7 ms·

Im genuinely blown away by llms. I’m an artist who’ve always struggled to learn how to code. I can pick up on computer science concepts, but when I try to sit

Im genuinely blown away by llms. I’m an artist who’ve always struggled to learn how to code. I can pick up on computer science concepts, but when I try to sit down and write actual code my brain just pretends it doesn’t exist. Over like 20 years, despite numerous attempts I could never get past few beginner exercises. I viscerally can’t stand the headspace that coding puts me in. Last night I managed to build a custom CDN to deliver cool fonts to my site a la Google fonts, create a gorgeous site with custom code injected CSS and Java (while grokking most of it), and best part … it was FUN! I have never remotely done anything like that in my entire life, and with ChatGPT’s help I managed to it in like 3 hours. It’s bonkers. AI is truly what you make of it, and I think it’s an incredible tool that allows you to learn things in a way that fits how your brain works. I think schools should have curriculum that teaches people how to use AI effectively. It’s truly a force multiplier for creativity. Computers haven’t felt this fun for a long time.

debugnik 1y ago
Genuine question, how would you feel about reading the dual to your comment here? "I'm a computer scientist who's always struggled to learn how to paint." "Last night I managed to create a gorgeous illustration with Stable Diffusion, and best part ... it was FUN!" "Art hasn't felt this fun for a long time."
zx8080 1y ago
> a gorgeous site with custom code injected CSS and Java (while grokking most of it) From the context, it's not Java, but Javascript.
- comeondude 1y ago
  Gotcha. Thanks.
- le-mark 1y ago
  This was the most surprising/disturbing/enlightening part of the post imo. Surpring; this person literally had no clue! Disturbing; this person literally had no clue? Enlightening; this person literally did not need a clue. My takeaway as an AI skeptic is AI as human augmentation may really have potential?
  - comeondude 1y ago
    Just a vision and goal. I feel like, AI makes learning way more accessible, at least it did for me, where it evoked a childlike sense of curiosity and joy for learning new things. I’m also working on a Trading Card Game, where I feed it my drawings and it renders it into final polished form based on visual style that I spent some time building in chat GPT. It’s like an amplifier / accelerator. I feel like, yes while it can augment us, at the end day it depends on our desire to grow and learn. Otherwise, you will end up with same result as everybody else.
edaemon 1y ago
Interesting, CDNs require a lot of infrastructure to be effective, what did you (or the LLM) use to set that up?
- comeondude 1y ago
  Maybe CDN isn’t the right term after all, see I’m not a software engineer! But, basically I wanted a way to have a custom repository of fonts a la Google Fonts (found their selection kinda boring) that I could pull from. Ran fonts through transfonter to convert them to .woff2, set up a GitHub repository (which is not designed for people like me), and set up an instance on Netlify, then wrote custom CSS tags for my ghost.org site. The thing that amazes me is that aside from my vague whiff of GitHub, I had absolutely no idea how to do this. Zilch. Nada. Chat GPT gave me a clear step by step plan, and exposed me to Netlify, how to write CSS injections, how ghost.org tagging works from styling side of things. And I’m able to have back and forth dialogue with it, not only to figure out how to do it, but understand how it works.
  - snerbles 1y ago
    Sounds more like a Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline - defined as a set of practices that automate the process of building, testing and deploying software. Or rather, fonts in this case. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of geographically scattered servers that speeds up delivery of web content by being closer to users. Most video/image services use CDNs to efficiently serve up content to users around the world. For example, someone watching Netflix in California will connect to a different server than someone watching the same show in London.
    - comeondude 1y ago
      Gotcha. Appreciate you taking the time to teach me!
  - speed_spread 1y ago
    Yes, it's an ever patient teacher that's willing to chop up any subject matter into bits that are just the correct shape and size for every brain, for as long and as deep as you're willing to go. That's definitely one effective way to use it.
alganet 1y ago
Nice! That's what we all want, but without the content reapropriation, surveillance and public discourse meddling. Think of a version that is even more fun, won't teach your kids wrong stuff, won't need a datacenter full of expensive chips and won't hit the news with sensacionalist headlines.
- comeondude 1y ago
  That’s the dream eh?!
  - alganet 1y ago
    It's a tradition, a way of building things. You're an artist, I'm sure you understand what art that comes from tradition tries to accomplish.
stevage 1y ago
I do love the approachability they create. Personally as a coder, I don't find the AI experience at all fun, but I get that others do. Have you tried using AI to further changes to any of these projects down the line?
- comeondude 1y ago
  Makes sense. I know what I built is nowhere near actual software development. Still I was able to quickly learn how things work through GPT. Since I’ve literally been working on this project for two days, here’s a somewhat related answer to your question: I’ve been using chat gpt to build art for TCG. Initially I was resistant and upset at AI companies were hoovering up people’s work wholesale for training data (which is why I think now is an excellent time to have serious conversation about UBI, but I digress). But I finally realized that I could develop my own distinctive 3D visual style by feeding GPT my drawings and having it iterate in interesting directions. It’s fun to refine the style, by having GPT simulate actual camera lens and lighting set up. But yes I’ve used AI to make numerous stylistic tweaks to my site, including building out a tagging system that allows me to customize the look of individual pages when I write a post) Hope I’ll be able to learn how to build an actual complex app one day, or games.
adamredwoods 1y ago
I enjoy the fun attitude, I had a family member state something similar, but I always warn: with powerful AI comes serious consequences. Are we ready for those consequences? How far do we want AI to reach into our lives and livelihood?
- andsoitis 1y ago
  We cannot predict what the consequences will be, but, as a species, we are pretty good at navigating upheavals, opportunities. There are no guarantees that human ingenuity is likely to always save the day, but the fact evolution has bestowed us with risk taking, curiosity, so we won’t stop. Enjoy the ride.
  - gmueckl 1y ago
    No, we are not good at that. We have dire warnings of extreme catastrophes heading our way for decades now and instead of fixing what is broken, we collectively decide to race to our extinction faster.
    - andsoitis 1y ago
      Modern Humans have been around and successful for 10s of thousands of years. This might be a genetic dead end in the relatively near short term, but I bet we and at least one branch of our descendants will live for many more 10s or 100s of thousands of years.
- comeondude 1y ago
  We managed to survive the nuke and environmental lead (two examples of humanity veering into drastically wrong directions) we are never ready for seismic changes. But we will have to adapt one way or another, might as well find a good use for it and develop awareness as a child would around handling knives.
atleastoptimal 1y ago
I think much of HN has a blind spot that prevents them from engaging with the facts. Yes, AI currently has limitations and isn't a panacea for cognitive tasks. But in many specific use cases it is enormously useful, and the rapid growth of ChatGPT, AI startups, etc. is evidence of that. Many will argue that it's all fake, that it's all artificial hype to prop of VC evaluations, etc. They literally will see the billions in revenue as not real, same with all the real people upskilled via LLM's in ways that are entirely unique to the utility of AI. I would trust many peoples' evaluations on the impacts of AI if they could at least engage with reality first.
- thousand_nights 1y ago
  because the preachers preach how amazing it is on their greenfield 'i built a todo list app in 5 minutes from scratch' and then you use it on an established codebase with a bigger context than the llm could ever possibly consume and spend 5x more time debugging the slop than it would've taken you to do the task yourself, and you become jaded stop underestimating the amount of internalized knowledge people can have about projects in the real world, it's so annoying. an llm can't ever possibly get close to it. there's some guy in a team in another building who knows why a certain weird piece of critical business logic was put there 6 years ago, the llm will never know this and won't understand this even if it consumed the whole repository because it would have to work there for years to understand how the business works
  - jofla_net 1y ago
    totally. Especially when i'm debugging something for colleagues or friends, given a domain and a handful of ways of doing it, if i'm familiar with it I generally already get a sense of the reasons why its failing or falling short. This has nothing to do with the code base, any given language not withstanding. It comes from years and decades of systems and idiosyncratic behaviors of systems and examples which strangely rear their heads in notable ways. Theese notable ways may also not be commonly known or put into words, but they persist nevertheless.
  - dmix 1y ago
    A completely non-technical saleslady on our team prototyped a whole JS web app that generated some data based on some user inputs (and even generated PDFs), which solved a problem our customers were having and our devs didnt have the time to develop yet. This obviously was a temporary tool we'd never let touch our github repo but it still very much worked and solved a niche problem. It even looked like our app because the LLM could consume screenshots to copy our designs. I'm on board with vibe coding = non-maintainable, non-tested, mostly useless code by non-devs. But the plus side it will expose many many people to learn basic programming and fill many tiny gaps not solved by bigger more serious pieces of code. Especially once people start building infrastructure and tooling around these non-devs, like hosting, deployment, webhook integrations, etc.
nomel 1y ago
> "I'm an artist" This is actually what I'm most excited about: in the reasonably near future, productivity will be related to who is most creative and who has the most interesting problems rather than who's spent the most hours behind a specific toolchain/compiler/language. Solutions to practical problems won't be required to go through a layer of software engineer. It's going to be amazing, and I'm going to be without a job.
- wwweston 1y ago
  So your understanding is that the chief value a software engineer provides is experience utilizing a specific toolchain/compiler/language to generate code. Is that correct?
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Why would you be out of a job? Nothing he described is something that someone is being paid to do. Look at everything he needs just to match a fraction of your power. Consumer apps may see less sales as people opt to just clone an app using AI for their own personal use, customized for their preferences. But there’s a lot of engineering being done out there that people don’t even know exists, and that has to be done by people who know exactly what they’re doing, not just weekend warriors shouting stuff at an LLM.
  - tartoran 1y ago
    > But there’s a lot of engineering being done out there that people don’t even know exists, and that has to be done by people who know exactly what they’re doing, not just weekend warriors shouting stuff at an LLM. Except that the expectation of them is going to be higher and higher possibly with a downward pressure on compensation. I guess it'll find equilibrium somewhere eventually.
- ryandv 1y ago
  > productivity will be related to who is most creative and who has the most interesting problems rather than who's spent the most hours behind a specific toolchain/compiler/language. Why stop at software? AI will do this to pretty much every discipline and artform, from music and painting, to law and medicine. Learning, mastery, expertise, and craftsmanship are obsolete; there's no need to expend 10,000 hours developing a skill when the AI has already spent billions of hours in the cloud training in its hyperbolic time chamber. Academia and advanced degrees are worthless; you can compress four years of study into a prompt the size of a tweet. The idea guy will become the most important role in the coming aeon of AI.
llmthrow103 1y ago
This post is about a specific, complex system that stretches from operating system to the physical world, as well as some philosophical problems. What you're describing is a dead simple hobby project that could be completed by a complete novice in less than a week before the advent of LLMs. It's like saying "I'm absolutely blown away by microwaves, I can have a meal hot and ready in just a few minutes with no effort or understanding. I think all culinary schools should have a curriculum that teaches people how to use microwaves effectively." Maybe the goal of education should be giving people a foundation that they can build on, not make them an expert in something that a low skill ceiling and diminishing returns.
- RangerScience 1y ago
  I mean - going from “doable in a week with the right mindset” to “doable in a day when I’ve struggled before” is uhhh kinda worth being blown away by
  - llmthrow103 1y ago
    Yeah, great, but also completely irrelevant. Is every post on Hacker News related to AI in any way a place to post anecdotes about AI?
    - comeondude 1y ago
      I’m actually a huge fan of Brett Victor and I felt like he’s kinda missing the dynamic, adaptable nature of AI that allows non-technical people like me to finally access the system layer of computation for our creative ends. In other words, in many ways, AI (or rather llms) is the very thing that Brett Victor has spent his whole career imagining and creating - a computing interface that closes gap between human imagination and creation. But here, he’s focusing on the negatives while neglecting, IMHO, the vast potential of AI to allow people to connect, create, and express themselves. As in truly having a PERSONAL computer. At Dynamicland, he was attempting to build a system that non-technical people like me can interface in a way that makes sense to us. Taking your unnecessarily disparaging microwave analogy - Using CHATGPT, I can understand it, reprogram it, and do fun stuff, like I don’t know - set up a basketball hoop that sets the timer based on how many shots I make, despite having limited or no technical background. Like I can tell chatgpt my crazy vision, and it will give me step by step approach, with proper resources, and respond in a way that I can grok to build this thing. THIS is why I'm awestruck. My anecdote is just my personal reaction to the post. Besides, what’s wrong with people expressing themselves freely here?

debugnik 1y ago

Genuine question, how would you feel about reading the dual to your comment here? "I'm a computer scientist who's always struggled to learn how to paint." "Last night I managed to create a gorgeous illustration with Stable Diffusion, and best part ... it was FUN!" "Art hasn't felt this fun for a long time."

zx8080 1y ago

> a gorgeous site with custom code injected CSS and Java (while grokking most of it) From the context, it's not Java, but Javascript.

comeondude 1y ago
Gotcha. Thanks.
le-mark 1y ago
This was the most surprising/disturbing/enlightening part of the post imo. Surpring; this person literally had no clue! Disturbing; this person literally had no clue? Enlightening; this person literally did not need a clue. My takeaway as an AI skeptic is AI as human augmentation may really have potential?
- comeondude 1y ago
  Just a vision and goal. I feel like, AI makes learning way more accessible, at least it did for me, where it evoked a childlike sense of curiosity and joy for learning new things. I’m also working on a Trading Card Game, where I feed it my drawings and it renders it into final polished form based on visual style that I spent some time building in chat GPT. It’s like an amplifier / accelerator. I feel like, yes while it can augment us, at the end day it depends on our desire to grow and learn. Otherwise, you will end up with same result as everybody else.

edaemon 1y ago

Interesting, CDNs require a lot of infrastructure to be effective, what did you (or the LLM) use to set that up?

comeondude 1y ago
Maybe CDN isn’t the right term after all, see I’m not a software engineer! But, basically I wanted a way to have a custom repository of fonts a la Google Fonts (found their selection kinda boring) that I could pull from. Ran fonts through transfonter to convert them to .woff2, set up a GitHub repository (which is not designed for people like me), and set up an instance on Netlify, then wrote custom CSS tags for my ghost.org site. The thing that amazes me is that aside from my vague whiff of GitHub, I had absolutely no idea how to do this. Zilch. Nada. Chat GPT gave me a clear step by step plan, and exposed me to Netlify, how to write CSS injections, how ghost.org tagging works from styling side of things. And I’m able to have back and forth dialogue with it, not only to figure out how to do it, but understand how it works.
- snerbles 1y ago
  Sounds more like a Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline - defined as a set of practices that automate the process of building, testing and deploying software. Or rather, fonts in this case. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of geographically scattered servers that speeds up delivery of web content by being closer to users. Most video/image services use CDNs to efficiently serve up content to users around the world. For example, someone watching Netflix in California will connect to a different server than someone watching the same show in London.
  - comeondude 1y ago
    Gotcha. Appreciate you taking the time to teach me!
- speed_spread 1y ago
  Yes, it's an ever patient teacher that's willing to chop up any subject matter into bits that are just the correct shape and size for every brain, for as long and as deep as you're willing to go. That's definitely one effective way to use it.

alganet 1y ago

Nice! That's what we all want, but without the content reapropriation, surveillance and public discourse meddling. Think of a version that is even more fun, won't teach your kids wrong stuff, won't need a datacenter full of expensive chips and won't hit the news with sensacionalist headlines.

comeondude 1y ago
That’s the dream eh?!
- alganet 1y ago
  It's a tradition, a way of building things. You're an artist, I'm sure you understand what art that comes from tradition tries to accomplish.

stevage 1y ago

I do love the approachability they create. Personally as a coder, I don't find the AI experience at all fun, but I get that others do. Have you tried using AI to further changes to any of these projects down the line?

comeondude 1y ago
Makes sense. I know what I built is nowhere near actual software development. Still I was able to quickly learn how things work through GPT. Since I’ve literally been working on this project for two days, here’s a somewhat related answer to your question: I’ve been using chat gpt to build art for TCG. Initially I was resistant and upset at AI companies were hoovering up people’s work wholesale for training data (which is why I think now is an excellent time to have serious conversation about UBI, but I digress). But I finally realized that I could develop my own distinctive 3D visual style by feeding GPT my drawings and having it iterate in interesting directions. It’s fun to refine the style, by having GPT simulate actual camera lens and lighting set up. But yes I’ve used AI to make numerous stylistic tweaks to my site, including building out a tagging system that allows me to customize the look of individual pages when I write a post) Hope I’ll be able to learn how to build an actual complex app one day, or games.

adamredwoods 1y ago

I enjoy the fun attitude, I had a family member state something similar, but I always warn: with powerful AI comes serious consequences. Are we ready for those consequences? How far do we want AI to reach into our lives and livelihood?

andsoitis 1y ago
We cannot predict what the consequences will be, but, as a species, we are pretty good at navigating upheavals, opportunities. There are no guarantees that human ingenuity is likely to always save the day, but the fact evolution has bestowed us with risk taking, curiosity, so we won’t stop. Enjoy the ride.
- gmueckl 1y ago
  No, we are not good at that. We have dire warnings of extreme catastrophes heading our way for decades now and instead of fixing what is broken, we collectively decide to race to our extinction faster.
  - andsoitis 1y ago
    Modern Humans have been around and successful for 10s of thousands of years. This might be a genetic dead end in the relatively near short term, but I bet we and at least one branch of our descendants will live for many more 10s or 100s of thousands of years.
comeondude 1y ago
We managed to survive the nuke and environmental lead (two examples of humanity veering into drastically wrong directions) we are never ready for seismic changes. But we will have to adapt one way or another, might as well find a good use for it and develop awareness as a child would around handling knives.

atleastoptimal 1y ago

I think much of HN has a blind spot that prevents them from engaging with the facts. Yes, AI currently has limitations and isn't a panacea for cognitive tasks. But in many specific use cases it is enormously useful, and the rapid growth of ChatGPT, AI startups, etc. is evidence of that. Many will argue that it's all fake, that it's all artificial hype to prop of VC evaluations, etc. They literally will see the billions in revenue as not real, same with all the real people upskilled via LLM's in ways that are entirely unique to the utility of AI. I would trust many peoples' evaluations on the impacts of AI if they could at least engage with reality first.

thousand_nights 1y ago
because the preachers preach how amazing it is on their greenfield 'i built a todo list app in 5 minutes from scratch' and then you use it on an established codebase with a bigger context than the llm could ever possibly consume and spend 5x more time debugging the slop than it would've taken you to do the task yourself, and you become jaded stop underestimating the amount of internalized knowledge people can have about projects in the real world, it's so annoying. an llm can't ever possibly get close to it. there's some guy in a team in another building who knows why a certain weird piece of critical business logic was put there 6 years ago, the llm will never know this and won't understand this even if it consumed the whole repository because it would have to work there for years to understand how the business works
- jofla_net 1y ago
  totally. Especially when i'm debugging something for colleagues or friends, given a domain and a handful of ways of doing it, if i'm familiar with it I generally already get a sense of the reasons why its failing or falling short. This has nothing to do with the code base, any given language not withstanding. It comes from years and decades of systems and idiosyncratic behaviors of systems and examples which strangely rear their heads in notable ways. Theese notable ways may also not be commonly known or put into words, but they persist nevertheless.
- dmix 1y ago
  A completely non-technical saleslady on our team prototyped a whole JS web app that generated some data based on some user inputs (and even generated PDFs), which solved a problem our customers were having and our devs didnt have the time to develop yet. This obviously was a temporary tool we'd never let touch our github repo but it still very much worked and solved a niche problem. It even looked like our app because the LLM could consume screenshots to copy our designs. I'm on board with vibe coding = non-maintainable, non-tested, mostly useless code by non-devs. But the plus side it will expose many many people to learn basic programming and fill many tiny gaps not solved by bigger more serious pieces of code. Especially once people start building infrastructure and tooling around these non-devs, like hosting, deployment, webhook integrations, etc.

nomel 1y ago

> "I'm an artist" This is actually what I'm most excited about: in the reasonably near future, productivity will be related to who is most creative and who has the most interesting problems rather than who's spent the most hours behind a specific toolchain/compiler/language. Solutions to practical problems won't be required to go through a layer of software engineer. It's going to be amazing, and I'm going to be without a job.

wwweston 1y ago
So your understanding is that the chief value a software engineer provides is experience utilizing a specific toolchain/compiler/language to generate code. Is that correct?
deadbabe 1y ago
Why would you be out of a job? Nothing he described is something that someone is being paid to do. Look at everything he needs just to match a fraction of your power. Consumer apps may see less sales as people opt to just clone an app using AI for their own personal use, customized for their preferences. But there’s a lot of engineering being done out there that people don’t even know exists, and that has to be done by people who know exactly what they’re doing, not just weekend warriors shouting stuff at an LLM.
- tartoran 1y ago
  > But there’s a lot of engineering being done out there that people don’t even know exists, and that has to be done by people who know exactly what they’re doing, not just weekend warriors shouting stuff at an LLM. Except that the expectation of them is going to be higher and higher possibly with a downward pressure on compensation. I guess it'll find equilibrium somewhere eventually.
ryandv 1y ago
> productivity will be related to who is most creative and who has the most interesting problems rather than who's spent the most hours behind a specific toolchain/compiler/language. Why stop at software? AI will do this to pretty much every discipline and artform, from music and painting, to law and medicine. Learning, mastery, expertise, and craftsmanship are obsolete; there's no need to expend 10,000 hours developing a skill when the AI has already spent billions of hours in the cloud training in its hyperbolic time chamber. Academia and advanced degrees are worthless; you can compress four years of study into a prompt the size of a tweet. The idea guy will become the most important role in the coming aeon of AI.

llmthrow103 1y ago

This post is about a specific, complex system that stretches from operating system to the physical world, as well as some philosophical problems. What you're describing is a dead simple hobby project that could be completed by a complete novice in less than a week before the advent of LLMs. It's like saying "I'm absolutely blown away by microwaves, I can have a meal hot and ready in just a few minutes with no effort or understanding. I think all culinary schools should have a curriculum that teaches people how to use microwaves effectively." Maybe the goal of education should be giving people a foundation that they can build on, not make them an expert in something that a low skill ceiling and diminishing returns.

RangerScience 1y ago
I mean - going from “doable in a week with the right mindset” to “doable in a day when I’ve struggled before” is uhhh kinda worth being blown away by
- llmthrow103 1y ago
  Yeah, great, but also completely irrelevant. Is every post on Hacker News related to AI in any way a place to post anecdotes about AI?
  - comeondude 1y ago
    I’m actually a huge fan of Brett Victor and I felt like he’s kinda missing the dynamic, adaptable nature of AI that allows non-technical people like me to finally access the system layer of computation for our creative ends. In other words, in many ways, AI (or rather llms) is the very thing that Brett Victor has spent his whole career imagining and creating - a computing interface that closes gap between human imagination and creation. But here, he’s focusing on the negatives while neglecting, IMHO, the vast potential of AI to allow people to connect, create, and express themselves. As in truly having a PERSONAL computer. At Dynamicland, he was attempting to build a system that non-technical people like me can interface in a way that makes sense to us. Taking your unnecessarily disparaging microwave analogy - Using CHATGPT, I can understand it, reprogram it, and do fun stuff, like I don’t know - set up a basketball hoop that sets the timer based on how many shots I make, despite having limited or no technical background. Like I can tell chatgpt my crazy vision, and it will give me step by step approach, with proper resources, and respond in a way that I can grok to build this thing. THIS is why I'm awestruck. My anecdote is just my personal reaction to the post. Besides, what’s wrong with people expressing themselves freely here?