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Genuine question: Do you feel like you're learning the language/frameworks/techniques well? Or do you feel like you're just getting more adept at leveraging the

Genuine question: Do you feel like you're learning the language/frameworks/techniques well? Or do you feel like you're just getting more adept at leveraging the LLM? Do you think you could you maintain and/or debug someone else's application?

spaceman_2020 2y ago
Not as much as I would have if I was writing everything from scratch. But then again, my goal isn’t to be a coder or get a job as a coder - I’m primarily a marketer and got into coding simply because I had a stack of ideas I wanted to experiment with Most of the things I’ve built are fun things See: GoUnfaked.com and PlaybookFM.com as examples PlaybookFM.com is interesting because everything from the code to the podcasts to the logo are AI generated
- an_guy 2y ago
  How much time did you spend on getting it working especially for playbookfm?
  - spaceman_2020 2y ago
    Less than a week, tops. The hard part was the content - curating the resources for creating the podcasts
- kenjackson 2y ago
  I’ve had the same experience, except helping complement build components or scripts. Everyone on HN tells me how LLMs are horrible, yet I’ve saved literally hundreds of hours with them so far. I guess we’re just lucky.
  - spaceman_2020 2y ago
    Look at the replies on my comment This place is far gone. Some of the most close minded, uncurious people in tech I don’t think this place deserves to be called “Hacker” News anymore
    - jpc0 2y ago
      We have different definitions of hacker. I played around with LLMs... Found they aren't very useful. Slapping a project together to ship isn't what hacking is about. Hacking is about deeply understanding what is actually happening under the hood by playing around, taking it apart, rebuilding it. When the craze started everyone here were out looking for ways to escape the safeties of the LLMs, or discussing how they are being built etc. This comment thread is about using the technology to slap a thing together so you can sell it. There's no exploration of the topic at hand, there's no attempt to understand. I'm trying to think of a decent analogy but can't think of one but this smacks of a certain type of friend who finds a technology you have been hacking on and makes it so unbearable that you actually just lose interest...
      - kenjackson 2y ago
        So almost every person on here is not a hacker since I’ve met very few people here who are knowledgeable about EE, computer architecture, compiler technology, or heck even how browsers work. Of course there are some, but HN is mostly about slapping together technology to sell your startup.
        jpc0 2y ago
        Don't correlate hackernews and YCombinator. I am perfectly aware of the owner here but there is usually at least one or two posts a day here that has what I call a "hacker culture".
lxgr 2y ago
There are so many frameworks, especially on the web and in Javascript, that I have absolutely zero interest in learning. In fact, my main reason for not doing any web development is that I find the amount of layers of abstraction and needless complexity for something that should really be simple quite deterring. I'm sure e.g. React and GraphQL allow people to think about web apps in really elegant and scalable ways, but the learning curve is just way more than I can justify for a side project or a one-off thing at work that will never have more than two or three users opening it once every few months.
jstummbillig 2y ago
The more important question that programmers, who are not product makers, often miss is: Are you solving real problems? It's a slightly orthogonal way of thinking about this but if you are solving real problems, you get away with so much shit, it's unreal. Maybe Google is not gonna let you code monkey on their monorepo, but you do not have to care. There's enough not-google in the world, and enough real problems.

spaceman_2020 2y ago

Not as much as I would have if I was writing everything from scratch. But then again, my goal isn’t to be a coder or get a job as a coder - I’m primarily a marketer and got into coding simply because I had a stack of ideas I wanted to experiment with Most of the things I’ve built are fun things See: GoUnfaked.com and PlaybookFM.com as examples PlaybookFM.com is interesting because everything from the code to the podcasts to the logo are AI generated

an_guy 2y ago
How much time did you spend on getting it working especially for playbookfm?
- spaceman_2020 2y ago
  Less than a week, tops. The hard part was the content - curating the resources for creating the podcasts
kenjackson 2y ago
I’ve had the same experience, except helping complement build components or scripts. Everyone on HN tells me how LLMs are horrible, yet I’ve saved literally hundreds of hours with them so far. I guess we’re just lucky.
- spaceman_2020 2y ago
  Look at the replies on my comment This place is far gone. Some of the most close minded, uncurious people in tech I don’t think this place deserves to be called “Hacker” News anymore
  - jpc0 2y ago
    We have different definitions of hacker. I played around with LLMs... Found they aren't very useful. Slapping a project together to ship isn't what hacking is about. Hacking is about deeply understanding what is actually happening under the hood by playing around, taking it apart, rebuilding it. When the craze started everyone here were out looking for ways to escape the safeties of the LLMs, or discussing how they are being built etc. This comment thread is about using the technology to slap a thing together so you can sell it. There's no exploration of the topic at hand, there's no attempt to understand. I'm trying to think of a decent analogy but can't think of one but this smacks of a certain type of friend who finds a technology you have been hacking on and makes it so unbearable that you actually just lose interest...
    - kenjackson 2y ago
      So almost every person on here is not a hacker since I’ve met very few people here who are knowledgeable about EE, computer architecture, compiler technology, or heck even how browsers work. Of course there are some, but HN is mostly about slapping together technology to sell your startup.
      - jpc0 2y ago
        Don't correlate hackernews and YCombinator. I am perfectly aware of the owner here but there is usually at least one or two posts a day here that has what I call a "hacker culture".

lxgr 2y ago

There are so many frameworks, especially on the web and in Javascript, that I have absolutely zero interest in learning. In fact, my main reason for not doing any web development is that I find the amount of layers of abstraction and needless complexity for something that should really be simple quite deterring. I'm sure e.g. React and GraphQL allow people to think about web apps in really elegant and scalable ways, but the learning curve is just way more than I can justify for a side project or a one-off thing at work that will never have more than two or three users opening it once every few months.

jstummbillig 2y ago

The more important question that programmers, who are not product makers, often miss is: Are you solving real problems? It's a slightly orthogonal way of thinking about this but if you are solving real problems, you get away with so much shit, it's unreal. Maybe Google is not gonna let you code monkey on their monorepo, but you do not have to care. There's enough not-google in the world, and enough real problems.