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Kickstarter is full of projects like this where every possible shortcut is taken to get to market. I’ve had some good success with a few Kickstarter projects bu
by Aurornis 9mo ago
Kickstarter is full of projects like this where every possible shortcut is taken to get to market. I’ve had some good success with a few Kickstarter projects but I’ve been very selective about which projects I support. More often than not I can identify when a team is in over their heads or think they’re just going to figure out the details later, after the money arrives.
For a period of time it was popular for the industrial designers I knew to try to launch their own Kickstarters. Their belief was that engineering was a commodity that they could hire out to the lowest bidder after they got the money. The product design and marketing (their specialty) was the real value. All of their projects either failed or cost them more money than they brought in because engineering was harder than they thought.
I think we’re in for another round of this now that LLMs give the impression that the software and firmware parts are basically free. All of those project ideas people had previously that were shelved because software is hard are getting another look from people who think they’re just going to prompt Claude until the product looks like it works.
- lr4444lr 9mo agoAt this point, I trust LLMs to come up with something more secure than the cheapest engineering firm for hire.
- minimalthinker 9mo agothis.
- lukan 9mo agoAnd the cheapest engineering firm won't use LLMs as well, wherever possible?
- TheRealPomax 9mo agofun fact, LLMs come in cheapest and useless and expensive but actually does what's being asked, too. So, will they? Probably. Can you trust the kind of LLM that you would use to do a better job than the cheapest firm? Absolutely.
- fc417fc802 9mo agoThe cheapest engineering firm will turn out to be headed up by an openclaw instance.
- Aurornis 9mo agoThe cheapest engineering firms you hire are also using LLMs. The operator is still a factor.
- jama211 9mo agoYeah, but they’ll add another layer of complexity over doing it yourself
- Aurornis 9mo agoThe people doing these kickstarters are outsourcing the work because they can’t do it themselves. If they use an LLM, they don’t know what to look for or even ask for, which is how they get these problems where the production backend uses shared credentials and has no access control. The LLM got it to “working” state, but the people operating it didn’t understand what it was doing. They just prompt until it looks like it works and then ship it.
- caminante 9mo agoYou're still not following. The parents are saying they'd rather vibe code themselves than trust an unproven engineering firm that does(n't) vibe code.
- TeMPOraL 9mo ago> they'd rather vibe code themselves than trust an unproven engineering firm You could cut the statement short here, and it would still be a reasonable position to take these days. LLMs are still complex, sharp tools - despite their simple appearance and proteststions of both biggest fans and haters alike, the dominating factor for effectiveness of an LLM tool on a problem is still whether or not you're holding it wrong.
- caminante 9mo agoI forgot about that Jobs/Apple reference! Paraphasing, LLMs are great (bad) tools for the right (wrong) job... in the right hands, at the right time, in the right place...
- nozzlegear 9mo ago"Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?" https://xcancel.com/beneater/status/2012988790709928305 https://xcancel.com/beneater/status/2012988790709928305
- alexjplant 9mo agoPeople make these mistakes too. Several times in my high school shop class kids shorted out 9V batteries trying to build circuits because they didn't understand how electronics work. At no point did our teacher stop them from doing so - on at least one occasion I unplugged one from a breadboard before it got too toasty to handle (and I was/am an electronics nublet). Similarly there was also a lot of hand-wringing about the Gemini pizza glue in a world where people do wacky stuff like cook fish in a dishwasher or defrost chicken overnight on the counter or put cooked steak on the same plate it was on when raw just a few minutes prior. LLMs are just surfacing the fact that assessing and managing risk is an acquired, difficult-to-learn skill. Most people don't know what they don't know and fail to think about what might happen if they do something (correctly or otherwise) before they do it, let alone what they'd do if it goes wrong.
- nozzlegear 9mo agoWell said, but I'd add that LLMs are also surfacing the fact that there's a swathe of people out there who will treat the machines as more trustworthy than humans by default, and don't believe they need to do any assessment or risk management in the first place.
- hnlmorg 9mo agoPeople are just lazy. It’s got nothing to do with LLMs having more trust because they’re a machine because most people would happily trust their friend over an expert. They’d trust the first blog post they find online over an expert. Most people are just too lazy and not skilled enough to perform independent review. And to be fair to those people, coming to topics with a research mindset is genuinely hard and time consuming. So I can’t actually blame people for being lazy. All LLMs do is provide an even easier way to “research”. But it’s not like people were disbelieving random Facebook posts, online scams, and word-of-mouth before LLMs.
- Kiro 9mo agoLLMs definitely write more robust code than most. They don't take shortcuts or resort to ugly hacks. They have no problem writing tedious guards against edge cases that humans brush off. They also keep comments up to date and obsess over tests.
- devmor 9mo agoInteresting and completely wrong statement, what gave you this impression?
- Kiro 9mo agoThe discourse around LLMs has created this notion that humans are not lazy and write perfect code. They get compared to an ideal programmer instead of real devs.
- salawat 9mo agoLLM's at best asymptotically approach a human doing the same task. They are trained on the best and the worst. Nothing they output deserves faith other than what can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt with your own eyes and tooling. I'll say the same thing to anyone vibe coding that I'd say to programmatically illiterate. Trust this only insofar as you can prove it works, and you can stay ahead of the machine. Dabble if you want, but to use something safely enough to rely on, you need to be 10% smarter than it is.
- gxs 9mo agoAmen. On top of that, especially now, with good prompting you can get closer to that better than you think.
- joe_mamba 9mo agoThis. The hacks, shortcuts and bugs I saw in our product code after i got hired, were stuff every LLM would tell you not to do.
- dylanowen 9mo ago
- seanmcdirmid 9mo agoI don’t know, you can get a lot of nice engineering done in a Shenzhen dark alley.
- girvo 9mo agoOh gosh anyone who thinks LLMs make firmware free haven’t seriously tried to use it for firmware engineering then.
- noduerme 9mo agoI think you're right. And it's going to be loads of fun to watch. Not go say there haven't also been very good coders who weren't outsourcing anything, who still got out over their skis with stuff they promised on Kickstarter. I worked on Star Citizen and saw the lure of inflating project scope, responding to the vox populi, go to someone's head in realtime. Where they could still at some point conceivably have done what they had promised if they could just resist promising more stuff. I find it odd that industrial designers wouldn't have a firmer grasp on what was involved in shipping a product than coders do, since code seems much more prone to mission creep than a physical product would be. But I totally agree that if you're used to outsourcing the build phase of whatever you do, AI is going to be the ultimate mirage.