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csmpltn 4 hours ago

So where’s all of this cutting edge amazing and flawless stuff you’ve built in a weekend that everybody else couldn’t because they were too dumb or slow or clueless?

wild_egg 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is such a tired response at this point.

People are under zero obligation to release their work to the public. Simon actually publishes and writes about a remarkable amount of the side projects he builds with AI.

The rest of us just build tons of cool stuff for personal use or for $JOB. Releasing stuff to the public is, in general, a massive amount of extra work for very little benefit. There are loads of FOSS maintainers trapped spending as much time managing their communities as they do their actual projects and many of us just don't have time for that.

rgoulter an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> The rest of us just build tons of cool stuff for personal use or for $JOB. Releasing stuff to the public is, in general, a massive amount of extra work for very little benefit. There are loads of FOSS maintainers trapped spending as much time managing their communities as they do their actual projects and many of us just don't have time for that.

I wouldn't worry about this.

There are many examples of people sharing a project they've used LLMs to help write, and the result was not a huge amount of attention & expectation of burden.

Perhaps "I don't share it because I'm worried people will love it too much" even suggests the opposite: you can concretely demonstrate the kinds of things you've been able to build using LLMs.

> This is such a tired response at this point.

Lack of specificity & concrete examples frequently mean all that's left for discussion is emotion for hype and anti-hype, though.

In this thread, the discussion was:

  pro: use LLMs or get left behind

  conserve: okay, I'll start using LLMs when they're good

  pro: no no they won't be that good, it takes effort to get to use them

  conserve: do you have any examples?

  pro: why should we have to share examples?
I like LLMs. But making big claims while being reticent about concrete claims and demonstrations is irksome.
Anamon 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The response may be tired when asked in this personal way, but in general, it's a fair question. Nobody is forced to share their work. But with all the high praises, we'd expect to see at least some uptick in the software world. But there is no surge in open source projects. No surge in app store entries. And for the bigger companies claiming high GenAI use, they're not iterating faster or building more. They are continually removing features and their software is getting worse, slower, less robust, and less secure.

Software quality has been on a step downwards curve as far as quality and capabilities are concerned, for years before LLM coding had its breakthrough. For all the promises I'd have expected to, three years later, at least notice the downward trajectory easing off. But it hasn't been happening.

grayhatter an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

All I took from your reply was

> I could if I wanted to, but I just don't feel like it.

What am I missing where I can understand that's not what you meant?

simonw 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wouldn't call these flawless but here you go:

- https://github.com/simonw/denobox is a new Python library that gives you the ability to run arbitrary JavaScript and WASM in a sandbox provided by Deno, because it turns out a Python library can depend on deno these days. I built that on my phone in bed yesterday morning.

- https://github.com/simonw/pwasm is a WebAssembly runtime written in pure Python with no dependencies, built by feeding Claude Code the official WASM specification along with its conformance test suite and having it hack away at that (again via my phone) to get as many of the tests to pass as possible. It's pretty slow and not really useful yet but it's certainly interesting.

- https://github.com/datasette/datasette-transactions is a Datasette plugin which provides a JSON API for starting a SQLite transaction, running multiple queries within it and then executing or rolling back that transaction. I built that one on my phone on a BART (SF Bay Area metro) trip.

- https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript is a pure Python, no dependency JavaScript interpreter which started as a port of MicroQuickJS. Here's a demo of that one running in a browser https://simonw.github.io/micro-javascript/playground.html - that's my JavaScript interpreter running inside Python running in Pyodide in WebAssembly in your browser of choice, which I find inherently amusing.

All of those are from the past three weeks. Most of them were built on my phone while I was doing other things.

Cyph0n 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I am not at all an AI sceptic, but probably less impressed by what LLMs are capable of.

Looking at these projects, I have a few questions:

1. These seem to be fairly self-contained and well specified problems, which is the best case scenario for “vibe coding”. Do you have any examples of projects where the solution was somewhat vague and open-ended? If not, how do you think Claude Code or similar would perform?

2. Did you feel excited or energized by having an LLM implement these projects end-to-end? Personally, I find LLMs useful as a closely guided assistant, particularly to interactively explore the space of solutions. I also don’t feel energized at all by having it implement anything non-trivial end to end, outside of writing tests (and even then, not all types of tests!).

3. Do you think others would find these projects useful? In particular, if you vibe coded them, why couldn’t someone else do the same thing? And once these projects are picked up by future model training runs, they’ll probably be even easier to one shot, reducing the value even further.

Let me provide an example of what I mean by (2), at least in the context of hobbyist dev. I could have Claude Code vibe code a Gameboy emulator and it would probably do a fine job given that it’s a well specified problem that is likely well represented in its training data. But the process would neither be exciting nor energizing. I would rather spend hours gradually getting more and more working and experience the fruits of my labor (I did this already btw).

At $DAYJOB, I simply do not have confidence in an LLM doing anything non-trivial end to end. Besides, the complexity remains in defining the requirements and constraints, designing the solution, gaining consensus, and devising a plan for implementation. The goal would be for the LLM to pick up discrete, well defined chunks of work.

CjHuber an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Based on those, it seems you are not actually using them to create big codebases from scratch, but rather for problems that would normally take quite a while, not because they are inherently difficult to implement, but because you would normally have to spend considerable time on the finicky implementation details.

I think that's the reason why LLMs work so well for some like you, and generate slop for others, because if you let them alone with projects that require opinionated code and actual decision making they most often don't grasp the users intention well or worse misinterpret it so confidently that you end up with something with all the wrong opinions and decisions compounding path-dependently into the strangest and most useless slop.

simonw an hour ago | parent | next [-]

"for problems that would normally take quite a while, not because they are inherently difficult to implement, but because you would normally have to spend considerable time on the finicky implementation details"

Yes, exactly! How amazing is it that we have technology now that lets us quickly build projects where we would normally have to spend considerable time on the finicky implementation details?

peteforde an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Another lens is that many people either have terrible written communication skills, do not intuitively grasp how to describe a complex system design, or both. And yet, since everyone is a genius with 100% comprehensibility in their own mind, they simply aren't aware that the problem starts with them.

CjHuber an hour ago | parent [-]

Well I think it also has to do with communication with LLMs being different to communication with humans. If you tell a developer "don't do busywork" they surely wouldn't say "Oh the repo looks like a trash dump, but no busywork so I'm not going to clean it up, quickly document that as canonical structure, then continue"

jstummbillig 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I find it increasingly confusing that some people seem to believe, that other people not subjecting themselves to this continued interrogation, gives any credence to their position.

People seem to believe that there is a burden of proof. There is not. What do I care if you are on board?

I don't know what could change your mind, but of course the answer is "nothing" as long as you aer not open to it. Just look around. There is so much stuff, from so many credible people in all domains. If you can't find anything that is convincing or at least interesting to you, you are simply not looking.

pavlus 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> What do I care if you are on board?

Without enough adoption expect some companies you are a client of to increase prices more, or close entirely down the road, due to insufficient cash inflow.

So, you would care, if you want to continue to use these tools and see them evolve, instead of seeing the bubble pop.

williamcotton 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Over the last few days I made this ggplot2-looking plotting DSL as a CLI tool and a Rust library.

https://github.com/williamcotton/gramgraph

The motivation? I needed a declarative plotting language for another DSL I'm working on called Web Pipe:

  GET /weather.svg
    |> fetch: `https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=52.52&longitude=13.41&hourly=temperature_2m`
    |> jq: `
      .data.response.hourly as $h |
      [$h.time, $h.temperature_2m] | transpose | map({time: .[0], temp: .[1]})
    `
    |> gg({ "type": "svg", "width": 800, "height": 400} ): `
      aes(x: time, y: temp) 
        | line()
        | point()
    `
"Web Pipe is an experimental DSL and Rust runtime for building web apps via composable JSON pipelines, featuring native integration of GraphQL, SQL, and jq, an embedded BDD testing framework, and a sophisticated Language Server."

https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe

https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp

https://williamcotton.com/articles/basic-introduction-to-web...

I've been working at quite a clip for a solo developer who is building a new language with a full featured set of tooling.

I'd like to think that the approach to building the BDD-testing framework directly into the language itself and having the test runner using the production request handlers is at least somewhat novel!

  GET /hello/:world
    |> jq: `{ world: .params.world }`
    |> handlebars: `<p>hello, {{world}}</p>`

  describe "hello, world"
    it "calls the route"
      let world = "world"
      
      when calling GET /hello/{{world}}
      then status is 200
      and selector `p` text equals "hello, {{world}}"
I'm married with two young kids and I have a full-time job. Before these tools there was no way I could build all of these experiments with such limited resources.
user34283 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Where is all the amazing, much better stuff you implemented manually meanwhile?

llmslave3 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

He's built lots of cool stuff with AI. Here is four random ones pulled from https://tools.simonwillison.net

- https://tools.simonwillison.net/bullish-bearish

- https://tools.simonwillison.net/user-agent

- https://tools.simonwillison.net/gemini-chat

- https://tools.simonwillison.net/token-usage

m4nu3l 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

All of the linked apps look trivial to me. Also, the first one, the UI has no feedback once you click the answer (plus some questions don't really make sense as they have the answer in them). There is more on the website, so there could be something interesting, but I'm having trouble finding it among all the noise. Not saying simple apps have no value. Even simple throwaway UIs can have value, especially if you develop them quickly.

simonw 2 hours ago | parent [-]

How about these ones, are these trivial too? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582192

CamelCaseName 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is not really cool or impressive at all?

_yc_is_evil_ 4 hours ago | parent [-]

[dead]

sesm 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A page that outputs your user agent as an example of 'cool stuff built with AI'?

simonw 2 hours ago | parent [-]

See my comment here - I suspect that those were deliberately picked by llmslave3 to NOT be impressive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582209

For more impressive examples see https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/html-tools/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574276#46582192

simonw 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

llmslave3 appears to have deliberately picked the least interesting from my HTML+JavaScript tools collection here. This post describes a bunch of much more interesting ones: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/html-tools/

llmslave3 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

simonw 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Did you genuinely select those examples in good faith?

If you're here to converse in good faith, what's your opinion of the examples I shared in this post over here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574276#46582192

llmslave3 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

[dead]