22 ms·

Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

• fizx 1y ago
  The "time dialation" is real. I mostly manage these days, yet my fun projects progress faster than they ever have, because I can prompt in the 2 minutes between meetings, and come back to significant progress.
  • jvanderbot 1y ago
    Yes, it's not faster to develop with AI if you watch it work. It's faster to develop with AI if you parallelize. Typing was never the bottleneck, but is is a now-parallelizeable part of the pipeline.
    • criley2 1y ago
      It can still be faster to develop with AI watching it work. It can legitimately introduce an entire simple fullstack change across multiple projects in my monorepo including graphql queries/mutations, typeorm repository, a service layer, and a reactnative frontend using apollo client, etc. It can do that in about 10 minutes in my local. I can't. If I turned it into a speed run event and practiced, maybe I could get it done in 10 minutes but honestly, it's a machine and I'm John Henry. Since it's using my IDE, it's using my meticulously setup and maintained local and I'm able to quickly stop it and fix any mistake it makes. Level 2 driving assist. I have enjoyed the github copilot agent style development where someone elses computer is running everything, and I can make a request and just come back half an hour later and check on it. But this level 5 driver gets the wrong destination basically every time, and then it's another 10, 20 or even 30 minutes for it to make a minor adjustment. It doesnt understand my `yarn` scripts, it runs my tests wrong, it can't do codegen, it doesn't format or lint files, etc. I asked copilot yesterday to lint and format a PR and it took 25 minutes of agentic work lol.
      • wrs 1y ago
        For me, one of the new superpowers is the ability to interactively do multiple drafts following different design principles and see which works better. I just started an embedded project where two different people had implemented subsystems independently, and I asked Claude to merge the code into a single project and convert the existing synchronous code into asynchronous state machines called from a single main loop. It wrote three drafts with me giving it different stylistic principles to follow. I don't know if I would have had the patience to do that myself!
      • twelve40 1y ago
        > I'm able to quickly stop it and fix any mistake it makes I would think that's the process too, but according to the article the dude is almost completely hands off: > You come back to ten thousand lines of code. You spend 5 minutes reading. One sentence of feedback. Another ten thousand lines appear while you're making lunch. You can't humanly review 10 thousand lines of code in 5 minutes. This is either complete bullshit or it really writes flawless code for them and never makes any mistakes.
    • nojs 1y ago
      > Yes, it's not faster to develop with AI if you watch it work. It’s actually a lot faster. You read the diffs as soon as they start coming in, and immediately course correct or re-prompt when you see bad mistakes.
      • aprilthird2021 1y ago
        I don't have this experience. Watching and course correcting like this makes me realize I could have done a better job myself
        • unshavedyak 1y ago
          That’s always true in my experience, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to. The trick I’m working towards is refining the workflow such that i can reliably produce maybe 90% as “good” as what I’d personally produce but much, much faster. All sorts of side work I was avoiding before also becomes much easier, less tedious refactors and large test coverage and etc. It can type much faster than I can, the trick is if we can constrain the thinking enough to make it useful. Keeping it as an autocomplete is as productive as it is difficult imo.
      • wrs 1y ago
        Indeed, I hit the stop button quite a bit when Claude goes off course. Then make a note of the right choice so maybe it won't do that again, revert and proceed. I have the feeling there is an optimal size of project proportional to the context size, where you can fit the critical design points into the context and/or there are enough examples in the code of how things should be done.
      • hooverd 1y ago
        presumably you've done the work enough pre-AI to notice those mistakes?
• renewiltord 1y ago
  I have a local LLM router app with profiles that set up the right system prompts and the right MCPs so I can swap between toolsets as I work. This would take time to write if I’m doing it myself so I decided to vibe code it entirely. I had this idea that a compiled language is less likely to have errors (on account of the compiler giving the LLM quicker feedback than me) and so I chose Tauri with TS (I think). The experience has been both wonderful and strange. The app was built by Claude Code with me intermittently prompting it between actual work sessions. What’s funny is the bugs. If you ever played Minecraft during the Alpha days you know that Notch would be like “Just fixed lighting” in one release. And you’d get that release and it’d be weird like rain would now fall through glass. Essentially the bugs are strange. At least in the MC case you could hypothesize (transparency bit perhaps was used for multiple purposes) but this app is strange. If the LLM configuration modal is fixed, suddenly the MCP/tool tree view will stop expanding. What the heck, why are these two related? I don’t know. I could never know because I have never seen the code. The compile time case did catch some iterations (I let Claude compile and run the program). But to be honest, the promise of correctness never landed. Some people have been systematic and documented the prompts they use but I just free flowed it. The results are outstanding. There’s no way I could have had this built for the $50 in Claude credits. But also there’s no way I could interpret the code.
• fmbb 1y ago
  That time dilation feels a bit like what METR reported: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... Developers believe they complete tasks 25% faster with AI but when measured they are 19% slower when using AI.
  • paulgerhardt 1y ago
    This was the study with a population size of 16?
    • sarchertech 1y ago
      16 developers doing hundreds of tasks. And the effect size was big enough for the result to be statistically significant.
    • fmbb 1y ago
      Do you have any better research we can read?
    • filoeleven 1y ago
      This was the only study that's been done so far?
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • logicchains 1y ago
    It depends on how the AI is used; there's a huge difference in productivity between a structured workflow with repeated automated feedback to the AI, and just ad-hoc prompting. For instance, Gemini 2.5 coding up a spec-compliant HTTP2.0 server in two weeks: https://outervationai.substack.com/p/building-a-100-llm-written-standards https://outervationai.substack.com/p/building-a-100-llm-writ... . 15k lines of code and 30k lines of tests; no human coder could produce something like that so fast.
    • djeastm 1y ago
• aprilthird2021 1y ago
  Eh, idk. First of all, the article is really wordy to say very few things. That just frustrated me a bit. Second of all, it's easy to fart out some program in a few days vibe coding. How will that fare as more and more features need to be added on? We all used to say "Dropbox that's just FTP wrapped in a nice UI anyone can make that". This protocollie project seems to be a documentation viewer / postman for MCP. Which is cool, but is it something that would have taken a competent dev months to build? Probably not. And eventually the actual value of such things is the extensibility and integrations with various things like corporate SAML etc. Will the vibe code projects of today be extensible like that, enough to grab market share vs the several similar versions and open source versions anyone can make in a few days, as the author suggests? It can be hard to extend a codebase you don't understand because you didn't write...
  • CharlesW 1y ago
    > First of all, the article is really wordy to say very few things. A clickbaity title in opposition with the content isn't helpful either. I would've recommended their "The Great Experiment Nobody's Running the Same Way" heading as a better choice, even thought it might not perform as well from a content marketing POV.
  • ModernMech 1y ago
    You prompt. You go live your life. You come back to ten thousand lines of code. You spend 5 minutes reading. One sentence of feedback. Another ten thousand lines appear while you're making lunch. Yeah, it strikes me the author writes prose the same way they're generating code. 20k lines? That's enough code for a whole compiler or an operating system kernel. I'd love to see what those 20k lines actually do -- notably, in these articles about AI, people tend to not link the actual code when they easily could, which is curious. I mean, my macro expander can also write 20k lines of code while I eat lunch, but no one is pretending it's sentient and about to replace devs.
    • wilkystyle 1y ago
      I definitely did a double take when I got to this section. I am neither an AI optimist nor an AI pessimist (probably slightly on the optimistic side of the midpoint) but this sounds insane to me for any software that people might truly depend on. Five minutes of review for 10,000 lines, happening multiple times per day?
• nirvanatikku 1y ago
  This article is spot on. I had stumbled upon Kidlin’s Law—“If you can write down the problem clearly, you’re halfway to solving it”. This is a powerful guiding principle in today’s AI-driven world. As natural language becomes our primary interface with technology, clearly articulating challenges not only enhances our communication but also maximizes the potential of AI. The async approach to coding has been most fascinating, too. I will add, I've been using Repl.it *a lot*, and it takes everything to another level. Getting to focus on problem solving, and less futzing with hosting (granted it is easy in the early journey of a product) - is an absolute game changer. Sparking joy. I personally use the analogy of mario kart mushroom or star; that's how I feel using these tools. It's funny though, because when it goes off the rails, it really goes off the rails lol. It's also sometimes necessary to intercept decisions it will take.. babysitting can take a toll (because of the speed of execution). Having to deal with 1 stack was something.. now we're dealing with potential infinite stacks.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • dustincoates 1y ago
    Repl.it is so hit or miss for me, and that's that is so frustrating. Like, it can knock out something in minutes that would have taken me an afternoon. That's amazing. Then other times, I go to create something that is suggested _by them below the prompt box_ and it can't do it properly.
    • baxter001 1y ago
      The fact that you think it was suggested _by_ them is I think where your mental model is misleading you. LLMs can be thought of metaphorically as a process of decompression, if you can give it a compressed form for your scenario 1 it'll go great - you're actually doing a lot of mental work to arrive at that 'compressed' request, checking technical feasibility, thinking about interactions, hinting at solutions. If you feed it back it's own suggestion it's no so guaranteed to work.
      • 1y ago
• schneems 1y ago
  The input to output ratio is interesting. We are usually optimizing for volume of output, but now it’s inverted. I actually don’t want maximum output, I want the work split up into concrete, verifiable steps and that’s difficult to achieve consistently. Ive taken to co-writing a plan with requirements with cursor and it works really well at first. But as it makes mistakes and we use those mistakes to refine the document eventually we are ready to “go” and suddenly it’s generating a large volume of code that directly contradicts something in the plan. Small annoyances like its inability to add an empty line after markdown headings have to be explicitly re added and re-reminded. I almost wish I had more control over how it was iterating. Especially when it comes to quality and consistency. When I/we can write a test and it can grind on that is when AI is at its best. It’s a closed problem. I need the tools to help me, help it, turn the open problem I’m trying to solve into a set of discrete closed problems.
• lordnacho 1y ago
  I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now. I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding. It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to change a bunch of things to test my new idea. I can skim my code and see a bunch of things that would normally take me ages to fiddle. The fiddling is frustrating, because I feel like I know what the end result should be, but there's some minor BS in the way, which takes a few minutes each time. It used to take a whole stackoverflow search + think, recently it became a copilot hint, and now... Claude simply does it. For instance, I wrote a mock stock exchange. It's the kind of thing you always want to have, but because the pressure is on to connect to the actual exchange, it is often a leftover task that nobody has done. Now, Claude has done it while I've been reading HN. Now that I have that, I can implement a strategy against it. This is super tedious. I know how it works, but when I implement it, it takes me a lot of time that isn't really fulfilling. Stuff like making a typo, or forgetting to add the dependency. Not big brain stuff, but it takes time. Now I know what you're all thinking. How does it not end up with spaghetti all over the place? Well. I actually do critique the changes. I actually do have discussions with Claude about what to do. The benefit here is he's a dev who knows where all the relevant code is. If I ask him whether there's a lock in a bad place, he finds it super fast. I guess you need experience, but I can smell when he's gone off track. So for me, career-wise, it has come at the exact right time. A few years after I reached a level where the little things were getting tedious, a time when all the architectural elements had come together and been investigated manually. What junior devs will do, I'm not so sure. They somehow have to jump to the top of the mountain, but the stairs are gone.
  • zwnow 1y ago
    So you are relaxing and the AI is coding? Neat! Way to replace yourself, hope you won't cry after your job once it is gone.
    • lubujackson 1y ago
      What you miss is the constant need to refine and understand the bigger picture. AI makes everyone a lead architect. A non-coder can't do this or will definitely get lost in the weeds eventually.
• facefactsdamnit 1y ago
  The only thing that should matter in software development is: does it work to spec? Why are these chatbots that mangle data 1/3 to 1/2 of the time getting their budgets 10x over and over again? This is irrational. If the code mangles data this bad, it's garbage.
  • iLoveOncall 1y ago
    > The only thing that should matter in software development is: does it work to spec? Unless you've never written code outside of a classroom you should know how unbelievably wrong this is.
    • timpieces 1y ago
      Maybe it's just semantics, but it doesn't feel so wrong to me. The main nuance is that this statement needs to be true over time as the spec changes. Developers try to write maintainable code so that their code will still work/adapt to spec when the spec changes. Maintainable code feels less important in a world where AI can rewrite a growing portion of your code quickly. I find myself accepting a much lower bar for non-critical parts of my projects with the knowledge that claude can rewrite it quickly if needs change. But disclaimer: I haven't yet used this technique in teams. The norms on usage aren't there yet.
• EddieSpeaks 1y ago
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• Flatcircle 1y ago
  My theory on AI is it's the next iteration of google search, a better more conversational, base layer over all the information that exists on the internet. Of course some people will lose jobs just like what happened to several industries when search became ubiquitous. (newspapers, phone books, encyclopedias, travel agents) But IMHO this isn't the existential crisis people think it is. It's just a tool. Smart, clever people can do lots of cool stuff with tools. But you still have to use it, Search has just become Chat. You used to have to search, now you chat and it does the searching, and more!
  • jopsen 1y ago
    It's clearly useful for many things other than search.
  • staplers 1y ago
    A lot of modern entry-level jobs were filled by people who knew how to use google and follow instructions. I imagine the next generation will have a similar relationship with AI. What might seem "common sense" with the younger, more tech-saavy crowd, will be difficult for older generations whose default behavior isn't to open up chatgpt or gemini and find the solution quickly.
  • ivanjermakov 1y ago
    > Search has just become Chat I think chat-like LLM interfacing is not the most efficient way. There has to be a smarter way.
    • clickety_clack 1y ago
      There’s an efficient way to serve the results, and there’s an efficient way for a human to consume them, and I find LLMs to be much more efficient in terms of cognitive work done to explore and understand something than a google search. The next thing will have to beat that level of personal mental effort, and I can’t imagine what that next step would look like yet.
      • 1y ago
• shermantanktop 1y ago
  Im going to be overly picky about the subheading (which is an incidental aspect of TFA): “The future of software development might just be jazz. Everyone improvising. Nobody following the sheet music.” That’s not jazz. Jazz being what it is, a lot of people in 2025 think it’s “everyone improvising,” but (outside of some free jazz) it’s quite structured and full of shared conventions. Analogies work when you and your audience both understand the things being compared. In this case, the author doesn’t, and maybe some of the audience shares the same misperception, and so the analogy only works based on shared misunderstanding. The analogy to jazz actually works better the more you know about it. But that’s accidental.
  • nixpulvis 1y ago
    Software jazz is when you and your teammate are working hard on a project and you both land big PRs at the same time without a merge conflict, then integrate before the build system even has time to realize what happened.
• karel-3d 1y ago
  Reading articles like this feels like being in a different reality. I don't work like this, I don't want to work like this and maybe most importantly I don't want to work with somebody who works like this. Also I am scared that any library that I am using through the myriad of dependencies is written like this. On the other hand... if I look at this as some alternate universe where I don't need to directly or indirectly touch any of this... I am happy that it works for these people? I guess? Just keep it away from me
  • lordnacho 1y ago
    But you also can't not swim with the tide. If you drove a horse-buggy 100 years ago, it was probably worth your while to keep your eye on whether motor-cars went anywhere. I was super skeptical about a year ago. Copilot was making nice predictions, that was it. This agent stuff is truly impressive.
    • rafaelmn 1y ago
      More like people telling us there will be no more professional drivers on the road in 5-10 years 10 years ago. Agents are like lane assist, not even up to the current self driving levels.
      • miltonlost 1y ago
        So many people are hyping AI like it's Musk's FSD, with the same fraudulance in overestimating its capabilities.
        • dingnuts 1y ago
          it's exactly like this. we're 3 years into being told all white collar jobs are going to be gone next year, just like we're ten years into being told we'll have self driving cars next year
          • johnnienaked 1y ago
• hoppp 1y ago
  I like to use it to generate python and react Ui components with tailwind css And also to help me troubleshoot my old yacht, it taught me to be an amateur marine electrician I do not let it into my entire codebase tho. Keep the context small and if I dont get what I want in one or two prompt I dont use it
• d00mB0t 1y ago
  "I'd wander into my office, check what Claude had built, test it real quick. If it worked, great! Commit and push." Man, I'm going to make so much money as a Cybersecurity Consultant!
  • pkoird 1y ago
    Potentially. But also remember what they say about self-driving cars, that it'd make fewer and fewer mistakes than a real driver.
    • dyauspitr 1y ago
      Waymos are in many cities and doing really well.
    • thomasfromcdnjs 1y ago
      Yeah, when I'm building side projects that sometimes have more traction than anticipated I build them taking many shortcuts. I've found LLM's add lots of standard protections to api endponts, or database constraints etc than I would do on a lazy Saturday.
    • JohnKemeny 1y ago
      Tesla drivers are involved in more accidents than drivers of any other brand.
    • LtWorf 1y ago
      Real drivers would also do fewer mistakes if they only drove in the limited and ideal conditions the self driving cars are limited to.
  • sureglymop 1y ago
    I tend to generally think the same as you, as I work in the same field. A long time ago I thought to myself, if AI adoption increases exponentially, there is a chance that the amount of security vulnerabilities introduced by it also increases at the same rate. However, what we are maybe not considering enough is that general AI adoption could and almost certainly will affect the standards for cybersecurity as well. If everyone uses AI and everyone gets used to its quirks and mistakes and is also forgiving about someone else using it since they themselves use it too, the standards for robust and secure systems could decrease to adjust to that. Now, your services as a cybersecurity consultant are no longer in need as much, as whatever company would need them can easily point to all the other companies also caring less and not doing anything about the security issues introduced by the AI that everyone uses. The legal/regulation body would also have to adjust to this, as it is not possible to enforce certain standards if no one can adhere to them.
• zkmon 1y ago
  Not sure what the complaint is about. If the coding work has to be thrown away, we need to do that and move on. We did that many times earlier. We have thrown away hunting, farming, calculations by hand, cameras and so on. Coding work might get extinct for some use cases. Nothing wrong with it. Learn how to use your tools, assistants and godzillas. The bigger issue, would there be a need for coding and software? Who would use them? Why are they using it? Are they buying something? searching for info? The usecase will see a revolution. The new usecases won't need the traditonal kind software. But AI can only produce traditional software. Can I ask Claude to code up its clone for local use?
• arresin 1y ago
  Why not use the mcp inspector instead of protocollie?
• ujal 1y ago
  See also https://github.com/davidkimai/Context-Engineering https://github.com/davidkimai/Context-Engineering
• black_13 1y ago
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• wwdmaxwell 1y ago
  I only call provider APIs and try to include only devDependancies in my project. Really helped my understanding of how apps work.
• layer8 1y ago
  Excuse me, you can't build software that fast, and definitely not while making pancakes. Please return to your regularly scheduled struggling.
• andrewstuart 1y ago
  It’s amazing to me all the Luddite developers who are “against” all this. Completely new ways of programming are forming, completely new ways of computing and the best the luddites can do is be “against it”. A revolution came along, a change in history and instead of being excited by the possibilities, joining in, learning, discovering, creating …… the luddites are just “against it all”. I feel sorry for them. Why be in computing at all if you don’t like new technology?
  • recursive 1y ago
    > Why be in computing at all if you don’t like new technology? Because computers can be used to run programs. You feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for the future.
• tronicjester 1y ago
  >we dont have a word for it yet I call it 'Orchestratic Development'. Edit: Seriously, down voted twice when just commenting on an article? God I hate this arrogant shithole.
  • trallnag 1y ago
    Check out image boards like 4chan or more localized boards like Kohlchan for Germany. No votes, no accounts
• xyst 1y ago
  "You’re using it wrong" arguments/hype articles showing up. Speculators love it. But in reality if you need to extol the benefits of AI, then is it really the user or the technology? Honestly reminds me of the digital currency mania that busted a couple of years ago. Same types of articles popping up too. Look I understand the benefits of AI but it’s clear ai is limited by the compute power of today. Maybe the dream this author has will be realized some day. But it won’t be today or in current generations lifespan.
• therein 1y ago
  >I've been coding for long enough to remember when we carved HTML tables by hand. When CSS was a suggestion, not a lifestyle. When JavaScript was for mouseover effects and nothing else. Cringe. The tech is half baked and the author is already fully committed to this is the future, I am living in the future, I bake cookies while Claude codes. Pure cringe. This confirms my earlier theories that everyone just wants to be a manager. You don't need to manage humans. You just want to be a manager. The whole article could be summed down to I always wanted to be a manager and now I am a manager of bots.
• lvl155 1y ago
  Based on how easy it is to trigger cool-down or throttle on Claude Code, I think people know how to build with AI. Or they’re trying really hard to figure it out. The race is on and it’s wide open. There are a lot gotchas with these new models. They get incredibly lazy if you let them. For example, I asked it to do a simple tally by year. I just assumed it’s simple enough I don’t need to ask to write a code. It counted first couple of years and just “guessed” the rest based on pattern it noticed. Sometimes, it feels like having a lazy coworker that you have to double check constantly and email with repeated details. Other times, I just sit there in awe of how smart it is in my weekly AGI moment and how it’s going to replace me soon.
• iLoveOncall 1y ago
  I feel increasingly tired of reading excuse after excuse when you bring up that AI tools simply cannot solve anything beyond extremely basic problems. It's always a mix of: 1. "Wait for the next models", despite models having all but plateaued for the past 3 years, 2. "It's so good for boilerplate code", despite libraries and frameworks being much better suited for this task, and boilerplate code being actually rare to write in the normal lifecycle of a project, 3. "You need to prompt it differently", glossing over the fact that to prompt it so it can do what you want it to do accurately it would take longer than not to use AI at all, 4. And the worst: "We don't know how to use those models yet" Maybe the real reason it doesn't work is because IT JUST DOESN'T FUCKING WORK. Why is it so unfathomable that a next token generator is gonna suck at solving complex problems? It is blindingly obvious.
  • strange_quark 1y ago
    There’s about half a trillion reasons that it’s unfathomable to some.
• deleted 1y ago
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• reactordev 1y ago
  Congratulations, you just passed project management class. What you describe is exactly what a project manager does. Refines the technical, stories, organizes the development towards a goal. This doesn’t feel like programming because it isn’t. It doesn’t NOT feel like programming because you’re supervising. In the end, you are now a project manager.
• asadotzler 1y ago
  I seem to have missed the part where he successfully prompted for security, internationalizability, localizability, accessibility, usability, etc., etc. This is a core problem with amateurs pretending to be software producers. There are others, but this one is fundamental to acceptable commercial software and will absolutely derail vibe coded products from widespread adoption. And if you think these aspects of quality software are easily reduced to prompts, you've probably never done serious work in those spaces.
  • helix400 1y ago
    Exactly. >My four-document system? Spaghetti that happened to land in a pattern I could recognize. Tomorrow it might slide off the wall. That's fine. I'll throw more spaghetti. Amazing that in July 2025 people still think you can scale development this way.
  • baby_souffle 1y ago
    > And if you think these aspects .. , you've probably never done serious work in those spaces. To be fair, a lot of commercial software clearly hasn't, either.
  • nhaehnle 1y ago
    I'm skeptical too, but at least accessibility and usability do show up in those four documents they link to. I didn't see internationalization and localization, but I don't see anything fundamental about those that would be different. Security, on the other hand, does feel like a different beast.
  • Zacharias030 1y ago
    Isn’t that like „the dog speaks English, but makes occasional grammar mistakes“? Give it two years.
    • bopbopbop7 1y ago
      It’s been two more years for the past three years. What’s going to happen in those two years? Are we going to find 10 more internets to train on?
• foobarbaz569 1y ago
  Impossible to read this. Very wordy and full of tangents.
• sansseriff 1y ago
  There's a weird insecurity I've noticed cropping up. I want to design the codebase 'my way'. I want to decide on the fundamental data structures. But there's this worry that my preferred architecture is not massively better than whatever the machine comes up with. So by insisting on 'my way' I'm robbing everyone productivity. I know most true programmers will vouch for me and my need to understand. But clients and project managers and bosses? Are they really gonna keep accepting a refrain like this from their engineers? "either it gets done in a day and I understand none of it, or it gets done in a month and I fully understand it and like it"
  • bGl2YW5j 1y ago
    Until an LLM or some new form of AI can manage an entire architecture itself, I say we need a middle ground. Something will always go wrong, and understanding of the system is necessary to troubleshoot.
  • greenchair 1y ago
    Not sure if a developer would ever say that to their manager. Agreed on the need to 100% fully understand what's going on. Otherwise the "AI can get it done in a day" is extremely high risk to the business. Junior may not be able to recognize a half-baked solution that doesn't follow existing patterns, poor security, poor performance, etc.
• mediumsmart 1y ago
  I find its all about the joy of building with the subset you can be an expert in and the AI telling you where the typo is and why it still wont work after fixing it.
• chamomeal 1y ago
  I don’t mean to be a dick, but stuff like this > With enough AI assistants building enough single-purpose tools, every problem becomes shallow. Every weird edge case already has seventeen solutions. Every 2am frustration has been felt, solved, and uploaded. > We're not drowning in software. We're wading in it. And the water's warm Just sounds like GPT style writing. I’m not saying this blog is all written by GPT, but it sounds like it is. I wonder if those of us who are constantly exposed to AI writing are starting to adopt some of that signature fluffy, use-a-lot-of-words-without-saying-much kinda style. Life imitates art. Does intelligence imitate artificial intelligence?? Or maybe there’s more AI written content out there than I’m willing to imagine. (Those snippets are from another post in this blog)
• wiremine 1y ago
  I've been experimenting with model-based development lately, and this resonated strongly with me. The section "What Even Is Programming Anymore?" hit on a lot of the thoughts and feels I've been going through. I'm using all my 25+ years of experience and CS training, but it's _not_ programming per se. I feel like we're entering an era where we're piloting a set of tools, not hand crafting code. I think a lot of people (who love crafting) will be leaving the industry in the next 5 years, for better or worse. We'll still need to craft things by hand, but we're opening some doors to new methodologies. And, right now, those methodologies are being discovered, and most of us are pretty bad at them. But that doesn't mean they're not going to be part of the industry.
  • gronglo 1y ago
    > I think a lot of people (who love crafting) will be leaving the industry in the next 5 years, for better or worse. I think you're spot on. It was once necessary to acquire knowledge in order to acquire productivity. This made knowledge valuable and worth attaining. Now, with LLMs, we we can skip the middle man and go straight to the acquisition of productivity. I'd call it the democratisation of knowledge, but it's something more than that — knowledge just isn't needed anymore.
    • yoyohello13 1y ago
      This kind of makes sense. I love acquiring knowledge, just for knowledges sake. That’s why I got into math and programming in the first place. I just like learning stuff. It was a happy accident that the stuff I like doing happens to also be lucrative. Kind of sucks that all that stuff I spent my life doing is losing value by the day. I love programming because there are an endless amount of things to learn. I actually care very little about the productivity.
    • doom2 1y ago
      Which makes me wonder: why shouldn't AI use be a core part of technical interviews now? If we're trading "knowledge of how to code" for "knowledge of how to use LLMs" and treating Claude like a much more productive junior engineer, do we still need to filter candidates on their ability to write a doubly linked list? And if we are still asking those sorts of interview questions, why shouldn't candidates be able to use LLMs in the process? After all, like others have said elsewhere in this thread, you still need some core technical capabilities to effectively manage the AI. It's just a tool and we can judge how well someone knows how to use it or not.
• jerpint 1y ago
  Funny enough, I’m building a tool that does basically what the author describes, but with a bit more software engineering driving it (context-llemur) https://github.com/jerpint/context-llemur https://github.com/jerpint/context-llemur The idea is to track all of the context of a project using git. It’s a CLI and MCP tool, the human guides it but the LLM contributes back to it as the project evolves I used it to bootstrap the library itself, and have been using it more and more for context management of all sorts of things I care about
• soruly 1y ago
  > "coherent desire" or "precise imagination" or "structured wishing." the most precise way to express your desire is by giving computer commands, or you may call it programming.
• saadatq 1y ago
  this isn’t vibe coding. This is something completely new. I call it “flex coding.” heck I built a full app in an afternoon AND I was a good dad? > I'd wander into my office, check what Claude had built, test it real quick. If it worked, great! Commit and push. "Now build the server connection UI," I'd say, and wander back out. Made breakfast. Claude coded. Played with my son. Claude coded. Watched some TV. Claude coded. Every hour or so, I'd pop back in. Five minutes of testing. One minute of feedback.
  • herval 1y ago
    careful, Claude might soon start complaining you're not pulling your weight and refuse to work
  • jen729w 1y ago
    This is all very emotive and I'm sure is a dream many of us would love to live. But does Claude's code work? Does it work to the level where you'd depend on it yourself; where you'd bill customers for it; where you'd put your reputation behind it? I say no. And it's because I use Claude. Two events changed how I use Claude: now it's an advisor, and I mostly type the code myself. Because I don't trust it. First, I caught it copying one of my TypeScript interfaces and modifying it. So now we have User which looks like my actual user, that I defined, and UserAgain which does not, and which Claude is now using and proudly proclaiming that my type checks all pass. Well of course they do! Second, I was told that the best way to catch this sort of thing is to get it to write tests. So it wrote some tests, and they failed, and it kept going, and it eventually wrote an un-failable test. The test mocked itself. So, sure, enjoy time with your kids. Please don't ask me to use your app for anything important.
    • SparkyMcUnicorn 1y ago
      It's interesting reading comments on both sides of this. Some people are answering no, and others are answering yes to your question and succeeding at it... so far. I've experienced the exact issues you've described. I've also drastically reduced these issues via good instructions and automated followup passes that eliminate code that was created from ignored instructions. It all feels like a hack, but the more I choose to trust it and treat it like it's the correct path and that it's just a different set of problems that need to be solved, the more success I have.
• forrestthewoods 1y ago
  Yawn. I wish HN would just ban AI skip articles until someone writes about an actual product that provides actual value to paying customers. In fact what I really want to see is a successful product that no one realizes was built by AI vibes until after it was successful. Customers don’t give a shit how something was built.
  • Daniel_sk 1y ago
    I don't think it's either "vibe coding or nothing" choice you have to make with AI. I am part of a team working on a complex Kotlin backend. I have been experimenting with Claude recently and I have been amazed how well it can pick up the existing patterns used in the project and create new code if given reasonable instructions. And it writes great tests too (something that would take me a lot of time and kill my motivation). It has been a great productivity boost for me. Of course we review the code in PRs, we test it but in the end it does the job in less time and saves me from doing tedious work.
• thegrim33 1y ago
  I know it's an analogy that's probably been done to death already, but it truly feels like Bitcoin 2.0. Back in the Bitcoin hype days, there were new posts here every single day about the latest and greatest Bitcoin thing. Everyone was using it. It was going to take over the world. Remember all the people on this very site that sincerely thought fiat currency was going away and we'd be doing all of our transactions with Bitcoin? How'd that work out? It feels exactly the same. Now the big claims are that coding jobs are going away, or if you at least don't use it you'll be left behind. People are posting AI stories every day. Everyone is using it. People say it's going to transform the industry. Back then there was greater motivation to evangelize Bitcoin, as you could get rich by convincing people to buy in, and it's just to a lesser degree now. People who work for AI companies (like the author), posting AI stuff, trying to drum up more people to give them views/clicks, buy their products. And of course you'll have people replying to this trying to make the case for why AI coding is already a thing, when in reality those posts are once again going to be carbon copies of similar comments from the Bitcoin days "hey, you're wrong, I bought pizza with Bitcoin last night, it's already taking over, bud!"
  • scorpioxy 1y ago
    My feelings exactly. For a while I thought I was missing out and then I started learning how(and why) it works and I thought it was interesting but greatly over-hyped, exactly like bitcoin was. I tried to follow the hype and generate an application but it took a lot of time and it did generate something but not something that works with many subtle bugs. Now it may be that I needed to prompt it better, but that response also feels similar to how Scrum is always "done wrong" when it doesn't work. The result started getting better when I got more and more detailed with my prompts and then I realized that I am about to start writing code as a prompt and I may as well write the code myself. So I still think it's an interesting tool, and it will automate away certain industries but no where near what the advertising is implying.
  • fragmede 1y ago
    peeThe difference is Bitcoin is a networked system. Bitcoin is useless if I use it and you/my landlord/stores/the taxman doesn't. If my pizza store doesn't take Bitcoin, I can't use my Bitcoin. Meanwhile, LLM assisted programming has value to its adherents without needing you/my landlord/stores/the taxman to even have heard of it. My time machine is just as good as yours, so I have no idea if OpenAI, specifically is going to be around in 10 years, but I can tell you that I'll still have deepseek-r1.ggml
• bgwalter 1y ago
  The "AI" promotion articles are beginning to read like Jack Kerouac.
• keeda 1y ago
  Nobody knows how to build with AI yet, and the corollary (which TFA concludes with) is that everybody should figure out for themselves how to best work with AI. I've said it before and I'll say it again: there likely isn't a "golden workflow" or "generally accepted best practices" on how to code with AI. The new models and agentic capabilities seem to be very powerful, and they will conform to whatever methodologies you currently use with whatever project you're working on, but that may still be under-utilizing what they are truly capable of. A true optimum may even require you to adjust the way you work, down to structuring your code and projects differently. In fact you may need to figure out different approaches based on the project, the language, the coding style, the model, the specific task at hand, even your personality. I am convinced this aspect is what's causing the bimodal nature of AI coding discussions: people who stuck at it and figured it out, or just got lucky with the right mix of model / project / task / methodology, are amazed at their newfound superpowers -- whereas people who didn't, are befuddled by the hype. This may seem like a lot of work, but it makes sense if you stop thinking of this as just a tool and more like working with a new team-mate.
• deadbabe 1y ago
  The entire premise of using AI to build stuff is founded on the idea that building faster is somehow automatically better. I’m starting to believe that’s not necessarily true. And if some study finds out later that stuff built slowly by hand is actually better in every way except time-to-market, then it means AI is not really a competitive edge, it’s just a Quality of Life improvement that allows software engineers to be even lazier. And at future price points of $200, $400, even $1000 a month per head, that becomes a hard sell for most companies. Might be easier to have engineers pay for their own AI if they want to be lazy. And of course whether they use AI or not, you can still measure productivity under the assumption that every engineer does…
• barbazoo 1y ago
  I was hoping this would be about building products with AI.
• draw_down 1y ago
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• cadamsdotcom 1y ago
  How wonderful for all of us to be thrown back into “what are we doing” mode. Like when you were a teenager, hacking stuff you were just excited to build, with none of the “here’s how you should do this” we’ve burdened ourselves with over the years.
• daveguy 1y ago
  > The Story Breakdown - Everything in 15-30 minute chunks. Why? Because that's roughly how long before Claude starts forgetting what we discussed ten minutes ago. Like a goldfish with a PhD. This is interesting. Does Claude have a memory? Is this just a limit on the number of input tokens? It sounds like a fundamental misappropriation of cause, but maybe I just don't understand the latest whizbang feature of Claude. Can anyone clarify?
• cedws 1y ago
  I’m feeling limited by the tools right now. The software for using LLMs is an incongruent mess. For example, how can I have a global system prompt shared across all the apps I use my OpenRouter key with? I can’t, I have to set it in each application. How can I carry a conversation over from one app to another? How can I give all my apps access to the same set of MCP tools? Most of the apps I use don’t even properly support MCP yet. It sounds like Claude Code is the best UX right now but I don’t want to be locked into a Claude subscription, I want to bring my own key and tap into whatever provider I want.
  • terhechte 1y ago
    I have this small project that lets you use Claude code (because their terminal UI is really smart) with any OpenRouter model: https://github.com/terhechte/CCORP https://github.com/terhechte/CCORP Works fine on macOS / Linux, untested on Windows. Still working on improving it.
    • cedws 1y ago
      Thanks, interested in trying this.
• mycentstoo 1y ago
  The market value of software diminishes as it becomes significantly easier to write.
• noodletheworld 1y ago
  There is a fundamentally unfortunate reality here which is quite problematic. Namely, you don’t deserve to be paid for working 8 hours if you only worked for 30 minutes over an eight hour period. I don’t care if you personally agree with that or not, the reality is that businesses believe it. That means, sooner or later there will be a great rebalancing where people will be required to do significantly more work; probably the work of other developers who will be fired. It’s fun for home projects; but the somewhat depressing reality is that there is no chance in hell this (sitting around for 7 hours a day reading reddit while Claude codes) will fly in corporate environments; instead, you’re looking at mass layoffs. So. Enjoy it while you can folks. In the future you’ll be spending that 8 hours struggling to juggle the context and review 20 different tasks, not playing with your kids.
  • drivebyhooting 1y ago
    Playing with your kids, aka increasing their IQ and investing in the future.
    • noodletheworld 1y ago
      It doesn’t matter what downtime task it is. You won’t have time to do it; it’s naive and ridiculous to expect that businesses will just let people goof off for 7 hours a day. Regardless of the output they generate. Anyone who doesn’t believe this has never had to manage budgets and staff. It’s the “AI utopia” people making vague hand wavey motions about post-scarcity.
    • deleted 1y ago
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  • CalRobert 1y ago
    Twas always such. Until we build a system where necessities are cheap (housing scarcity is a self-imposed own goal for one) we will be in constant competition with our peers so the value we produce can be extracted by casual owners.
  • trashtensor 1y ago
• dangero 1y ago
  I want claude code on my phone running in a cloud vm so I can give feedback out on a trail somewhere and continue my three hour hike or bike ride with my family.
  • mhrmsn 1y ago
    I think you can already kind of do that with something like vibetunnel :) https://vibetunnel.sh https://vibetunnel.sh
  • tobyhinloopen 1y ago
    Just enjoy the hike and bike ride and keep the coding at home (:
  • globular-toast 1y ago
    Screen+SSH. 90s technology. An LLM probably could have told you this.
  • pksunkara 1y ago
    I am working on something for that at https://automa.app https://automa.app. Let me know if you are interested in trying it out.
• tobyhinloopen 1y ago
  Instead of walking away, I have worked on multiple projects at the same time. Prompt one project, let it run, prompt another project, let it run and go back to the first. Maybe walking away is a better choice hah.
  • gngoo 1y ago
    Yep! I work on multiple client projects. And while one agent is running in one project, I’m reviewing and writing down the task for another. Generally I just do this 2-3 hours per day; trying to block this time. And then go outside and enjoy free time.
    • yoyohello13 1y ago
      Enjoy it while it lasts. Once this becomes the norm, the free time will diminish.
• Zacharias030 1y ago
  I just came here to remark how exceptional the prose in this article is.
  • Anamon 1y ago
    I guess one man's exceptional is another man's borderline unreadable (:
• globular-toast 1y ago
  Building with LLMs is a bit like driving with GPS. You ever get that feeling the GPS is wrong or leading you along a difficult route? But for some reason you follow the GPS anyway? Maybe there's a name for the phenomenon. I notice it more and more. The decision making parts of people's brains will atrophy. It will be interesting to see what will happen.
• gngoo 1y ago
  To me it feels like I’m in the camp of people who has already figured it out. And I have now learned the hard way that it’s almost impossible to teach others (I organized several meetups on the topic). The ability seems like pure magic. I know that there are others who have it very easy now building even complex software with AI and delivering project after project to clients at record speed at no less of quality as they did before. But the majority of devs who won’t even believe that it’s remotely possible to do so is also not helping this style of building/programming mature. I wouldn’t even call it vibe coding anymore. I think the term hurts what it actually is. For me it’s just a huge force multiplier, maybe 10-20x of my ability to deliver with my own knowledge and skills on a web dev basis.
  • Sammi 1y ago
    It's just hard to believe something is real when it's not reproducible.
    • real-hacker 1y ago
      The spec, or prompts system, whatever you call it, is more like a recipe than code. It doesn't automatically generate the dishes; a good cook is still needed.
      • Sammi 1y ago
        Yes and culinary schools exist and create new cooks in a reproducible way. Why can't coding with ai be taught?
        • intrasight 1y ago
          I fully expect that in 1-2 years that SWE curriculum will have AI coding as a major feature. The question I have is will students be required to do their first year or first assignments in a given course without AI. My ex teaches UX. We were talking about AI in academia last week. She said that she requires students to not use AI on their first assignment but on subsequent ones they are permitted to.
• brap 1y ago
  I don’t know which models you guys are working with, but all of the SOTA ones I’ve tried in different configurations ended up producing mostly garbage. I find myself having to spend more time guiding the model in the right direction and fixing its mistakes than I would’ve spent building it all myself. Every time I read one of these stories I feel like maybe you guys have models from 2035, because the ones we have today seem to be useless outside of creating greenfield, simple React apps that just sort of work. One thing I’ll say is that it’s been a real time saver for debugging. For coding, a huge waste of time. Even for tasks that are menial, repetitive, require no thinking etc. I find that it’s mostly crap.
  • Anamon 1y ago
    It works for people who don't really look at the code, or try to understand what the LLM spat out. It's right there in this article: if it compiles and runs, just commit and push. They usually don't write this kind of blog post anymore after they tried to vibe-code an extension or modification onto their vibe-coded application. There was a good one on HN a while ago, though, of someone who decided to actually take a look at their vibe-coded codebase, finding an unbelievable mess of inconsistencies and redundancies. People who just want to put something together and hate programming can be fine with this. Anyone who wants to build something clean that actually lasts, won't.
• sgt101 1y ago
  So far: - when I ask models to do defined that I know how to do and can tell them about that method but can't remember the details off off hand and then I check the answers things work. - when I attempt to specify things that I don't understand fully the model creates rubbish 7 out of 10 times, and those episodes are irretrievable. About 30% of the time I get a hint of what I should do and can make some progress.
  • NohatCoder 1y ago
    Probably down to a combination of LLMs on average having a harder time with tasks that humans typically find difficult, and the task of prompting being easier the more you know about the problem.
• aszantu 1y ago
  Takes me more time to define what I want than to make the thing
• NohatCoder 1y ago
  So, is Protocollie actually any good? I don't have any means of evaluating the final product, but I feel like evaluating what ultimately stuck to the wall is a pretty important part of the tale. How buggy is it? How long would it have taken to build something similar by hand?
• rmdashrfv 1y ago
  A bit part of this that people are not understanding is that a major part of the author's success is due to the fact that he clearly does not care at all how anything is implemented, mostly because he doesn't need to. You get way farther when you have the AI drop in Tailwind templates or Shadcn for you and then just let it use those components. There is so much software outside that web domain though. A lot of people just stop working on their AI projects because they don't realize how much work it's going to take to get the AI to do exactly what they want in the way that they want, and that it's basically going to be either you accept some sort of randomized variant of what you're thinking of, or you get a thing that doesn't work at all.
• JKCalhoun 1y ago
  > There's this moment in every new technology where everyone pretends they know what they're doing. Perhaps that is true, but without any examples I was immediately suspicious of this line. > Either way, we're in this delicious middle ground where nobody can pretend expertise because the whole thing keeps changing under our feet. Upon reflection this does in fact remind me of the early days of rocketry when we were just reaching into the upper atmosphere and then orbit. Wild things were being tried because there was not yet any handrails. Exploding a huge tank of water in the ionosphere just because, launching giant mylar balloons into orbit to try and bounce radar signals off of them, etc.
• leecommamichael 1y ago
  Reminds me of Sussman’s “We don’t know how to compute” which is essentially maligning that we haven’t gone full Smalltalk with some Lisp sprinkled on top to get “soft computers.” None of that is actually what makes my favorite tools work. It’s usually some nerds that never stopped using C/C++ and really know hardware.
• simultsop 1y ago
  We are expecting a moment like when sublime was born. Sidebar map, concurrent cursors, blazing speed. Right now its all monetization at gravity. As if companies are ready to pour software developer salaries in tools. I imagine beginners will not have gpu rich environments and AI will not reach mainstream as traditional development did, unless something happens, idk what. Right now, seniors love the complexity and entry barrier to it, so they can occupy the top of the food chain. History has proven that that does not last long. In some scenarios as airtable, AI is replacing docs and customer support, eleminating the learning curve.
• divan 1y ago
  > I'd wander into my office, check what Claude had built, test it real quick. If it worked, great! Commit and push. Do people read the code? Or just test if it work and push? To me, code is like a map that has to be clear enough so other humans can read it to navigate the territory (codebase). Even if it's just two – me and AI agent – working on the codebase, it's not much different from "me and another programmer". We both want to have updated mental model of how exactly code structured and how it works and why. Using AI for coding and not reading the code sounds more like stopping being developer and self-promoting yourself to the manager of AI-programmers who trusts their craft completely.
  • jraedisch 1y ago
    Stefan Munz called this “YOLO vs tight-leash” at a very entertaining agentic coding meetup in Hamburg recently. https://bsky.app/profile/stefanmunz.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/stefanmunz.bsky.social https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/de-DE/agentic-coding-meetup-hamburg/events/308816601/ https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/de-DE/agentic-coding-meetup-ham...
• deleted 1y ago
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• stephenlf 1y ago
  Beautiful read. Thank you. ——— > Maybe all methodology is just mutually agreed-upon fiction that happens to produce results? Good news! *All of computer science is this way.* There’s nothing universally fundamental about transistors, or Turing machines, or OOP, or the HTTP protocol. They’re all just abstractions that fit, because they worked. ——— When should I stop learning and start building? My coworker wrote absolutely ATROCIOUS code, alone, for the past decade. But he was BUILDING that whole time. He’s not up to date on modern web practices, but who cared? He built.
• bawana 1y ago
  At what point does LLM output become more expensive than search? For example, the author made protocollie. Could the LLM gather all similar apps that are already written to solve the prompt that birthed it,, and then simply provide THOSE apps iinstead of figuring out how to code it anew? Sounds like this could be a moat that only hyperscalars could implement and woould reduce their energy requirements drastically.
• tom_m 1y ago
  Why are we counting the number of documents? It doesn't matter. What matters is putting together a plan and being able to articulate what you want. Then review and adjust and prompt again. You have to know how software gets built and works. You can't just expect to get it right without a decent understanding of software architecture and product design. This is something that's actually very hard. I'm coming to grips with that slowly, because it's always been part of my process. I'm both a programmer and a graphic designer. It took me a long while to recognize not everyone has spent a great deal of time doing both. Fewer yet decide to learn good software design patterns, study frameworks and open-source projects to understand the problems each of them are solving. It takes a LOT of time. It too me probably 10-15 years just to learn all of this. I've been building software for over 20 years. So it just takes time and that's ok. The most wonderful thing I see about AI is that it should help people focus on these things. It should free people from getting too far into the weeds and too focused on the code itself. We need more people who can apply critical thinking and design from a bird's eye perspective. We need people who can see the big picture.
  • bob1029 1y ago
    Knowing is at least half the battle. Doesn't matter what kind of tools you intend to use if you don't even know where the job site is located. I've been around the block a few times on ideas like a B2B/SaaS requirements gathering product that other B2B/SaaS vendors could use to collect detailed, structured requirements from their customers. Something like an open-world Turbo Tax style workflow experience where the user is eventually cornered into providing all of the needed information before the implementation effort begins.
  • devin 1y ago
    > The most wonderful thing I see about AI is that it should help people focus on these things. Unfortunately I’ve been around this industry long enough to know that this is not in fact what is going to happen. We will be driven by greedy people with small minds to produce faster rather build correct systems, and the people who will pay will be users and consumers.
• siliconc0w 1y ago
  I like to use other parts of the codebase (or other codebases) as an example which helps a lot to maintain standards and consistency (though adds cost). I am a bit disillusioned - I find mentoring humans satisfying but I don't get the same satisfaction mentoring AI. I also think it's a probably going to backfire by hamstringing the next generation and 'draining the competence' from the current.
• i_niks_86 1y ago
  This isn’t about replacing developers. It’s about redefining them. Developers are becoming system choreographers, not syntax specialists.
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