5 ms·

Honestly people are in such a weird place with this shit. I'm not saying don't read the fucking code - but I managed to get my setup to write 100k lines of indi

by reedf1 7mo ago

Honestly people are in such a weird place with this shit. I'm not saying don't read the fucking code - but I managed to get my setup to write 100k lines of indistinguishable SWE code in a week or so. The main limitation was my reading speed. This is something like a 10x speedup for me.

Grimblewald 7mo ago
How does one verify 100k lines in a week? Let alone evaluate it to being SWE equivallent? That's super human. I like to think I am pretty good at what I do, but really critically engaging with 100k lines in a week is beyond even 10 of me. Forgive my skepticism, but I'm going to hazard the guess that you don't know what the fuck you're doing. You've lost your goddamn mind if you think you're doing anything other than skim read at a rate of 42 lines a minute for your entire work day without a break.
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  On Saturday I had claude generate ~10k of lines of Lua code which uses the libASS subtitle format to build up nearly two dozen GUI widgets from subtitle drawing primitives, including nestable scrollable containers with clipping, drop down menus, animated tab bars, and everything else I could think of. I read probably about 100 lines of code myself that day, I "verified" the code only by testing out the demo claude was updating through the process. Then on Sunday I woke up and had claude bang out a series of half a dozen projects each using this GUI library. First, a script that simply offers to loop a video when the end is reached. Updated several of my old scripts that just print text without any graphical formatting. Then more adventurous, a playlist visualizer with support for drag to reorder. Another that gives a nice little control overlay for TTS reading normal media subtitles. Another that let's people select clips from whatever they're watching, reorder them and write out an edit decision list, maybe I'll turn this one into a complete NLE today when I get home from work. Reading every line of code? Why? The shit works, if I notice a bug I go back to claude and demand a "thoughtful and well reasoned" fix, without even caring what the fix will be so long as it works. The concepts and building blocks used for all of this is shit I've learned myself the hard way, but to do it all myself would take weeks and I would certainly take many shortcuts, like certainly skipping animations and only implementing the bare minimum. The reason I could make that stuff work fast is because I already broadly knew the problem space, I've probably read the mpv manpage a thousand times before, so when the agent says its going to bind to shift+wheel for horizonal scrolling, I can tell it no, mpv has WHEEL_LEFT and RIGHT, use those. I can tell it to pump its brakes and stop planning to load a PNG overlay, because mpv will only load raw pixel data that way. I can tell it that dragging UI elements without simultaneously dragging the whole window certainly must be possible, because the first party OSC supports it so it should go read that mess of code and figure it out, which it dutifully does. If you know the problem space, you can get a whole lot done very fast, in a way that demonstrably works. Does it have bugs? I'd eat a hat if it doesn't. They'll get fixed if/when I find them. I'm not worried about it. Reading every line of code is for people writing airliner autopilots, not cheeky little desktop programs.
  - Grimblewald 7mo ago
    right, but we're not talking cheeky desktop personal programs here. Who cares what you do for your own devices and in your own time? Absolutely no one gets to tell you what to do there, so why discuss it? Live your life, do your thing, great! But that isn't what is being discussed here.
    - mikkupikku 7mo ago
      We're talking about the capabilities of the technology. I would not even think about using LLM output in life critical roles, but we're not talking about only such scenarios. I'm addressing your claim that these > blows up in damn well near every professionals face If you know how to use the tools, and know their limitations, you can generate vast quantities of useful code very quickly. If you can't manage this, its PEBKAC. You're saying you don't trust these to make more than minor changes, which might make sense if your code could kill people buy otherwise you're being overcautious or severely underestimating what these can do.
      - Grimblewald 7mo ago
        Useful is relative. Silly little toy aps? Sure go full auto, heck, i personally do. However, these will fail catastrophically or have failures that should never even have happened. So, in professional environments, full auto is negligent to a point i hope it becomes a fireable offense. Like trusting lane-assist and adaptive-cruise in a car to handle full auto driving. It might even seem like it can, until the leading car disappears, until it hits a t intersection. You get me? Modern llms are lane assist and adaptive cruise, not full self driving. It frees up some of your headspace and attention but not all, in fact not even most of it.
- reedf1 7mo ago
  You have a fair perspective and I'm not going to try to move you from it. You have my exact opinion as of 3 months ago. I will just suggest you earnestly try it yourself.
  - Grimblewald 7mo ago
    I have, hence my perspective. For boiler plate and solved problems, it can do ok. However, anytime it needs to do something novel it will be hit and miss, usually miss. If it needs to do something where best practice has changed but training data overwhelmingly does bad / dated practice, you'll get that if you don't specify. Loads of issues like that. So, without giving small isolated and well framed tasks the output of which is then critically engaged with, you'll get increasingly opaque and unstable code.
- duskdozer 7mo ago
  The answer is they don't. They don't verify or care about it. They're only interested in "shipping" as fast as possible.

by reedf1 7mo ago

Grimblewald 7mo ago

How does one verify 100k lines in a week? Let alone evaluate it to being SWE equivallent? That's super human. I like to think I am pretty good at what I do, but really critically engaging with 100k lines in a week is beyond even 10 of me. Forgive my skepticism, but I'm going to hazard the guess that you don't know what the fuck you're doing. You've lost your goddamn mind if you think you're doing anything other than skim read at a rate of 42 lines a minute for your entire work day without a break.

mikkupikku 7mo ago
On Saturday I had claude generate ~10k of lines of Lua code which uses the libASS subtitle format to build up nearly two dozen GUI widgets from subtitle drawing primitives, including nestable scrollable containers with clipping, drop down menus, animated tab bars, and everything else I could think of. I read probably about 100 lines of code myself that day, I "verified" the code only by testing out the demo claude was updating through the process. Then on Sunday I woke up and had claude bang out a series of half a dozen projects each using this GUI library. First, a script that simply offers to loop a video when the end is reached. Updated several of my old scripts that just print text without any graphical formatting. Then more adventurous, a playlist visualizer with support for drag to reorder. Another that gives a nice little control overlay for TTS reading normal media subtitles. Another that let's people select clips from whatever they're watching, reorder them and write out an edit decision list, maybe I'll turn this one into a complete NLE today when I get home from work. Reading every line of code? Why? The shit works, if I notice a bug I go back to claude and demand a "thoughtful and well reasoned" fix, without even caring what the fix will be so long as it works. The concepts and building blocks used for all of this is shit I've learned myself the hard way, but to do it all myself would take weeks and I would certainly take many shortcuts, like certainly skipping animations and only implementing the bare minimum. The reason I could make that stuff work fast is because I already broadly knew the problem space, I've probably read the mpv manpage a thousand times before, so when the agent says its going to bind to shift+wheel for horizonal scrolling, I can tell it no, mpv has WHEEL_LEFT and RIGHT, use those. I can tell it to pump its brakes and stop planning to load a PNG overlay, because mpv will only load raw pixel data that way. I can tell it that dragging UI elements without simultaneously dragging the whole window certainly must be possible, because the first party OSC supports it so it should go read that mess of code and figure it out, which it dutifully does. If you know the problem space, you can get a whole lot done very fast, in a way that demonstrably works. Does it have bugs? I'd eat a hat if it doesn't. They'll get fixed if/when I find them. I'm not worried about it. Reading every line of code is for people writing airliner autopilots, not cheeky little desktop programs.
- Grimblewald 7mo ago
  right, but we're not talking cheeky desktop personal programs here. Who cares what you do for your own devices and in your own time? Absolutely no one gets to tell you what to do there, so why discuss it? Live your life, do your thing, great! But that isn't what is being discussed here.
  - mikkupikku 7mo ago
    We're talking about the capabilities of the technology. I would not even think about using LLM output in life critical roles, but we're not talking about only such scenarios. I'm addressing your claim that these > blows up in damn well near every professionals face If you know how to use the tools, and know their limitations, you can generate vast quantities of useful code very quickly. If you can't manage this, its PEBKAC. You're saying you don't trust these to make more than minor changes, which might make sense if your code could kill people buy otherwise you're being overcautious or severely underestimating what these can do.
    - Grimblewald 7mo ago
      Useful is relative. Silly little toy aps? Sure go full auto, heck, i personally do. However, these will fail catastrophically or have failures that should never even have happened. So, in professional environments, full auto is negligent to a point i hope it becomes a fireable offense. Like trusting lane-assist and adaptive-cruise in a car to handle full auto driving. It might even seem like it can, until the leading car disappears, until it hits a t intersection. You get me? Modern llms are lane assist and adaptive cruise, not full self driving. It frees up some of your headspace and attention but not all, in fact not even most of it.
reedf1 7mo ago
You have a fair perspective and I'm not going to try to move you from it. You have my exact opinion as of 3 months ago. I will just suggest you earnestly try it yourself.
- Grimblewald 7mo ago
  I have, hence my perspective. For boiler plate and solved problems, it can do ok. However, anytime it needs to do something novel it will be hit and miss, usually miss. If it needs to do something where best practice has changed but training data overwhelmingly does bad / dated practice, you'll get that if you don't specify. Loads of issues like that. So, without giving small isolated and well framed tasks the output of which is then critically engaged with, you'll get increasingly opaque and unstable code.
duskdozer 7mo ago
The answer is they don't. They don't verify or care about it. They're only interested in "shipping" as fast as possible.