Comment by user43928
11 hours ago
Many on HN still have the opinion that you must understand every line of code in the project, and that all is lost should you merge code that wasn't reviewed.
Obviously any model will do if you use it as a better autocomplete.
I believe that there is a large gap in expectations between different workflows.
Until the AI like reads my mind and produces perfectly production ready apps with minimal intervention from my side, there is still going to be room for improvement.
How I feel it Opus 5.5 and Astra 6 are both quite disappointing. They still write shit Rust. And they are very slow.
Now my provider serves DeepSeek around 300 tokens a second. The code is shit but I can have a few more rounds of corrections.
DeepSeek was maybe a dollar for the full PR. Opus/Astra over 50 dollars. And double that if you use their fast variants which matches the DeepSeek speeds on certain providers.
Yes, it is so good I rarely test new models anymore. Or think about cost.
> Many on HN still have the opinion that you must understand every line of code in the project, and that all is lost should you merge code that wasn't reviewed.
Uhm, yes?
Last week I elicited a parametric 3-D design model of a sand battery, a simplified thermal circuit model of it for rough exploration, a backward Euler multiphysics solver to evaluate its performance more accurately, and a volumetric visualization for the resulting temperature distributions, including some custom WebGL shaders: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/sandbattery/
It's about 12000 lines of code. I could probably understand every line of it if I spent a couple of months on it, although I'd need to learn some things about WebGL, numerical computation, and solid-state physics. But I elicited it in four days. Probably I'd be better off spending the next couple of months doing something else instead.
So, I was faced with the question of how I could keep the artifact thus created from being completely valueless. My solution was to export the heat-equation solution produced by the solver as (gzipped!) CSV, so that I can use my own code (that I do understand every line of!) to check that the solutions found by the solver are, in fact, solutions.
If that check checks out, the backward Euler solver may be of some value even if I don't understand every line of it.