go to prod -- but I have not nearly enough applications of LLMs on the post-prod phase; like dealing with evolution in requirements, ensuring security as zero days get discovered, etc.
Would love to hear folks' experience around "managing" all this new code.
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bugger! More than two visitors to my web site and it falls apart, I might fork out the $10 for the better CPU and more memory option before I post something in future.
Accidentally thought too big
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/is_it_worth_the_time.png
We really need to get nuanced about the discussion around LLMs in programming. My experience is that LLMs work great for producing glue code. Join together a bunch of well documented APIs? LLMs will make enough progress that I can finish it myself. Produce a pile of HTML and CSS for a nondescript design? I'll get at least a mostly working result that I can easily fix up. But try to, say, design a cross platform GUI library and the results are underwhelming. LLMs know a heck of a lot of stuff, but they are not very good at working with concepts.
The missing piece in your view here is that eventually nearly all code is or eventually becomes gibberish glue code, or it stops being used. LLMs just speed up the cycle.
Claude gave me the confidence to setup a router using the relatively obscure VyOS network stack. It was a lot of back and forth. The syntax has changed quite a bit between versions and Claude kept giving me out of date code. I would reply with the error message and snippets of the current documentation and it would try again. Things eventually worked. Perhaps it was a bit of a "stone soup" situation, but I would not have attempted the project without the assistance of an LLM.
What psychedelic/mind-altering/weird coaching prompts do you use?
I have separate system prompts for taboo-teaching, excessive-pedanticism, excessive-toxicity, excessive-praise, et cetera.
My general rules is anything & everything humans would never ever do, but that would somehow allow me to explore altered states of consciousness, ways of thinking, my mind, the world, better. Something to make me smarter from the experience of the chat.
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This is the most important change AI assisted code for me: it's making me confident I can tackle any problem.
it's interesting, it feels like less needing to think much bigger and more so that we're now able to accept that much bigger ideas we've been thinking about are far more feasible.
that's so cool. all those grand ideas that felt so far away are right here ready to grasp and realize.
Bad blog post
You don't want to use AI for complex things that you might not fully understand. These are the cases where you'll miss the hallucinations and get fucked
You just don't understand that AI becoming smarter than humans
> I am now at a real impasse, towards the end of my career and knowing I could happily start it all again with a new insight and much bigger visions for what I could take on. It feels like wining the lottery two weeks before you die
I envy this optimistic. I am not the opposite (im a sr engineer with more than 15 years of experience), but I am scared about my future. I invested too much time in learning concepts, theory, getting a Master degree, and in a few years all of my knowledge can be useless in the market.
IT is never static. I have had to take several forks in my career with languages and technologies often leading to dead-ends and re-training. It is amazing how much you learn doing one thing directly translates to another, it can often lead to you not having a specific/narrow mindset too.
Having an LLM next to you means there is never a stupid question, I ask the AI the same stupid questions repeatedly until I get it, that is not really possible with a smart human, even if they have the patience, you are often afraid to look dumb in their eyes.
I'm worried about being replaced by LLM. If it keeps evolving to the point where a CTO can ask LLM to do something and deploy it, why he would pay for a team of engineers?
Forking to different technologies and languages is one thing (I've been there, I started with PHP and I haven't touch it for almost a decade now), but being replaced by a new tech is something different. I don't see how I could pivot to still be useful.
I see it more as “if an LLM can do that, why would I need an employer?”
This coin has two sides. If a CTO can live without you, you can live without an expensive buffer between you and your clients. He’s now just a guy like you, and adds little value compared to everyone else.
I know what you mean but I don't see it positive either. If each engineer is now a startup, it will be extra complicated to make money.
It's like saying since all of us know how to write, we all can sell books.
I think the replacement for developers won't be CTOs but program managers -- folks with business degrees (or none at all) but who understand the company's needs for the software and can translate them into prompts to build the product without any understanding of how to code. (Some places call these folks 'software anthropologists'.) They'll hone the product iteratively though development almost like a genetic algorithm would, by trial and error -- rejecting or revising the output verbally (and eventually by interacting with components seen on the screen). Vibe programming by business types will replace today's software engineers.
Where in reality can a CTO talk to a human and deploy it? It takes engineers to understand the requirements and to iterate with the CTO. The CTO has better things to do with their time than wrestle with an LLM all day.
I guarentee that the first thought in any good CTO's mind in that world is "How much payroll do computer babysitters deserve?"
They ask that already.
I could not disagree more. Those concepts, theories and all that knowledge is what makes it so powerful. I feel successful with AI because I know what to do (I’m older than you by a lot). I talk to younger people and they don’t know how to think about a big system or have the ability to communicate their strategies. You do. I’m 72 and was bored. Now that Claude will do the drudgery, I am inspired.
I understand your point of view and I do agree that with the current state of affairs I am kind of OK. It's useful for me, and I am still needed.
But seeing the progress and adoption, I wonder what will happen when that valuable skill (how to think about a big system, etc) will also be replicated by AI. and then, poof.
I certainly feel uneasy. To whatever extent “AI” fulfills its promise of enabling regular people to get computers to do exactly what needs doing, that’s the extent that the “priest class” like me who knows how to decide what’s feasible and design a good system to do it, will be made redundant. I guess I hope it moves slowly enough that I can get enough years in on easy mode (this current stage where technical people can easily 5-10x their previous output by leveraging the AI tools ourselves).
But if the advancement moves too slowly, we will have some serious pipeline problems filling senior engineer positions, caused by the destruction that AI (combined with the end of ZIRP) has caused to job prospects for entry level software engineers.
Probably right at the end of your career is where this tool would be the most useful
An undergrad using the hottest tech right of the bat? Cooked.
It's like giving the world 128gb of ram and 64bits in 1970, we would have just maxed it out by 1972.
An undergrad using the hottest tech right of the bat? Cooked.
What if I tell you there is an undergrad that just flunked a class and is depressed and cries about it? Considers changing their major? This is pre-AI. We have a chance that undergrads will never feel that way again. Not intimidated by anything.
There's a misconception that passing is worth 1 and flunking is worth 0.
There's shitty ways to pass and good ways to pass
> Cooked
People using this phrase should probably stop, it's become extremely tiresome as a cliche
Im guessing "cooked" means the opposite of "based" ?
but I could be a Feynman radian out on those vectors in leet space.
Cooked means "you're finished, it's over, no return", it's a really definitive term which I'm opposed to by philosophy
Using AI has changed everything for me and made my ambition swell. I despise looking up the details of frameworks and api’s, transmitting a change of strategy through a system, typing the usual stupid loops and processes that are the foundation of all programs. Hell, the amount of time I save on typing errors is worth it.
I have plans for many things I didn’t have the energy for in the past.
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Lost me there: that a project will use a technology or programming language I don’t know.:) Good luck.
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> I have noticed that I am no longer scared that a project will be too big or too complex for me,
That's still a valid worry. At best, you can do larger projects on your own than before.
> or that a project will use a technology or programming language I don’t know.
Was that ever a worry? I've always considered it an opportunity for self improvement.