alt Hacker NewsI spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real progress was made when I actually dig into the documentation of colmap/OpenMVS (essential tools, which I had never used before, in my workflow).
The AI gave me unprecedented turn around time in experimentation. The same experiments would easily take me over a month in the past. Now it was a few days. But still, real progress is made only when my understanding catch up with reality.
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It sounds great for prototyping. Once you do a month's experimentation in a day and generate some shit app that barely works, but looks functional, you have a definite goal to recreate that design but working properly.
I think the mistake there was the 5 hour session specing the app. It's so hard to know what you want before you see it, so optimize towards seeing it as soon as possible. That's what I thought the article was going to be about based off the title.
Once you have something concrete you can iterate on the prototype until it's a mess. But, hopefully, in that time you got closer to figuring out what you want. And even if the code for the prototype is a mess the "idea" of it should be cleaner. I like to have an LLM make a new spec at that point, and start fresh with it. You can clean up the abstractions and the UX there.
When writing code is cheap figuring out what you want to write is the hard part. It always was, but the barrier of getting the code written and working made that less obvious.
I find the more structure that the AI can be given to follow the better. I recently tried building a side project with Elixir, Phoenix & LiveView but on the recommendation of somebody I decided to have it use the Ash framework within it.
I've been very pleasantly surprised. The combination of the compiler improvements in Elixir 1.20 and the structural guardrails from Ash seems to have led to very consistent, organized and readable code.
It's very difficult to keep AI focused, when it barfs out 3 pages of reply in response to a one-sentence prompt. It's sort of its nature for some reason, it's very impressive if you've never seen it but it's exhausting to use for very long. It's like a very eager assistant who doesn't have enough experience to understand scope.