6 ms·

You can basically hand it a design, one that might take a FE engineer anywhere from a day to a week to complete and Codex/Claude will basically have it coded up

by nprz 8mo ago

You can basically hand it a design, one that might take a FE engineer anywhere from a day to a week to complete and Codex/Claude will basically have it coded up in 30 seconds. It might need some tweaks, but it's 80% complete with that first try. Like I remember stumbling over graphing and charting libraries, it could take weeks to become familiar with all the different components and APIs, but seemingly you can now just tell Codex to use this data and use this charting library and it'll make it. All you have to do is look at the code. Things have certainly changed.

skydhash 8mo ago
> You can basically hand it a design And, pray tell, how people are going to come up with such design?
- nprz 8mo ago
  Honestly you could just come up with a basic wireframe in any design software (MS paint would work) and a screen shot of a website with a design you like and tell it "apply the aesthetic from the website in this screenshot to the wireframe" and it would probably get 80% (probably more) of the way there. Something that would have taken me more than a day in the past.
  - prawn 8mo ago
    I've been in web design since images were first introduced to browsers and modern designs for the majority of sites are more templated than ever. AI can already generate inspiration, prototypes and designs that go a long way to matching these, then juice them with transitions/animations or whatever else you might want. The other day I tested an AI by giving it a folder of images, each named to describe the content/use/proportions (e.g., drone-overview-hero-landscape.jpg), told it the site it was redesigning, and it did a very serviceable job that would match at least a cheap designer. On the first run, in a few seconds and with a very basic prompt. Obviously with a different AI, it could understand the image contents and skip that step easily enough.
  - IAmGraydon 8mo ago
    I have never once seen this actually work in a way that produces a product I would use. People keep claiming these one-shot (or nearly one-shot) successes, but in the mean time I ask it to modify a simple CSS rule and it rewrites the enter file, breaks the site, and then can't seem to figure out what it did wrong. It's kind of telling that the number of apps on Apple's app store has been decreasing in recent years. Same thing on the Android store too. Where are the successful insta-apps? I really don't believe it's happening. https://www.appbrain.com/stats/number-of-android-apps https://www.appbrain.com/stats/number-of-android-apps I've recently tried using all of the popular LLMs to generate DSP code in C++ and it's utterly terrible at it, to the point that it almost never even makes it through compilation and linking. Can you show me the library of apps you've launched in the last few years? Surely you've made at least a few million in revenue with the ease with which you are able to launch products.
    - metadat 8mo ago
      AI is typically better at working with AI-generated code than human-authored. AI on AI tends to work great.
    - claytongulick 8mo ago
      This, of course, is the problem. There's a really painful Dunning-Kruger process with LLMs, coupled with brutal confirmation bias that seems to have the industry and many intelligent developers totally hoodwinked. I went through it too. I'm pretty embarrassed at the AI slop I dumped on my team, thinking the whole time how amazingly productive I was being. I'm back to writing code by hand now. Of course I use tools to accelerate development, but it's classic stuff like macros and good code completion. Sure, a LLM can vomit up a form faster than I can type (well, sometimes, the devil is always the details), but it completely falls apart when trying to do something the least bit interesting or novel.
      - IAmGraydon 8mo ago
        Absolutely. I also think there's a huge number of wannabe developers who don't have the patience to actually learn development. Those people desperately want this AI development dream to be true so they pretend and convince themselves that it is. They talk about how well it works on internet forums, but you ask for the product and it's crickets. It's all wishful thinking.
cruffle_duffle 8mo ago
The number of non-technical people in my orbit that could successfully pull up Claude code and one shot a basic todo app is zero. They couldn’t do it before and won’t be able to now. They wouldn’t even know where to begin!
- nprz 8mo ago
  You go to chatGPT and say "produce a detailed prompt that will create a functioning todo app" and then put that output into Claude Code and you now have a TODO app.
  - mwwaters 8mo ago
    Maybe I’m biased working in insurance software, but I don’t get the feeling much programming happens where the code can be completely stochastically generated, never have its code reviewed, and that will be okay with users/customers/governments/etc. Even if all sandboxing is done right, programs will be depended on to store data correctly and to show correct outputs.
    - jrumbut 8mo ago
      Insurance is complicated, not frequently discussed online, and all code depends on a ton of domain knowledge and proprietary information. I'm in a similar domain, the AI is like a very energetic intern. For me to get a good result requires a clear and detailed enough prompt I could probably write expression to turn it into code. Even still, after a little back and forth it loses the plot and starts producing gibberish. But in simpler domains or ones with lots of examples online (for instance, I had an image recognition problem that looked a lot like a typical machine learning contest) it really can rattle stuff off in seconds that would take weeks/months for a mid level engineer to do and often be higher quality. Right in the chat, from a vague prompt.
  - cruffle_duffle 8mo ago
    Step one: you have to know to ask that. Nobody in that orbit knows how to do that. And these aren’t dumb people. They just aren’t devs.
slopinthebag 8mo ago
Not really. What the FE engineer will produce in a week will be vastly different from what the AI will produce. That's like saying restaurants are dead because it takes a minute to heat up a microwave meal.
- ehnto 8mo ago
  It does make the lowest common denominator easier to reach though. By which I mean your local takeaway shop can have a professional looking website for next to nothing, where before they just wouldn't have had one at all. I think exceptional work, AI tools or not, still takes exceptional people with experience and skill. But I do feel like a certain level of access to technology has been unlocked for people smart enough, but without the time or tools to dive into the real industry's tools (figma, code, data tools etc).
  - slopinthebag 8mo ago
    The local takeaway shop could have had a professional looking website for years with Wix, Squarespace, etc. There are restaurant specific solutions as well. Any of these would be better than vibe coding for a non-tech person. No-code has existed for years and there hasn't been a flood of bespoke software coming from end users. I find it hard to believe that vibe-coding is easier or more intuitive than GUI tooling designed for non-experts... I think the idea that LLM's will usher in some new era where everyone and their mom are building software is a fantasy.
    - ehnto 8mo ago
      I more or less agree specifically on the angle that no-code has existed, yet non-technical people still aren't executing on technical products. But I don't think vibe-coding is where we see this happening, it will be in chat interfaces or GUIs. As the "scafolding" or "harnesses" mature more, and someone can just type what they want, then get a deployed product within the day after some back and forth. I am usually a bit of an AI skeptic but I can already see that this is within the realm of possibility, even if models stopped improving today. I think we underestimate how technical things like WIX or Squarespace are, to a non-technical person, but many are skilled business people who could probably work with an LLM agent to get a simple product together. People keep saying code was never the real skill of an engineer, but rather solving business logic issues and codifying them. Well people running a business can probably do that too, and it would be interesting to see them work with an LLM to produce a product.
bluGill 8mo ago
I figure it takes me a week to turn the output of ai into acceptable code. Sure there is a lot of code in 30 seconds but it shouldn't pass code review (even the ai's own review).
- josephg 8mo ago
  For now. Claude is worse than we are at programming. But its improving much faster than I am. Opus 4.6 is incredible compared to previous models. How long before those lines cross? Intuitively it feels like we have about 2-3 years before claude is better at writing code than most - or all - humans.
  - KeplerBoy 8mo ago
    It is certainly already better than most humans, even better than most humans who occasionally code. The bar is already quite high, I'd say. You have to be decent in your niche to outcompete frontier LLM Agents in a meaningful way.
    - bluGill 8mo ago
      I'm only allowed 4.5 at work where I do this (likely to change soon but bureaucracy...). Still the resulting code is not at a level I expect. i told my boss (not fully serious) we should ban anyone with less than 5 years experience from using the ai so they learn to write and recognize good code.
    - claytongulick 8mo ago
      The key difference here is that humans can progress. They can learn reasoning skills, and can develop novel methods. The LLM is a stochastic parrot. It will never be anything else unless we develop entirely new theories.
      - josephg 8mo ago
        And yet, claude is improving at programming much faster than I am. Maybe its skill will hit a ceiling at some point, but it hasn't happened yet.
samlinnfer 8mo ago
It might be 80-95% complete but the last 5% is either going to take twice the time or be downright impossible.
- don_esteban 8mo ago
  This is like Tesla's self-driving: 95% complete very early on, still unsuitable for real life many years later. Not saying adding few novel ideas (perhaps working world models) to the current AI toolbox won't make a breakthrough, but LLMs have their limits.
  - josephg 8mo ago
    Why do you think that? Do you think human level intelligence is special somehow? Do you have any facts? Or are you just hoping?
- varjag 8mo ago
  That was the same thing with human products though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule Except that the either side of it is immensely cheaper now.
nly 8mo ago
The last 20% is usually what takes 80% of the time

by nprz 8mo ago

skydhash 8mo ago

> You can basically hand it a design And, pray tell, how people are going to come up with such design?

nprz 8mo ago
Honestly you could just come up with a basic wireframe in any design software (MS paint would work) and a screen shot of a website with a design you like and tell it "apply the aesthetic from the website in this screenshot to the wireframe" and it would probably get 80% (probably more) of the way there. Something that would have taken me more than a day in the past.
- prawn 8mo ago
  I've been in web design since images were first introduced to browsers and modern designs for the majority of sites are more templated than ever. AI can already generate inspiration, prototypes and designs that go a long way to matching these, then juice them with transitions/animations or whatever else you might want. The other day I tested an AI by giving it a folder of images, each named to describe the content/use/proportions (e.g., drone-overview-hero-landscape.jpg), told it the site it was redesigning, and it did a very serviceable job that would match at least a cheap designer. On the first run, in a few seconds and with a very basic prompt. Obviously with a different AI, it could understand the image contents and skip that step easily enough.
- IAmGraydon 8mo ago
  I have never once seen this actually work in a way that produces a product I would use. People keep claiming these one-shot (or nearly one-shot) successes, but in the mean time I ask it to modify a simple CSS rule and it rewrites the enter file, breaks the site, and then can't seem to figure out what it did wrong. It's kind of telling that the number of apps on Apple's app store has been decreasing in recent years. Same thing on the Android store too. Where are the successful insta-apps? I really don't believe it's happening. https://www.appbrain.com/stats/number-of-android-apps https://www.appbrain.com/stats/number-of-android-apps I've recently tried using all of the popular LLMs to generate DSP code in C++ and it's utterly terrible at it, to the point that it almost never even makes it through compilation and linking. Can you show me the library of apps you've launched in the last few years? Surely you've made at least a few million in revenue with the ease with which you are able to launch products.
  - metadat 8mo ago
    AI is typically better at working with AI-generated code than human-authored. AI on AI tends to work great.
  - claytongulick 8mo ago
    This, of course, is the problem. There's a really painful Dunning-Kruger process with LLMs, coupled with brutal confirmation bias that seems to have the industry and many intelligent developers totally hoodwinked. I went through it too. I'm pretty embarrassed at the AI slop I dumped on my team, thinking the whole time how amazingly productive I was being. I'm back to writing code by hand now. Of course I use tools to accelerate development, but it's classic stuff like macros and good code completion. Sure, a LLM can vomit up a form faster than I can type (well, sometimes, the devil is always the details), but it completely falls apart when trying to do something the least bit interesting or novel.
    - IAmGraydon 8mo ago
      Absolutely. I also think there's a huge number of wannabe developers who don't have the patience to actually learn development. Those people desperately want this AI development dream to be true so they pretend and convince themselves that it is. They talk about how well it works on internet forums, but you ask for the product and it's crickets. It's all wishful thinking.

cruffle_duffle 8mo ago

The number of non-technical people in my orbit that could successfully pull up Claude code and one shot a basic todo app is zero. They couldn’t do it before and won’t be able to now. They wouldn’t even know where to begin!

nprz 8mo ago
You go to chatGPT and say "produce a detailed prompt that will create a functioning todo app" and then put that output into Claude Code and you now have a TODO app.
- mwwaters 8mo ago
  Maybe I’m biased working in insurance software, but I don’t get the feeling much programming happens where the code can be completely stochastically generated, never have its code reviewed, and that will be okay with users/customers/governments/etc. Even if all sandboxing is done right, programs will be depended on to store data correctly and to show correct outputs.
  - jrumbut 8mo ago
    Insurance is complicated, not frequently discussed online, and all code depends on a ton of domain knowledge and proprietary information. I'm in a similar domain, the AI is like a very energetic intern. For me to get a good result requires a clear and detailed enough prompt I could probably write expression to turn it into code. Even still, after a little back and forth it loses the plot and starts producing gibberish. But in simpler domains or ones with lots of examples online (for instance, I had an image recognition problem that looked a lot like a typical machine learning contest) it really can rattle stuff off in seconds that would take weeks/months for a mid level engineer to do and often be higher quality. Right in the chat, from a vague prompt.
- cruffle_duffle 8mo ago
  Step one: you have to know to ask that. Nobody in that orbit knows how to do that. And these aren’t dumb people. They just aren’t devs.

slopinthebag 8mo ago

Not really. What the FE engineer will produce in a week will be vastly different from what the AI will produce. That's like saying restaurants are dead because it takes a minute to heat up a microwave meal.

ehnto 8mo ago
It does make the lowest common denominator easier to reach though. By which I mean your local takeaway shop can have a professional looking website for next to nothing, where before they just wouldn't have had one at all. I think exceptional work, AI tools or not, still takes exceptional people with experience and skill. But I do feel like a certain level of access to technology has been unlocked for people smart enough, but without the time or tools to dive into the real industry's tools (figma, code, data tools etc).
- slopinthebag 8mo ago
  The local takeaway shop could have had a professional looking website for years with Wix, Squarespace, etc. There are restaurant specific solutions as well. Any of these would be better than vibe coding for a non-tech person. No-code has existed for years and there hasn't been a flood of bespoke software coming from end users. I find it hard to believe that vibe-coding is easier or more intuitive than GUI tooling designed for non-experts... I think the idea that LLM's will usher in some new era where everyone and their mom are building software is a fantasy.
  - ehnto 8mo ago
    I more or less agree specifically on the angle that no-code has existed, yet non-technical people still aren't executing on technical products. But I don't think vibe-coding is where we see this happening, it will be in chat interfaces or GUIs. As the "scafolding" or "harnesses" mature more, and someone can just type what they want, then get a deployed product within the day after some back and forth. I am usually a bit of an AI skeptic but I can already see that this is within the realm of possibility, even if models stopped improving today. I think we underestimate how technical things like WIX or Squarespace are, to a non-technical person, but many are skilled business people who could probably work with an LLM agent to get a simple product together. People keep saying code was never the real skill of an engineer, but rather solving business logic issues and codifying them. Well people running a business can probably do that too, and it would be interesting to see them work with an LLM to produce a product.

bluGill 8mo ago

I figure it takes me a week to turn the output of ai into acceptable code. Sure there is a lot of code in 30 seconds but it shouldn't pass code review (even the ai's own review).

josephg 8mo ago
For now. Claude is worse than we are at programming. But its improving much faster than I am. Opus 4.6 is incredible compared to previous models. How long before those lines cross? Intuitively it feels like we have about 2-3 years before claude is better at writing code than most - or all - humans.
- KeplerBoy 8mo ago
  It is certainly already better than most humans, even better than most humans who occasionally code. The bar is already quite high, I'd say. You have to be decent in your niche to outcompete frontier LLM Agents in a meaningful way.
  - bluGill 8mo ago
    I'm only allowed 4.5 at work where I do this (likely to change soon but bureaucracy...). Still the resulting code is not at a level I expect. i told my boss (not fully serious) we should ban anyone with less than 5 years experience from using the ai so they learn to write and recognize good code.
  - claytongulick 8mo ago
    The key difference here is that humans can progress. They can learn reasoning skills, and can develop novel methods. The LLM is a stochastic parrot. It will never be anything else unless we develop entirely new theories.
    - josephg 8mo ago
      And yet, claude is improving at programming much faster than I am. Maybe its skill will hit a ceiling at some point, but it hasn't happened yet.

samlinnfer 8mo ago

It might be 80-95% complete but the last 5% is either going to take twice the time or be downright impossible.

don_esteban 8mo ago
This is like Tesla's self-driving: 95% complete very early on, still unsuitable for real life many years later. Not saying adding few novel ideas (perhaps working world models) to the current AI toolbox won't make a breakthrough, but LLMs have their limits.
- josephg 8mo ago
  Why do you think that? Do you think human level intelligence is special somehow? Do you have any facts? Or are you just hoping?
varjag 8mo ago
That was the same thing with human products though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule Except that the either side of it is immensely cheaper now.

nly 8mo ago

The last 20% is usually what takes 80% of the time