Comment by tehnub

people say this like it's a criticism, but damn is it ever nice to start writing a simple crud form and just have copilot autocomplete the whole thing for me.

HN's cynicism towards AI coding (and everything else ever) is exhausting. Karpathy would probably cringe reading this.

or a typical CRUD app architecture, or a common design pattern, or unit/integration test scaffolding, or standard CI/CD pipeline definitions, or one-off utility scripts, etc...

Like 80% of writing coding is just being a glorified autocomplete and AI is exceptional at automating those aspects. Yes, there is a lot more to being a developer than writing code, but, in those instances, AI really does make a difference in the amount of time one is able to spend focusing on domain-specific deliverables.

I don't know. I successfully use it for small changes on VHDL FPGA designs these days.

I've had some success with a multi-threaded software defined radio (SDR) app in Rust that does signal processing. It's been useful for trying something out that's beyond my experience. Which isn't to say it's been easy. It's been a learning experience to figure out how to work around Claude's limitations.

Generative AI for coding isn't your new junior programmer, it's the next generation of app framework.

Really such an annoying genre of comment. Yes I’m sure your groundbreaking bespoke code cannot be written by LLMs, however for the rest of us that build and maintain 99% of the software people actually use, they are quite useful.

simple CRUD, is as common in many many business applications or backend portals, are a good fit for AI assistance imho. And fix some designs here and there, where you can't be bothered to keep track of the latest JS/CSS framework

I've had success in the past with getting it to write YueScript/Moonscript (which is not a very large part of its training data) by pointing it to the root URL for the language docs and thus making that part of the context.

If your typed version of Lua has a syntax checker, you could also have it try to use that first on any code it's generated

Are you using a coding agent or just an llm chat interface? Do you have a linter or compiler that will catch the misuse that you’ve hooked up to the agent?

Hey, thank you for making this—I really enjoyed playing it and it feels like it fits the mental-reward-between-work-tasks need. It did spin up my M1's fans after a few minutes which is a rather rare occurrence, but I'm guessing that's par for the course when you're working with a bunch of video on canvas. Either way, hope I remember it the next time I'm looking for a puzzle to solve while I take a break :)

>and the "LLMs will usher in a new era of messianic programming" camps

Well, this one might still be borne out. It's just silly to think it's the case right now. Check in again in 10 years and it may be a very different story. Maybe even in 5 years.

Both can be true. LLMs tend to be mediocre at (almost) everything, so they're always going to be worse than the user at whatever the user is an expert in.

But 'mediocre' isn't 'useless'.

Now to wait for Sonnet 5 and GPT-6, and ask them to build that, and see what they come up with.

That's not really how LLM work though. It's fundamentally next word prediction, based on statistics of the context. Reordering ideas (which can drastically change the outcome) can result in a statistically rare context. The silly failures of simple riddles [1], and the like, demonstrate this well.

The riddle issue is putting trivial ideas together, but combined them in a statistically rare way, giving low quality output that tends towards the statistically significant answer, even if it's incorrect. The same things happens with coding, when combining well known things together in uncommon ways.

Worse (as with the riddle problem), nearby concepts that have strong statistics are going to act like attractors, with the LLM always trending towards those, removing and rewriting bits of code to better accommodate those, even if they're the opposite of what you want. I have this happen all the time in my somewhat obscure work. It'll rewrite key maths in my code to be the statistically significant textbook example, which is not what I need. I'll fix it manually or point it out, and a few changes later, it'll rewrite it again. A reasonable way around this is to "pin" the concept with a very strongly worded negative comment, like "DO NOT USE DOT PRODUCT. THIS IS NOT VECTOR PROJECTION. DO NOT modify the next line of code.".

[1] Claude 4.1 Opus:

> Prompt: "A son and his mother are in a car accident. They’re both rushed to the hospital. The doctor is about to operate on the son. But, before he does, he looks down and says "This is my son! I can’t operate on this boy!". How can this be?"

> Response: "The doctor is the boy's father.

This is a classic riddle that plays on assumptions people might make about gender and professions. The boy has two parents - his mother (who was in the car with him) and his father (the doctor at the hospital). The riddle works because some people automatically assume the doctor must be male, forgetting that the boy's father could be the doctor since his mother was already mentioned as being in the accident."

Another, with output that doesn't match the goal, statistically attracted to the riddle:

> Prompt: "A man, a sheep, and a wolf are on one side of the river, with a boat that can only hold two. How can the man safely get the boat to the other side of the river, without the sheep being eaten?"

You have found the joke.