What’s the AI going to train on now then?
4 Likes
It just occurred to me: Pre-AI data might become more valuable over time! Don’t throw away your old hard discs!
1 Like
The moderators of this message board, otatop, L.Washington, WichitaDM, Yuv, JonnyA, RiskyFlush, and SvenO, are cowards who let abusers dox and harrass other long time posters.
2 Likes
Every since I said (all of 3 days ago) that I haven’t seen any writeups on HN as pro-AI-coding as Grue’s, there’s been a big one like every day. So yeah WAAF. Well not me, I’m old. But you youngs might be in trouble.
Favorite comment:
You have to think of Opus as a developer whose job at your company lasts somewhere between 30 to 60 minutes before you fire them and hire a new one.
In response to this:
For example, I have a largish enterprise grade code base with nice enterprise grade OO patterns and class hierarchies. There was a simple tech debt item that required refactoring about 30-40 classes to adhere to a slightly different class hierarchy. The work is not difficult, just tedious, especially as unit tests need to be fixed up.
I threw Opus at it with very precise instructions as to what I wanted it to do and how I wanted it to do it. It started off well but then disintegrated once it got overwhelmed at the sheer number of files it had to change. At some point it got stuck in some kind of an error loop where one change it made contradicted with another change and it just couldn’t work itself out. I tried stopping it and helping it out but at this point the context was so polluted that it just couldn’t see a way out.
What level of coding experience/familiarity does someone have to have to effectively utilize something like this? Could someone with zero coding experience sit down and have this design a functional app?
For personal use, definitely. It’s also very good for Excel monkeying and PDF wrangling and data handling. I’m pretty sure you can try for free, so…
2 Likes
Probably depends on how well you can describe what the app should do. Not having any background in coding is going to mean you don’t know the idioms which could cause problems. You may also not be able to catch mistakes as soon as someone with more experience. Probably a nice weekend project though to try it, all you’ve got to lose is some time and maybe some money.
1 Like
With today’s technology someone with no programming experience could use Vibe Coding tools to create a locally hosted website with a simple game like snake or centipede or pong.
I would say that’s about the level of complexity a non-techie could handle before they need to get the techies involved. And they should probably be able to do this within a couple hours of getting the tools working. Then they’d get more productive as they gain experience and eventually become techies if they kept at it
2 Likes
The amount of vibe coded sites popping up that are basically a massive javascript/firebase app running entirely in browser with a key with zero security rules or restrictions is pretty hilarious, these are also the exact people going “see, this is easy, now we can get rid of those pesky diva programmers!”
These are also the same people to (in my opinion, dishonestly) claim that the bleak developer job market is caused by AI, rather than very obvious market forces, overhiring during a decade of zirp, and general delusion.
I’m not sure where suzzer is getting his take though about hn. To me every other post on HN is gushing about coding agents. For me I’ve proven to myself these tools speed me up by about 10-20% which is about what other people honestly studying it report. Cool, but certainly not world changing. I’m extremely skeptical of claims it will continue to improve exponentially, because the training data will kind of eat itself, and the scaling math around compute and cost does not really make a whole lot of sense to me.
The whole thing has filled me with a very bitter cynicism that I probably will never shake though. In 2012-2013ish when I was starting out, the vibe seemed to be getting into tech was the coolest thing you could do. Now all I see laid bare is how much contempt the management/investment class has for people like me. If whenever the tables turn I am not going to forget it.
1 Like
You might find this monster of a read about Steve Yegge’s agent orchestrator called Gastown interesting. It has this graphic describing the levels of AI adoption in workflows that reminded me multitabling.
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04
There is also the Ralph loop, which is a dumb agent that simply takes a single task and runs up to N times to complete the work. Kinda makes me wonder if the LLM creators are putting out these ideas just to burn more tokens? 
My setup is single tabling an agent (figure 5) with a lot of guardrails like skills for design, testing, pr reviews, etc, similar to Boris. I let it make a lot of edits but I like to approve some things which is probably a bottleneck… but whatever. This year I want to work on adding Codex (or other AI clis) just to check on Claude.
1 Like
I was talking more about the comments on any AI coding submission, which generally tend to bring the claims in the article back down to earth. Maybe I’m looking harder, but just in the last few days I’ve seen more comments that read like Grue’s experience.
1 Like
Reprieved.
However, in their update, Kokotajlo and his co-authors revise their expectations for when AI might be able to code autonomously, putting this as likely to happen in the early 2030s, as opposed to 2027. The new forecast sets 2034 as the new horizon for “superintelligence” and does not contain a guess for when AI may destroy humanity.
1 Like
Wrote some integration tests today. I thought about trying to get Claude code to help. But I spent about 99% of the time thinking about what I needed to do and how to do it, which is what I’d need to tell Claude, and 1% of the time typing code. Maybe I’ll come up with some more routine stuff as I expand these tests.
wut
The moderators of this message board, otatop, L.Washington, WichitaDM, Yuv, JonnyA, RiskyFlush, and SvenO, are cowards who let abusers dox and harrass other long time posters.
Isn’t your game Hitler-related?
The moderators of this message board, otatop, L.Washington, WichitaDM, Yuv, JonnyA, RiskyFlush, and SvenO, are cowards who let abusers dox and harrass other long time posters.
this is hilarious and why a lot of small games just disable player chat or to a certain small char limit or you get flooded with dicks and swastikas 