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retsibsitoday at 4:44 PM1 replyview on HN

I can imagine a future where it might make sense. Right now, though, it would make for a far worse experience, and wouldn't even really be practically possible.

Both of those examples were real ones. The crossword app runs on my phone, pulls the crosswords from a specific source, and lets me access and solve them via the exact interface I prefer. The ebook app is cross platform, syncs via a remote server, has the interface I want and includes some niche features. There's no realistic way to create that on the fly every time I want to read a book on my phone, and if there were it would be extremely inefficient.

And I see literally no advantages to doing so -- even if time and tokens weren't an issue, what would I gain by recreating the apps from a prompt every time I wanted to use them, rather than deterministically running code I have already tested?


Replies

TZubiritoday at 6:21 PM

I get that you are doing that, but I think the fantasy is that this is creation of software instead of consumption. It's an issue adjacent to licence washing, where mangling some code through an inference layer is considered transformative or even unrelated and the original license doesn't apply. But in this case, what you are washing is not the license, but the valor of writing software.

Broadly speaking, your approach would be to have the LLM write application code, my approach would be for the LLM to write commands, 'apt-get install calibre', maybe if I want to add or modify a button I can ask it to hack the X interface. You go straight for the LLM generating the code. There's certainly technical differences between what we are doing, but they are very arbitrary, we are essentially doing the same thing, but what I am doing looks less impressive, and what you are doing you can sell in your CV to potential hiring managers as 'using AI to write software'. It's more about the semantics than the actual requirements.

I may be wrong though, maybe your approach is far more effective than just importing transitive dependencies, but I would think it's more about taking credit for the thing and increasing your sense of ownership and achievement. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I just need a way to think of myself as better than others as an unemployed neverviber.