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Has anyone had success applying with these yet? I found that for anything above hello world complexity the snippets produced by these tools take more time and

Has anyone had success applying with these yet? I found that for anything above hello world complexity the snippets produced by these tools take more time and have lower quality than if you just learned the tool yourself (which you can use AI for) and did it yourself. I did manage to get interesting results when I turned it into a few shot prompt with a lot more RAG. So maybe more specialized versions of these tools can produce better results than generalist versions.

ericol 2y ago
I'll say I've had success with it, to the extents of what I was trying to solve https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41410867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41410867
- faizshah 2y ago
  This is nice but this is what I would call hello world complexity. Like if you do a basic react tutorial or have the AI teach it to you (2 hours) then you would be able to make this in <30 minutes and most likely it would teach you tailwind as well. The advantage is this lets you see what something would look like in a few minutes without needing to learn the thing (saves you 2.5 hours) the disadvantage is when you try to add new features or build a new site you haven’t learned anything. The 2.5 hours is an investment in the skill. Another interesting thing to point out is how the UI pattern is off in your example. Do you see how “selected” category is in the same multi selection as the actual menu items whereas the normal UI pattern would be to have a Cart or something on the page. This is the issue that I have been running into with these Generative UI approaches is this stuff happens constantly and in very strange ways.
  - ericol 2y ago
    > the disadvantage is when you try to add new features or build a new site you haven’t learned anything I don't have an example to prove you wrong here, but here's my 2 cents: 1. You could probably decompose the app in different parts, and then put everything together. Even thought my experience with React is nill, I do (Think I do) have the expertise and know-how to glue everything together (It is yet to be proven that Claude cannot do this). 2. I obviously don't think it can replace a Sr. Dev (yet) but for somebody with my expertise, this is a very good starting point. It saves you 2.5 hours... Every. Single. Time. 3. This is ground zero (sort of). In the words of the famous Tank from The Matrix... This is loco.
    - faizshah 2y ago
      So I have used it in the way you’re describing for coding a backend service in Rust. I had never used rust before and I was just trying to see how easy it would be. The good part is you can get the minimum viable product of every feature up every time. The bad part is when you run into bugs you can’t debug it yourself because you haven’t built up the mental model of how the system works since you’re just copying and pasting. The more unique your problem gets (once you’re out the hello world zone of problems) the worse the AI is at helping you. The first few times you run into a simple debugging and the AI figures it out for you it’s pretty cool but the frequent times the AI gets stuck in a loop and you spend hours feeding it debug output after debug output and it still being broken makes you hate this workflow. So yes it does help you rapidly build the features but at the same time there’s an immense amount of additional work needed to maintain and debug the system. Also the code is generally very poorly structured and architected. So yea impressive stuff at a surface level and great for speeding up your ability to get started on a task. But really bad to rely on it (at this point) for anything of greater complexity than the basic quick start tutorial of your library of choice (in my experience).
M4v3R 2y ago
I managed to build a non-trivial desktop app (a game trainer which hooks up to a process and reads/manipulates memory in real-time) using Tauri framework (which is based in Rust) almost entirely using Claude 3.5 Sonnet. And I had zero Rust experience prior to that. There were some issues along the way but with the help of Claude I was able to solve them.

ericol 2y ago

I'll say I've had success with it, to the extents of what I was trying to solve https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41410867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41410867

faizshah 2y ago
This is nice but this is what I would call hello world complexity. Like if you do a basic react tutorial or have the AI teach it to you (2 hours) then you would be able to make this in <30 minutes and most likely it would teach you tailwind as well. The advantage is this lets you see what something would look like in a few minutes without needing to learn the thing (saves you 2.5 hours) the disadvantage is when you try to add new features or build a new site you haven’t learned anything. The 2.5 hours is an investment in the skill. Another interesting thing to point out is how the UI pattern is off in your example. Do you see how “selected” category is in the same multi selection as the actual menu items whereas the normal UI pattern would be to have a Cart or something on the page. This is the issue that I have been running into with these Generative UI approaches is this stuff happens constantly and in very strange ways.
- ericol 2y ago
  > the disadvantage is when you try to add new features or build a new site you haven’t learned anything I don't have an example to prove you wrong here, but here's my 2 cents: 1. You could probably decompose the app in different parts, and then put everything together. Even thought my experience with React is nill, I do (Think I do) have the expertise and know-how to glue everything together (It is yet to be proven that Claude cannot do this). 2. I obviously don't think it can replace a Sr. Dev (yet) but for somebody with my expertise, this is a very good starting point. It saves you 2.5 hours... Every. Single. Time. 3. This is ground zero (sort of). In the words of the famous Tank from The Matrix... This is loco.
  - faizshah 2y ago
    So I have used it in the way you’re describing for coding a backend service in Rust. I had never used rust before and I was just trying to see how easy it would be. The good part is you can get the minimum viable product of every feature up every time. The bad part is when you run into bugs you can’t debug it yourself because you haven’t built up the mental model of how the system works since you’re just copying and pasting. The more unique your problem gets (once you’re out the hello world zone of problems) the worse the AI is at helping you. The first few times you run into a simple debugging and the AI figures it out for you it’s pretty cool but the frequent times the AI gets stuck in a loop and you spend hours feeding it debug output after debug output and it still being broken makes you hate this workflow. So yes it does help you rapidly build the features but at the same time there’s an immense amount of additional work needed to maintain and debug the system. Also the code is generally very poorly structured and architected. So yea impressive stuff at a surface level and great for speeding up your ability to get started on a task. But really bad to rely on it (at this point) for anything of greater complexity than the basic quick start tutorial of your library of choice (in my experience).

M4v3R 2y ago

I managed to build a non-trivial desktop app (a game trainer which hooks up to a process and reads/manipulates memory in real-time) using Tauri framework (which is based in Rust) almost entirely using Claude 3.5 Sonnet. And I had zero Rust experience prior to that. There were some issues along the way but with the help of Claude I was able to solve them.