Comment by delaminator

The problem I had that the larger your project gets, the more mistakes Claude makes. I (not a parent commenter) started with a basic CRUD web app and was blown away by how detailed it was, new CSS, good error handling, good selection and use of libraries, it could even write the terminal commands for package management and building. As the project grew to something larger Claude started forgetting that some code already existed in the project and started repeating itself, and worse still when I asked for new features it would pick a copy at random leaving them out of sync with eachother. Moving forward I've been alternating between writing stuff with AI, then rewriting it myself.

Here's mine fully deployed, https://hackernewsanalyzer.com/. I use it daily and have some users. ~99.7% LLM code. About 1 hour to first working prototype then another 40 hours to get it polished and complete to current state.

If you haunt the pull requests of projects you use I bet you'll find there's a new species of PR:

> I'm not an expert in this language or this project but I used AI to add a feature and I think its pretty good. Do you want to use it?

I find myself writing these and bumping into others doing the same thing. It's exciting, projects that were stagnant are getting new attention.

I understand that a maintainer may not want to take responsibility for new features of this sort, but its easier than ever to fork the project and merge them yourself.

I noticed this most recently in https://github.com/andyk/ht/pulls which has two open (one draft) PRs of that sort, plus several closed ones.

Issues that have been stale for years are getting traction, and if you look at the commit messages, it's AI tooling doing the work.

People feel more capable to attempt contributions which they'd otherwise have to wait for a specialist for. We do need to be careful not to overwhelm the specialists with such things, as some of them are of low quality, but on the whole it's a really good thing.

If you're not noticing it, I suggests hanging out in places where people actually share code, rather than here where we often instead brag about unshared code.

At this point my prior is that all these 300/ns projects are some kind of internal tools, with very narrow scope and many just for a one-off use.

Which is also fine and great and very useful and I am also making those, but it probably does not generalize to projects that require higher quality standards and actual maintenance.

I also see a lot of this so I can't blame you for thinking it! See my other post about some projects build _only_ using LLMs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46133458

There's a massive incentive not to share them. If I wrote a project using AI I'd be reluctant to publish it at all because of the backlash I've seen people get for it.

Building something is easy

Building something that works ? Not so easy

Pushing that thing in production ? That the hardest part

I came with receipts

In an ideal world we function in exactly this way - using LLMs to bootstrap our skill/knowledge improvement journeys.

Yeah, if you pay attention to its output you can pick up little tips and tricks all over the place.

Maybe the most depressing part of all this is if people start thinking they would not have been able to do things without the LLM. Of course they would have, it's not like LLMs can do anything that you cannot. Maybe it would have taken more time at least the first time and you would have learned a few things in the process.

> I have no idea if the code is any good, I’ve never looked at it and I have no idea how to code in Rust or Racket or Erlang anyway.

In that case, are you really producing multiple projects per week? If you've never looked at the code, have you verified that they work?

Something about restricting an AI agent by using another AI to write code to restrict it is quite funny

As opposed to ad hominems and handwave dismissals, which are highly credible?

Weird, because I've created a webcam app that does segmentation so they can delete the background and put a new background in I mean, I suppose that's not groundbreaking. But it's not just reading and writing to a database.

I've just added a ATA over Ethernet server in Rust, I thought of doing it in the car on the way home and an hour later I've got a working version.

I type this comment using a voice to text system I built, admittedly it uses Whisper as the transcriber but I've turned it into a personal assistant.

I make stuff every day I just wouldn't bother to make if I had to do it myself. and on top of that it does configuration. So I've had it build full wireguard configs that is taking on our pay addresses so that different destinations cause different routing. I don't know how to do that off the top of my head. I'm not going to spend weeks trying to find out how it works. It took me an evening of prompting.

We don’t need more software, we need the right software implemented better. That’s not something LLMs can possibly give us because they’re fucking pachinko machines.

Here’s a hint: Nobody should ever write a CRUD app, because nobody should ever have to write a CRUD app; that’s something that can be generated fully and deterministically (i.e. by a set of locally-executable heuristics, not a goddamn ocean-boiling LLM) from a sufficiently detailed model of the data involved.

In the 1970s you could wire up an OS-level forms library to your database schema and then serve literally thousands of users from a system less powerful than the CPU in modern peripheral or storage controller. And in less RAM too.

People need to take a look at what was done before in order to truly have a proper degree of shame about how things are being done now.

But what we're getting is a flood of buggy, unoriginal crap.

Nice deflection. Did you use ChatGPT to come up with it?