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points by jack_pp 1 day ago | 0 comments

I think where LLMs truly shine is personal greenfield projects, maybe start a side project

Completely agree. LLMs are amazing for side projects.

The other place they are amazing is in working with legacy code bases. I mean, the kind the dev team always wants to throw away. First, even if you do want to throw it away, you can first find out what it does and realize it does more than you think it does. You can also create integrations to more modern components which can be used to extend it. You can also create a pretty decent test suite if you do not have one. And, once the behaviour has good test coverage, you can re-write it into something more modern. You can even completely change the architecture while ensuring compatible external behaviour. Remember, this is all in place of “throw it away and start over from scratch, only to discover that the scope is much larger than expected”.

[–] simonask 1 day ago

You could already do all of that. Like, none of that is infeasible to achieve on a scale of weeks in most cases.

It’ll still take weeks with AI in the picture, but for some reason management is more willing to plan it when they also have the additional token bills to pay.

[–] 1123581321 1 day ago

It was often not organizationally feasible because you needed permission to spend those weeks up front, instead of working on something else, just to get to where you knew enough to give approval to finish the work.

Now, you can make enough progress with one developer’s quiet afternoon to be confident and finishing the work also takes less time.

The technical grasp of the legacy codebase was a factor, but often not the largest.

[–] sick_of_slop 1 day ago

I’m so burnt out by being swapped with so much work from AI at my day job that I don’t even want to look at anything with a screen when I’m off anymore.

I despise AI but the thought of doing something the “old way” just makes me wince at how long it would take me to do anything that would take minutes with agents that I despise.

I touch grass whenever I can now.

[–] llama_drama 1 day ago

There's this joke like "I used to have 5 unfinished side projects, but AI changed everything. Now I have 30 unfinished side projects". And in my case it's not even a joke

[–] brabel 21 hours ago

Well ai made it extremely easy to finish things. Projects are usually left unfinished because the last mile is filled with boring and tedious tasks we do not like to do. AI loves those tasks. I have finished everything I bothered to, most of the time I still wrote stuff by hand, the AI just fixed tests for me (usually OS specific stuff that I can’t test locally which is a pain), told me what I was doing wrong so it was trivial for me to fix it, and checked my documentation which invariably got out of date.

[–] vtjeng 1 day ago

I've definitely found that while "AI makes getting from 0-80 done much easier than the 80-100" holds true, it is much easier to get my work to a quality bar that I'm excited to share with my peers...

[–] sgt101 19 hours ago

There's still a lot of effort required to move something from "good idea, loads to do" to "really finished and really works and I've proved it".

But its a lot less effort that when we didn't have LLM's.

Interestingly it does seem that it's still enough effort to prevent most folks from making that step though.

[–] erikus 1 day ago

So relatable. But I have some finished projects now and some of them I use daily.

[–] wolfinterval 19 hours ago

The definition of "finished" has changed for me also.

More and more, I am using half finished as a polished product, but pragmatically very useful software I have built myself.

More importantly, I see no reason to polish this into a product. It is more useful in this half finished, easily moldable state.

Like it use to make sense to bake the clay and sell the hardened output but now I want to keep the soft clay so it can be molded to my changing needs. I keep adding to a collection of these moldable states.

[–] jack_pp 1 day ago

Can't really blame AI for that though.

[–] sodapopcan 1 day ago

They aren't blaming AI, they are just backing up the "not much has changed" idea.

[–] furyofantares 1 day ago

It's always been easier to start a project than finish it, and LLMs make starting a project roughly free. I'm not sure they change how much work it is to finish it all that much.

I mean, I have finished more side projects than before. So they do change it. Just not as dramatically.

[–] anonymous908213 1 day ago

Of course you can. LLMs take you from 0 to 80 instantly. They are then completely incapable of getting from 80 to 100 and making something worth shipping to production. They are the ultimate unfinished side project generator.

[–] StilesCrisis 1 day ago

Have you, uh, used them recently? LLMs absolutely get to 100 now.

[–] brabel 21 hours ago

I’m can’t even believe that they think they can’t finish stuff. I am finishing absolutely everything I care to now. LLMs are the best thing ever to anyone who has unfinished stuff lying around. See the Goose programming language for an example, its design was written 15 years ago and perfected over time but the effort to write the compiler was just too much… before LLM. Claude wrote it in a couple of weeks I think. And I tried it, it’s as good as it looks.

[–] anonymous908213 1 day ago

For a definition of 100 which includes nobody actually using any LLM-written software in production at scale, other than Codex and Claude Code, which are both horrifically buggy, bloated, insecure pieces of software that are only used for their association with another piece of software gated behind them and which nobody would choose to use if they were themselves third-party harnesses. If LLMs could get to 100, the promised software revolution I am told is here every day would actually be visible.

We would be using LLM-generated compilers, an LLM-generated OS, an LLM-generated browser, LLM-generated databases, etc. etc. etc. etc, and not only are we not using all of those things, we're not using a single one of those things. Nobody is buying LLM-generated games, nobody is using LLM-generated consumer applications that replace Photoshop or Final Cut or Blender or Unity ("PhotoCraft" is itself an admitted scam from its own prompter, who outright confessed here that he lied about its capabilities on Reddit to build hype), nobody is accomplishing anything of economic value. LLMs are obviously hundreds of times more "productive" than humans, so the moment they can reach 100, all of these things would happen basically overnight, and yet none of them have happened. Curious, isn't it?

[–] StilesCrisis 1 day ago

What makes you think people _aren't_ using LLMs to work on your OS, your compilers, your databases? I know for a fact Microsoft is using LLMs heavily in development. Linux now accepts LLM PRs. We just had an article a few days ago about how PostgreSQL is having dozens of bugs discovered and fixed via LLMs. I work in compilers and everyone I know uses LLMs.

[–] anonymous908213 1 day ago

I am talking about people starting new projects, which was the subject of this subthread. I am aware that Microsoft is using LLMs to work on Windows, and now they have remote code execution in MS Paint. Great. The ability to commit shit code to something that is already in production is not exactly revolutionary either.

> how PostgreSQL is having dozens of bugs discovered and fixed via LLMs

The PostgreSQL article was specifically about how the LLMs were incapable of fixing bugs, meaning they had to delay their next major version because humans were unable to deal with the volume of issues reported. I did not make a claim that LLMs are useless, could not help review code, etc, but there is a difference between a useful tool and something that generates production-ready software wholesale.

This is what "100" looks like if you try to generate a DB from scratch: https://jepsen.io/analyses/particledb-1.1.4 - written in Rust, ""formally verified"", scammed AI-pilled investors out of $90 million for a database that fundamentally doesn't work in any capacity whatsoever.

[–] drivebyhooting 1 day ago

What prevents AI from cloning photoshop feature for feature, bug for bug?

You have the perfect verifier.

[–] anonymous908213 1 day ago

The Halting Problem, for one.

[–] ChickeNES 22 hours ago

> We would be using LLM-generated compilers, an LLM-generated OS, an LLM-generated browser, LLM-generated databases, etc. etc. etc. etc, and not only are we not using all of those things, we're not using a single one of those things.

Speak for yourself :)

[–] krapp 1 day ago

Skill issue. I had 30 unfinished side projects even before AI. Just raw talent.

[–] lgl 1 day ago

No idea what you're talking about. I'm using AI to help me on my paperclip production side project, and it's going great!

[–] jopsen 1 day ago

Yeah, when there is no code review requirements and no pesky production database you can't just yolo :)

At work, they mostly let me increase quality, because it's easy to say find all parsers in my code base and fuzz them.

[–] rajay99 1 day ago

It is great. I just had claude yolo a human in the loop image segmentation pipeline last night. It cut weeks of work down to an evening like 4h. Segment Anything 3.1 + Napari final touch.

[–] switchbak 1 day ago

I'd also say: when you really understand a domain well and you're a one-(wo)man show, you can just fly!

Of course, you can make a giant pile of doggy-doo-doo, but that was always true, just you can now make an epic Giza-sized pile.

[–] Seattle3503 1 day ago

> but that was always true

Yeah but were more likely to learn how bad your code was in the process. I see people oblivious to their slop putting pressure on others to merge it.