4 ms·

> The idea of making personal single user software is a fantasy, an oxymoron, you MAKE software? there's the presumption that it will be used for other people,

> The idea of making personal single user software is a fantasy, an oxymoron, you MAKE software? there's the presumption that it will be used for other people, otherwise you'd be USING software. It definitely isn't. I've done it (successfully) a few times. > The idea of an assistant that can use natural language is nice! But why would you MAKE software with it, it IS software, just do the thing you want to do! This makes no sense to me. Are you suggesting that instead of using an LLM to make, say, an ebook reader or crossword app that meets my personal needs, I should invoke an LLM every time I want to read a book or do a crossword? That feels like a strawman, but I can't work out what else you might be arguing here.

deleted 2mo ago
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TZubiri 2mo ago
> I should invoke an LLM every time I want to read a book or do a crossword. Well no, I'd say, use any of the existing 100 book readers to read a book, or any of 50 crossword apps. But if you want to use an LLM to customize it the exact way you want it. Yes, use the LLM every time you want to do it. Wanting the LLM to do a previous gen app and then get out of the way sounds like asking for faster horses. Just tell the LLM you want to play a crossword game with X and Y rules, then give it a name so you can play it again in the future if you want, and if you want to try out rule Z, you do that, a la Kay's Dynabook. That may sound weird to you, but asking an LLM to 'make software like we used to' sounds weird to me, and seeing "invoking an LLM every time I want to do X" as weird sounds like something that's true only for a very brief period of time where something is so uncommon that it's inference is expensive.
- retsibsi 2mo ago
  I can imagine a future where it might make sense. Right now, though, it would make for a far worse experience, and wouldn't even really be practically possible. Both of those examples were real ones. The crossword app runs on my phone, pulls the crosswords from a specific source, and lets me access and solve them via the exact interface I prefer. The ebook app is cross platform, syncs via a remote server, has the interface I want and includes some niche features. There's no realistic way to create that on the fly every time I want to read a book on my phone, and if there were it would be extremely inefficient. And I see literally no advantages to doing so -- even if time and tokens weren't an issue, what would I gain by recreating the apps from a prompt every time I wanted to use them, rather than deterministically running code I have already tested?
  - TZubiri 2mo ago
    I get that you are doing that, but I think the fantasy is that this is creation of software instead of consumption. It's an issue adjacent to licence washing, where mangling some code through an inference layer is considered transformative or even unrelated and the original license doesn't apply. But in this case, what you are washing is not the license, but the valor of writing software. Broadly speaking, your approach would be to have the LLM write application code, my approach would be for the LLM to write commands, 'apt-get install calibre', maybe if I want to add or modify a button I can ask it to hack the X interface. You go straight for the LLM generating the code. There's certainly technical differences between what we are doing, but they are very arbitrary, we are essentially doing the same thing, but what I am doing looks less impressive, and what you are doing you can sell in your CV to potential hiring managers as 'using AI to write software'. It's more about the semantics than the actual requirements. I may be wrong though, maybe your approach is far more effective than just importing transitive dependencies, but I would think it's more about taking credit for the thing and increasing your sense of ownership and achievement. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I just need a way to think of myself as better than others as an unemployed neverviber.
    - retsibsi 2mo ago
      Thanks, I think I understand your point better now. In this case, though, you are wrong about both my intentions and the relative practical value of the two approaches (to me). I'm not doing this to take creative or intellectual credit in any external way; you're right that there is some degree of increased personal satisfaction (which I don't see as a problem, as long as it doesn't crowd out more wholesome ways of 'earning' that satisfaction), but I'm not kidding myself about what I've actually done here. I also write my own code for fun/creative expression/intellectual stimulation/showing off, but that's a separate thing and there's not much crossover between the two types of project for me. And the end products really are useful to me in a way that I couldn't replicate just by using something that already exists, and couldn't replicate nearly as easily by manually modifying open source. (I'm sure I could do it by starting with open source and using an LLM to make changes, and in other cases I have done exactly that, but at that point I don't really see the conceptual difference -- I'm still getting an LLM to write code and then repeatedly running that code. Ideally I would be giving something back by making a useful contribution to the public repo(s), but that would turn this into a completely different, more tedious and effortful thing, and I'm not sure it would be welcome anyway. So, case by case, I choose whichever approach seems likely to be more effective or efficient or less annoying, and sometimes that means getting Claude to write something 'from scratch'; other times there's an open source application I already use that just needs some tweaking, and I start with that.)

deleted 2mo ago

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TZubiri 2mo ago

> I should invoke an LLM every time I want to read a book or do a crossword. Well no, I'd say, use any of the existing 100 book readers to read a book, or any of 50 crossword apps. But if you want to use an LLM to customize it the exact way you want it. Yes, use the LLM every time you want to do it. Wanting the LLM to do a previous gen app and then get out of the way sounds like asking for faster horses. Just tell the LLM you want to play a crossword game with X and Y rules, then give it a name so you can play it again in the future if you want, and if you want to try out rule Z, you do that, a la Kay's Dynabook. That may sound weird to you, but asking an LLM to 'make software like we used to' sounds weird to me, and seeing "invoking an LLM every time I want to do X" as weird sounds like something that's true only for a very brief period of time where something is so uncommon that it's inference is expensive.

retsibsi 2mo ago
I can imagine a future where it might make sense. Right now, though, it would make for a far worse experience, and wouldn't even really be practically possible. Both of those examples were real ones. The crossword app runs on my phone, pulls the crosswords from a specific source, and lets me access and solve them via the exact interface I prefer. The ebook app is cross platform, syncs via a remote server, has the interface I want and includes some niche features. There's no realistic way to create that on the fly every time I want to read a book on my phone, and if there were it would be extremely inefficient. And I see literally no advantages to doing so -- even if time and tokens weren't an issue, what would I gain by recreating the apps from a prompt every time I wanted to use them, rather than deterministically running code I have already tested?
- TZubiri 2mo ago
  I get that you are doing that, but I think the fantasy is that this is creation of software instead of consumption. It's an issue adjacent to licence washing, where mangling some code through an inference layer is considered transformative or even unrelated and the original license doesn't apply. But in this case, what you are washing is not the license, but the valor of writing software. Broadly speaking, your approach would be to have the LLM write application code, my approach would be for the LLM to write commands, 'apt-get install calibre', maybe if I want to add or modify a button I can ask it to hack the X interface. You go straight for the LLM generating the code. There's certainly technical differences between what we are doing, but they are very arbitrary, we are essentially doing the same thing, but what I am doing looks less impressive, and what you are doing you can sell in your CV to potential hiring managers as 'using AI to write software'. It's more about the semantics than the actual requirements. I may be wrong though, maybe your approach is far more effective than just importing transitive dependencies, but I would think it's more about taking credit for the thing and increasing your sense of ownership and achievement. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I just need a way to think of myself as better than others as an unemployed neverviber.
  - retsibsi 2mo ago
    Thanks, I think I understand your point better now. In this case, though, you are wrong about both my intentions and the relative practical value of the two approaches (to me). I'm not doing this to take creative or intellectual credit in any external way; you're right that there is some degree of increased personal satisfaction (which I don't see as a problem, as long as it doesn't crowd out more wholesome ways of 'earning' that satisfaction), but I'm not kidding myself about what I've actually done here. I also write my own code for fun/creative expression/intellectual stimulation/showing off, but that's a separate thing and there's not much crossover between the two types of project for me. And the end products really are useful to me in a way that I couldn't replicate just by using something that already exists, and couldn't replicate nearly as easily by manually modifying open source. (I'm sure I could do it by starting with open source and using an LLM to make changes, and in other cases I have done exactly that, but at that point I don't really see the conceptual difference -- I'm still getting an LLM to write code and then repeatedly running that code. Ideally I would be giving something back by making a useful contribution to the public repo(s), but that would turn this into a completely different, more tedious and effortful thing, and I'm not sure it would be welcome anyway. So, case by case, I choose whichever approach seems likely to be more effective or efficient or less annoying, and sometimes that means getting Claude to write something 'from scratch'; other times there's an open source application I already use that just needs some tweaking, and I start with that.)