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- Hacker News
- *siiiighhh... Slop automation. Removing self from loop, automating brainstorming. It's madness. No way that code is any good, shippable beyond 2 users or even maintainable beyond auto-slapping on more slop. Sad.by saint-evan
- I am completely calm regarding AI and development.
First nobody sane want to give their domain IP to OpenAI/Anthropic. That's why local AI will eventually prevail and flourish because people who actually have some IP will have no problem to buy 10k+ EUR machine to run some pretty good models on it. However if your main job is just doing CRUD stuff, then you are screwed.
Secondly hallucination is really Achilles heel of every LLM. Sure you can recreate an application which exists in thousand of variations on the internet, but the moment you will try to go more into domain knowledge you will start struggling more and more.
Try to make CAN driver for ESP32, easy it is probably going to work. Try to make CAN driver for STM32F7xx now the AI will start having a problem but probably will be able to produce something what is working after a lot of debugging. Now let's make CAN driver for MPC5555. AI will start writing fairy tales about registers which do not exist. All of processor above have reference manuals and sometimes example git repositories available on open internet.
by general1465 - > All of processor above have reference manuals and sometimes example git repositories available on open internet.
okay? then give those reference manuals and git repositories? I haven't heard something know LLMs can't get around and figure out?
by abletonlive - Did you try this by giving it access to the materials? Human programmers also don't memorize all this stuff. If this is the reason for your calmness it's quite shortsighted.
There are problems when you rely too much on AI generated code, but these shallow dismissals are quite annoying.
by bonoboTP - > First nobody sane want to give their domain IP to OpenAI/Anthropic. That's why local AI will eventually prevail and flourish because people who actually have some IP will have no problem to buy 10k+ EUR machine to run some pretty good models on it. However if your main job is just doing CRUD stuff, then you are screwed
Replace OpenAI/Anthropic with AWS and this is not too dissimilar to the arguments in 2009 about cloud providers.
It’s not that there's nobody for whom this is true, it’s just that there’s enough of everyone else to build an empire with.
by duggan - > First nobody sane want to give their domain IP to OpenAI/Anthropic.
Pretty much the whole industry has zero problem giving OpenAI/Anthropic full access to their systems and codebases.
You're putting way more thoughts into it than the vast majority, most companies seem to go with the momentum
by dgellow - More Yegge tier psychosis.
- Exactly.by lofaszvanitt
- Good writeup. I think the main difference in my workflow is that I skipped the sandboxing part and accepted the coding agent having access to the entire 24/7 dev machine, so I'm still running on worktrees. Also, the "idea enrich" steps in my workflow are less formal - I tend to write most details in a feature spec myself. I also do my workflow on my own self-hosted custom interface which comes with a kanban board for project tracking, so I don't need Github. The rest of the workflow looks pretty similar.by 2001zhaozhao
- "Automating Myself Out of Development" .. "I’m neither an AI-fanatic"
Clicks through bio, clicks into their linkedin .. wow, who could have ever guessed .. they're the CTO at an AI company whose sole product is trying to replace workers with AI solutions. Who could have ever guessed? That the person writing a personal blog post about how they're not an AI fanatic and how they can automate their work using AI tools .. is the CTO at an AI company selling products that do exactly that? Wow, what a coincidence. Surely this blog post contains a purely objective, impartial analysis of the topic.
by thegrim33 - I'm not some evil spy trying to make everyone use AI... both the startup and the blogpost are an experiment, a work in progress that I'm sharing I don't think anyone would read my blog and be like "Oh, now I need a tool for my SRE to automate incident management" People are starved for real life examples, this is a real life example. of course I'm not objective. To be objective you'd need to make a large scale study among thousands of companies. I'm sorry I don't have resources for that... just trying to get other people's feedbackby nisabek
- I'm in general more supportive of others' comments within this article... but I'm still glad your research/tone is posted here, too.
Nobody is entirely correct/wrong about the coming Future changes. Nobody knows what is reasonably believable, anymore...
- >Automating myself out of development
>I want to start by saying that I’m neither an AI-fanatic
Kind of like saying you are a fanatic before saying you aren't.
I don't think theres too much here (e.g. "spec driven development") I haven't seen elsewhere.
by pydry - > I don't think theres too much here I haven't seen elsewhere.
Isn't that the rhyme here. I can't think of any article or discussion on AI here that contains anything new or noteworthy. And yet all those articles we've read before and all those "discussions" we've had before keep coming and coming. I have gotten bored and I'm just waiting for anything decisive to happen.
by classified - Interestingly, despite it being much more detailed and a lot more process and procedure than what I currently do - which is more akin to the version 0 described, but in parallel - we come up at the same final problem: reviews and quality assurance.
I sign off the code I merged, part of company policy but also just to be sure it is actually decent. But reviewing has become the real draining bottleneck: even stacked PRs, if that total 5-6k lines is not a 5min job. Even if I brainstormed and set the plan, that's really the part that doesn't scale right now for me in this. But the author is very shy about that: either the changes arent that big in the end or they trust the process enough to review in a more casual manner. Being equally untrusting I can't do that ...
by gnunicorn - If I'm attentive during spec/plan creation I sort of build this "expectation" of what the actual PR will look like, the mental model of it. Then it's somewhat easier to review. But the mental load is brutal tbh, and still not sure if it's "worth it"by nisabek
- Proper review should take longer than writing it yourself, because you need to know the correct solution, understand the proposed solution, and evaluate the difference between the two. When designing it yourself, you just need to know the correct solution and write it, and with modern high-level languages and IDEs with autocomplete writing it is hardly a bottleneck.by strogonoff
- For decades, engineers understood that large code reviews are harder than small ones. Out of both politeness and a desire to receive better code reviews, we learned to break our large changes into smaller chunks. Some engineers took things even further and replaced code reviews with pair programming. But then LLMs showed up and everyone seems to have forgotten those lessons.
They can be still be applied now using coding agents, if you're willing to push back against the default setup and change your mode of thinking a little bit. Of course it doesn't help that an entire industry is dedicated to persuading us that maximizing token spend is the only way to get shit done.
I appreciate this probably seems like an extremist take, but I wrote some more about it here in case there's anybody out there who identifies with it:
by philbo - I don't know if I’m overly critical but there’s gotta be a middle ground between totally AI pilled people that otherwise have no talents, and control freak veteran developers who cant let go
My current process is also using Github projects in a normal scrum style way, with many tickets written or fleshed out and state managed by the LLM, and it doubling as the memory system
Completely leapfrogging all these other open and closed source concoctions and being more effective
But its effective enough that I don’t need OP’s final form state of still approving everything
Auto-mode is fine. Worktrees are built into Claude Code now. I just tell it to classify tickets as sequential or parallel possible and spawn subagents to tackle all of the tickets in the todo list
They all get their own context window its pretty perfect now
in the meantime I work in a couple tabs of Claude Design for different flows of any client side app. My philosophy has been that devs could pick up graphic and UI/UX design easily, its just still a full time job to make variations of layouts and portray their states.
UI/UX is not a full time job anymore.
And I use Claude chat to flesh out aspects of the overall idea
I think you may be overcomplicating your workflow in the concluding state.
Overall I agree that planning and intention is now most of the time, before a 10 subagent precision strike is initiated
by yieldcrv - > control freak veteran developers who cant let go
It is not control freak behavior to want to be in control when you are the one accountable for it if it breaks.
- All these people saying UI/UX is dead, then I see their designs and they're absolutely the worst (but they're always swearing by how incredible it is).
Sorry access to an LLM (even if it could center a div reliably and make a responsive designs, it can't) does not give you taste, intuition or make you good at building user interfaces. You people/sloppers have no idea the amount of sweat that gets poured into great UX.
Its insulting when you people say these things and Im not even a designer or frontend dev.
I actually think UI/UX designers and devs will be the last to fall. I will want beautiful products that were built by beautiful minds, thats how you will set yourself apart from the slop. And fortunately it will be even easier when 80% of everything is half assed cranked out UI by llm design tools. The contrast is already glaring.
- I just do turn based development with Cline. I design my UIs in the browser first then let something like Claude wire it up, correcting it as I go. Way faster than before, easy to correct mistakes, doesn't require self-sacrifice or submission.
I shudder when I hear about some people's (wildly overcomplicated) setups. I get the allure but there's something nice about pair programming with an LLM in a singular chat.
by rglover - Could be (the overcomplicating part), I'm just not yet comfortable loosing the mental model of the final application. At least not in all types of tickets. Are you not seeing that?..by nisabek
- There are tons of people, those are just not as vocal.by thi2
- I wish people would describe in more detail the tasks they use LLMs to code. My experience is that simple components in an existing architecture are fine, but anything requiring architectural considerations quickly becomes a mess. On my projects (e.g. a ui framework), running multiple agents in parallel would just increase the speed at which it can stuff up the project.by noelwelsh
- I'm currently using it to do a large migration from one Relay environment to another, but this is possible because
1. We've done it by hand for another route already, which the LLM uses as reference
2. Theres a strong validation setup/harness I've setup for it with storybooks, and component tests
3. It's a _mostly_ mechanical transform. Not entirely, as the two environments/APIs are not 1:1, but it's close enough
But! I and my team are still reviewing everything shrug it is "faster" because I get to have this running while I'm in meetings planning other more interesting projects
And this isn't really that many agents in parallel. Yeah, plenty of fan-out subagents, but that IMO doesn't count/isn't really the same as what others are talking about
by girvo - Me when not trying to meet management expectations, only as smarter code completion, formatting code, basic code analysis, and helping copy pasting code examples between languages.
Me when meeting management expectations, agent orchestration tools like Boomi and Workato calling into tools, doing with AI what a few years ago would be done with BPEL.
by pjmlp - You have to make those architectural decisions and feed them to the agents. Be very specific. That's been my experience.by TheBigSalad
- I personally limit LLMs to single files only at the moment. Self-contained components.
Using LLMs in a larger scope can sometimes work, but it has the real risk of turning a project into a mess after which you will have to undo the work and lose a lot of time.
Also, using LLMs this way with less clear boundaries will make reading and maintaining the code more cumbersome.
by amelius - I used LLMs to develop Whistle Enterprise (https://whistle-enterprise.com) from the ground up, from scratch.
It's taken _a lot_ of time and effort, but this is an example of what can be developed using LLMs alone.
You have to have dedication and a goal to reach, but you can absolutely build anything if you're building with the right foundations in mind.
by properbrew