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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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

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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/

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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.

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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.

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2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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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?

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.