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Can I ask what exactly you are building? Your experience tracks for me when building a real product -- something I want other people to use. Most of my time on
by gaflo 3mo ago
Can I ask what exactly you are building? Your experience tracks for me when building a real product -- something I want other people to use. Most of my time on these projects is spent talking to my users and carefully refining my requirements and design.
For personal pet projects I can definitely see how you can blow through your token budget very quickly. If I just point my coding agent to iteratively come up with some heuristics for some NP-hard problem, it will read intermediary outputs and constantly make small changes "in the dark" until it either finds a small improvement or gives up. In a similar vein I found that you can burn many many tokens if you try to let the agent reverse engineer something where you don't have the source code. If you just give it a binary or some interface to work with and a vague task you can easily burn your entire budget with 1 prompt.
I wouldn't want anyone to use these fully vibe coded toy projects though; it is more of an exploratory curiosity for me where I learn more about some problems I'm interested in as well as gauge how good the agents are at tasks that I seem to have a much better intuition on how to approach.
- tunesmith 3mo agoI'm building a website that allows friends to write branching fiction novels together, and another website that allows people to argue and conclude together using first-principles thinking. I've abandoned a project that allows people to register percentage certainty of sports outcomes to improve their calibration - it wasn't fun enough for the users. A few other things besides. I recently wrote a gpl TUI to edit dags here: https://github.com/tunesmith/dagim https://github.com/tunesmith/dagim - that one as something of an experiment since it's in a language I don't know, that one took 3-4 days of steady prompting.
- gaflo 3mo agoVery interesting, thanks for your reply. I don't have much domain knowledge with your sorts of project so I don't have an intuition on how well it would go with coding agents. I have done quite a lot of programming with graphs, but I don't understand the motivation of the tool you linked. From the video included in the repo I can see an example for cooking, but from my own experience I can hold this size of a graph well enough in my head to make optimal decisions in real time. And for bigger graphs I never had to create them by hand, but rather from datasets and then make adjustments to the graph with some heuristics depending on the problem. I don't understand the use case, at least for myself.