6 ms·

So where’s all of this cutting edge amazing and flawless stuff you’ve built in a weekend that everybody else couldn’t because they were too dumb or slow or clue

by csmpltn 9mo ago

So where’s all of this cutting edge amazing and flawless stuff you’ve built in a weekend that everybody else couldn’t because they were too dumb or slow or clueless?

wild_egg 9mo ago
This is such a tired response at this point. People are under zero obligation to release their work to the public. Simon actually publishes and writes about a remarkable amount of the side projects he builds with AI. The rest of us just build tons of cool stuff for personal use or for $JOB. Releasing stuff to the public is, in general, a massive amount of extra work for very little benefit. There are loads of FOSS maintainers trapped spending as much time managing their communities as they do their actual projects and many of us just don't have time for that.
- Anamon 9mo ago
  The response may be tired when asked in this personal way, but in general, it's a fair question. Nobody is forced to share their work. But with all the high praises, we'd expect to see at least some uptick in the software world. But there is no surge in open source projects. No surge in app store entries. And for the bigger companies claiming high GenAI use, they're not iterating faster or building more. They are continually removing features and their software is getting worse, slower, less robust, and less secure. Software quality has been on a step downwards curve as far as quality and capabilities are concerned, for years before LLM coding had its breakthrough. For all the promises I'd have expected to, three years later, at least notice the downward trajectory easing off. But it hasn't been happening.
- rgoulter 9mo ago
  > The rest of us just build tons of cool stuff for personal use or for $JOB. Releasing stuff to the public is, in general, a massive amount of extra work for very little benefit. There are loads of FOSS maintainers trapped spending as much time managing their communities as they do their actual projects and many of us just don't have time for that. I wouldn't worry about this. There are many examples of people sharing a project they've used LLMs to help write, and the result was not a huge amount of attention & expectation of burden. Perhaps "I don't share it because I'm worried people will love it too much" even suggests the opposite: you can concretely demonstrate the kinds of things you've been able to build using LLMs. > This is such a tired response at this point. Lack of specificity & concrete examples frequently mean all that's left for discussion is emotion for hype and anti-hype, though. In this thread, the discussion was: pro: use LLMs or get left behind conserve: okay, I'll start using LLMs when they're good pro: no no they won't be that good, it takes effort to get to use them conserve: do you have any examples? pro: why should we have to share examples? I like LLMs. But making big claims while being reticent about concrete claims and demonstrations is irksome.
  - trollbridge 9mo ago
    I’m waiting to see a huge burst of high quality open source code, which should be happening, right?
- grayhatter 9mo ago
  All I took from your reply was > I could if I wanted to, but I just don't feel like it. What am I missing where I can understand that's not what you meant?
llmslave3 9mo ago
He's built lots of cool stuff with AI. Here is four random ones pulled from https://tools.simonwillison.net https://tools.simonwillison.net - https://tools.simonwillison.net/bullish-bearish https://tools.simonwillison.net/bullish-bearish - https://tools.simonwillison.net/user-agent https://tools.simonwillison.net/user-agent - https://tools.simonwillison.net/gemini-chat https://tools.simonwillison.net/gemini-chat - https://tools.simonwillison.net/token-usage https://tools.simonwillison.net/token-usage
- CamelCaseName 9mo ago
  This is not really cool or impressive at all?
  - _yc_is_evil_ 9mo ago
    [dead]
- m4nu3l 9mo ago
  All of the linked apps look trivial to me. Also, the first one, the UI has no feedback once you click the answer (plus some questions don't really make sense as they have the answer in them). There is more on the website, so there could be something interesting, but I'm having trouble finding it among all the noise. Not saying simple apps have no value. Even simple throwaway UIs can have value, especially if you develop them quickly.
  - simonw 9mo ago
    How about these ones, are these trivial too? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582192
    - m4nu3l 9mo ago
      The first one is basically some glue code using pipes. The ones I'd say are not trivial are the VMs in Python. However, I'd say they are entirely useless, and not too complex either (although somewhat tedious to implement).
user34283 9mo ago
Where is all the amazing, much better stuff you implemented manually meanwhile?
- suddenlybananas 9mo ago
  Are you asking for evidence that humans can write good code?
  - user34283 9mo ago
    No, I am pointing out the hypocrisy in demanding evidence of production results in a derisive manner whenever someone mentions a productivity boost with AI. To some extend it's an understandable ask, but obviously even with a decent productivity boost side projects still require a lot of time and effort before a possible public release.
- csmpltn 9mo ago
  I'm not the one making unverifiable, extravagant, pompous and extraordinary claims though :)
  - user34283 9mo ago
    Did you miss the part where the guy you derisively asked replied with an extensive list of quite verifiable projects?
jstummbillig 9mo ago
I find it increasingly confusing that some people seem to believe, that other people not subjecting themselves to this continued interrogation, gives any credence to their position. People seem to believe that there is a burden of proof. There is not. What do I care if you are on board? I don't know what could change your mind, but of course the answer is "nothing" as long as you aer not open to it. Just look around. There is so much stuff, from so many credible people in all domains. If you can't find anything that is convincing or at least interesting to you, you are simply not looking.
- pavlus 9mo ago
  > What do I care if you are on board? Without enough adoption expect some companies you are a client of to increase prices more, or close entirely down the road, due to insufficient cash inflow. So, you would care, if you want to continue to use these tools and see them evolve, instead of seeing the bubble pop.
- lunar_mycroft 9mo ago
  > People seem to believe that there is a burden of proof. There is not. What do I care if you are on board? The burden of proof rests on those making the positive claim. You say you don't care if others get on board, but a) clearly a lot of others do (case in point: the linked article) and b) a quick check of your posts in this very thread shows that you are indeed making positive claims about the merits of LLM assisted software development.
- albedoa 9mo ago
  > What do I care if you are on board? This is baffling. Why would you make the claim if you do not care if we are on board? Who are you talking to if not exactly those who you care to convince?
simonw 9mo ago
I wouldn't call these flawless but here you go: - https://github.com/simonw/denobox https://github.com/simonw/denobox is a new Python library that gives you the ability to run arbitrary JavaScript and WASM in a sandbox provided by Deno, because it turns out a Python library can depend on deno these days. I built that on my phone in bed yesterday morning. - https://github.com/simonw/pwasm https://github.com/simonw/pwasm is a WebAssembly runtime written in pure Python with no dependencies, built by feeding Claude Code the official WASM specification along with its conformance test suite and having it hack away at that (again via my phone) to get as many of the tests to pass as possible. It's pretty slow and not really useful yet but it's certainly interesting. - https://github.com/datasette/datasette-transactions https://github.com/datasette/datasette-transactions is a Datasette plugin which provides a JSON API for starting a SQLite transaction, running multiple queries within it and then executing or rolling back that transaction. I built that one on my phone on a BART (SF Bay Area metro) trip. - https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript is a pure Python, no dependency JavaScript interpreter which started as a port of MicroQuickJS. Here's a demo of that one running in a browser https://simonw.github.io/micro-javascript/playground.html https://simonw.github.io/micro-javascript/playground.html - that's my JavaScript interpreter running inside Python running in Pyodide in WebAssembly in your browser of choice, which I find inherently amusing. All of those are from the past three weeks. Most of them were built on my phone while I was doing other things.
- CjHuber 9mo ago
  Based on those, it seems you are not actually using them to create big codebases from scratch, but rather for problems that would normally take quite a while, not because they are inherently difficult to implement, but because you would normally have to spend considerable time on the finicky implementation details. I think that's the reason why LLMs work so well for some like you, and generate slop for others, because if you let them alone with projects that require opinionated code and actual decision making they most often don't grasp the users intention well or worse misinterpret it so confidently that you end up with something with all the wrong opinions and decisions compounding path-dependently into the strangest and most useless slop.
williamcotton 9mo ago
Over the last few days I made this ggplot2-looking plotting DSL as a CLI tool and a Rust library. https://github.com/williamcotton/gramgraph https://github.com/williamcotton/gramgraph The motivation? I needed a declarative plotting language for another DSL I'm working on called Web Pipe: GET /weather.svg |> fetch: `https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=52.52&longitude=13.41&hourly=temperature_2m` |> jq: ` .data.response.hourly as $h | [$h.time, $h.temperature_2m] | transpose | map({time: .[0], temp: .[1]}) ` |> gg({ "type": "svg", "width": 800, "height": 400} ): ` aes(x: time, y: temp) | line() | point() ` "Web Pipe is an experimental DSL and Rust runtime for building web apps via composable JSON pipelines, featuring native integration of GraphQL, SQL, and jq, an embedded BDD testing framework, and a sophisticated Language Server." https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp https://williamcotton.com/articles/basic-introduction-to-web-pipe https://williamcotton.com/articles/basic-introduction-to-web... I've been working at quite a clip for a solo developer who is building a new language with a full featured set of tooling. I'd like to think that the approach to building the BDD-testing framework directly into the language itself and having the test runner using the production request handlers is at least somewhat novel! GET /hello/:world |> jq: `{ world: .params.world }` |> handlebars: `<p>hello, {{world}}</p>` describe "hello, world" it "calls the route" let world = "world" when calling GET /hello/{{world}} then status is 200 and selector `p` text equals "hello, {{world}}" I'm married with two young kids and I have a full-time job. Before these tools there was no way I could build all of these experiments with such limited resources.
klustregrif 9mo ago
Asking Simon Willis “where is all this amazing stuff you’ve built” is crazy. I assume you didn’t know who you were responding to. Not only is he insanely productive, but he’s also incredibly open and sharing about his work and his work gets posted to hackernews constantly. It was the top most upvoted blog of 2024 by almost twice the as much as the next runner up.

by csmpltn 9mo ago

So where’s all of this cutting edge amazing and flawless stuff you’ve built in a weekend that everybody else couldn’t because they were too dumb or slow or clueless?

wild_egg 9mo ago

This is such a tired response at this point. People are under zero obligation to release their work to the public. Simon actually publishes and writes about a remarkable amount of the side projects he builds with AI. The rest of us just build tons of cool stuff for personal use or for $JOB. Releasing stuff to the public is, in general, a massive amount of extra work for very little benefit. There are loads of FOSS maintainers trapped spending as much time managing their communities as they do their actual projects and many of us just don't have time for that.

Anamon 9mo ago
The response may be tired when asked in this personal way, but in general, it's a fair question. Nobody is forced to share their work. But with all the high praises, we'd expect to see at least some uptick in the software world. But there is no surge in open source projects. No surge in app store entries. And for the bigger companies claiming high GenAI use, they're not iterating faster or building more. They are continually removing features and their software is getting worse, slower, less robust, and less secure. Software quality has been on a step downwards curve as far as quality and capabilities are concerned, for years before LLM coding had its breakthrough. For all the promises I'd have expected to, three years later, at least notice the downward trajectory easing off. But it hasn't been happening.
rgoulter 9mo ago
> The rest of us just build tons of cool stuff for personal use or for $JOB. Releasing stuff to the public is, in general, a massive amount of extra work for very little benefit. There are loads of FOSS maintainers trapped spending as much time managing their communities as they do their actual projects and many of us just don't have time for that. I wouldn't worry about this. There are many examples of people sharing a project they've used LLMs to help write, and the result was not a huge amount of attention & expectation of burden. Perhaps "I don't share it because I'm worried people will love it too much" even suggests the opposite: you can concretely demonstrate the kinds of things you've been able to build using LLMs. > This is such a tired response at this point. Lack of specificity & concrete examples frequently mean all that's left for discussion is emotion for hype and anti-hype, though. In this thread, the discussion was: pro: use LLMs or get left behind conserve: okay, I'll start using LLMs when they're good pro: no no they won't be that good, it takes effort to get to use them conserve: do you have any examples? pro: why should we have to share examples? I like LLMs. But making big claims while being reticent about concrete claims and demonstrations is irksome.
- trollbridge 9mo ago
  I’m waiting to see a huge burst of high quality open source code, which should be happening, right?
grayhatter 9mo ago
All I took from your reply was > I could if I wanted to, but I just don't feel like it. What am I missing where I can understand that's not what you meant?

llmslave3 9mo ago

He's built lots of cool stuff with AI. Here is four random ones pulled from https://tools.simonwillison.net https://tools.simonwillison.net - https://tools.simonwillison.net/bullish-bearish https://tools.simonwillison.net/bullish-bearish - https://tools.simonwillison.net/user-agent https://tools.simonwillison.net/user-agent - https://tools.simonwillison.net/gemini-chat https://tools.simonwillison.net/gemini-chat - https://tools.simonwillison.net/token-usage https://tools.simonwillison.net/token-usage

CamelCaseName 9mo ago
This is not really cool or impressive at all?
- _yc_is_evil_ 9mo ago
  [dead]
m4nu3l 9mo ago
All of the linked apps look trivial to me. Also, the first one, the UI has no feedback once you click the answer (plus some questions don't really make sense as they have the answer in them). There is more on the website, so there could be something interesting, but I'm having trouble finding it among all the noise. Not saying simple apps have no value. Even simple throwaway UIs can have value, especially if you develop them quickly.
- simonw 9mo ago
  How about these ones, are these trivial too? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582192
  - m4nu3l 9mo ago
    The first one is basically some glue code using pipes. The ones I'd say are not trivial are the VMs in Python. However, I'd say they are entirely useless, and not too complex either (although somewhat tedious to implement).

user34283 9mo ago

Where is all the amazing, much better stuff you implemented manually meanwhile?

suddenlybananas 9mo ago
Are you asking for evidence that humans can write good code?
- user34283 9mo ago
  No, I am pointing out the hypocrisy in demanding evidence of production results in a derisive manner whenever someone mentions a productivity boost with AI. To some extend it's an understandable ask, but obviously even with a decent productivity boost side projects still require a lot of time and effort before a possible public release.
csmpltn 9mo ago
I'm not the one making unverifiable, extravagant, pompous and extraordinary claims though :)
- user34283 9mo ago
  Did you miss the part where the guy you derisively asked replied with an extensive list of quite verifiable projects?

jstummbillig 9mo ago

I find it increasingly confusing that some people seem to believe, that other people not subjecting themselves to this continued interrogation, gives any credence to their position. People seem to believe that there is a burden of proof. There is not. What do I care if you are on board? I don't know what could change your mind, but of course the answer is "nothing" as long as you aer not open to it. Just look around. There is so much stuff, from so many credible people in all domains. If you can't find anything that is convincing or at least interesting to you, you are simply not looking.

pavlus 9mo ago
> What do I care if you are on board? Without enough adoption expect some companies you are a client of to increase prices more, or close entirely down the road, due to insufficient cash inflow. So, you would care, if you want to continue to use these tools and see them evolve, instead of seeing the bubble pop.
lunar_mycroft 9mo ago
> People seem to believe that there is a burden of proof. There is not. What do I care if you are on board? The burden of proof rests on those making the positive claim. You say you don't care if others get on board, but a) clearly a lot of others do (case in point: the linked article) and b) a quick check of your posts in this very thread shows that you are indeed making positive claims about the merits of LLM assisted software development.
albedoa 9mo ago
> What do I care if you are on board? This is baffling. Why would you make the claim if you do not care if we are on board? Who are you talking to if not exactly those who you care to convince?

simonw 9mo ago

I wouldn't call these flawless but here you go: - https://github.com/simonw/denobox https://github.com/simonw/denobox is a new Python library that gives you the ability to run arbitrary JavaScript and WASM in a sandbox provided by Deno, because it turns out a Python library can depend on deno these days. I built that on my phone in bed yesterday morning. - https://github.com/simonw/pwasm https://github.com/simonw/pwasm is a WebAssembly runtime written in pure Python with no dependencies, built by feeding Claude Code the official WASM specification along with its conformance test suite and having it hack away at that (again via my phone) to get as many of the tests to pass as possible. It's pretty slow and not really useful yet but it's certainly interesting. - https://github.com/datasette/datasette-transactions https://github.com/datasette/datasette-transactions is a Datasette plugin which provides a JSON API for starting a SQLite transaction, running multiple queries within it and then executing or rolling back that transaction. I built that one on my phone on a BART (SF Bay Area metro) trip. - https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript is a pure Python, no dependency JavaScript interpreter which started as a port of MicroQuickJS. Here's a demo of that one running in a browser https://simonw.github.io/micro-javascript/playground.html https://simonw.github.io/micro-javascript/playground.html - that's my JavaScript interpreter running inside Python running in Pyodide in WebAssembly in your browser of choice, which I find inherently amusing. All of those are from the past three weeks. Most of them were built on my phone while I was doing other things.

CjHuber 9mo ago
Based on those, it seems you are not actually using them to create big codebases from scratch, but rather for problems that would normally take quite a while, not because they are inherently difficult to implement, but because you would normally have to spend considerable time on the finicky implementation details. I think that's the reason why LLMs work so well for some like you, and generate slop for others, because if you let them alone with projects that require opinionated code and actual decision making they most often don't grasp the users intention well or worse misinterpret it so confidently that you end up with something with all the wrong opinions and decisions compounding path-dependently into the strangest and most useless slop.

williamcotton 9mo ago

Over the last few days I made this ggplot2-looking plotting DSL as a CLI tool and a Rust library. https://github.com/williamcotton/gramgraph https://github.com/williamcotton/gramgraph The motivation? I needed a declarative plotting language for another DSL I'm working on called Web Pipe: GET /weather.svg |> fetch: `https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=52.52&longitude=13.41&hourly=temperature_2m` |> jq: ` .data.response.hourly as $h | [$h.time, $h.temperature_2m] | transpose | map({time: .[0], temp: .[1]}) ` |> gg({ "type": "svg", "width": 800, "height": 400} ): ` aes(x: time, y: temp) | line() | point() ` "Web Pipe is an experimental DSL and Rust runtime for building web apps via composable JSON pipelines, featuring native integration of GraphQL, SQL, and jq, an embedded BDD testing framework, and a sophisticated Language Server." https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp https://williamcotton.com/articles/basic-introduction-to-web-pipe https://williamcotton.com/articles/basic-introduction-to-web... I've been working at quite a clip for a solo developer who is building a new language with a full featured set of tooling. I'd like to think that the approach to building the BDD-testing framework directly into the language itself and having the test runner using the production request handlers is at least somewhat novel! GET /hello/:world |> jq: `{ world: .params.world }` |> handlebars: `<p>hello, {{world}}</p>` describe "hello, world" it "calls the route" let world = "world" when calling GET /hello/{{world}} then status is 200 and selector `p` text equals "hello, {{world}}" I'm married with two young kids and I have a full-time job. Before these tools there was no way I could build all of these experiments with such limited resources.

klustregrif 9mo ago

Asking Simon Willis “where is all this amazing stuff you’ve built” is crazy. I assume you didn’t know who you were responding to. Not only is he insanely productive, but he’s also incredibly open and sharing about his work and his work gets posted to hackernews constantly. It was the top most upvoted blog of 2024 by almost twice the as much as the next runner up.