Comment by hollowturtle
6 days ago
Don't want to be rough, but I'd like to read experiences about novelty ideas that solve people real problems in the real world, your project it's just about selling new shovels.
As I commented on another thread
> If you're trying to solve a HARD problem people REALLY have, it's a novelty that agents can't help with, otherwise if it gets 97% there MAYBE it's just a signal that your idea isn't that novel!
As a random example of a "hard" problem solved by AI that I couldn't have realistically done myself, despite having decades of wide industry experience:
Reverse engineering a proprietary protocol from a binary executable.
I heard about people finding security vulnerabilities in compiled code with the combination of Claude Mythos wired up to a disassembler like NSA's Ghidra. Someone here mentioned that GPT 5.5 "extra high" is just as capable, I had a problem to solve, spare token quota for the week, so... I gave it a go.
My problem was that I'm working with a product that uses a legacy 1990s style network appliance output log format that is proprietary, undocumented, and has no publicly available decoders other than an app by the same vendor, and that app has fundamental limitations. (I.e.: it's nothing like Splunk or Elastic.)
Codex with a Ghidra MCP bridge figured it all out: the framing, bit and byte packing, endian order, field names, data types, etc. It made me a neat little protocol parser in a modern language that I can use to spit out something sane like NDJSON or OTLP protobufs.
There is no way I could have reverse engineered this myself from compiled C++ code and/or packet captures! The format isn't self-describing and is incredibly dense (similar to NetFlow). In a hex viewer it looks like line noise!
> There is no way I could have reverse engineered this myself from compiled C++ code and/or packet captures! The format isn't self-describing and is incredibly dense (similar to NetFlow). In a hex viewer it looks like line noise!
I think you could have. However I don't think you would have - there is a big difference. It is a lot of work to to that, and people who try normally give up. However if your boss told you could have. Note that I suspect from your story this is more like give this to a dozen people and in 2 years you get results - at a cost of several million dollars.
Of course, there is a philosophical difference between "impossible" and "intractable", but to a business with a budget and a schedule there isn't.
This is a pretty wild take. What percentage of human engineers are creating novel solutions for hard problems, you think? I work in R&D and even my work is 90% doing things that other people already solved. If you are really doing cutting edge SOTA work that has never been done by another human in some form or another, then kudos to you and I want your job.
> What percentage of human engineers are creating novel solutions for hard problems, you think?
IMO Every engineer should try spending his time in a company that tries to solve new problems.
Otherwise we will be stuck, as we are now, with big tech paying you mountains of money for doing nothing, incentivizing you to embark on useless activities for letting other managers have a career, fear layoffs and when that happen complaining about it because "it's a year i'm looking for a new job" pretending same compensation and environment. Web development jobs are particularly affected by that.
In the game industry, for example, if you don't do something interesting your game won't sell a copy.
Let me stress this out again, if LLMs get you 97% there, maybe you should try another idea.
> IMO Every engineer should try spending his time in a company that tries to solve new problems.
Yet typically 95% of software developers mainly work on CRUD-type apps. Coding agents are not perfect there either but they’re really a lot more reliable than they were a few months ago.
Please you don’t need to stress anything. I think you are conflating ideas.
Unique game loops ideas make a good game, it has very little to do with the engineering. This is true for most software engineering products. Most engineering work is just reinventing or reimplementing existing ideas, what you describe rarely exists. It may exist in that the people learning the new ideas think it’s novel but very little is truly unique.
The comment was directed at:
> For generating production code even with a lot of steering and baby sitting? Absolutely not, not quite there not even close in my experience.
As I said, this is an example of using AI successfully to produce a high quality product (one that I use every day).
But to your point: I am solving hard problems that people really have. You just don't see those because I haven't mentioned them publicly yet. And they won't be released or talked about until they're ready.
Claude wrote me a little python script to help me sort and rank all the AI videos I've generated. It also extracted the metadata and organized it into a CSV. I sent it some hex dumps of the header and it got it first try. The header structure of webms generated by comfy are pretty novel.