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You still spend all your time troubleshooting the reinvented wheels even if AI writes it because you won’t know the edge cases til you hit them. Then you modify

You still spend all your time troubleshooting the reinvented wheels even if AI writes it because you won’t know the edge cases til you hit them. Then you modify the lib, re-release, and update all your apps, but now look where all your time is spent. The assumption you make is the classic LLM mistake of thinking writing code === building software. To cite your example SQL has had its tires kicked a lot it’s seen things you can’t even imagine thanks to being used millions of times by millions of people. It’s hard to just replicate all that iteration, learning, mastery, and process. If you reinvent it, users will encounter the dumbest bugs over and over and over. Sure you’ll fix them, but you’re now embarking on this big thing that SQL and others already did. If you love the problem space definitely do it - go full steam ahead - especially if you’re actually innovating and doing things better, but don’t be fooled into thinking anyone can, or should with every side project. The new struggle is focus, what not to build, I almost have the purely opposite view of instead of using LLMs for grandiosity, only using the LLM for tedium and making sure it doesn’t do anything too much that I haven’t planned for or want to do. I drive the thing, so every new project is still my time and energy and focus.

ux266478 2mo ago
> The assumption you make is the classic LLM mistake of thinking writing code === building software. Not quite. I'd agree with you if you try to do code generation in one-shot, but the agentic loop importantly isn't that. Natural testing at-scale is automated as well. > but don’t be fooled into thinking anyone can, or should with every side project. You're right, and I hoped I had conveyed that but I guess I didn't. I'm very bearish on whether or not we're democratizing anything. What I do think is we have a very complicated and interesting tool, and within a reasonable precondition of additional scaling and structural innovation, one that promises a certain kind of person the ability to swing with the weight of an entire institution. I have been playing around with transformers for 7 years now, and can see and qualify the improvements observationally. Innovations like thinking blocks, the agentic loop, the many architectural refinements flourishing, SAEs, steering vectors, harnesses, etc. Despite what it sounds like, I've yet to incorporate LLMs into any of my professional workflows, they're really not quite up to my standards yet. But then, in my industry I would never in a million years touch anything like SQLite either. Those kinds of things are very taboo for anything but like an internet service and that's more the kind of operations drek that gets shoved off to the IT department. All of this colors my perspective. I was never pulling in dependencies. In the future, it's looking like I'll have infinitely less reason to.

ux266478 2mo ago

> The assumption you make is the classic LLM mistake of thinking writing code === building software. Not quite. I'd agree with you if you try to do code generation in one-shot, but the agentic loop importantly isn't that. Natural testing at-scale is automated as well. > but don’t be fooled into thinking anyone can, or should with every side project. You're right, and I hoped I had conveyed that but I guess I didn't. I'm very bearish on whether or not we're democratizing anything. What I do think is we have a very complicated and interesting tool, and within a reasonable precondition of additional scaling and structural innovation, one that promises a certain kind of person the ability to swing with the weight of an entire institution. I have been playing around with transformers for 7 years now, and can see and qualify the improvements observationally. Innovations like thinking blocks, the agentic loop, the many architectural refinements flourishing, SAEs, steering vectors, harnesses, etc. Despite what it sounds like, I've yet to incorporate LLMs into any of my professional workflows, they're really not quite up to my standards yet. But then, in my industry I would never in a million years touch anything like SQLite either. Those kinds of things are very taboo for anything but like an internet service and that's more the kind of operations drek that gets shoved off to the IT department. All of this colors my perspective. I was never pulling in dependencies. In the future, it's looking like I'll have infinitely less reason to.