5 ms·
"I knew you weren't a great engineer the moment you started pulling dependencies for a simple app" You realize my point right? People are taught to not reinven
by epolanski 1y ago
"I knew you weren't a great engineer the moment you started pulling dependencies for a simple app"
You realize my point right? People are taught to not reinvent the wheel at work (mostly for good reasons) so that's what they do, me and you included.
You ain't gonna be bothered to write html and manual manipulation, the people that will give you libraries to do so won't be bothered reimplementing parsers and file watchers, file watcher writers won't be bothered reimplementing file system utils, file system utils developers won't be bothered reimplementing structured cloning or event loops, etc, etc.
I myself just the other day had the task of converting HTML to markdown, because I don't remember whether it was Jira or Github APIs that returns comments as HTML and despite it being mostly few hours of work that would get us 90% there everybody was in favor of pulling a dependency to do so (with its own dependencies) and thus further exposing our application to those risks.
- komali2 1y agoPause, you could write an HTML to markdown library in half a day? Like, 4 hours? Or 12? Either way damn
- epolanski 1y agoOne that gets me 90% there would take me few hours, one that gets me 99% there few months, which is why eventually people would rather pull a dependency.
- williamcotton 1y agoOr about 15 minutes with an LLM? https://github.com/williamcotton/markdown-to-html-llm https://github.com/williamcotton/markdown-to-html-llm ;)
- neilv 1y agoIn less time than that, you could `git clone` the desired open source package, and text search & replace the author's name with your own.
- williamcotton 1y agoAnd then still be subject to supply-chain attacks with all of the dependencies in whatever open source package you're cloning?
- xrisk 1y agoyou are aware that the app you just wrote with Claude pulls in dependencies, yes?
- williamcotton 1y agoNot for the parser, only for the demo server! And I guess the dev dependencies as well, but with a much smaller surface area. But yeah, I don't think a TypeScript compiler is within the scope of an LLM.
- epolanski 1y agoI love how it took you very short to implement...the wrong thing. > I myself just the other day had the task of converting HTML to markdown > you could write an HTML to markdown library in half a day
- williamcotton 1y agoLOL! Good point, my friend.
- williamcotton 1y agoClaude Code just added support for HTML to Markdown. Seems to work?
- epolanski 1y agoIn any case, not following the point you're trying to make.
- williamcotton 1y agoLLMs are pretty good at greenfield projects and especially if they are tasked with writing something with a lot of examples in the training data. This approach can be used to solve the problem of supply-chain attacks with the downside being that the code might not be as well written and feature complete as a third-party package.
- epolanski 1y agoI use LLMs too, but don't share your opinion fully.