Comment by Lyngbakr 16 hours ago
I was nodding along enthusiastically right up until LLMs and that point we sharply diverge.
For me, part of creating "perfect" software is that I am very much the one crafting the software. I'm learning while creating, but I find such learning is greatly diminished when I outsource building to AI. It's certainly harder and perhaps my software is worse, but for me the sense of achievement is also much greater.
I hope at some point people don't feel the need to justify using or not using LLMs. If you feel like using them, use them. If you regret doing that, delete the code and write it yourself. And vice versa - if you are in a slog and an LLM can get you out, just use it.
What!
Why is this, idunno a better way to say it, good?
So ok you don't get into the weeds and you're proud of that, but also nothing you can think of wanting to do turns out to be worth doing.
Those things are wholly related. Opportunity never comes exactly the time and the way you expect. You have to be open to it, you have to be seeking out new experiences and new ideas. You have to get into the weeds and try things without being entirely sure what the outcome might be, what insight you might gain, or when that insight might become useful.
I'm now using an LLM to write a voice note organisation application that I have been dreaming about for two decades.
I did vibe code the first version. It runs, but it is utterly unmaintainable. I'm now rewriting it using the LLM as if it were a junior or outsourced programmer (not a developer, that remains my job) and I go over every line of application code. I love it, I'm pushing out decent quality code and very focused git commits. I write every commit message myself, no LLM there. But I don't even bother checking the LLM's unit and integration tests.
I would have never gotten to this stage of my dream project without AI tooling.
> I would have never gotten to this stage of my dream project without AI tooling.
Why not? People have been writing successful personal projects without LLMs for years.
Not grandparent, but I'm in the same boat. I've been dreaming for almost 10 years of building a sort of digital bullet journal. I had some feeble attempts to start, but never got to the point where I could actually use it. Last year I started again, heavily LLM assisted. After 1-2 weeks (this was before agents), I had something usable, from which I could benefit, which wanted to make me improve it more, which made me want to use it more.
By now it's grown to 100k lines of code. I've not read all of them, but I do have a high level overview of the app, I've done several refactorings to keep it maintainable.
This would not have happened without AI agents. I don't have the time, period. With AI agents, I can kickoff a task while I'm going to the park with my kids. Instead of scrolling HN, I look every now and then to what the agent is doing.
That’s really not the point of the post!
The author is saying that “perfect software” is like a perfect cup of coffee. It’s highly subjective to the end user. The perfect software for me perfectly matches how I want to interact with software. It has options just for me. It’s fine tuned to my taste and my workflows, showing me information I want to see. You might never find a tool that’s perfect for you because someone else wrote it for their own taste.
LLMs come in because it wildly increases the amount of stuff you can play around with on a personal level. It means someone finally has time to put together the perfect workflow and advanced tools. I personally have about 0 time outside of work that I can invest in that, so I totally buy the idea that LLMs can really give people the space to develop personal tools and workflows that work perfectly for them. The barrier to entry and experimentation is incredibly low, and since it’s just for you, you don’t need to worry about scale and operations and all the hard stuff.
There is still plenty of room for someone to do it by hand, but I certainly don’t have time to do that. So I’ll never find perfect software for some of my workflows unless I get an assist from LLMs.
I agree with you about learning and achievement and fun — but that’s completely unrelated to the topic!
I definitely made software for me with zero desire to learn, zero learning happening, just to scratch an itch.
that being said calling it "perfect" is on the nose, at least for my own, it does a thing, it does it good enough, and that's all. It could be better but it won't be because it's not worth it, because it's good enough
Just today I gave an LLM the task of porting some Python modules to rust. I then went back and learned enough rust to understand these modules. This would have taken me days without the LLM. And I learned a lot.
IMO LLMs/AI alone neither make nor break anything.
I find that most of the time, programming is just procrastination, and having the LLM there breaks through that procrastination and lets me focus on the idea I was thinking on without going into the weeds.
A lot of the time, the LLM outputs the code, I test my idea, and realize I really don't care or the idea wasn't that great, and now I can move on to something else.