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amelius 57 minutes ago [-]
Somehow, on HN, suggesting to use an LLM to solve some problem gives you negative responses.
But then ... posting to HN that you've used an LLM to solve a problem is OK?
profsummergig 31 minutes ago [-]
Seems like the divide between the voters who vote in the Primaries and the voters who vote in the actual Election. Vocal minority vs. Silent majority.
nozzlegear 10 minutes ago [-]
Goomba fallacy
2398aG 3 hours ago [-]
OP works at a robotics company, hence the inability to use Google search and "git clone" to find dozens of ready made apps, some of them years old.
Dig1t 2 hours ago [-]
For most people talking to Claude is a much better experience than doing a Google search.
yndoendo 1 hours ago [-]
Google search as become nothing more than a shitty AI by design. Alternative search engines are the only means to actually navigate.
I can still find core material using an alternative.
Don't worry, Google is now embedding that AI into Android's core. Rinse and repeat, expect the same results.
marcosdumay 2 hours ago [-]
LLMs are a much better experience than what web search has become nowadays. And they probably are a better experience than what standard search could ever be.
But yeah, that doesn't mean they are doing much more than search.
Dig1t 21 minutes ago [-]
Well I'm saying that asking Claude is a much better experience than the old Google search style of looking at 10 blue links.
They are doing more than search insofar as they are:
1. Reasoning about your question and trying to identify intent
2. Doing the search and accessing multiple search results for you
3. Formatting a response based on your intent and in the way you specify
This is collapsing many steps that humans used to have to do on their own. It's more ergonomic, and gets to a better answer, faster.
satvikpendem 1 hours ago [-]
Google already has AI overviews which I use instead of polluting my ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini chats.
sebastiennight 40 minutes ago [-]
The unwanted effect of AI overviews, in my experience, is turning their users into very-confidently-wrong arguers of everything.
The upside is that telling said users to double-check the sources usually results in them realizing the AI overview was wrong, but it's still a waste of everyone's time.
The 2021-era of of just "Not finding the results" was maybe a better outcome.
aidos 21 hours ago [-]
Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess.
It’s a funny time to live through. A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden.
bdcravens 20 hours ago [-]
> A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden.
This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it
This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".
sota_pop 3 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, I have personally felt this way about projects in which I was involved in the past(written both by me and by others)…
sometimes starting from scratch just faster and/or easier.
skywal_l 3 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of Niven/Pournelle's "The Mote in God’s Eye" where the aliens have a very pragmatic/Jury-rigged approach to technology and everything is more or less improvised.
I have noticed this with co-workers also, when you have the ability to read/write/understand things very quickly, you tend to spend much less time on making things tidy, clear and maintainable.
majormajor 4 hours ago [-]
> This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".
nah, it reflects on how applications built by humans usually do become spaghetti messes with all the resulting brittleness and unintended negative side effects of changes that result
but it probably doesn't matter for a little toy piano app
qsera 2 hours ago [-]
>just throw the code away and rebuild it
What about all the undocumented "adjustments" ("bug fixes" in a professional context) that were made to make it actually useful?
axus 2 hours ago [-]
Well first it could write a spec, THEN throw it away :) Like you are supposed to do with a prototype.
qsera 1 hours ago [-]
Well it could miss relevant things to include in the spec.
whateveracct 4 hours ago [-]
errors compound
budsniffer952 4 minutes ago [-]
...Whether you are an LLM or human. And, on average, LLMs write better code than humans.
Not you, of course. You write exceptional code with zero errors that never needs rework. I'm talking about the rest of us.
ssl-3 17 hours ago [-]
And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity.
Sometimes it seems like they're moving very slowly. That makes sense: It's easy to get used to how they work today and it is also easy to forget how much worse they were last year.
When we look back and realize that just 4 years ago these tools didn't really exist at all, it becomes clear that the rate of progress is rather amazing.
In 4 years, we've gone from "hah, good luck with that crap!" to "little kids writing music-learning games on their own in a few minutes"
That's pretty friggin' awesome, and it's not finished yet. :)
nozzlegear 15 hours ago [-]
> And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity.
Since this is Claude, the models of the future might be more expensive, or more locked down, or might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model, etc.
swat535 2 hours ago [-]
People tend to not realize how far these models have become.
I remember when they would always hallucinate APIs that wasn't there or make up fields that didn't exist.. those problems are virtually solved now.
So with that in mind, why wouldn't AI be able to write better code?
The code would have to be maintainable by AI itself (operating based on the assumption that the future will be Agentic Engineering)
nozzlegear 37 minutes ago [-]
I don't use Claude, but isn't the consensus right now that Opus 5 is worse than previous generations? I suppose you could just commit to always using Fable and never use Opus, but it
> might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model
My contention isn't that models haven't improved or won't keep improving – my position is that the business goals of our American AI firms (Anthropic especially) aren't necessarily aligned with continuing to make those improved models available to the public forever. We need only look at the Mythos/Fable split for evidence of this happening already.
Yeah, the models aren't improving because Reddit told you, and the businesses aren't incentivized to make better models. Galaxy brain take.
pessimizer 2 hours ago [-]
> So with that in mind, why wouldn't AI be able to write better code?
> Since this is Claude, the models of the future might be more expensive, or more locked down, or might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model, etc.
I have no idea what you're trying to add.
satvikpendem 1 hours ago [-]
Models in general have gotten better, not specifically Claude, is what they mean; 4 years ago was when ChatGPT without any Anthropic was released.
OptionOfT 3 hours ago [-]
Eh, not really. It's the same issue with porting. You always rely on features you didn't properly articulate.
SketchySeaBeast 3 hours ago [-]
Good luck to future models figuring out which weird section of code are bugs and which are features.
fsniper 19 hours ago [-]
AI writes faster, so the rate it incurs tech debt is proportionally higher. However it's ability to have large context kept on memory compared to humans is also a key component fighting against it. These are occasionally forgotten when code quality of AI for large code bases are discussed. So Yes I think humans also build spaghetti, but as they write slower they get to the same place a lot later. However humans can't correct it, or can't correct it fast enough. AI can.
aselimov3 15 hours ago [-]
It does somewhat depend on the application size. Seems to me that for regular software projects (that aren't enterprise SaaS) a good programmer will create better software than Claude. Maybe the dehumanizing way to say it is that humans have more efficient/improved retrieval. The amount of time I see repeat code for no reason, or code/context that has been obviously missed is absurd.
budsniffer952 9 minutes ago [-]
>Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess.
What does this even mean? Does the software run? Did you plan on extending it? Maybe turning it into a "platform"?
Why doesn't HackerNews understand software exists to solve a problem? No one cares if code is pretty if it does the job. You can talk about "potential issues" until you're blue in the face. It doesn't matter.
elbear 4 minutes ago [-]
It's not about prettiness. It's about being harder to extend thus making future adaptations harder.
jpcom 3 hours ago [-]
She's 8 years old man cut her a little slack on the code aesthetics ;)
tocs3 2 hours ago [-]
And Claude is even younger.
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
Guess you depend on how you measure. As "released product to the public" then probably yes. Cumulative training hours spent actually creating and adjusting the weights during training? Probably no.
tocs3 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe, I do not know how the number of neurons in a child's brain and the connections compare to Claude and its training but I would think it is comparable. Also, while a child might sleep the brain does not just switch off, there is still stuff going on that adds to the child's development.
I am, here, not counting time for separate instances of Claude (so 10 instances running for a year is not 10 years). So, I think the 8yo is still older.
Full disclosure, I am not a neurologist or computer scientist (although I find both interesting). I would consider fair criticism of this fair and would even like to see what those in those fields would have to say.
1659447091 55 minutes ago [-]
> compare to Claude and its training [...] Also, while a child might sleep the brain does not just switch off
A child doesn't get centuries of curated human knowledge and public works as its starting point
m463 21 hours ago [-]
I wonder. I remember before emissions, what's underneath a car hood was relatively organized and simple. Then with emissions it became a maze of vacuum hoses and so much other nonsense.
then ... in some places (maybe cars that people care about working on) it became cleaner again. In the other places, they added a second hood to hide the mess.
There is some clean code out there, like maybe the seL4 kernel:
"with an explicit goal of enabling comprehensive formal verification..." (and lots more stuff)
maybe we can still have niches like this.
pona-a 21 hours ago [-]
That's what happens with scale...
The purpose of a car itself didn't change. But the massive inflated demand, as our city planners decided every adult must be put in a rolling metal cage to participate in society, changed the environment it was originally designed for.
Now it's a matter of geopolitical stability, or even basic human habitability of these spaces, that a car converts as much of that chemical energy into movement, and releases as little toxic byproducts in the process. Whereas before, that cost, at scale, was small enough to neglect.
Just like a modern CPU evolved into an incomprehensible mess, even though the basic consumer needs hadn't changed much, because the politics of computing forced them to run expanding institutional cruft at reasonable speeds, on battery-powered always-on addiction machines.
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
> then ... in some places (maybe cars that people care about working on) it became cleaner again
Those cleaner looking engine bays are usually worse to work on. Not better.
When you open up the hood and immediately see lines everywhere, that also means they’re within reach. This is great.
The engine bays that look nice and clean for the showroom still have those same lines. They’re just buried in there. If you need to work on them you’re going to be reaching underneath things, climbing under the car, or even removing other parts to access something simple.
Also, it’s not all about emissions. A lot of those lines are for modern comforts like cruise control and improvements like features that make cold starts easier or make the engine behave better at extreme temperatures. Some of those have been superseded by electronically controlled versions which is why some of those lines are disappearing on modern cars, but the overall complexity has increased further.
wkjagt 3 hours ago [-]
I have a 1981 Volvo 244 and I'm very happy none of the hoses are hidden.
toasty228 21 hours ago [-]
It was simple because it was inefficient and archaic. Reducing pollution is not "nonsense"
m463 19 hours ago [-]
Not criticizing function, criticizing elegance of the solution. Eventually with time elegance was achieved again.
another analogy would be opening some computers to add memory/ssd/hd, as judged by ifixit
ssl-3 17 hours ago [-]
PC accessories have been easy during the era of ifixit, though.
I remember installing seventy-two individual DIP chips onto an Everex 2-megabyte 8-bit ISA EMS expansion card and downloading software to make it work in MS-DOS from Intel's dial-up BBS. I remember chains of MFM drives being made to work by keying obscure commands into debug to run programs that were built into the hard drive controller card.
Oh, so many fun evenings working out which devices could share IRQs and configuring software to work around the corner cases that developed. Serial mice, PS/2 mice, plus bus mice of several different varieties. XT, AT, and PS/2 keyboards. The veritable plethora of mutually-incompatible CD-ROM interfaces.
A clock card: A whole friggin' card with a clock chip and a battery, just to keep track of wall time. (And the software to make it work.)
I even remember SCSI, which was famously renowned for the number of goat sacrifices that were required to to make it work. (Except, I remember SCSI very fondly. CD burner, reader, 7-disc Nakamichi changer, flatbed scanner, DDS tape, and a few IBM Ultrastar 9ES hard drives all sharing the same bus? Sure, why not? It worked. But it took some care to get there.)
It's simple today. Want more storage? SATA is easy (and everyone will make fun of you, but USB 3 works great for a hard drive in a desktop rig). m.2 is compact, and only has a couple of variations. Video cards -- even multiples of them -- just slot right into motherboards and they don't even have jumbers to configure. Sound cards are forgotten. RAM comes in standard forms that only change once every decade or so. Input devices, basic NICs, and video capture stuff can just plug in with USB. The USB ports themselves can be multiplied using hubs.
It's pretty good today, isn't it? Am I missing something?
m463 16 hours ago [-]
> Am I missing something?
lol. the original statement was that AI written code is a mess "under the hood"
And I tried to say - cars were "simple/fixable under the hood", then emissions made them a mess then some (specific) cars became simple/fixable again.
but my analogy wasn't clear, so I tried saying that computers went the same way.
started out with simple s-100 bus/pc with slots... but at some point they became no-user-servicable-parts-inside (per ifixit) but some have gotten servicable again.
in summary - I think AI can make a mess, but maybe AI can make clean/maintainable code someday.
maybe there will need to be an AIfixit.com to rate models.
ssl-3 16 hours ago [-]
Ah.
Yeah, I wasn't quite picking up what you were putting down. :) And I'd apologize for writing about old computers, except I enjoy writing about old computers. I never had much experience with S-100, though; my days of hands-in computing started with PCs in the 80s and I missed the earlier eras.
Anyway, I think you're right: The bot will continue to improve. It will get simpler to operate, and it will also generate cleaner code.
But with a twist: That generated code won't become cleaner because it makes it cheaper/easier for humans to understand and work on. Instead, it will instead get cleaner because it makes it cheaper/easier for bots to understand and work on.
(Why use many token when few do trick?)
moffkalast 2 hours ago [-]
I think the vacuum hoses are actually for the brake booster and why you don't have any regular brakes if your engine dies. But yes, smaller engine + turbo or twin turbo is definitely more complex than a simple big block. There's also an absolute shit ton more sensors on everything now.
reidjs 2 hours ago [-]
In what world would this be a future burden? It's just a throwaway fun project lol
rendaw 1 hours ago [-]
Suppose she decides from the experience that she likes making games, and wants to expand on it. She wants to support more songs, different types of song sources, colorful animated backgrounds, flashy graphics, change how it scores, a hundred other things. But by the time she gets halfway through it claude just starts getting things wrong and making them worse, and it turns into a nightmare where she doesn't even know how to go back and going back doesn't fix the problem. Or going back undoes some things she did want along with all the stuff it broke, and now she has to do it all over again. She makes a change on one screen and it changes the behavior on a dozen others. Claude starts telling her that things are impossible, or that it did this because there was a comment that said she wanted it, or coming up with other weird complicated reasons, citing random lines of code, why this or that can't work. And then she decides that yeah, making things is an awful experience and she never wants to do it again.
jayd16 1 hours ago [-]
I think the fear is that a lot of this stuff will end up being load bearing. A lot more folks now know enough to be dangerous but not enough to know what to throw away.
satvikpendem 1 hours ago [-]
Load bearing, huh? I see you're becoming Claude himself.
mypalmike 14 minutes ago [-]
I thought I was the only one who realized how much Claude called things “load bearing”. I’ve mentioned it to colleagues and they hadn’t noticed.
jayd16 14 minutes ago [-]
You're right to push back
bonsai_bar 1 hours ago [-]
You mean the 8 year old shouldn't be thinking about how she will maintain this code when she's 15? This generation is lost.
magic_hamster 34 minutes ago [-]
The job of code like this is going to serve as a makeshift spec for future coding agents, so they extract the intended use and redo it on command. Better models will be able to improve the actual code until you hit some diminishing returns for the problem you've solved.
david-gpu 18 hours ago [-]
> Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess.
That is how compiler-generated assembly looks to humans, as well. Human-produced is typically much more readable. Yet, here we are. Most programmers only know the very basics of assembly programming, but the world keeps spinning just fine.
aselimov3 15 hours ago [-]
Comparing LLM output to compiler output is such a stale meme by now that it's surprising to see people still saying it. Obviously a deterministic translation of a higher level programming language to machine code is different than the slop cannon.
david-gpu 10 hours ago [-]
1. Compilation has typically not been deterministic. Even within the same exact compiler tool chain version.
2. Compilers and building tool chains change all the time. CI and automated testing catch any regressions. Tye same can be done with LLMs.
3. LLM code generation, with some work, can be made deterministic, if that mattered to somebody.
customguy 5 minutes ago [-]
Nonsense. The "weights" in "models" refer to probabilities.
Even the implicit claim that they could deterministically produce "the" correct answer with 100% certainty doesn't withstand any scrutiny.
Nevermind problems posed in English prose, complicated or philosophical questions. Is the correct answer to 2+2 four, or is it 1+3? When you you have 2 apples and give me one apple, how many apples do you have now; one, or half as many as before? What is the correct answer? Without a spaghetti of arbitrary axioms in the system prompt? Even if you come up with something clever about apples, it even fails at "when is your birthday". When it is today, should I say "today" or say the date? Not even God could decide that.
Arguably, the specifications for a compiler is also such a mess of axioms, and you can split hairs and say "it's all random anyway", but you'll still use a seatbelt instead of silly string, so what gives?
For compilers, give or take, there is a correct output for a given input (under which I'll include config, options, the targeted architecture, whatever). With LLM there is no such thing even if you do infinite mental backflips, and there won't be, because there can't be. Even if you could perfect the compilers that are needed to make the software that trains and drives LLM deterministic, you cannot make LLM fully deterministic without making them not an LLM.
If you can find a way to encode what a compiler would do to programs into the weights of a model so that produces the output of a compiler that would be a cool and completely useless feat, because it would probably be bigger, slower and impossible to reason about. But it would still be cool and I would still try it out.
blargey 16 hours ago [-]
Picking over the theoretical maintainability of one-off tools and toys that were generated in minutes by what will soon be an outdated model, feels very...missing the forest for the trees, when it comes to speculating about the future impact of this stuff.
orbital-decay 16 hours ago [-]
That's the kind of thing I learned actual programming for, at the same age.
gxs 20 hours ago [-]
Yes but it’s far better than anything anyone, let alone a small child, could make in 15 minutes
On the other hand an engineer might take a couple hours and build this in a clean way with the right prompting
These “got ‘em” ai criticism comments are getting so old
aidos 10 hours ago [-]
I wasn’t trying to make a “got em” comment.
The fact that this is possible and works at all is mind blowing - even more mind blowing is that my 8 yo is growing up in a world where they can talk to a machine to produce a custom application in seconds and they don’t realise how mind blowing it is!
In terms of the code, it would take even less time than that to tidy it up. For this application you wouldn’t bother. That’s almost a form of “premature optimisation” unless you’re actually planning on doing more work on it.
My hunch is that what the world is about to see a lot of is much bigger bits of work, or changes to other bigger existing systems done by people without the skills to know how to contain the complexity. That’s going to come with a burden.
ranger_danger 20 hours ago [-]
The only reason it's a spaghetti mess is because it's not being prompted correctly by an expert.
bakugo 20 hours ago [-]
Are these experts in the room with us right now? Because if even the creators of Claude seemingly can't prompt non spaghetti code (see: Claude Code leak), I'd like to know who can.
ranger_danger 19 hours ago [-]
How do you know they were even trying in the first place? Have you analyzed the prompt they used?
bakugo 18 hours ago [-]
How do you know they weren't? Have you analyzed the prompt they used?
There's no shortage of examples of unmaintainable spaghetti AI code, Claude Code is just one of many. If you have examples of good codebases maintained by "prompting experts", I'd love to see them.
ranger_danger 12 hours ago [-]
Pretty much any existing project (that started before LLMs were a thing) who accepts LLM-generated code, I would argue fits your requirement, since the PRs adhere to their existing code style and guidelines, or they wouldn't be accepted in the first place. In those cases it may be impossible to tell that an LLM was even involved.
Recent notable examples would be the Linux kernel or cURL.
gxs 18 hours ago [-]
The difference is he’s not passing judgement on it or jumping to conclusions, fyi
Dylan16807 17 hours ago [-]
Nobody is jumping to conclusions. There's enough examples to come to perfectly reasonable conclusions and judgements.
Ancapistani 19 hours ago [-]
Speaking for myself - they may not have cared to.
I can absolutely prompt AI to following established patterns and produce nice, clean output in a legacy codebase. I also have a completely separate set of skill files that I’ve been building organically by allowing the agent to do make most decisions about conventions. The latter produces code that would be a nightmare to modify by hand, but I’m still able to iterate on it many times faster than I could in the codebase where code quality is a requirement.
“Code quality” is mostly “human readability”, and I’m simply not sure that’s a valuable attribute anymore.
bakugo 18 hours ago [-]
> “Code quality” is mostly “human readability”
That's an extremely narrow view of programming, and shows a complete lack of experience.
gxs 20 hours ago [-]
100%
A novice writing code by hand could also write spaghetti code
If you've worked in enterprise software, you might have seen that even competent professionals can write spaghetti code
At this point AI really is just garbage in garbage out
gxs 18 hours ago [-]
Haha it’s so comical how predictable downvotes are - which is a proxy for knowing what developers sensibilities are
Wild to me that we see this even in what is a relatively more “sophisticated” forum
Dylan16807 17 hours ago [-]
The downvotes are because you're just saying some devs are bad, you're not explaining how/why incorrect prompting is the only reason it's a mess. Or even the main reason.
antii 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
varjag 2 hours ago [-]
So GIMP kept crashing on me when importing 48 bit TIFFs. I threw a trace at Codex (without so much as a local GIMP repo) from which it figured out that the culprit was thumb preview handling code. It suggested turning off two non-obvious to me options that would circumvent that codepath it indeed worked.
pengaru 2 hours ago [-]
It's not like this is an unknown gimp problem - conventional search turns up plenty of results describing this class of bugs and advising to disable the previews.
tracerbulletx 1 hours ago [-]
While I don't think this is novel I am a believer that AI has changed computing forever in the same way the tweet implies.
Cancelled by Strength App, Zwift for indoor bike trainer, and strava for running apps and built my own app that brings all 3 together and works better.
https://coachsamsyn.com/
Among about 100 little smaller tools.
All of these are released and work. Some of them have other customers. One of them has 1000s.
There is absolutely no way I could have done all of this without AI. I don't really consider most of it too be slop, ive been an engineer for 20 years. I care a lot about the details and the underlying properties of the system. I had shipped my side projects years before AI that had real users so I have a good idea of what it takes to ship something end to end that people can actually use. It's mostly about the details and ease of use and the last 20% is the hardest. Some of us know that from our day jobs but it is different when you have to it all yourself and be responsible for every choice.
I use rssi to find my stuff regularly. There are a ton of android apps to do it. I also use it for room presence detection with homeassistant (using the BLE in my ESP32s and Shelly switches).
grepfru_it 31 minutes ago [-]
Bluetoothctl in Linux.
Have done exactly this 15 years ago to find my lost phone (:
Also wrote a cheap 30 line shell script to allow playing videos and music to “follow me” from one room to another with well placed raspberry pi’s, 11 years ago
burnte 19 hours ago [-]
That's because people like me were doing that and writing about it 20+ years ago. Everything from Claude comes from human minds.
DonsDiscountGas 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, technology at step N is built from technology at step N-1. Always has been.
ksifjsjdie 37 minutes ago [-]
This is the most obvious thing anyone could ever say about anything… ever.
Of course current technology is a step forward from yesterday’s. Of course what we have today is built on what came before it.
Things don’t exist in a vacuum, anyone over the age of 12 should have this figured out by now.
burnte 3 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I love that. I'm where I am because of billions of humans before me cutting paths. Its why I like building for the next generation.
pessimizer 2 hours ago [-]
You're replying with a trite cliché to a comment saying that this particular technology was step N-(20+) being built at step N.
asd1287 3 hours ago [-]
This is just plagiarism. No new step exists at all.
speedgoose 2 hours ago [-]
Yes you can do that.
It’s a standard feature on my Garmin watch. I can access it in a few button presses, sometimes two if it’s the last action I used.
unqueued 19 hours ago [-]
I used bluez and bash to lock xscreensaver using some very minimal bash. It wasn't my idea I believe people on the Gentoo forums were doing it.
But you can just loop over something like `hcitool rssi "$MAC"` and project it somewhere, there's a variety of ways.
I like using dunstify with the -p option to persist on screen.
I think it's really impressive what these agents can do, but you should also consider whether you're asking it to burn tokens reinventing the wheel for you, or making a pretty wrapper around a wrapper.
59nadir 37 minutes ago [-]
People who don't know things are usually very impressed by solutions that LLMs come up with. I saw one recently that was very impressed that their chosen LLM took screenshots of their vibe coded game to check results, when it's clear from what they were saying the LLM could've literally just read the framebuffer instead, and that's trivial to set up.
dexterlagan 21 hours ago [-]
Had this song in my head, wrote some lyrics, hummed it into Suno, generated the song. I love listening to it. What a world.
I make little tools like that all the time. My GitHub is filled with these little things I write or gen once never to be used again. Some of them I use daily (GitHub.com/dexterlagan). Since LLMs became decent I make even more of these. The more we move forward, the more people make things for their own use. I think it's cool. I see a lot of naysayers, but man, I have been waiting for this kind of tech since I was 10. Let's enjoy it I say.
6stringmerc 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 4 hours ago [-]
You can't attack other users like this, no matter how right you are or feel you are, nor how justified or strongly you feel. Preserving a container for respectful interaction here is more important, and we need commenters to contribute to that, not destroy it. If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post like this again, we would appreciate it.
---
Edit: as your most recent comments have all been breaking the site guidelines in a similar way, I've banned this account. It's not ok to do that here.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
reeeeee 3 hours ago [-]
I understand your frustration, but I don't agree with the sentiment that AI-training should not be allowed without compensation.
If I learn to draw, make music, build stuff, etc. I look at what others have done before me. I don't pay anyone either. Why should the AI?
ksifjsjdie 34 minutes ago [-]
First, starting off with “as a <insert self aggrandising title>…” already makes you ineligible to emit an opinion on any given subject.
Second, rude.
Third, you might want to check with a professional, but it seems to me you are projecting your own (fairly obvious, and loud) insecurities onto others; I’m sorry that you feel you’re not good enough at music.
chkaloon 17 hours ago [-]
I did that a few years ago when my wife lost her fitbit in the woods. She knew the approximate area, +/- 50ft. Thick brush. Using a BT meter on the phone led me right to it like a metal detector
LunicLynx 20 hours ago [-]
If this happens often for you (it does for me) I can recommend a garmin watch. It also can find the phone based on signal strength.
If the app garmin app is running in the background it can also play a sound on your phone, but the signal strength part saved me many times.
spottedmarley 20 hours ago [-]
Claude is MacGyvermaxxing
flyinglizard 19 hours ago [-]
I routinely use the RSSI indications in my UniFi WiFi (thoroughly recommended) to find various kids devices around the house. You go by AP first (each section has its own), then each room tends to give its own RSSI, give or take.
visiondude 19 hours ago [-]
cool, that’s like the Phone Buddy app for Apple Watch
But then ... posting to HN that you've used an LLM to solve a problem is OK?
I can still find core material using an alternative.
Don't worry, Google is now embedding that AI into Android's core. Rinse and repeat, expect the same results.
But yeah, that doesn't mean they are doing much more than search.
They are doing more than search insofar as they are:
1. Reasoning about your question and trying to identify intent 2. Doing the search and accessing multiple search results for you 3. Formatting a response based on your intent and in the way you specify
This is collapsing many steps that humans used to have to do on their own. It's more ergonomic, and gets to a better answer, faster.
The upside is that telling said users to double-check the sources usually results in them realizing the AI overview was wrong, but it's still a waste of everyone's time.
The 2021-era of of just "Not finding the results" was maybe a better outcome.
Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess.
It’s a funny time to live through. A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden.
This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it
This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".
sometimes starting from scratch just faster and/or easier.
I have noticed this with co-workers also, when you have the ability to read/write/understand things very quickly, you tend to spend much less time on making things tidy, clear and maintainable.
nah, it reflects on how applications built by humans usually do become spaghetti messes with all the resulting brittleness and unintended negative side effects of changes that result
but it probably doesn't matter for a little toy piano app
What about all the undocumented "adjustments" ("bug fixes" in a professional context) that were made to make it actually useful?
Not you, of course. You write exceptional code with zero errors that never needs rework. I'm talking about the rest of us.
Sometimes it seems like they're moving very slowly. That makes sense: It's easy to get used to how they work today and it is also easy to forget how much worse they were last year.
When we look back and realize that just 4 years ago these tools didn't really exist at all, it becomes clear that the rate of progress is rather amazing.
In 4 years, we've gone from "hah, good luck with that crap!" to "little kids writing music-learning games on their own in a few minutes"
That's pretty friggin' awesome, and it's not finished yet. :)
Since this is Claude, the models of the future might be more expensive, or more locked down, or might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model, etc.
I remember when they would always hallucinate APIs that wasn't there or make up fields that didn't exist.. those problems are virtually solved now.
So with that in mind, why wouldn't AI be able to write better code?
The code would have to be maintainable by AI itself (operating based on the assumption that the future will be Agentic Engineering)
> might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model
My contention isn't that models haven't improved or won't keep improving – my position is that the business goals of our American AI firms (Anthropic especially) aren't necessarily aligned with continuing to make those improved models available to the public forever. We need only look at the Mythos/Fable split for evidence of this happening already.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgpyni/my_opus_5...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgq0jm/opus_5_af...
https://www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1vfvdgz/anthropic_l...
> Since this is Claude, the models of the future might be more expensive, or more locked down, or might decide your 8yo is actually trying to build a cleverly disguised bomb so her request gets silently downgraded to a dumber model, etc.
I have no idea what you're trying to add.
What does this even mean? Does the software run? Did you plan on extending it? Maybe turning it into a "platform"?
Why doesn't HackerNews understand software exists to solve a problem? No one cares if code is pretty if it does the job. You can talk about "potential issues" until you're blue in the face. It doesn't matter.
I am, here, not counting time for separate instances of Claude (so 10 instances running for a year is not 10 years). So, I think the 8yo is still older.
Full disclosure, I am not a neurologist or computer scientist (although I find both interesting). I would consider fair criticism of this fair and would even like to see what those in those fields would have to say.
A child doesn't get centuries of curated human knowledge and public works as its starting point
then ... in some places (maybe cars that people care about working on) it became cleaner again. In the other places, they added a second hood to hide the mess.
There is some clean code out there, like maybe the seL4 kernel:
https://github.com/seL4/seL4/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeL4
"with an explicit goal of enabling comprehensive formal verification..." (and lots more stuff)
maybe we can still have niches like this.
The purpose of a car itself didn't change. But the massive inflated demand, as our city planners decided every adult must be put in a rolling metal cage to participate in society, changed the environment it was originally designed for.
Now it's a matter of geopolitical stability, or even basic human habitability of these spaces, that a car converts as much of that chemical energy into movement, and releases as little toxic byproducts in the process. Whereas before, that cost, at scale, was small enough to neglect.
Just like a modern CPU evolved into an incomprehensible mess, even though the basic consumer needs hadn't changed much, because the politics of computing forced them to run expanding institutional cruft at reasonable speeds, on battery-powered always-on addiction machines.
Those cleaner looking engine bays are usually worse to work on. Not better.
When you open up the hood and immediately see lines everywhere, that also means they’re within reach. This is great.
The engine bays that look nice and clean for the showroom still have those same lines. They’re just buried in there. If you need to work on them you’re going to be reaching underneath things, climbing under the car, or even removing other parts to access something simple.
Also, it’s not all about emissions. A lot of those lines are for modern comforts like cruise control and improvements like features that make cold starts easier or make the engine behave better at extreme temperatures. Some of those have been superseded by electronically controlled versions which is why some of those lines are disappearing on modern cars, but the overall complexity has increased further.
another analogy would be opening some computers to add memory/ssd/hd, as judged by ifixit
I remember installing seventy-two individual DIP chips onto an Everex 2-megabyte 8-bit ISA EMS expansion card and downloading software to make it work in MS-DOS from Intel's dial-up BBS. I remember chains of MFM drives being made to work by keying obscure commands into debug to run programs that were built into the hard drive controller card.
Oh, so many fun evenings working out which devices could share IRQs and configuring software to work around the corner cases that developed. Serial mice, PS/2 mice, plus bus mice of several different varieties. XT, AT, and PS/2 keyboards. The veritable plethora of mutually-incompatible CD-ROM interfaces.
A clock card: A whole friggin' card with a clock chip and a battery, just to keep track of wall time. (And the software to make it work.)
I even remember SCSI, which was famously renowned for the number of goat sacrifices that were required to to make it work. (Except, I remember SCSI very fondly. CD burner, reader, 7-disc Nakamichi changer, flatbed scanner, DDS tape, and a few IBM Ultrastar 9ES hard drives all sharing the same bus? Sure, why not? It worked. But it took some care to get there.)
It's simple today. Want more storage? SATA is easy (and everyone will make fun of you, but USB 3 works great for a hard drive in a desktop rig). m.2 is compact, and only has a couple of variations. Video cards -- even multiples of them -- just slot right into motherboards and they don't even have jumbers to configure. Sound cards are forgotten. RAM comes in standard forms that only change once every decade or so. Input devices, basic NICs, and video capture stuff can just plug in with USB. The USB ports themselves can be multiplied using hubs.
It's pretty good today, isn't it? Am I missing something?
lol. the original statement was that AI written code is a mess "under the hood"
And I tried to say - cars were "simple/fixable under the hood", then emissions made them a mess then some (specific) cars became simple/fixable again.
but my analogy wasn't clear, so I tried saying that computers went the same way.
started out with simple s-100 bus/pc with slots... but at some point they became no-user-servicable-parts-inside (per ifixit) but some have gotten servicable again.
in summary - I think AI can make a mess, but maybe AI can make clean/maintainable code someday.
maybe there will need to be an AIfixit.com to rate models.
Yeah, I wasn't quite picking up what you were putting down. :) And I'd apologize for writing about old computers, except I enjoy writing about old computers. I never had much experience with S-100, though; my days of hands-in computing started with PCs in the 80s and I missed the earlier eras.
Anyway, I think you're right: The bot will continue to improve. It will get simpler to operate, and it will also generate cleaner code.
But with a twist: That generated code won't become cleaner because it makes it cheaper/easier for humans to understand and work on. Instead, it will instead get cleaner because it makes it cheaper/easier for bots to understand and work on.
(Why use many token when few do trick?)
That is how compiler-generated assembly looks to humans, as well. Human-produced is typically much more readable. Yet, here we are. Most programmers only know the very basics of assembly programming, but the world keeps spinning just fine.
2. Compilers and building tool chains change all the time. CI and automated testing catch any regressions. Tye same can be done with LLMs.
3. LLM code generation, with some work, can be made deterministic, if that mattered to somebody.
Even the implicit claim that they could deterministically produce "the" correct answer with 100% certainty doesn't withstand any scrutiny.
Nevermind problems posed in English prose, complicated or philosophical questions. Is the correct answer to 2+2 four, or is it 1+3? When you you have 2 apples and give me one apple, how many apples do you have now; one, or half as many as before? What is the correct answer? Without a spaghetti of arbitrary axioms in the system prompt? Even if you come up with something clever about apples, it even fails at "when is your birthday". When it is today, should I say "today" or say the date? Not even God could decide that.
Arguably, the specifications for a compiler is also such a mess of axioms, and you can split hairs and say "it's all random anyway", but you'll still use a seatbelt instead of silly string, so what gives?
For compilers, give or take, there is a correct output for a given input (under which I'll include config, options, the targeted architecture, whatever). With LLM there is no such thing even if you do infinite mental backflips, and there won't be, because there can't be. Even if you could perfect the compilers that are needed to make the software that trains and drives LLM deterministic, you cannot make LLM fully deterministic without making them not an LLM.
If you can find a way to encode what a compiler would do to programs into the weights of a model so that produces the output of a compiler that would be a cool and completely useless feat, because it would probably be bigger, slower and impossible to reason about. But it would still be cool and I would still try it out.
On the other hand an engineer might take a couple hours and build this in a clean way with the right prompting
These “got ‘em” ai criticism comments are getting so old
The fact that this is possible and works at all is mind blowing - even more mind blowing is that my 8 yo is growing up in a world where they can talk to a machine to produce a custom application in seconds and they don’t realise how mind blowing it is!
In terms of the code, it would take even less time than that to tidy it up. For this application you wouldn’t bother. That’s almost a form of “premature optimisation” unless you’re actually planning on doing more work on it.
My hunch is that what the world is about to see a lot of is much bigger bits of work, or changes to other bigger existing systems done by people without the skills to know how to contain the complexity. That’s going to come with a burden.
There's no shortage of examples of unmaintainable spaghetti AI code, Claude Code is just one of many. If you have examples of good codebases maintained by "prompting experts", I'd love to see them.
Recent notable examples would be the Linux kernel or cURL.
I can absolutely prompt AI to following established patterns and produce nice, clean output in a legacy codebase. I also have a completely separate set of skill files that I’ve been building organically by allowing the agent to do make most decisions about conventions. The latter produces code that would be a nightmare to modify by hand, but I’m still able to iterate on it many times faster than I could in the codebase where code quality is a requirement.
“Code quality” is mostly “human readability”, and I’m simply not sure that’s a valuable attribute anymore.
That's an extremely narrow view of programming, and shows a complete lack of experience.
A novice writing code by hand could also write spaghetti code
If you've worked in enterprise software, you might have seen that even competent professionals can write spaghetti code
At this point AI really is just garbage in garbage out
Wild to me that we see this even in what is a relatively more “sophisticated” forum
I now use my own video compositor to edit videos instead of after effects https://lowkeyviewer.com/studio/
use my own ecommerce and landing page builder for my businesses. that I use in production.
https://modelpad.app/
Cancelled by Strength App, Zwift for indoor bike trainer, and strava for running apps and built my own app that brings all 3 together and works better. https://coachsamsyn.com/
Among about 100 little smaller tools.
All of these are released and work. Some of them have other customers. One of them has 1000s.
There is absolutely no way I could have done all of this without AI. I don't really consider most of it too be slop, ive been an engineer for 20 years. I care a lot about the details and the underlying properties of the system. I had shipped my side projects years before AI that had real users so I have a good idea of what it takes to ship something end to end that people can actually use. It's mostly about the details and ease of use and the last 20% is the hardest. Some of us know that from our day jobs but it is different when you have to it all yourself and be responsible for every choice.
Have done exactly this 15 years ago to find my lost phone (:
Also wrote a cheap 30 line shell script to allow playing videos and music to “follow me” from one room to another with well placed raspberry pi’s, 11 years ago
Of course current technology is a step forward from yesterday’s. Of course what we have today is built on what came before it.
Things don’t exist in a vacuum, anyone over the age of 12 should have this figured out by now.
It’s a standard feature on my Garmin watch. I can access it in a few button presses, sometimes two if it’s the last action I used.
But you can just loop over something like `hcitool rssi "$MAC"` and project it somewhere, there's a variety of ways.
I like using dunstify with the -p option to persist on screen.
I think it's really impressive what these agents can do, but you should also consider whether you're asking it to burn tokens reinventing the wheel for you, or making a pretty wrapper around a wrapper.
I make little tools like that all the time. My GitHub is filled with these little things I write or gen once never to be used again. Some of them I use daily (GitHub.com/dexterlagan). Since LLMs became decent I make even more of these. The more we move forward, the more people make things for their own use. I think it's cool. I see a lot of naysayers, but man, I have been waiting for this kind of tech since I was 10. Let's enjoy it I say.
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Edit: as your most recent comments have all been breaking the site guidelines in a similar way, I've banned this account. It's not ok to do that here.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
If I learn to draw, make music, build stuff, etc. I look at what others have done before me. I don't pay anyone either. Why should the AI?
Second, rude.
Third, you might want to check with a professional, but it seems to me you are projecting your own (fairly obvious, and loud) insecurities onto others; I’m sorry that you feel you’re not good enough at music.