7 ms·

I can imagine a future where it might make sense. Right now, though, it would make for a far worse experience, and wouldn't even really be practically possible.

I can imagine a future where it might make sense. Right now, though, it would make for a far worse experience, and wouldn't even really be practically possible. Both of those examples were real ones. The crossword app runs on my phone, pulls the crosswords from a specific source, and lets me access and solve them via the exact interface I prefer. The ebook app is cross platform, syncs via a remote server, has the interface I want and includes some niche features. There's no realistic way to create that on the fly every time I want to read a book on my phone, and if there were it would be extremely inefficient. And I see literally no advantages to doing so -- even if time and tokens weren't an issue, what would I gain by recreating the apps from a prompt every time I wanted to use them, rather than deterministically running code I have already tested?

TZubiri 1mo ago
I get that you are doing that, but I think the fantasy is that this is creation of software instead of consumption. It's an issue adjacent to licence washing, where mangling some code through an inference layer is considered transformative or even unrelated and the original license doesn't apply. But in this case, what you are washing is not the license, but the valor of writing software. Broadly speaking, your approach would be to have the LLM write application code, my approach would be for the LLM to write commands, 'apt-get install calibre', maybe if I want to add or modify a button I can ask it to hack the X interface. You go straight for the LLM generating the code. There's certainly technical differences between what we are doing, but they are very arbitrary, we are essentially doing the same thing, but what I am doing looks less impressive, and what you are doing you can sell in your CV to potential hiring managers as 'using AI to write software'. It's more about the semantics than the actual requirements. I may be wrong though, maybe your approach is far more effective than just importing transitive dependencies, but I would think it's more about taking credit for the thing and increasing your sense of ownership and achievement. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I just need a way to think of myself as better than others as an unemployed neverviber.
- retsibsi 1mo ago
  Thanks, I think I understand your point better now. In this case, though, you are wrong about both my intentions and the relative practical value of the two approaches (to me). I'm not doing this to take creative or intellectual credit in any external way; you're right that there is some degree of increased personal satisfaction (which I don't see as a problem, as long as it doesn't crowd out more wholesome ways of 'earning' that satisfaction), but I'm not kidding myself about what I've actually done here. I also write my own code for fun/creative expression/intellectual stimulation/showing off, but that's a separate thing and there's not much crossover between the two types of project for me. And the end products really are useful to me in a way that I couldn't replicate just by using something that already exists, and couldn't replicate nearly as easily by manually modifying open source. (I'm sure I could do it by starting with open source and using an LLM to make changes, and in other cases I have done exactly that, but at that point I don't really see the conceptual difference -- I'm still getting an LLM to write code and then repeatedly running that code. Ideally I would be giving something back by making a useful contribution to the public repo(s), but that would turn this into a completely different, more tedious and effortful thing, and I'm not sure it would be welcome anyway. So, case by case, I choose whichever approach seems likely to be more effective or efficient or less annoying, and sometimes that means getting Claude to write something 'from scratch'; other times there's an open source application I already use that just needs some tweaking, and I start with that.)
  - TZubiri 1mo ago
    >couldn't replicate nearly as easily by manually modifying open source. (I'm sure I could do it by starting with open source and using an LLM to make changes, and in other cases I have done exactly that, but at that point I don't really see the conceptual difference -- I'm still getting an LLM to write code and then repeatedly running that code Yes, that's what I meant, vibecoding something that uses existing software, not manually using open source stuff. It doesn't even need to fork or modify code. >at that point I don't really see the conceptual difference -- I'm still getting an LLM to write code and then repeatedly running that code I do agree, it's a subtle difference, about importing higher level dependencies vs building on top of low lever abstractions and writing everything else. Which is ironic/nuanced because I'm a huge proponent of aggressively not using dependencies in industrial programming, to the point where my requirements.txt/package.json is literally empty, and I use POSIX compliant sockets syscalls instead of importing packages like flask or express. But when it comes to actually using software, whether for personal usecases, or as a sysadmin, my approach takes the opposite form, I aggressively don't write code, I still aggressively minimize dependencies, but the game is actually using the Operating System primitives to combine these dependencies, relying only on OS installers like apt/yum, maybe minimal configuration, if code is written, it's on a scripting capacity, a bash or python script, glue code you know? Sure the line can be fuzzed at some point, but it's clear to me that you can either write an application or be a poweruser of an application, and early in my career I've seen businesses go for the building software in house route for the fun factor, I don't think that was the right answer in the dot com boom, and as time went by, and the corpus of software grew, building your own became even more wrong than using existing third party products. Now in personal computing, the fun-factor maybe is more important, but I have to judge this personal-software thing on how it will affect the actual important stuff, because that's what the stakes are, and that's how it's being sold. In the industry code agents are either used for building software, or for consuming software, and outside of personal experimentation I still hold that building your own software isn't a good idea, I don't think the advent of LLM materially changes that, the consequence of ending up with an ossified, non standard, low quality product is still there, perhaps even magnified, it's just that it's not something that you notice when you are starting a software product, it's only when your pyramid reaches a couple of hundred meters high that you realize that it can't grow into a skyscraper. And I get that not everything needs to be a skyscraper, but it feels like one-off software is taking the form factor and tooling of long-term skyscrapers, the logical consequence is that we would end up with thousands of little skyscrapers, which is a place we can only get to by ignorance of the history and essence of skyscrapers, it's something a city child would imagine after going on a road trip once, "what if we had little skyscrapers throughout the whole country instead of very high skyscrapers in a single place?".

TZubiri 1mo ago

I get that you are doing that, but I think the fantasy is that this is creation of software instead of consumption. It's an issue adjacent to licence washing, where mangling some code through an inference layer is considered transformative or even unrelated and the original license doesn't apply. But in this case, what you are washing is not the license, but the valor of writing software. Broadly speaking, your approach would be to have the LLM write application code, my approach would be for the LLM to write commands, 'apt-get install calibre', maybe if I want to add or modify a button I can ask it to hack the X interface. You go straight for the LLM generating the code. There's certainly technical differences between what we are doing, but they are very arbitrary, we are essentially doing the same thing, but what I am doing looks less impressive, and what you are doing you can sell in your CV to potential hiring managers as 'using AI to write software'. It's more about the semantics than the actual requirements. I may be wrong though, maybe your approach is far more effective than just importing transitive dependencies, but I would think it's more about taking credit for the thing and increasing your sense of ownership and achievement. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I just need a way to think of myself as better than others as an unemployed neverviber.

retsibsi 1mo ago
Thanks, I think I understand your point better now. In this case, though, you are wrong about both my intentions and the relative practical value of the two approaches (to me). I'm not doing this to take creative or intellectual credit in any external way; you're right that there is some degree of increased personal satisfaction (which I don't see as a problem, as long as it doesn't crowd out more wholesome ways of 'earning' that satisfaction), but I'm not kidding myself about what I've actually done here. I also write my own code for fun/creative expression/intellectual stimulation/showing off, but that's a separate thing and there's not much crossover between the two types of project for me. And the end products really are useful to me in a way that I couldn't replicate just by using something that already exists, and couldn't replicate nearly as easily by manually modifying open source. (I'm sure I could do it by starting with open source and using an LLM to make changes, and in other cases I have done exactly that, but at that point I don't really see the conceptual difference -- I'm still getting an LLM to write code and then repeatedly running that code. Ideally I would be giving something back by making a useful contribution to the public repo(s), but that would turn this into a completely different, more tedious and effortful thing, and I'm not sure it would be welcome anyway. So, case by case, I choose whichever approach seems likely to be more effective or efficient or less annoying, and sometimes that means getting Claude to write something 'from scratch'; other times there's an open source application I already use that just needs some tweaking, and I start with that.)
- TZubiri 1mo ago
  >couldn't replicate nearly as easily by manually modifying open source. (I'm sure I could do it by starting with open source and using an LLM to make changes, and in other cases I have done exactly that, but at that point I don't really see the conceptual difference -- I'm still getting an LLM to write code and then repeatedly running that code Yes, that's what I meant, vibecoding something that uses existing software, not manually using open source stuff. It doesn't even need to fork or modify code. >at that point I don't really see the conceptual difference -- I'm still getting an LLM to write code and then repeatedly running that code I do agree, it's a subtle difference, about importing higher level dependencies vs building on top of low lever abstractions and writing everything else. Which is ironic/nuanced because I'm a huge proponent of aggressively not using dependencies in industrial programming, to the point where my requirements.txt/package.json is literally empty, and I use POSIX compliant sockets syscalls instead of importing packages like flask or express. But when it comes to actually using software, whether for personal usecases, or as a sysadmin, my approach takes the opposite form, I aggressively don't write code, I still aggressively minimize dependencies, but the game is actually using the Operating System primitives to combine these dependencies, relying only on OS installers like apt/yum, maybe minimal configuration, if code is written, it's on a scripting capacity, a bash or python script, glue code you know? Sure the line can be fuzzed at some point, but it's clear to me that you can either write an application or be a poweruser of an application, and early in my career I've seen businesses go for the building software in house route for the fun factor, I don't think that was the right answer in the dot com boom, and as time went by, and the corpus of software grew, building your own became even more wrong than using existing third party products. Now in personal computing, the fun-factor maybe is more important, but I have to judge this personal-software thing on how it will affect the actual important stuff, because that's what the stakes are, and that's how it's being sold. In the industry code agents are either used for building software, or for consuming software, and outside of personal experimentation I still hold that building your own software isn't a good idea, I don't think the advent of LLM materially changes that, the consequence of ending up with an ossified, non standard, low quality product is still there, perhaps even magnified, it's just that it's not something that you notice when you are starting a software product, it's only when your pyramid reaches a couple of hundred meters high that you realize that it can't grow into a skyscraper. And I get that not everything needs to be a skyscraper, but it feels like one-off software is taking the form factor and tooling of long-term skyscrapers, the logical consequence is that we would end up with thousands of little skyscrapers, which is a place we can only get to by ignorance of the history and essence of skyscrapers, it's something a city child would imagine after going on a road trip once, "what if we had little skyscrapers throughout the whole country instead of very high skyscrapers in a single place?".