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points by dimitrios1 4 days ago | 0 comments

Congrats? I used to write one of these every so often in a couple hours when I was learning a new programming language.

Don’t take this as directed at you because I don’t know your background, but I’m starting to wonder if many who called themselves engineers here that have similar takes to this ever knew how to actually program to begin with.

[–] rolisz 4 days ago

I mean in total it's about 300k lines of code (across all the tools I built for myself). It's a poor metric, but it's not something you put together in a couple of hours.

Oh, and specifically the food logging part: no, you didn't do that in a couple of hours years ago. Taking pictures of food and having estimates grounded in your personal "recipe" library was a major research project until vLLMs came out.

[–] spence-s 4 days ago

There is still like 20 free versions of these on the market (pre-ai) I am sure yours is barely different. You just wasted time and tokens and pat yourself on the back for it and somehow feel this can be applied generally as "productivity" and "massive imporvements in software"

[–] rozularen 4 days ago

sure dimitrios, you were producing a fully fledged UI + backend in a couple of hours while also learning a new language.

you also were doing another 2 or 3 tasks in parallel while implementing them - just like with AI

sure, dimitrios :)

[–] dimitrios1 4 days ago

No not fully fledged and feature complete. But a baseline POC with the core functionality? Isn’t every react tutorial these days a Todo app?

Anyways my point wasn’t to try and make myself out to be some John Henry (I could have done without the snarky "congrats", apologies). It’s that drowned out in the noise of AI based development, we forget that there are amazing software engineers out there (I’m not placing myself in this category) that were incredibly productive in a short amount of time. Quite some time ago, I watched, in awe, a live stream of two prominent Go developers completely rewrite the HTTP package, for example. And this was over the course of a night.

We need a new metric to gauge AI usefulness other than “I built this thing quickly”

[–] gamblor956 3 days ago

It used to be that most programmers were good enough to reimplement a basic database app in a few hours as a way of learning a new language or framework.

The pool of programmers today is many times larger and less trained and so correspondingly most of today's programmers simply aren't very good and are astounded by feats that were once basic learning tasks.

[–] kragen 4 days ago

I did that when I learned React, but it took me all night, not a couple of hours.

[–] podocarp 2 days ago

Yes, now you just produce the app and not learn anything. That's how you do it in 4 hours and parallel.