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I've found that if you're a novice coder you don't know what to ask for. Your decades of experience are probably a bit like mine: you sense the cause of a prob
by raffraffraff 1y ago
I've found that if you're a novice coder you don't know what to ask for.
Your decades of experience are probably a bit like mine: you sense the cause of a problem in an almost psychic way, based on knowledge of the existing codebase, the person who wrote the last update, the "smell" of the problem. I've walked into a major incident, looked at a single alert on a dashboard, and almost with a smile on my face identified the root cause immediately. It's decades of knowledge that allow to know what to ask for.
Same with vibe coding: I've been having tremendous fun with it but occasionally a totally weird failure will occur, something that "couldn't happen" if you wrote it yourself. Like, you realise that the AI didn't refactor your code when you added the last feature, so it added "some tiny thing" to three separate functions. Then over several refactors it only updated one of those "tiny things", so now that specific feature only breaks in very specific cases.
Or let's say you want to get it to write something that AI seems to have problems with. Example, assemble and manage a NAS array using mdadm. I've been messing with that recently and Google Gemini has lost the whole array twice, and utterly failed to figure out how to rename an array device name. It's a hoot. Just to see if it would ever figure it out I kept going. Pages and pages of over-and-back, repeating the same mistakes, missing the obvious. Maybe it's been trained on 10 years of Muppets online giving terrible advice on how to manage mdadm?
- johnisgood 1y ago> I've found that if you're a novice coder you don't know what to ask for. And this is the reason for why I think I am productive with LLMs, and why people who know nothing about the underlying concepts are not going to be as productive.
- theshrike79 1y agoI’ve had the … pleasure of working with outsourced talent for 20 years and I think it gives me an edge with LLMs Both will never push back or say no and will just rush headlong into implementing - something. They will use 57 libraries when stdlib will do and make convoluted hierarchies when a simple functional program is enough. But both can produce very good results if you have predetermined limits, acceptance criteria and a proper plan and spec. Then you iterate in “sprints” and check the results after each one and challenge their output.
- johnisgood 1y agoYeah, in case of LLMs, I have never been told something is a bad idea, I had to point it out why it is a bad idea.
- fakedang 1y agoAs a counterexample, there's someone who vibe-coded a subscription adult website complete with payments and stuff, while having zero computer science experience while living in an RV. I can't find the link now, although last I saw on X, she was complaining about being blocked by trad finance after Bill Ackman's campaign. So yeah, it's absolutely possible. From personal experience, I was able to implement a basic scan and go application complete with payment integrations without going through a single piece of documentation. As long as you're ready to jostle for a bit in frustration with an AI, you can make something monetizable once you've identified an underserved market.
- theshrike79 1y agoGemini CLI is like a fresh self taught coder on massive amounts of cocaine and adderall. Just last night I asked it to create a project plan as markdown files. It started writing to disk and I tabbed out to watch Squid Game When I came back it was 80% through implementation and was trying to fix some weird python async issue in a loop over and over again. I never told it to implement anything. But it will always - ALWAYS - rush into implementation unless you tell it not to with ALL CAPS. Google really needs to add a Claude style explicit plan mode for it… I interrupted it, gave the error to Claude Code, which fixed it in one go.