Comment by lysecret
11 days ago
Ok so after watching the latent space pod and going through their docs my understanding of what they are doing:
- solve it is mostly an approach less so an app they also build some Jp notebook style ide with branching and deep chat integration + a stateful vm which looks neat though
- my definition of the philosophical approach is: don’t let ai ever generate code you don’t understand be there every step of the way and build things “bottom up” in a very incremental way (basically exactly how Jp notebooks have always worked)
Now my view on the philosophy I actually don’t think I agree. With Claude code and codex I feel like my preferred development flow is “top down” to declare what you want on a high level and then let ai build some complete construct (making sure everything is type safe) and then dig in and understand this construct and iron out all of the details. I don’t think I need to understand fully each intermediate result.
I absolutely fundamentally agree that every line of the final output has to be fully understood and signed off by you.
Honestly, their videos and posts are very difficult to understand so if I misunderstood something I’m super happy to be corrected. I have high respect for the team and it’s nice to see theme excited.
Yes I think you've done a good job of capturing the key ideas. Thank you for taking the time to look into it!
I think you might be somewhat under-estimating the amount of novel ideas in, and the significance of, the solveit platform. But "chatgpt + vscode editor + jupyter + a persistent Linux server" is a reasonable starting point for thinking about what it consists of.
It's totally fine to disagree on the philosophy. I suspect it'll turn out that both the approach you describe and our very different approach can both work, and are probably suited for different kinds of people and tasks.
It's very early days and there's no established methodologies for AI-assisted software dev. I know our approach works and scales across a team of 10 and over a period of >1 year (and across multiple connected projects), since that's what we do in-house.