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I don't think there's anyone better positioned to answer your question than I am, given that I've spent the last 3 years building the IDE tech that OpenAI reall

I don't think there's anyone better positioned to answer your question than I am, given that I've spent the last 3 years building the IDE tech that OpenAI really wants and needs right now (though they don't yet know it). The problem is that what you're discussing is a political undertaking. I don't mean that it's "left versus right" political, I mean that the primary task that makes it hard is getting a lot of human beings to agree on some low-level details about how the gory internals of an IDE work. LLMs can produce text, but they have no will to political organization. They aren't going to accomplish a task by going out and trying align the needs of many individuals in a compromise that requires determined work to find out what those people really want and need, which is the only way to get this particular task done. Somehow the natural-language-as-API idea has made many people think that in the future APIs and formal technical standards will be unnecessary, something for which I do not see evidence. There's a second problem too, one of alignment: LLMs encourage you to give away the work of coding. I would not for anything give away the pain of using mediocre tools like VSCode to write a lot of code myself, because what I learn as the intelligence doing the work is what I need to know to be able to make tools for doing that work more efficiently. I use my learnings to design protocols, data structures, libraries, frameworks, and programming languages which don't just *mask* the underlying pain of software development but which can reduce it greatly.

conartist6 2y ago
And the next link I click captures it perfectly: https://blog.ollien.com/posts/llm-friction/ https://blog.ollien.com/posts/llm-friction/ To quote Ollien: > Even as an “LLM-skeptic”, it would be silly for me to say that the tools are useless for software development. There are clearly times where they can be useful, whether that’s to perform a refactoring too complicated for IDE tooling, or to get a proof-of-concept put together. With that said, in my time both using and watching others use LLMs, I have noticed a troubling trend: they help reduce friction when developing software – friction that can help us to better understand and improve the systems we work on. It's quite funny to me that in the case I'm talking about, "a refactor that's too complicated for IDE tooling" is exactly the kind of friction that needs to be felt
- __loam 2y ago
  That friction is the smell you need to chase down for a refactor.
- dickersnoodle 2y ago
  If the refactoring is beyond the IDE tooling it's even more incumbent on the engineers/developers to know what they're doing instead of outsourcing it to the "brains" behind an LLM.
- never_inline 2y ago
  I wouldn't use LLM for serious refactors. It's actually the common "recipes" using popular libraries where LLM is most useful for me now.
surgical_fire 2y ago
> Why couldn’t OpenAI vibe code their own Windsurf/Cursor competitor? The obvious answer is that vibecoding does not work. If it did, OpenAI wouldn't need to buy Windsurf
- conartist6 2y ago
  I'm as much of a skeptic about vibe coding as you are. I consider engineering a bit of an art, so it's not for me. That said, the kinds of things I've been hearing as going wrong with vibe coding are all or mostly fixable. I would even go as far as to say they're manifestations of the same problems that make IDEs such clumsy tools for humans to use at the moment, which is why we're trying to foist all this annoyance of using them off onto AIs. The biggest problem, THE problem in this space is that tools we use don't have the language to describe the logic -- the intent -- behind refactorings. If you've never captured the user's intent, you can't learn from it. The ability to capture that intent is absent all the way from the highest level UX right down the lowest level of serialization: the patch format That's why I believe it's my tech they really need and not Windsurf's -- I'm working on capturing the intent top to bottom.
  - cdelsolar 2y ago
    Iunno, Cline is vibe coding some stuff for me right now while I’m surfing through hacker News.
    - conartist6 2y ago
      Yeah that's weird to me but I've made my peace with it. I do this to make the software I want to use, and I think that's a chance everyone should have.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    Isn’t the intent described in the commit message, which is one of many ways the developer can use to share intent? Code is only the what and the how. The why should be in Wiki, Readmes, Commit, Issue tracker…
runfaster2000 2y ago
This excellent presentation (Veritasium) is making much the same point (learning comes from “reps”). https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?si=rXg5_wjg4bEdMalw https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?si=rXg5_wjg4bEdMalw
jv22222 2y ago
I’ve been building text editor as notion from the ground up. Recently i’ve been uploading the full codebase to Gemini to discuss different tasks. I can fully agree that the LLM can simply not decide on how to do things! If you slightly tweak your prompt it will suggest an entirely different architecture. You have to be very careful about pulling out the right stuff from the cargo cult best practice stuff baked in to the model. Another thing, a really obvious optimization might be just staring it in the face and it won’t suggest it unless you say “have you considered XYZ?” and then all of a sudden it won’t stop talking about XYZ! But most of all you just have to be strong in your will power to guide it in the direction you want.

conartist6 2y ago

And the next link I click captures it perfectly: https://blog.ollien.com/posts/llm-friction/ https://blog.ollien.com/posts/llm-friction/ To quote Ollien: > Even as an “LLM-skeptic”, it would be silly for me to say that the tools are useless for software development. There are clearly times where they can be useful, whether that’s to perform a refactoring too complicated for IDE tooling, or to get a proof-of-concept put together. With that said, in my time both using and watching others use LLMs, I have noticed a troubling trend: they help reduce friction when developing software – friction that can help us to better understand and improve the systems we work on. It's quite funny to me that in the case I'm talking about, "a refactor that's too complicated for IDE tooling" is exactly the kind of friction that needs to be felt

__loam 2y ago
That friction is the smell you need to chase down for a refactor.
dickersnoodle 2y ago
If the refactoring is beyond the IDE tooling it's even more incumbent on the engineers/developers to know what they're doing instead of outsourcing it to the "brains" behind an LLM.
never_inline 2y ago
I wouldn't use LLM for serious refactors. It's actually the common "recipes" using popular libraries where LLM is most useful for me now.

surgical_fire 2y ago

> Why couldn’t OpenAI vibe code their own Windsurf/Cursor competitor? The obvious answer is that vibecoding does not work. If it did, OpenAI wouldn't need to buy Windsurf

conartist6 2y ago
I'm as much of a skeptic about vibe coding as you are. I consider engineering a bit of an art, so it's not for me. That said, the kinds of things I've been hearing as going wrong with vibe coding are all or mostly fixable. I would even go as far as to say they're manifestations of the same problems that make IDEs such clumsy tools for humans to use at the moment, which is why we're trying to foist all this annoyance of using them off onto AIs. The biggest problem, THE problem in this space is that tools we use don't have the language to describe the logic -- the intent -- behind refactorings. If you've never captured the user's intent, you can't learn from it. The ability to capture that intent is absent all the way from the highest level UX right down the lowest level of serialization: the patch format That's why I believe it's my tech they really need and not Windsurf's -- I'm working on capturing the intent top to bottom.
- cdelsolar 2y ago
  Iunno, Cline is vibe coding some stuff for me right now while I’m surfing through hacker News.
  - conartist6 2y ago
    Yeah that's weird to me but I've made my peace with it. I do this to make the software I want to use, and I think that's a chance everyone should have.
- skydhash 2y ago
  Isn’t the intent described in the commit message, which is one of many ways the developer can use to share intent? Code is only the what and the how. The why should be in Wiki, Readmes, Commit, Issue tracker…

runfaster2000 2y ago

This excellent presentation (Veritasium) is making much the same point (learning comes from “reps”). https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?si=rXg5_wjg4bEdMalw https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?si=rXg5_wjg4bEdMalw

jv22222 2y ago

I’ve been building text editor as notion from the ground up. Recently i’ve been uploading the full codebase to Gemini to discuss different tasks. I can fully agree that the LLM can simply not decide on how to do things! If you slightly tweak your prompt it will suggest an entirely different architecture. You have to be very careful about pulling out the right stuff from the cargo cult best practice stuff baked in to the model. Another thing, a really obvious optimization might be just staring it in the face and it won’t suggest it unless you say “have you considered XYZ?” and then all of a sudden it won’t stop talking about XYZ! But most of all you just have to be strong in your will power to guide it in the direction you want.