alt Hacker NewsThis _all_ (waves hands around) sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper.
Writing _all_ (waves hands around various llm wrapper git repos) these frameworks and harnesses, built on top of ever changing models sure doesn't feel sensible.
I don't know what the best way of using these things is, but from my personal experience, the defaults get me a looong way. Letting these things churn away overnight, burning money in the process, with no human oversight seems like something we'll collectively look back at in a few years and laugh about, like using PHP!
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I would encourage my competitors to use AI agents on their codebase as much as possible. Make sure every new feature has it, lots of velocity! Run those suckers day and night. Don't review it, just make sure the feature is there! Then when the music stops, the AI companies hit the economic realities, go insolvent, and they are left with no one who understands a sprawling tangled web of code that is 80% AI generated, then we'll see who laughs last.
I am not laughing about PHP. To this very day many of my best projects are built on PHP. And while last 7 years I have spent in full stack JavaScript/TypeScript environment it has never produced the same things I was actually able to do with PHP.
I actually feel that things I built 15 years ago in PHP were better than anything I am trying to achieve with modern things that gets outdated every 6 months.
> sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper.
It's not more work; it's a convergence of roles. BA/PO/QA/SWE are merging.
AI has automated aspects of those roles that have made the traditional separation of concerns less desirable. A new hybrid role is emerging. The person writing these acceptance criteria can be the one guiding the AI to develop them.
So now we have dev-BAs or BA-devs or however you'd like to frame it. They're closer to the business than a dev might have been or closer to development than a BA might have been. The point is, smaller teams are able to play wider now.
These people play around with shit and try to sell you on their secret sauce. If it actually works it will come to claude code - so you can consider them practical SOTA and honestly just plopping CC to a mid sized codebase is a pretty great experience for me already. Not ideal but I get real tangible value out of it. Not 10x or any such nonsense but enough to think that I don't think I want to be managing junior developers anymore, the ROI with LLMs is much faster and significant IMO.
Looking back we see how foolish the anti-php memes were. Meanwhile PHP lives on and becomes better with each release.
Tooling around llms are a natural next step that will become your default one day.
I can't believe we're back to advocating for TDD. It was a failed paradigm that last few times we tried it. This time isn't any different because the fundamental flaw has always been the same: tests aren't proofs, they don't have complete coverage.
Before anyone gets too confused, I love tests. They're great. They help a lot. But to believe they prove correctness is absolutely laughable. Even the most general tests are very narrow. I'm sure they help LLMs just as they help us, but they're not some cure all. You have to think long and hard about problems and shouldn't let tests drive your development. They're guardrails for checking bonds and reduce footguns.
Oh, who could have guessed, Dijkstra wrote about program completeness. (No, this isn't the foolishness of natural language programming, but it is about formalism ;)
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD288...
It being a lot of work is why they didn't do it at all for weeks and still, without self reflection, wrote that they care about the code quality of the code they hadn't looked at or tested
"You better work, bitch" -- Britney Spears
Our society is obsessed with work. Work will never end. If things become easier we just do more of them. Whether putting all our efforts into recycling things created by those that came before is good for us will remain to be seen.
I saw a guys post on LinkedIn who created llm agent to water how plants based on sensor on his plants
He still has to water the plants on his own. Its just that it costs him quite a bit when all of that could he mamaged with an alarm to remind him to water plants.
php still makes money though!
It's always the uber conservative and over principled people who laugh about using PHP that have an opinion on everything while not knowing how to get shit done.
They're all just tools. You decide how to use them.
> like using PHP
lmao, chuckled
> sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper.
Not if you are an AI gold rush shovel salesman.
From the article:
> I've run Claude Code workshops for over 100 engineers in the last six months