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resonious 2 days ago

Trust me there are plenty of us using cloud AI to actually ship stuff. We just aren't writing blog posts about it.

BLKNSLVR 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

... replying to internet comments to reassure the fact that cloud AI is worth it because we're 'this close' to shipping a product that allows more efficient usage of cloud AI ...

But seriously, a friend of mine has been both amazed and frustrated in equal measure by cloud AI, and I think the frustration part is resultant from the new precedent set by the amazing parts.

... his project is as-yet unshipped.

dominotw 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

what did you ship?

ncphillips 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve used it for several improvements to our wysiwyg. I was able to refactor to a much more cohesive architecture that is making future work much easier/safer. We got a fzf like search algorithm for an autocomplete that includes marking which characters matched. It fixed some jank performance issues I was struggling to track down.

Fixed small several bugs last week without even open the editor. It wrote tests that confirmed the bugs, then fixed them. Then I manually confirmed as well.

It built a double entry event log. A single application event produces two logs, one for the person doing the action, one for the person being acted upon.

For a nasty problem we have, we had AI prototype 2 different solutions. Then we reveiewed them as a team. We threw those out but it was very helpful input into our decision making.

zabzonk 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> I’ve used it for several improvements to our wysiwyg. I was able to refactor to a much more cohesive architecture that is making future work much easier/safer. We got a fzf like search algorithm for an autocomplete that includes marking which characters matched. It fixed some jank performance issues I was struggling to track down.

so, basically did some vague, almost incomprehensible stuff. seems par for the course.

dpark 17 hours ago | parent [-]

How was any of that incomprehensible? They gave a list of some actual things they shipped. The hand wavy dismissal where you pretend they didn’t say anything just exposes your bias. You don’t want to hear a success story so you don’t.

zabzonk 15 hours ago | parent [-]

how do you ship a "wysiwyg"?

and my point is he is doing the hand-waving. i'm quite happy to hear success stories - we get so few concrete ones here.

dpark 15 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s obvious from context that his team owns some sort of WYSIWYG editor.

resonious a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just features for the client. The same stuff I was shipping before but much faster and more stable.

password4321 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most of "What are you working on?" is AI assisted; not much is shipped.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=working%20author%3Adavid927&so...

Thanemate 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Checking all the past "what are you working on?" threads just to realize that, somewhere in August 2024 stuff just exploded and the average thread goes reached ~1000 messages, from ~50 pre-August.

dominotw 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Tons of ppl got into CS in last few years worldwide.

fc417fc802 13 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think that explains it. CS has been an extremely popular degree for at least the past 20 years. Not to mention coding bootcamps and the like.

The obvious notable event circa 2024 was LLMs becoming reasonably useful for code assistance (IMO and IIRC OFC).

properbrew a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://whistle-enterprise.com

cgio 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I did ship a quite efficient quantum simulator as a toy out of other work (and a block truncation certificate as a side-product). https://github.com/cgiogkarakis/qut

tracerbulletx a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I shipped this shader based video compositor as part of a bigger project ive been working on since before LLMs but the compositor was 100% ai and it works fantastically. It's not a huge project but I and a number of my users use it. https://lowkeyviewer.com/studio/

Schiendelman a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've shipped (to TestFlight) a fairly fun video game that's tricking my friends into working out: https://reverdure.yourstrategy.co

girvo a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

operatorsval.gg

Which is basically a fancy calendar and team management system for my Valorant Premier team haha

It’s on my GitHub as operators-premier-manager but note it is not great: it serves its purpose which is to wrangle my team to show up for practice and scrims

ch4s3 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My team redid a bunch of our ETL. I personally built a programming language that you can download and use, and I’m about to release an iOS app(in a few weeks).

6510 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thinking about it a better question [for me] would be what might have but didn't ship because of LLMs.

dofm 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have been thinking about this for a while, because I personally need a career pivot but I was going to move into personalised training, and I think AI likely really messes with the viability of that.

ncphillips 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s an interesting question, in particular because I don’t think I have a single example

ksaun 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm hesitant to respond, because I haven't shipped yet and I haven't shown any evidence. But I am close enough to completion that I am certain Claude's work will be sufficient to ship.

I'm making a fairly simple game, a single player 2D roguelite strategy game. More context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886151

From an implementation perspective, it is about 80% complete, where by "complete", I mean "adequately polished such that I could ship it." (I'm not interested in providing evidence of my claim at this time, and you are welcome to not believe me.) Most of the remaining 20% are optional game modes I could choose to cut (and may, for gameplay reasons).

I do not contend that the code is excellent. But to whatever extent the code is "slop", that has not meaningfully inhibited the ongoing development or caused noticeable issues with the player experience.

The game is not especially ambitious, but it's something I would have been unable to create without genAI. The version of me that could have made it without genAI would have taken > 10x as long to get as far as I've gotten.

stavros 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Whenever I've answered this question, the reply was always "this is shit", so I don't bother now. Bad faith questions just shouldn't be answered.

dofm 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

If you characterise questions as bad faith so you don’t have to answer, sure.

Since this is my thread, and since I am an exasperated freelancer who has made most of his post-dot-com career from writing exactly the kind of quite small, simple, unambitious, often internal things for smaller customers that nobody would confuse with anything cool, who is trying to understand how AI is going to make his life any better when it’s so opaque, fast moving, poorly documented and full of unverifiable claims battling unverifiable claims, let me assure you that the following question is not being asked in bad faith:

What did you ship?

galangalalgol 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't use it to ship whole products. I have it do some tasks.

I have it code dsp techniques in journal articles I hand it. I have it create the unit tests, pipelines documentation. Then I manually verify the test cases aren't wrong and run the tests. If they pass it does what I wanted and I start looking at the code quality. It varies from being better than I could have done it to being objectively bad. I fix it if it needs fixing, then I'm done.

I have also pointed it at issues in our backlog and it usually finds the subtle logic errors underlying the behavior in the issue.

I haven't started and entire product from zero and shipped it. Mostly because I haven't started a new product since it was capable of that. But also because it has a scale beyond which I don't find it as useful. I have used it for an entire repo, but in the crates.io or npm scale of repo, not boost scale.

ncphillips 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I work at a 6 year old startup. Essentially every feature and bug fix we’ve shipped in the last year has had LLMs involved. Every project plan involved AI, either for writing or for codebase research. For code review we get AI to do the first pass.

stavros 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've shipped small, simple, unambitious internal things for our company that saved people lots of time, and I've shipped them in minutes rather than the a day or two they used to take.

I've just shipped a migration from our old auth service to the new one in a week, a migration that we've put off for three years because it would take the team months to finish.

I've shipped small side-projects that I'm the primary (and usually only) user of, but they now take me two days rather than weeks of effort and learning (e.g. https://www.writelucid.cc, https://pine.town, https://stavrobot.stavros.io, https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula).

I've made changes in OSS apps that I just wouldn't have made otherwise (https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/pulls/skorokith...), and even some closed-source ones (https://www.stavros.io/posts/adding-a-feature-to-a-closed-so...).

I've shipped hardware projects that would have taken me months of learning in a few days (https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/).

How's that?

dofm 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you for the details! These are precisely the kind of things I want to hear about because they are self-contained and I can judge against the kind of stuff I do.

I am quite interested in experimenting with it for migrations, because for example I have a set of sites written in older Nuxt and Vue and Buefy that need refreshing (and the frontend ported to that UI-agnostic Buefy replacement whose name escapes me at the moment but begins with “ou” I think). These migrations won’t happen any other way (small customers won’t pay for that) so I am open to whether tooling can reduce the cost I have to swallow. LLMs I have tested (including local models) seem to support the idea that this will be doable but I am a little out of the loop with the projects so I haven’t got back to this yet.

The hardware thing looks great; I am a sort of distracted maker and FreeCAD nerd but I often need a nudge to get started and I have found an LLM chat to help there a little bit (though it cannot answer some questions if I don’t have the specific vocabulary).

Writelucid is definitely cute.

I think you should not be put off talking about these things because whether people agree with you or not about whether they are important, they can at least measure against them.

stavros 2 days ago | parent [-]

You're welcome! LLMs definitely help with the migrations, there were definitely a few iterations because the surface area was massive, but overall it took the project from "will never be prioritised" to "I can work on it on and off when in boring meetings", which was a massive win.

I haven't found that LLMs help with CAD at all, but YMMV.

As for sharing here, the last time I shared something with "here's something I made with LLMs", the reply was "it shows", and that's just the latest instance. It just puts me off the whole thing.

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48916013

dofm 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Oh I definitely don't expect them to help with CAD and nor would I want them to — I really enjoy knowing FreeCAD.

It's more the microcontroller choice, broad components, all that.

The main areas I find LLMs struggle with research, I struggle with research too. I am a pretty solid researcher and I find it validating, in fact, to find that a more brute-force-trained thing is not better than me.

I see your point about the snarky reply; I must admit I have probably in the more distant past been somewhat snarky but I stopped commenting like that whenever I spot myself doing it because I know it is dispiriting.

(The other reply, re: early and late stages, is the kind of substantive question that lingers in my mind).

Anyway I just want to reiterate my thanks: I am sort of cynical about this, in that I believe the technologies may have their uses, but I have no time for the cult and the hype train, so it is nice to see anyone talking about actual things.

stavros a day ago | parent [-]

By the way, I've written up my workflow if that interests you: https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/

jurgenburgen 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I can work on it on and off when in boring meetings

That’s not a sign of a healthy org. If you’re in a meeting it’s disrespectful not to be present. If you think a meeting is not useful you should reject it.

stavros 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Sometimes I'm in a meeting where the item being discussed doesn't relate to me, and that's a good chance to put another turn in the LLM.

taosx 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is exactly why people shouold share what they are doing with ai, so we know whwn it works, the scope, tech...etc. Thank you for sharing.

dofm 2 days ago | parent [-]

I concur. I really want to see this from the "small stuff" upwards, which is probably why my own interest starts with local models and grows outwards, but all of these things are worth hearing.

2 days ago | parent | prev [-]
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itishappy 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why assume bad faith? I've witnessed a barrage of "proof of concepts" at my dayjob by folks who have zero intention of ever hooking up their dashboard to our actual messy data. Shipping is still a major barrier. Is your experience meaningfully different?

Forgeties79 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This just feels like a bad faith comment designed to spike the conversation entirely.

speedster217 2 days ago | parent [-]

Agreed. AI has been "just trust me bro" for so long. People need to show receipts instead of spreading vague hype

Forgeties79 a day ago | parent [-]

Especially given the wildly unsustainable rate of investment.

dominotw 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

shipped = paying real users ( or a non profit with users)

doesnt matter what subjective opinions are.

shipped is not pushing something on github.

dofm 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

My definition would be "users waiting for it who received it"; that's the one that fits the broadest real world definition of the word. Not everything is an organisation, not everyone is paying.

lovich a day ago | parent [-]

If the only user is the author, then I don’t see a meaningful distinction between shipped and not shipped. It’s like a blacksmith who said they invented a new tool with great value but they built it themselves and no one else is willing to use it because it’s so customized to their workflow.

Edit: I’ll add a caveat that I’d agree it was shipped if it’s making the author money even if they are the only user, but otherwise it all smells like dotcom era Pets.com level of selling a dollar for 99 cents and claiming it’s the future.

aytigra a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Many very well made software written without any AI was never "shipped" because there were no people who wanted to pay for it, many very poorly made software was shipped because demand and marketing did the job.

So evaluating software by "shipped or not" is just useless.

apparent a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I have used AI to ship software that users pay for.

apparent 15 hours ago | parent [-]

What a weird thing to downvote without comment. You doubt this? I am literally using AI right now to update software that generates tens of thousands of dollars of revenue annually.

kittoes 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.World...

"Shipped" is a bit strong in my case, but I think this counts as something that isn't mere slop.

dandellion 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

One sentence into that readme I can tell you that yes, it most definitely counts as slop.

kittoes 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's fair critique, the README itself is indeed slop explicitly written by bots for bots. What it actually does and how it works is actually pretty neat if you care to look.

Chris2048 2 days ago | parent [-]

Then.. why would you link to the readme if you know it's slop? What's the point of a slop README?

kittoes 2 days ago | parent [-]

'Cause I don't have any quality user-facing documentation yet; that README is for bots. None of the interfaces have had a chance to settle, so any time spent accurately and humanely documenting what the project is capable of right now is an investment I cannot afford. I figured most people would just give it over to their favorite LLM with whatever instructions they prefer for translation because that's what I would've done...

rsfern 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t mean to pick on you in particular here, but this approach has been bothering me a lot lately, and it seems like it’s super common.

I get that it’s an early prototype and not all the design choices are made yet, but I struggle with “I can’t afford human-readable documentation yet”. Isn’t human readable documentation important for efficiently planning and deciding what you want to build? I feel like I can’t afford not to have human readable docs and plans while the project is taking shape

Related, if a user can prompt an agent to translate to a human-readable summary, wouldn’t it be better to just do this in place? Sure, models can deal with noisy LLM outputs but shouldn’t a document that’s easier for humans also be easier for bots?

kittoes 2 days ago | parent [-]

No worries, I don't feel picked on at all.

Yes, it would probably be better to have something like that if you're struggling to plan and decide. In my particular case this has been a project that I have dreamt about and tinkered with for at least 15 years now. Most of the work I'm doing is just refinement of existing ideas what were already codified in other projects I've built.

Why don't I do this in place? The amount of churn is utterly incredible as ideas are refined and taken to the limit. These agents are getting quite good, but they regularly make the silliest of mistakes. You actually have to be extremely cautious about what you document because it often has a way of becoming "doctrine" to the agents. In fact, one of the most difficult parts of working on this project has been that the foundational properties cause the agents to lock down behavior WAY too early.

Chris2048 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What does "that README is for bots" mean? Are you implying it is some kind of special language written by and correctly understood by bots/LLMs, but otherwise semantically coherent?

kittoes 2 days ago | parent [-]

Sort of? The bots almost insist on making sure one exists because that's one of the many patterns they trained on and they do their best to be human-like, but we all know that just doesn't pan out. They're also a side-effect of your long-term interactions with the agents, very much like being in a tight clique where most of your conversations sound like gibberish to outsiders because of all the jargon.

inigyou 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Wait so someone asked for something you made with AI that wasn't slop, and then you linked to something you knew was slop, and you said "I think this counts as something that isn't mere slop" and then when called out on it you admit you knew it was slop the whole time?

This is a frequent pattern among AI users. What causes it?

fzeroracer 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I noticed this as well. A few days ago I was linked a game engine here when I similarly asked for proof and when I went to the repo and started reading it, the best way to describe it was keyword jargon soup and it seems to be the same for a lot of projects in this thread.

I think it's because it makes them seem...smarter? More technical? But they can't describe who it's for or what the actual design is without consulting an AI.

kittoes 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The README is, the project absolutely isn't and you don't have to take my word for it. I figure I'm speaking to a technically advanced audience who is perfectly capable of pulling down the repository if they're at all curious. I also provided a non-slop link elsewhere in the thread if that's more your bag. If not, oh well...

inigyou 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The project appears to also be slop.

dandellion a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Why would anyone pull it? When I want slop I just ask the AI to generate some exactly the way I like it.

kittoes a day ago | parent [-]

I get the skepticism, I really do, but my hope is that your own AI(s) confirm exactly what I'm claiming within these comments. Like I've told others, there's no need to take my word for it... the entire point of the project is that anyone can execute/prove the same things I claim using their own hardware via a Doom-replay type format. If I was one of those influencer types, then I would've simply led with "it's an agentic first engine!!! how amazeballz is this?!" or some other nonsense. On the extremely off chance that I'm actually working on some sort of ridiculous ARG, consider this post a canonical part of it.

lovich a day ago | parent [-]

> I get the skepticism, I really do, but my hope is that your own AI(s) confirm exactly what I'm claiming within these comments

Given that you stated your readme is for bots, given that you expect our own AI to interpret it based on your evidence, how do I, as a human, go about evaluating this project without just writing it off as slop from the linked evidence?

What is the starting off point for a human, not an AI agent, to evaluate this?

And to be clear if the answer is to just download arbitrary code onto my machine and run it, that’s not good enough given the increase in attacks from AI projects and fake recruiters telling you to just run it bro. I’ve already had to pass on multiple interviews despite being unemployed because the human/ai on the other side demanded root access or for me to run arbitrary code onto my machine as part of their process.

kittoes a day ago | parent [-]

Frankly, there's no "good" starting off point for a human right now, and that's why I'm not at all comfortable claiming this has actually shipped. It's very much a WIP where only a select few namespaces have actually had a chance to settle.

That said, the maths library might just be the best thing to start with because it's mostly stable, relatively simple, and virtually every other part of the project depends on it in some way. If graphics are more your jam then maybe check out the SDF VM project and associated documents. All rendering goes through a single instruction set that is implemented via a shader pipeline that allows arbitrary scenes to be defined without shader recompilation. The project is essentially multiple compilers wearing a trench coat so there's a little bit of something for everyone... like two fully implemented emulators of the brick variety, including peripherals.

If you're adventurous and want to have your favorite LLM give the project a review in a sandbox then I think that'd be neat! Especially considering that they would have absolutely no problem driving everything themselves through STDIN. Though I totally understand if that's not something you're keen on doing considering the state of things today. Either way, cheers!

lenkite 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Jesus Wept. Software engineering is dying at the moment and everyone has AI Glitz in their eyes.

kittoes 2 days ago | parent [-]

Dying? Really?

https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.Maths...

Some of us aren't just slopping it up like @theo and all the other AI influencers are, as I developed nearly every single line of this by hand over the span of the past decade. Agents recently became capable of factchecking it and helped find bugs that my other unit testing never caught. Software engineering has never been more alive!

https://gist.github.com/Kittoes0124/6827d08e457c1c8b790422af...

This is a snippet I wrote years ago to help me study different formulations of the equation ((1 + √5) / 2). There was this thing I could "see" in there that would allow me index into these sequences, and whole families of others, in O(1) time. The problem is that I still don't know enough maths to derive the exact object that I want from the nonsense that I have.

https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.Maths...

This is the reformulation of that snippet into a proper object, distilled using Fable and Sol. Unlike BinaryIntegerFunctions, I didn't write a line of this and I'm quite happy with that. It's been a slog for so long... being able to let these agents toil away at all the off-by-one type noise is just nice. I get to focus on an actual product for once instead of manufacturing every single nut and bolt myself.

lenkite a day ago | parent [-]

I am just confused on how you know that all of what has been generated is valid. When you write the code generator yourself, you have that level of confidence.

kittoes 20 hours ago | parent [-]

It's mathematically provable in most cases because the engine is deterministic from the ground up and I refused to ever compromise on that one detail. For example, nearly all of the VM and maths code functions have been validated for ALL possible 32-bit inputs and extensively fuzz tested in the 64-bit range. Even the more complicated sections of the code like the emulators have batteries of third party tests that ensure a certain level of compliance. The fact that you can play commerical ROMs to completion, including esoteric titles that require third party peripheral/MBC code, is quite solid proof too!

A form of recursion is also doing a lot of heavy lifting because the emulators are their own separate deterministic engines that are dynamically plumbed into the primary loop. This not only allows us to embed diegetic devices (as in, you can literally pick up a glowing brick in the world, hold it to your face, and play it), but also validates that the primary loop is coded accurately because the outer loop runs at X Hz while humble bricks must run at ~59.7275 Hz. Pacing inaccuracies in the main loop cause us to fail the brick suites that we test against. This concept of having features reinforce one another is applied as often as possible.

The obsession with determinism goes so far that both the DirectX and Vulkan backends are validated against each other for pixel level differences. If they differ more than the expected maximum then code is refactored until the drift is back within acceptable range.

inigyou 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

... What is it? A game, apparently? There are no screenshots. Is the game fun?

kittoes 2 days ago | parent [-]

It's not a full game yet, but the substrate on which I am building one. It implements a completely deterministic SDF VM rendering engine that allows edits in real-time at acceptable performance levels. The engine is essentially folded in on itself as the editor is the game; assuming that an editor mode was actually defined in the world document. It's a lot...

https://claude.ai/code/artifact/382aee8a-3a3b-4cf8-801f-3ddb...

inigyou 2 days ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

kittoes 2 days ago | parent [-]

It has so many words precisely because it isn't a slop game engine. You could indeed build a game out of it, and that's what I'm personally doing, but that isn't what it is. In a nutshell: it's just a really fancy compositor. We can take arbitrary feeds from different input sources and composite them in pretty much whatever way we want to. Obvious basic things like four-player split screen is possible but you could also choose to embed a fifth player screen within the game world itself, sculpted and riding on top of actual geometry. We can do this with a webcam, a program, the entire desktop, or even the built-in emulation engines; all editable and composable in real-time via a data-driven document. That's just scratching the surface...

inigyou 2 days ago | parent [-]

this is definitely slop. It's not slop because it supports 4-player split screen? That's your excuse? I think if I posted this same project to you and you'd never heard of it, you would come to the same conclusion.

kittoes 2 days ago | parent [-]

Did you actually try to read what I wrote, or are you just stopping at the very first thing you can parse? I'm engaging in good faith with you here, it would be nice if you even remotely attempted to do the same. You can literally walk around in a world, pick up an in-world device, turn it on, and watch/hear the device play an actual ROM. Furthermore, you could edit that ROM while you're playing it. Recursion and determinism all the way down. Again, that's just one of the many possible things you could do... call it slop all you want; I'll still believe that it's coolest thing I've ever worked on.

inigyou a day ago | parent [-]

A render graph is also nothing new, and neither is screen capture.

kittoes a day ago | parent [-]

The most wonderful feature of the project is that there are almost zero new ideas contained within. I'm standing on the shoulders of many giants, proudly.

https://github.com/ByteTerrace/WorldOfWarcraft.Addons.GamePa...

This is an addon that I wrote for WoW, well before having access to any sort of AI, that blatantly copies the crossbar layout popularized in FFXIV. Playing an MMO with a controller in that game was a mind-blowing experience for me because I never imagined it could work! So, I spent a winter break reimplementing the entire thing in my own unique way.

https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.Overl...

This is a generalization/simplification of that idea. New? No. Unique? Definitely.

2 days ago | parent | prev [-]
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