Hacker News

points by rowanG077 23 hours ago | 0 comments

Why does it matter? Tbh at this point if frontier models are used I would place more trust in the average codebase than the average pre-AI codebase.

There are outliers where an excellent team of devs produce great quality, better that even frontier LLM code now. SQLite comes to mind. But it's easy to forget that is the 0.x%.

[–] throawayonthe 22 hours ago

the comment isn't even about the quality, it's about the "from scratch" aspect (used to 'market' it)

[–] rowanG077 22 hours ago

But isn't that correct? It doesn't seem to be based on anything, or am I missing something?

Or is it "To make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe" kind of deal. Which doesn't make sense to me either.

[–] FeteCommuniste 22 hours ago

If you hired a chef to come to your house and make a pie from scratch, would you then share the pie with your friends and tell them that you made it from scratch?

[–] rowanG077 22 hours ago

No I wouldn't, but that is not really what happened here. If someone used a bread making robot and put the ingredients in there and it made bread most people would have no problem saying they made bread from scratch. In the same vein people say "I did the laundry" or "I did the dishes" but in both cases the real work is often done by a laundry machine or dishwasher.

In the same way a program manager is free to say "We build X from scratch" even though they made no code contribution to it. The we is replaced with I since no other person was involved in this case.

[–] ranger_danger 20 hours ago

> most people would have no problem saying they made bread from scratch

That's fine for bread, but for people that see code more like art, they have a preconceived notion that "from scratch" means writing the code yourself.

Some people code to solve a problem and they don't care how it gets done. They have no problems using AI and see other methods as prehistoric. That's fine for them, carry on.

For me, the journey is more important than the destination.

Being able to code "by hand" is what strokes my sense of worth and accomplishment... knowing I can do something that not just anyone can. Pushing a button or prompting an AI isn't the same for me, that's more like a project manager and something I never want to be.

When people bash on the anti-AI crowd, they just don't understand that people code for different reasons, and neither is more right or wrong.

[–] rowanG077 19 hours ago

I agree that people can write code for whatever they want, and that is valid.

Code can be art, making food can also be art. So I'm don't agree with your distinction that code is materially different from baking in that aspect.

The terminology "from scratch" and "by hand" are really not interchangeable in my opinion. "By hand" implies something about the process. "From scratch" implies something about the state before you started, not anything about the process.

[–] ranger_danger 11 hours ago

In this context I think they are interchangeable and that many people do interchange them, whether you agree with them or not.

It's fine to disagree, I don't think you're "wrong", and I don't think I'm "right" either. We just have different perspectives and definitions of words, and that's ok.

I think the more important thing is understanding the intent of the person speaking, instead of just trying to win an argument, as that's derailing the conversation/topic anyways. And in this context, all I was trying to convey by using "by hand" and "from scratch" was the notion of coding without using an LLM.

[–] program_whiz 21 hours ago

A more apt analogy is heating up a frozen packaged pie, then saying it was made from scratch. Yes _you_ bought from the store, but somewhere ingredients were assembled and it was made "from scratch".

[–] JdeBP 21 hours ago

The plotline of at least one Hallmark romcom movie, as I recall. (-: