danielvaughn

8 ms·

1.
by danielvaughn 5d ago
Right. The only way I'd feel comfortable doing that is if I spent an inordinate amount of time writing very detailed specs, so in terms of labor offset I'm not sure the juice would even be worth the squeeze there. In other words,
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by danielvaughn 5d ago
Yes. I use these models day in and day out, on all sorts of tasks. I cannot believe I hear people say that coding is solved.
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by danielvaughn 7d ago
I've always loved Tailwind, but at this point I'm not exactly sure why Shopify acquired them.
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by danielvaughn 7d ago
I had a different experience. I bought it on day one in 2016, and like everyone else, I was wowed by the planet hopping experience for about an hour or so. Then I put it down and didn't think about it again. Then I picked it up a few y
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by danielvaughn 7d ago
Art is a social activity whereby a human uses their creativity to produce an artifact that expresses some aspect of their experience, using non-standard forms of communication. It's a way of signaling to others "do you see what I
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by danielvaughn 7d ago
"We assume creative writing requires uniquely human qualities, such as emotional understanding and lived experience, which leads people to underestimate AI's capabilities." It's not about the relative "creativity&qu
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by danielvaughn 10d ago
The most interesting creative decisions happen within a tight set of constraints. Side note, I also had to expand my definition of "creativity" early in my career. I grew up and was educated as an artist. Even received a Bachelor
8.
by danielvaughn 19d ago
I've been on this kick for a long time. A few years ago I was exploring a UI design tool that was entirely keyboard-driven, using pneumonic keychords inspired by Vim: https://github.com/danielvaughn/stride My expe
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by danielvaughn 21d ago
To be fair, the article doesn't say that AC is banned - it mostly focuses on the HOA-style local ordinances and permits that discourage people from using AC.
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by danielvaughn 23d ago
I know someone who works at a data center for the IRS, and a lot of their records are all stored in PDFs. He thought it was disgusting when he first learned about it, but eventually realized that it's essentially resistant to a large s
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by danielvaughn 24d ago
Some variant of this idea has played in the back of my mind over the last few years. I'd love to play Skyrim, but where each character builds their own context for their history, their personality, their goals, and their interactions w
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by danielvaughn 24d ago
The rest of the blog post doesn't strike me as AI generated. Hard to tell, and personally I think "hard to tell" is about as good as it's going to get from here on out, so I give the author the benefit of my doubt. Agree
13.
by danielvaughn 27d ago
For software within a certain complexity scope, this is true. Like the average SaaS CRUD experience that many web developers were building before AI - a lot of that can be handled almost entirely by agents, with very little human in the loo
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by danielvaughn 27d ago
Yes, human imperfection is and will always be an issue. I think humans should get out of the loop for finite tasks, but the problem specifically with software creation is that it's inherently unbounded. You need a human somewhere to
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by danielvaughn 27d ago
That's definitely the goal. If the pseudocode is only ever touched by humans, then it will act as a frame of reference that could keep the LLM generated code in check.
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by danielvaughn 27d ago
Fascinating! I haven't been in the industry as long as you, but I can empathize with the sense of obsoletion. I was working on a design tool for over 10 years, with a goal of building a coding language that was understandable by design
17.
by danielvaughn 27d ago
In practice I think a lot of engineers would do this. My recommendation would be to avoid this at all costs. In my opinion, the way to scale a codebase with AI is to have some part of the codebase that is reserved only for human hands. You
18.
by danielvaughn 27d ago
Agree; something got lost in the sauce when we moved to the terminal.
19.
by danielvaughn 27d ago
Not yet, it's still a proof of concept. The next iteration will be a desktop app with filesystem access, so I'll be able to test out that scenario, as well as a few others.
20.
by danielvaughn 27d ago
We'd end up back where we started. One reason code is slow and expensive is that programmers have to tailor the syntax to precisely satisfy the compiler. The benefit of pseudocode is that you can choose how precise or imprecise you wan
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by danielvaughn 27d ago
Yeah for sure. I think I made a mistake in neglecting to mention the core differentiator in this editor, which is that it maintains a source map from your pseudocode to the generate source. So as a codebase grows, you'll be able to poi
22.
by danielvaughn 27d ago
Basically yes that’s what I’m proposing. Not sure if I’d describe it as a loop though - more like returning to some midway point after having traveled too far in one direction. Fully manual coding is the most reliable but extremely slow and
23.
by danielvaughn 27d ago
This largely matches my experience, and was one of the motivators behind this project. For some reason, LLMs are still very bad at distillation. We had a really large and complex codebase at my job that I had to quickly ramp up on. I asked
24.
by danielvaughn 27d ago
That’s exactly what this editor is for, except that your original written version is retained and source-mapped to the code that it generated. So as a project grows in size and complexity, you have a smaller foot print of human-written inte
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by danielvaughn 27d ago
I was pretty tired a month in, but this new way of coding felt so much fun that I was along for the ride. But now it's really starting to weigh me down and I feel like I need something new.
26.
by danielvaughn 27d ago
the difference is that you lose the prompt, and even if you kept the prompt around, there's no built-in mechanism that ties your prompt to the exact code that it produced. with this editor, that's all automated for you.
27.
by danielvaughn 27d ago
Yep one of the things a real version would need (this is just a proof of concept) is a kind of safeguarding and error handling. You could easily write code that the LLM couldn't feasibly implement, and it would need some way to mitigat
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by danielvaughn 27d ago
Yes exactly. Except now, the language has zero constraints. It can be a perfect distillation of your intentions. You might think, well code is perfect. But code is syntactically perfect, because it has to be. Because compilers can handl
29.
by danielvaughn 27d ago
Yeah I'm not opposed to bi-directionality, though right now there are a ton of projects attempting to do some variation on that theme. Extracting specs from code, producing short summaries, etc. I've tried a few ideas at the compa
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by danielvaughn 27d ago
I also tried spec-driven development, and also found that it did not work. I don't want to read a wall of text, and they also fell out of parity with the code, so engineers ended up just having the LLM update the specs. But now the spe

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