Comment by randusername

Comment by randusername 18 hours ago

39 replies

No more AI thought pieces until you tell us what you build!

AI is a general-purpose tool, but that doesn't mean best-practices and wisdom are generalizable. Web dev is different than compilers which is different than embedded and all the differences of opinion in the comments never explain who does what.

That said, I would take this up a notch:

> If you ask AI to write a document for you, you might get 80% of the deep quality you’d get if you wrote it yourself for 5% of the effort. But, now you’ve also only done 5% of the thinking.

Writing _is_ the thinking. It's a critical input in developing good taste. I think we all ought to consider a maintenance dose. Write your own code without assistance on whatever interval makes sense to you, otherwise you'll atrophy those muscles. Best-practices are a moving train, not something that you learned once and you're done.

bodge5000 18 hours ago

> No more AI thought pieces until you tell us what you build!

Absolutely agree with this, the ratio of talk to output is insane, especially when the talk is all about how much better output is. So far the only example I've seen is Claude Code which is mired in its own technical problems and is literally built by an AI company.

> Write your own code without assistance on whatever interval makes sense to you, otherwise you'll atrophy those muscles

This is the one thing that concerns me, for the same reason as "AI writes the code, humans review it" does. The fact of the matter is, most people will get lazy and complacent pretty quickly, and the depth of which they review the code/ the frequency they "go it alone" will get less and less until eventually it just stops happening. We all (most of us anyway) do it, its just part of being human, for the same reason that thousands of people start going to the gym in January and stop by March.

Arguably, AI coding was at its best when it was pretty bad, because you HAD to review it frequently and there were immediate incentives to just take the keyboard and do it yourself sometimes. Now, we still have some serious faults, they're just not as immediate, which will lead to complacency for a lot of people.

Maybe one day AI will be able to reliably write the 100% of the code without review. The worry is that we stop paying attention first, which all in all looks quite likely

  • Kerrick 16 hours ago

    > Absolutely agree with this, the ratio of talk to output is insane, especially when the talk is all about how much better output is.

    Those of us building are having so much fun we aren't slowing down to write think pieces.

    I don't mean this flippantly. I'm a blogger. I love writing! But since a brief post on December 22 I haven't blogged because I have been too busy implementing incredible amounts of software with AI.

    Since you'll want receipts, here they are:

    - https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/trunk/item/READ...

    - https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/rooibos/tree/trunk/item/README.rd...

    - https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/tokra/tree

    Between Christmas and New Year's Day I was on vacation, so I had plenty of time. Since then, it's only been nights & weekends (and some early mornings and lunch breaks).

    • yojat661 9 hours ago

      Are these software popular? Are these maintainable long term? Are you getting feedback from users?

  • g8oz 17 hours ago

    But simonw said that dark factories are the way forward /s

    • malfist 14 hours ago

      Lights out manufacturing is always the boogieman that's being built or coming tomorrow. Never seems to happen though. The Wikipedia article for it only cites two such factories, and at least one of them requires humans still and isn't fully lights out.

bandrami 10 hours ago

I'm really losing patience with AI fluff pieces mostly because I'm a sysadmin and the guys in dev cannot stop talking about how much they're producing with their agents or MCPs or whatever they're called this week and yet they're simply not getting me software to put into production any faster (it's actually slowed down slightly but that's consistent with previous product lifecycles). Neither are any of our vendors, at least as far as I can tell. Even Agile a quarter of a century ago actually produced software at a somewhat faster rate than the team had before (at the cost of more breakage, but there's a business case to be made for that) but I'm literally just not seeing an uptick here.

bartread 16 hours ago

> No more AI thought pieces until you tell us what you build!

Let me fix that for you:

No more AI thought pieces until you SHOW us what you build!

And I think it can safely be generalised to:

No more thought pieces until you show us what you build!

And that goes double for posts on LinkedIn.

  • strange_quark 15 hours ago

    I’d take it even further: I want to see the prompts! I’ll concede we’ve arrived at a point where the coding agents work, but I’m still unconvinced they’re actually saving anyone time. From my AI-pilled coworkers, it appears they’re all spending half an hour creating a plan with hyper-specific prompts, like “make this specific change to lines XXX-YYY in this file”, “move this function over here and change the args”, etc. As far as I can tell, this is current best practice, and I’ve tried it, but I’m always disappointed with the either the quality or the speed, usually both.

    • dullcrisp 14 hours ago

      Look learning vim is hard some people just want to describe their edits using natural language.

    • tempodox 14 hours ago

      Yea, if I were interested in that level of micromanagement, I would have become a manager.

gchamonlive 17 hours ago

Even if writing is thinking, which I don't think it's the case as writing is also feeling, but thinking isn't exclusively writing. Form is very important and AI can very well help you materialize an insight in a way that makes sense for a wider audience. The thinking is still all yours, only the aesthetics is refined by the AI with your guidance, depending on how you use AI.

fourthrigbt 15 hours ago

The product they build is literally mentioned in the post? It’s one of the more popular personal finance/budgeting apps, and it’s a pretty good one in my opinion as someone who has used a variety of them.

Ozzie_osman 18 hours ago

> No more AI thought pieces until you tell us what you build!

We build a personal finance tool (referenced in the article). It's a web/mobile/backend stack (mostly React and Python). That said, I think a lot of the principles are generalizable.

> Writing _is_ the thinking. It's a critical input in developing good taste.

Agree, but I'll add that _good_ prompt-writing actually requires a lot of thought (which is what makes it so easy to write bad prompts, which are much more likely to produce slop).

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doug_durham 17 hours ago

Ample evidence of production software being produced with the aid of AI tools has been provided here on HN over the last year or more. This is a tiresome response. A later response says exactly what they produce.

  • daveguy 17 hours ago

    Most of what I see are toys. Could you point us to the examples of production software from AI? I feel like I see more "stop spamming us with AI slop" stories from open source than production software from AI. Would love some concrete examples. Specifically of major refactors or ground up projects. Not, "we just stared using AI in our production software." Because it can take a while to change the quality (better or worse) of a whole existing code base.

    • doug_durham 12 hours ago

      "Us"??? Most of "us" don't need to be convinced that AI as a software development tool has merit. The comment literally two below my comment says that they develop banking software. At this point you can be confident that most of the software that you use that has had recent updates has been developed with the aid of AI. Its use is ubiquitous.

      • daveguy 9 hours ago

        I didn't say AI as a software development doesn't have merit. I asked what production software was being produced from or predominantly with AI tools. I just see a lot more examples of "stop the slop" than I do of positive stories about AI being used to build something from scratch. I was hoping you had a concrete example in all of the hay. Are my expectations based on the hype too high?

        That wasn't supposed to be an opportunity for you to get defensive, but an opportunity for you to show off awesome projects.

    • willtemperley 16 hours ago

      I imagine people who are shipping with AI aren’t talking about it. Doing so makes no business sense.

      Those not shipping are talking about it.

      • techblueberry 15 hours ago

        So, “trust me bro”? When people find a good tool, the can’t stop talking about it. See all the tech conferences.

        Absence of evidence, while not the only signal, is a huge fucking signal.

    • jama211 16 hours ago

      Sounds like you’ve got multiple ways to write off any example you’re given charged up and at the ready.

      • daveguy 14 hours ago

        I was just asking for a non-confounded example of what was claimed. But okay.

        • jama211 9 minutes ago

          Ok, the web portal/learning management site for the university I work at. I’m part of a small team of 5 devs but not a single one of us has developed without the use of AI tooling in two years.

          I’d say it’s rarer to find a dev who doesn’t use AI tools in their arsenal these days, that’s why your question sounds so odd to me.

jama211 16 hours ago

“Writing is the thinking” is a controversial and open to interpretation take, so everyone’s gonna argue about it. You muddied the water with that one.

CuriouslyC 18 hours ago

I don't get why people think AI takes the thought out of writing. I write a lot, and when I start hitting keys on keyboards, I already know what I'm going to say 100% of the time, the struggle is just getting the words out in a way that maximizes reader comprehension/engagement.

I'd go so far as to say that for the vast majority of people, if you don't know what you're going to say when you sit down to write, THAT is your problem. Writing is not thinking, thinking is thinking, and you didn't think. If you're trying to think when you should be writing, that's a process failure. If you're not Stephen King or Dean Koontz, trying to be a pantser with your writing is a huge mistake.

What AI is amazing for is taking a core idea/thesis you provide it, and asking you a ton of questions to extract your knowledge/intent, then crystallizing that into an outline/rough draft.

  • kranner 17 hours ago

    And how do you know you're not as good as Stephen King or Dean Koontz if you never even try? What AI seems to be amazing for is to persuade people to freeze themselves in place and accept their overlord-assigned stations in life.

    You're free to adopt this cynical and pessimistic outlook if you like but you're going a bit far trying to force it on others. Gawd.

    • CuriouslyC 17 hours ago

      "How do you know Michael Phelps's training routine isn't right for you if you don't spend 6 months following it?"

      If your argument starts with "how do you know you're not the best in the world unless you try" you fucked up.

      • kranner 17 hours ago

        Following an Olympic champion's training routine is not a bad idea if you don't expect it to make you an Olympic champion! It might be a great improvement on your current training routine though, if you're interested in the sport at all.

        The physical (and genetic) demands of athletics aside, we were talking about writing. Just starting on a lark is what worked for Haruki Murakami. Again, it's very unlikely you'll be the next Murakami. But at least you'll improve a lot at something you find interesting! What is the downside here, exactly? Unless you're an opportunity-cost-minimising, industrial-output-maximising kind of person. That's fine, but that's not everyone.