4 ms·

I really do not understand how software developer think anymore. Using a LLM to translate a project in a short time, is by itself incredible. Just like one-shot

I really do not understand how software developer think anymore. Using a LLM to translate a project in a short time, is by itself incredible. Just like one-shot whatever office clone. But what makes software is not the fast creation of a "product" but that actual development of its features. Figuring out how everything needs to work together, fixing the bugs, and the o so boring UI work. I have used LLMs to create stuff like word clones just for fun. It was a disaster. Sure, it had the basic functionality. But the moment you started with page structure (harder then one non-stop scrolling page), tables, images, rotating, and so many details that make up just the basics of word. Not even the extended functionality. You see every LLM just fall on its face. Sure, i can clone sqlite from c to rust. Hell, i may even get it to do all the tests 100%. But there is a 99% chance that the clone will be slower, as it lacks the years of optimizations from the original language. There will be new bugs because of the language changeover. There is a need for future support and fixes. People threat software like its something it is not. But unlike the past where your clients question your sanity for charging 100k for a piece of software. Not understanding its not just about writing the code. Now those expectation are even more pushed forwards, because of articles like this. I constantly see software being published on reddit that does X, Y, Z only for the authors to abandon it as fast as they vibe coded it. Because fixing bugs is NOT sexy. Even with a LLM at your fingertips. Dealing with nagging users, is not sexy. Dealing with security issues, is NOT sexy. Dealing with data structure / databases, especially as your system changes ... you get the point. Not understanding to the core the software you wrote, is going to exploded in your face. This is why these stupid "we rewrote X into Z with a LLM in Y days" mean nothing. Its one thing to get a head start using this trick, its another to actually learn the code of your rewrite. And dedicated the time into maintaining the port, growing it, fixing it. This is where a lot of software fails. But now this crap is out there, instead of the maintained version of Zig, now we have a unmaintained Rust version that clouded the airwaves because if people now search for it, those articles "X in Z days" will pop up. What have we become ...

furyofantares 3mo ago
> I have used LLMs to create stuff like word clones just for fun. It was a disaster. Sure, it had the basic functionality. But the moment you started with page structure (harder then one non-stop scrolling page), tables, images, rotating, and so many details that make up just the basics of word. Not even the extended functionality. You see every LLM just fall on its face. What do you think of https://scramblequest.app https://scramblequest.app and https://wordpeek.app https://wordpeek.app ? I have never looked at any of the code for them edit: Yeesh, misread your comment as "word games" not "word clones" and was very confused about the claim. Probably should have noted my confusion and re-read.
- rurban 3mo ago
  Nonsense. Provide/create proper tests for all features, and let the LLM test and fix everything. In case of ccc (claudes C compiler) they just did not use any tests, though they are many existing C testsuite. They just stopped, when it finished compiling the kernel, still failing hundreds of tests.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- oblio 3mo ago
  Are you comparing 2 relatively simple games with... Word? Word is basically an operating system. Unix people like to make fun of Emacs for being one, but Word is basically one, too. And all the features in there are used, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't keep them around.
  - furyofantares 3mo ago
    Haha, I misread as "word games" and was very confused about the claim.
  - reddalo 3mo ago
    >Word is basically an operating system. And .doc files are basically a memory dump.
    - someguyiguess 3mo ago
      Dump is a great word for it
    - galangalalgol 3mo ago
      That was certainly true once, but now all that state is serialized to xml amd zipped up. You can unzip it and look at it if you don't value your sanity.
      - 3mo ago
whstl 3mo ago
I think this is perfectly fine. If you explore Github, you're gonna see thousands of abandoned game engines, compilers for made-up languages. And that has been happening since before the LLM era. I used to be part of an OS messaging board in the early 2000s and almost everyone had their own OS. A dozen people or so could even run Firefox! I remember (now legend) Terry bothering us to check out LoseThos or GodOS or whatever was its name, but quite a few people had OSs that could do more than that. Not all software needs to be commercial to be useful, even if it's just for a learning experience. I have learned a lot from those experiments, even if they're not polished.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- piker 3mo ago
  > Not all software needs to be commercial to be useful, even if it's just for a learning experience. I have learned a lot from those experiments, even if they're not polished. This is fine so long as the author is learning something (questionable) and not polluting the commons with "I made this in a weekend" vibe slop.
  - Supermancho 3mo ago
    > This is fine so long as the author is learning something (questionable) and not polluting the commons with "I made this in a weekend" vibe slop. Almost all of my prototypes are made this way. "I made this in a weekend", is more often, "I made this in a day". Like any trad-coded project, time to vibe code a backend vs frontend time is 1:N
  - neonstatic 3mo ago
    > This is fine so long as the author is learning something (questionable) and not polluting the commons with "I made this in a weekend" vibe slop This is exactly the same as demanding, that people who post their thoughts always post original, useful thoughts. It's just not going to happen. Making something easy will increase the total volume and the majority of that volume will be junk. It's inevitable. What is needed is a search engine for quality software. Perhaps LLMs can do that, since they are better at understanding concepts than generating them.
sigbottle 3mo ago
The more technical you get, the more subsitutable you become - or at least, people think of it in that way, because the whole idea is "It's not me, or the people, it's the raw technical prowess that earns its keep in this place". But it seems like we're finally starting to accept that "accidentals" like network effects, ownership, accountability, etc. are important. Of course, that's why many of us fled to technical corners in the first place - because the "accidentals" become tied up with things like nepotism, unfair and arbitrary judges from random humans who don't understand your merit, the need for bullshitting more than real technical value. Supposedly, anyways.
- germandiago 3mo ago
  I think it is a very good point: "because the "accidentals" become tied up with things like nepotism, unfair and arbitrary" I never thought of this from this perspective but indeed it seems to be totally true.
- lackoftactics 3mo ago
  My thoughts too. The LLMs made me understand that the world had been working like that long before LLMs. Luck plays an enormous part in life. We gravitated toward a discipline that seemed free of all those problems, when in fact it had those downfalls better disguised.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
ChoGGi 3mo ago
> I constantly see software being published on reddit that does X, Y, Z only for the authors to abandon it as fast as they vibe coded it. Also if you whip something up, you tend not to care for it as much as something you took the time to create in a "proper" manner.
someguyiguess 3mo ago
It’s strange how you think AI is some static thing that only produces the type of output you experienced and isn’t constantly improving. My experience has proven the latter time and time again.
nope1000 3mo ago
Also I think porting code to another language or rewriting is one of the easier tasks for an LLM, since it has an extremely detailed spec (the source code itself) and a ton of tests already (hopefully).
- galangalalgol 3mo ago
  In my experience, it will go to every length to convince you it has ported code that it hasn't. It will silently drop upstream unit tests it has no code for, if questioned it will insert some markdown giving some rational why that specific bit was deferred, after the fact, and then point you to it. This was Opus 4.6 for reference. I have had much better luck with small numbers of higher level tests that I can individually verify equivalency. I haven't tried having it do differential fuzzing on some high level interface, that seems like it might work in some cases. But to summarize, treat it like an adversary trying to deceive you.
otabdeveloper4 3mo ago
> Using a LLM to translate a project in a short time, is by itself incredible. Not really. Transpilers have existed since forever. The hard part is all the edge cases. (And LLMs don't solve this problem; they probably akshually exacerbate it.)
- krupan 2mo ago
  Thank you for saying this! Every now and then I start to feel like I'm either the only sane person left or I must have gone insane and don't realize it. LLMs amazed us and we've been trying to find a good use for them since and there's a lot things like this, replacing a transpiler with a non-deterministic machine that just guesses when it doesn't know the answer. Shouldn't we be targeting LLMs at problems that traditional software absolutely can't handle?
Aurornis 3mo ago
> Its one thing to get a head start using this trick, its another to actually learn the code of your rewrite. I worked for a startup that stopped feature development and did a complete rewrite of a huge codebase. I was assigned to a side project during this time and missed the entire rewrite process. I came back to a completely rewritten codebase. There was almost no learning curve, despite being in an entirely different language. The core architecture, data structures, and concepts were the same. If you read the Bun blog post on how they did it, their rewrite was similar: The first step was getting it into a new language, not rearchitecting it from scratch. I think they did it the right way based on my pre-LLM. Rewriting into a different language as fast and basically as possible is important for getting the team switched over quickly. Rewriting into a different language in X days is actually a good goal to minimize.
- nicce 3mo ago
  > There was almost no learning curve, despite being in an entirely different language. The core architecture, data structures, and concepts were the same. > If you read the Bun blog post on how they did it, their rewrite was similar: The first step was getting it into a new language, not rearchitecting it from scratch They eventually might regret this, when they are trying to get rid of the last lines of unsafe code. Rust needs to be written differently before you can write safe things to perform fast when compared to other languages or unsafe code. It takes a lot of experience before you can see it.
  - hombre_fatal 3mo ago
    I doubt it. If this were a major issue then you'd have to always nail your Rust architecture correctly from day 1 to handle future unknowns, and this isn't the case. More importantly, LLMs are more than capable of figuring out how to rearchitect code and they have no problem making sweeping refactors for you, especially throwaway experimental ones that were way too expensive to do not long ago.
bwfan123 3mo ago
> Not understanding to the core the software you wrote, is going to exploded in your face. Short-termism at its peak. Code maintainers will learn the hard way how to set the boundaries between ai-generated code, and human maintainable code.
sfink 3mo ago
I'd like more people to be writing about this, because I find it fascinating. I have my own private project that is heavily LLM-coded, just to learn about what it's like. It's amazing how everything is different yet everything is the same. Big complicated features can start working quickly and give a massive endorphin boost, but then fixing them up and integrating them in properly and polishing the UI? It all feels even more painful having experienced the heady thrill of the initial implementation. And things get to a point where you can feel the inertia set in, the point where things have gotten so hacked up that the LLM can't make any progress without creating an even bigger mess. It's the point where you have to go back and fix up the architecture, or scrap the whole thing and restart with a better plan, or a bit of both (rewind to the "last sane point"). It's like developing with a jetpack -- you can go way faster towards your goal, and you can slam into walls way faster and more painfully too. I think there are tons of learnings to be shared about how to do this stuff, but it seems like it's all blocked behind arguments over whether AI is the best or worst thing ever, and penis-measuring contents about how to hold the tool. The net benefit is a very open question, and both the doom and gloom perspective and the AI booster perspective are valuable and have a lot of things right. But there's a dearth of information about what things work, what things don't, what happens in the process of using AI, how to adjust one's behavior and which of those adjustments is harmful even if effective. But then, I'm part of the problem. I keep meaning to write up a series of experience reports, but it's a lot of work. More fun to vibe a new feature into existence, or to finally fix a UI wart...
- TimTheTinker 3mo ago
  To build a robust piece of deep-functionality software (like an MS Word clone) with an LLM, you have to start from the underlying architectural decisions, particularly how data is structured and how it flows through the system. If you have an LLM or human just start coding up something without nailing down those decisions first, then he/she/it will implicitly make those decisions arbitrarily in the moment (usually based more on pattern-matching than real weighing of alternatives) and the result will be a massive mess. Ideally for an LLM, you'd hand-write a highly detailed DESIGN.md file to encode those decisions and a suite of test fixtures to enforce them.
LtWorf 2mo ago
As I understand it, bun was already vibe coded so nothing of value was lost in vibe porting it to a different language.
xnx 2mo ago
A fundamental miscommunication seems to be what part people are interested in. Just because I like to bake cakes doesn't mean I want to grow and mill my own wheat. Just because I like to make programs doesn't mean I want to tyoe code or learn the details of some library.

furyofantares 3mo ago

> I have used LLMs to create stuff like word clones just for fun. It was a disaster. Sure, it had the basic functionality. But the moment you started with page structure (harder then one non-stop scrolling page), tables, images, rotating, and so many details that make up just the basics of word. Not even the extended functionality. You see every LLM just fall on its face. What do you think of https://scramblequest.app https://scramblequest.app and https://wordpeek.app https://wordpeek.app ? I have never looked at any of the code for them edit: Yeesh, misread your comment as "word games" not "word clones" and was very confused about the claim. Probably should have noted my confusion and re-read.

rurban 3mo ago
Nonsense. Provide/create proper tests for all features, and let the LLM test and fix everything. In case of ccc (claudes C compiler) they just did not use any tests, though they are many existing C testsuite. They just stopped, when it finished compiling the kernel, still failing hundreds of tests.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
oblio 3mo ago
Are you comparing 2 relatively simple games with... Word? Word is basically an operating system. Unix people like to make fun of Emacs for being one, but Word is basically one, too. And all the features in there are used, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't keep them around.
- furyofantares 3mo ago
  Haha, I misread as "word games" and was very confused about the claim.
- reddalo 3mo ago
  >Word is basically an operating system. And .doc files are basically a memory dump.
  - someguyiguess 3mo ago
    Dump is a great word for it
  - galangalalgol 3mo ago
    That was certainly true once, but now all that state is serialized to xml amd zipped up. You can unzip it and look at it if you don't value your sanity.
    - 3mo ago

whstl 3mo ago

I think this is perfectly fine. If you explore Github, you're gonna see thousands of abandoned game engines, compilers for made-up languages. And that has been happening since before the LLM era. I used to be part of an OS messaging board in the early 2000s and almost everyone had their own OS. A dozen people or so could even run Firefox! I remember (now legend) Terry bothering us to check out LoseThos or GodOS or whatever was its name, but quite a few people had OSs that could do more than that. Not all software needs to be commercial to be useful, even if it's just for a learning experience. I have learned a lot from those experiments, even if they're not polished.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
piker 3mo ago
> Not all software needs to be commercial to be useful, even if it's just for a learning experience. I have learned a lot from those experiments, even if they're not polished. This is fine so long as the author is learning something (questionable) and not polluting the commons with "I made this in a weekend" vibe slop.
- Supermancho 3mo ago
  > This is fine so long as the author is learning something (questionable) and not polluting the commons with "I made this in a weekend" vibe slop. Almost all of my prototypes are made this way. "I made this in a weekend", is more often, "I made this in a day". Like any trad-coded project, time to vibe code a backend vs frontend time is 1:N
- neonstatic 3mo ago
  > This is fine so long as the author is learning something (questionable) and not polluting the commons with "I made this in a weekend" vibe slop This is exactly the same as demanding, that people who post their thoughts always post original, useful thoughts. It's just not going to happen. Making something easy will increase the total volume and the majority of that volume will be junk. It's inevitable. What is needed is a search engine for quality software. Perhaps LLMs can do that, since they are better at understanding concepts than generating them.

sigbottle 3mo ago

The more technical you get, the more subsitutable you become - or at least, people think of it in that way, because the whole idea is "It's not me, or the people, it's the raw technical prowess that earns its keep in this place". But it seems like we're finally starting to accept that "accidentals" like network effects, ownership, accountability, etc. are important. Of course, that's why many of us fled to technical corners in the first place - because the "accidentals" become tied up with things like nepotism, unfair and arbitrary judges from random humans who don't understand your merit, the need for bullshitting more than real technical value. Supposedly, anyways.

germandiago 3mo ago
I think it is a very good point: "because the "accidentals" become tied up with things like nepotism, unfair and arbitrary" I never thought of this from this perspective but indeed it seems to be totally true.
lackoftactics 3mo ago
My thoughts too. The LLMs made me understand that the world had been working like that long before LLMs. Luck plays an enormous part in life. We gravitated toward a discipline that seemed free of all those problems, when in fact it had those downfalls better disguised.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

ChoGGi 3mo ago

> I constantly see software being published on reddit that does X, Y, Z only for the authors to abandon it as fast as they vibe coded it. Also if you whip something up, you tend not to care for it as much as something you took the time to create in a "proper" manner.

someguyiguess 3mo ago

It’s strange how you think AI is some static thing that only produces the type of output you experienced and isn’t constantly improving. My experience has proven the latter time and time again.

nope1000 3mo ago

Also I think porting code to another language or rewriting is one of the easier tasks for an LLM, since it has an extremely detailed spec (the source code itself) and a ton of tests already (hopefully).

galangalalgol 3mo ago
In my experience, it will go to every length to convince you it has ported code that it hasn't. It will silently drop upstream unit tests it has no code for, if questioned it will insert some markdown giving some rational why that specific bit was deferred, after the fact, and then point you to it. This was Opus 4.6 for reference. I have had much better luck with small numbers of higher level tests that I can individually verify equivalency. I haven't tried having it do differential fuzzing on some high level interface, that seems like it might work in some cases. But to summarize, treat it like an adversary trying to deceive you.

otabdeveloper4 3mo ago

> Using a LLM to translate a project in a short time, is by itself incredible. Not really. Transpilers have existed since forever. The hard part is all the edge cases. (And LLMs don't solve this problem; they probably akshually exacerbate it.)

krupan 2mo ago
Thank you for saying this! Every now and then I start to feel like I'm either the only sane person left or I must have gone insane and don't realize it. LLMs amazed us and we've been trying to find a good use for them since and there's a lot things like this, replacing a transpiler with a non-deterministic machine that just guesses when it doesn't know the answer. Shouldn't we be targeting LLMs at problems that traditional software absolutely can't handle?

Aurornis 3mo ago

> Its one thing to get a head start using this trick, its another to actually learn the code of your rewrite. I worked for a startup that stopped feature development and did a complete rewrite of a huge codebase. I was assigned to a side project during this time and missed the entire rewrite process. I came back to a completely rewritten codebase. There was almost no learning curve, despite being in an entirely different language. The core architecture, data structures, and concepts were the same. If you read the Bun blog post on how they did it, their rewrite was similar: The first step was getting it into a new language, not rearchitecting it from scratch. I think they did it the right way based on my pre-LLM. Rewriting into a different language as fast and basically as possible is important for getting the team switched over quickly. Rewriting into a different language in X days is actually a good goal to minimize.

nicce 3mo ago
> There was almost no learning curve, despite being in an entirely different language. The core architecture, data structures, and concepts were the same. > If you read the Bun blog post on how they did it, their rewrite was similar: The first step was getting it into a new language, not rearchitecting it from scratch They eventually might regret this, when they are trying to get rid of the last lines of unsafe code. Rust needs to be written differently before you can write safe things to perform fast when compared to other languages or unsafe code. It takes a lot of experience before you can see it.
- hombre_fatal 3mo ago
  I doubt it. If this were a major issue then you'd have to always nail your Rust architecture correctly from day 1 to handle future unknowns, and this isn't the case. More importantly, LLMs are more than capable of figuring out how to rearchitect code and they have no problem making sweeping refactors for you, especially throwaway experimental ones that were way too expensive to do not long ago.

bwfan123 3mo ago

> Not understanding to the core the software you wrote, is going to exploded in your face. Short-termism at its peak. Code maintainers will learn the hard way how to set the boundaries between ai-generated code, and human maintainable code.

sfink 3mo ago

I'd like more people to be writing about this, because I find it fascinating. I have my own private project that is heavily LLM-coded, just to learn about what it's like. It's amazing how everything is different yet everything is the same. Big complicated features can start working quickly and give a massive endorphin boost, but then fixing them up and integrating them in properly and polishing the UI? It all feels even more painful having experienced the heady thrill of the initial implementation. And things get to a point where you can feel the inertia set in, the point where things have gotten so hacked up that the LLM can't make any progress without creating an even bigger mess. It's the point where you have to go back and fix up the architecture, or scrap the whole thing and restart with a better plan, or a bit of both (rewind to the "last sane point"). It's like developing with a jetpack -- you can go way faster towards your goal, and you can slam into walls way faster and more painfully too. I think there are tons of learnings to be shared about how to do this stuff, but it seems like it's all blocked behind arguments over whether AI is the best or worst thing ever, and penis-measuring contents about how to hold the tool. The net benefit is a very open question, and both the doom and gloom perspective and the AI booster perspective are valuable and have a lot of things right. But there's a dearth of information about what things work, what things don't, what happens in the process of using AI, how to adjust one's behavior and which of those adjustments is harmful even if effective. But then, I'm part of the problem. I keep meaning to write up a series of experience reports, but it's a lot of work. More fun to vibe a new feature into existence, or to finally fix a UI wart...

TimTheTinker 3mo ago
To build a robust piece of deep-functionality software (like an MS Word clone) with an LLM, you have to start from the underlying architectural decisions, particularly how data is structured and how it flows through the system. If you have an LLM or human just start coding up something without nailing down those decisions first, then he/she/it will implicitly make those decisions arbitrarily in the moment (usually based more on pattern-matching than real weighing of alternatives) and the result will be a massive mess. Ideally for an LLM, you'd hand-write a highly detailed DESIGN.md file to encode those decisions and a suite of test fixtures to enforce them.

LtWorf 2mo ago

As I understand it, bun was already vibe coded so nothing of value was lost in vibe porting it to a different language.

xnx 2mo ago

A fundamental miscommunication seems to be what part people are interested in. Just because I like to bake cakes doesn't mean I want to grow and mill my own wheat. Just because I like to make programs doesn't mean I want to tyoe code or learn the details of some library.