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“It never reimplements git — it shells out to the system git CLI and rebuilds commits with git commit-tree, reusing each commit's original tree so file contents
by NichoPaolucci 2mo ago
“It never reimplements git — it shells out to the system git CLI and rebuilds commits with git commit-tree, reusing each commit's original tree so file contents are provably never changed.”
Glad the LLM noted this - I was worried this would reimplement git
- YonathanTesfaye 2mo agoHa ha fair. But yeah shelling out to git and reusing the original tree object was deliberate means file contents can't change even if I screw up elsewhere.
- Myzel394 2mo agoWhy would you think such a project would reimplement git?
- mminer237 2mo agoI believe that was sarcasm.
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- whateveracct 2mo agowhy can't anyone just do things themselves anymore? it's all LLM crap
- danudey 2mo agoFor what it's worth, I've used Claude to write a lot of smaller utility tools that I wouldn't normally have the time to sit down and implement, but which also solve straightforward problems. One small example is an extension for the `gh` cli where I give it a PR number and multiple branches and it cherry-picks that PR to those branches, or lets me know if some of the branches don't work. For managing multiple release branches it's very handy, but not so handy that I would have spent a lot of time and energy doing a good job of it. This seems like a similar sort of thing - a user friendly way to do something that most people don't need, and most people who need it probably don't need it very badly. I haven't used claude to replace my actual skills - researching, solving problems, etc. - but I do use it to replace all the stuff which is essentially 'spend a few hours reading API docs and writing boilerplate code'.
- whateveracct 2mo agobut if you were sharing those utilities - even in a github gist! - why not write the English parts for human consumption yourself?
- gritzko 2mo agoThat is in fact the difficult part. You have to explain it all coherently while adjusting to the reader's frame. No one does that for no good reason. It is hellish work.
- saghm 2mo agogit has a notoriously overcomplicated interface, so this is a scenario that I can honestly understand why someone wouldn't want to do it by hand
- whateveracct 2mo agobut what about the writing English to describe it part? does English also have a notoriously overcomplicated interface lol
- arscan 2mo agoWell, yeah, it does. Effective and clear communication is really important and often really hard for engineers. It is said that one goal of stackoverflow was to help programmers learn how to write through practice, as it’s both very hard and very critical to their effectiveness: https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-write-without-writing/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-write-without-writing/ But programmers are also lazy*, so why put in the effort to improve when you can just get llms to do the work for you? * not necessarily in a bad way
- saghm 2mo agoI mean, given that the English you wrote above didn't make it clear that was the only part you were complaining about, it's worth it to consider that maybe precision is hard in natural language regardless of how it's written
- whateveracct 2mo agoit is pretty clear in context given what i was responding to
- InsideOutSanta 2mo agoMaybe I'm misunderstanding, too, but it seems to me that most people responding to you misunderstood your point.
- MattGaiser 2mo agoA tool like this never sees the light of day without an LLM. Git is complicated and use case for this is rather niche.
- whateveracct 2mo agoi definitely used to write bash functions for this sort of thing tho. no GUI, but it was useful to do stuff like obscure my working hours (make it look like i did personal stuff after-hours. make it seem like stuff took all day instead of an hour..like adding sawdust to meat). like you said, niche and probably unnecessary. and if i were to have published them (even in a gist!) i would have written the docs myself instead of forcing people to read LLM-speak. That's just lazy.
- gritzko 2mo agoYep, tell Claude to spit out a shell script. Use Python if bash is not enough.
- whateveracct 2mo agoIt wasn't hard to just..figure it out though. One sitting tops. Claude is learned (taught? lol) helplessness, at scale. I'm pretty sure it's their real moat.
- gritzko 2mo agoIf you dont use that regularly, why keep the app?
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoI'm reverse engineering a cherished video game from my childhood. I got to the audio engine part and things got pretty difficult. Managed to map out the locations of the audio data but figuring out which song was which was going to take a long time. Claude somehow wrote a bespoke one-off Python script to play back the songs straight out of the ROM. I give it the ROM and a hexadecimal address and it just plays it. Converts the data from the ROM into PCM audio samples and pipes them over SSH into termux on my phone where they are played back via SoX play. Yes, Claude wrote a literal sound synthesizer so I could do this. Claude painstakingly tuned the goddamn synthesizer too, he tweaked it over and over again until the output sounded right based on annoyingly human feedback like "these notes are supposed to be in the background but they are too loud". This tool turned a painstaking reverse engineering task into a nostalgic listening experience that brought literal tears to my eyes. I mapped out every single song in the game this way. Without LLMs, none of this would ever have happened.
- voidfunc 2mo agoBecause I have better things to do with my time.
- whateveracct 2mo agoI have better things to do than read LLM prose copy-pasted verbatim too. And yet here we are. I have to read LLM design docs that turn into LLM PRs with LLM PR descriptions and comments and docs.
- qurren 2mo agoThey can, just in today's world, they just are not deemed impressive enough by the voting public to make it to the front page.
- whateveracct 2mo agothat's troubling..
- vips7L 2mo agoPeople are lazy.
- rozab 2mo agoOne of the most annoying quirks of LLMs for me is the insistence on, after being corrected, loudly noting what wasn't done. After getting it to change something stupid in code, it will leave a comment in the code boasting about how it doesn't do the stupid thing, which to future readers reads like an 'asbestos free!' label on a cereal box.
- evan_ 2mo agoI’ve left so many PR reviews in the last few months that are essentially “this looks good but delete 80% of the comments.”
- victor_edka 2mo agothis. like I feel that even telling sonnet 5 to explicitly not add comments it still produces them even on suppa simple logic
- munk-a 2mo agoLets assume one of two worlds - one where AI is constantly improving and one where the tooling is a dead end. In the first world the AI generated comments are no better than the commentary that would be generated in the next six months - in the second world the AI generated comments will obscure the human written comments. In what world are AI generated comments actually value adds?
- evan_ 2mo agoIf the AI (or the person) ran into a non-obvious constraint, or some externality, or there’s a plan that just isn’t implemented yet- then the comment wouldn’t be able to be divined by the AI. But yeah just pointing the AI at something and saying “write me docs” will get you something at best equally good as what’s going to be available.
- colechristensen 2mo agoOne of the reasons this is there is the "psychology" of the LLM performs better with these kinds of affirmations. If you've made a mistake once you're likely to make it again, so leave a note. This indeed pollutes the code with a bunch of nonsense. One of the things I have it maintain instead is a "findings" document with lessons learned and such.
- wavemode 2mo agoOfftopic but, it always amuses me that the words "provably" and "probably" are one letter apart (and I frequently misread them for each other).