Maybe the internet has made me too cynical, and I'm glad people seem to be having a good time, but at time of posting I can't help but notice that almost every comment here is suspiciously vague as to what, exactly, is being coded. Still better than the breathless announcements of the death of software engineering, but quite similar in tone.

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probably_wrong a minute ago | parent | next [-]

> almost every comment here is suspiciously vague as to what, exactly, is being coded

Why? You don't trust a newly-created account that has not engaged with any of the comments to be anything but truthful?

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idopmstuff 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am currently using a Claude skill that I have been building out over the last few days that runs through my Amazon PPC campaigns and does a full audit. Suggestions of bid adjustments, new search terms and products to advertise against and adjustment to campaign structures. It goes through all of the analytics Amazon provides, which are surprisingly extensive, to find every search term where my product shows up, gets added to cart and purchased.

It's the kind of thing that would be hours of tedious work, then even more time to actually make all the changes to the account. Instead I just say "yeah do all of that" and it is done. Magic stuff. Thousands of lines of Python to hit the Amazon APIs that I've never even looked at.

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scottLobster 6 hours ago | parent [-]

And it doesn't freak you out that you're relying on thousands of lines of code that you've never looked at? How do you verify the end result?

I wouldn't trust thousands of lines of code from one of my co-workers without testing

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gopher_space 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's thousands of lines of variation on my own hand-tooling, run through tests I designed, automated by the sort of onboarding docs I should have been writing years ago.

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notAnAIBot768 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you trust the assembly your compiler puts out? The machine code your assembler puts out? The virtual machine it runs on? Thousands of lines of code you've never looked at...

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scottLobster 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

None of that is generated by an LLM prone to hallucination and is perfectly deterministic unless there's a hardware problem.

And yes, I have occasionally run into compiler bugs in my career. That's one reason we test.

	▲	notAnAIBot768 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> None of that is generated by an LLM How did you verify that? > prone to hallucination You know humans can hallucinate? > is perfectly deterministic We agree then that you can verify, test, and trust the deterministic code an LLM produces without ever looking at it. > That's one reason we test That's one way we can trust and verify code produced by an LLM. You can't stop doing all the other things that aren't coding. I get there's a difference. Shitty code can be produced by LLMs or humans. LLMs really can pump out the shitty code. I just think the argument that you cant trust code you haven't viewed is not a good argument. I very much trust a lot of code I've never seen, and yes I've been bitten by it too. Not trying to be an ass, more trying to figure out how im going to deal for the next decade before retirement age. Uts going to be a lot of testing and verification I guess

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

Compiler theory and implementation is based on mathematical and logic principles. And hence much more provable and trustworthy than a LLM thats stitching together pieces of text based on ‘training’

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bandrami 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Trust"? God no. That's why I have a debugger

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0xbadcafebee 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The other week I used Copilot to write a program that scans all our Amazon accounts and regions, collects services and versions, and finds the ones going EOL within a year. The data on EOL dates is scraped from several sources and kept in JSON. There's about 16 different AWS API calls used. It generates reports in markdown, json, and csv, so humans can read the markdown (flags major things, explains stuff), and the csv can be used to triage, prioritize, track work over time. The result is deduplicated, sorted, consolidated (similar entries), and classified. I can automatically send reports to teams based on a regex of names or tags. This is more data than I get from AWS Health Dashboard, and can put it into any format I want, across any number of accounts/regions.

Afaik there are no open source projects that do this. AWS has a behemoth of a distributed system you can deploy in order to do something similar. But I made a Python script that does it in an afternoon with a couple of prompts.

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incr_me 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the past month, in my spare time, I've built:

- A "semantically enhanced" epub-to-markdown converter

- A web-based Markdown reader with integrated LLM reading guide generation (https://i.imgur.com/ledMTXw.png)

- A Zotero plugin for defining/clarifying selected words/sentences in context

- An epub-to-audiobook generator using Pocket TTS

- A Diddy Kong Racing model/texture extractor/viewer (https://i.imgur.com/jiTK8kI.png)

- A slimmed-down phpBB 2 "remake" in Bun.js/TypeScript

- An experimental SQLite extension for defining incremental materialized views

...And many more that are either too tiny, too idiosyncratic, or too day-job to name here. Some of these are one-off utilities, some are toys I'll never touch again, some are part of much bigger projects that I've been struggling to get any work done on, and so on.

I don't blame you for your cynicism, and I'm not blind to all of the criticism of LLMs and LLM code. I've had many times where I feel upset, skeptical, discouraged, and alienated because of these new developments. But also... it's a lot of fun and I can't stop coming up with ideas.

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slopinthebag 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

In my experience, I have "vibe coded" various tools and stuff that, while nice to have, isn't really something I need or brings a ton of value to me. Just nice-to-haves.

I think people enjoy writing code for various reasons. Some people really enjoy the craft of programming and thus dislike AI-centric coding. Some people don't really enjoy programming but enjoy making money or affecting some change on the world with it, and they use them as a tool. And then some people just like tinkering and building things for the sake of making stuff, and they get a kick out of vibe coding because it lets them add more things to their things-i-built collection.