Comment by austin-cheney
19 hours ago
Yeah, I have never understood the over reliance on AI. Writing the code is not the challenge. The time it takes to push a new feature and test it out is often trivial, maybe a few hours.
The real challenge is forming the new ideas in the first place and most of those new ideas coming either from using the code as a product or time spent maintaining and refactoring large code.
Anyways, if you want to continue on the path towards regaining control and take it to the next level I wrote something similar here: https://blog.sharefile.systems/be-brave-go-low/
Wriring the code is not the challenge, but it's what was taking up most of the time. Not the typing itself, but also because I had to think of how to implement it.
Now I can just say "add 2FA" and in 5 minutes, while I test something else, it is done.
It also made iterations a lot faster, you can try something out, see how it feels, if it doesn't work, you can just trash all the code and start again.
But you still have to review that 2FA code and that involves thinking through the implementation, right?
No.
Haven't typed a line of code or read any code for over 6 months now.
And I used to love coding and be a competitive programmer, but this is how "coding" goes nowdays.
I have a mental model of what it would do, and how it would work, and I ask questions to confirm things and tell it to watch for specific gotchas. Then simply test the feature myself a bit.
Security-wise, I think the latest cyber models are better than me anyway at finding vulnerabilitates and pentesting such features.
Plus 2FA is a very common pattern, so it likely has in the training dataset many really good implementations.
61 replies →
I don't know what it built for you in 5 minutes, probably something that "works".
I have spent two weeks using opus just to write a plan/design for 2FA and iron it out until review (about 7 of them) doesn't flag it with 20+ problems (with security holes of various sizes), for which I had to guide it through to not turn it into a mess and whac-a-mole.
2FA is quite simple, right?
It's just a secret key that an autheticator uses to generate a time-based code, which the app can validate before completing a normal log-in flow.
What model did you use?
Astra xhigh on fast mode can probably indeed one-shot that in 5 minutes.
Plus optionally QR image generator to easily add that key to the authenticator app.
There are already many libraries doing 2FA, but implementing it in any language is quite trivial, right
7 replies →
>Not the typing itself, but also because I had to think of how to implement it.
I believe "writing the code" means literally just "writing the code" not thinking how to implement it.
How can we write without thinking?
If the problem and implementation is so well defined, and "determnistic", this means that LLMs should also be able to just "write code" from specs, without thinking.
The limiting factor of development (for money) is good ideas, or valuable ideas. If you have 5 features you want, but only time in a month for 2, then that forces you to choose the best 2, which come with the tech debt, support and opportunity cost.
Removing the opportunity cost doesn't eliminate the other two costs of a feature
How many lines of code do you write, on a good day?
I'd expect it's in the tens of thousands, given how effortless you find it.
Would that be a good thing?
Code is a liability.
According to GitHub it was about +2114 / -1519 lines of code from 45 files yesterday. I felt productive yesterday.
https://github.com/prettydiff/aphorio/commit/0c730389c9e4e69...
This actually sums up a lot of what I feel about AI. For everything. For flyers, menus, all the rest of it.
It always only took a few hours. And yeah, whatever, sure it adds up. But now you've got this dogshit looking flyer outside your restaurant, and it would have taken you like 45 minutes to adept a Canva template.
For AI, the skill loss and all the rest of it, the lack of control, the lack of knowledge of the codebase. It doesn't feel like saving the few hours is ever worth it.