alt Hacker NewsWe should be more ambitious with the software we build
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Behind the link "slow software that the creator is claiming is fast" is the following text:
"funnily enough, I have some faith in some of the projects that people are the most skeptical of, e.g., every time I see pgrust somewhere, there are a lot of skeptical comments. But, without having looked into the details of what he's optimizing, I would trust that they're not doing something shady with their benchmarks because Michael Malis started the project (and is still involved)"
This aged like milk. pgrust was caught cheating on all benchmarks this week.
You know what would be really ambitious? Software that exists in a stable form without breaking for more than 15 years. Truly ambitious would be a stable, non-changing common linux base (like how Nintendo NES emulation target is stable) of packages that just gets supported for decades.
Perhaps that's too ambitious. But it would be of incredible utility not having to re-make the same things over and over in pepertuity with ever more abstraction layers. So much work on computer is just the constant churn and future shock of libraries adding new features which require updates which break other things. I'm tired of building castles on sand.
I’ve been using the latest agentic frameworks and have come to realize that the discourse around vibe coding and slop really needs more nuance.
There is a gulf of difference between someone who doesn’t understand how to program “vibe coding” software and an experienced software developer using ai to write code with heavy direction, review, and best practices.
Today both would be said to be “vibe coded” but we really need to differentiate them. Also, if everything I’m hearing from people is true, it sounds like most corporate code is now completely ai written in the latter way I described. It’s interesting we don’t hear commercial software being called slop yet. Maybe it’s coming.
In any case, ai is far more capable than I realized. Not sure what to make of it.
I'm building an open-source Shopify for every vertical and built a software factory to do it. I envisioned this before LLMs, but LLMs are finally making it possible!
amazing
archived; easier to read: https://nonograph.com/we-should-be-more-ambitious-with-the-s...
> On looking into this, the accusations of nefarious cheating seem to be false
I think the claim is more that the Ai cheated, not Malis, and that this is evidence of eyes free coding.
I'd still like to see the actual commit history and the community getting to do their own investigation. The squashed mega commits with 1000s of files (400k files in the first commit) does not lend itself to transparency. Transparency is often the best cure to accusations. Not providing transparency upon controversy will be seen as a cover up.
>every time I see pgrust discussed on a news aggregator, most people dismiss it as vibeslop garbage because almost all of these rewrite projects are slop.
I understand being predisposed to expect a poor quality half arsed effort for projects like this. I don't really have a problem with that. There is a lot of crap out there.
What I find rather offensive is when people declare something to be poor quality and half arsed before they have taken a good look at it.
It's one thing to think something is probably crap so I'm not going to bother even looking. It is something completely different when you think something is probably crap so you tell people that it is crap without checking.
Better late than never.
Some of us have been taking this approach for literally years now.
Many startups can now work in ways that were only fathomable in Big Tech before. Do you want a build system like Bazel for your monorepo? You can have it. Do you want to rewrite your app in a faster language? Sure, go ahead. Do you want to have native apps in all platforms? Yes, please.
Though, I am an "Ultra Noob," light years behind most people here, I am actually in the process of making a couple or four Vibe Coded apps, starting with a Markdown editor, a couple of training suites that target the areas where my knowledge is weakest, which turns out to be every area apparently. I am also working on an app for Linux that Microsoft has had for a few years that Ubuntu users--the noobs--are in desperate need of, and should have, but sadly has been missing from most Linux distros, in my view. Of course, this is using free tier AIs and not locally hosted agents. None-of these apps are rust-based a the moment, but I try to instruct the AI to make it as fast as possible for the given platform.
It's really challenging to do this, especially creating the AppImages locally so I can test them when the apps do not not work correctly, having to alter the files manually. Yup, I'm not an avid GitHub pusher, just more of a cloner.
I'm having to use multiple free-tier AI agents to help me do this and record the steps and commands I use in markdown files so I don't forget them the next time I try to improve the app.
If I am successful in making these apps work without hosing my system, I'm hopeful that this will become a game changer, for those Noobs that using Ubuntu, or myself at least.
The hardest part is when the AI does not follow my instructions such as requests to generate markdown README.md files with instructions on how to create AppImages, Flatpak, deb files, etc. Have to ask other AIs for help with that while dealing with the frustrating Free-tier cutoff periods :(
I sympathize with the sentiment in this post but it’s a losing proposition.
In the past building something fast, complicated etc required quite a lot of skill and some time. Now you need far lesser skill and lesser time. This just means what you are building is commodified, and has far lesser value that it had before. Take typescript, if it becomes clear that LLMs can speed it up with no regressions and a week or so of prompting, then most likely every company will have their own typescript compiler and no one will use your new one that you built with your 200$ plan.
A lot of tasks are much easier now and also monetarily they’re not worth the 200$ or so tokens of the ChatGPT plan you’re using, because anybody (or at least a number of people) can do it now.
Rather than being more ambitious with AI, you will be far better off finding a unique combination of skills and services that does not compete / AI can’t provide. Only the big labs can be really ambitious with AI.
[delayed]
A lot of my professional-pride and satisfaction kind of complaints with AI is that it uses space age technology for the stupidest and most primitive target: generating code. I’ve called this Flintstone Engineering. You have a remarkable technology but everything around it does not fit in. So you should definitely be more ambitious. You should think about formal verification and “super human” levels of testing and verification. You should consider making a very readable but maybe not performant oracle library to test alongside your really-used and maybe performance-tuned library. You should think of every avenue that before was too costly in terms of time and money—something that not even an independently wealthy OSS would think to do—and consider if the new kind of budget can accommodate it.
And these ideas were always plenty of. The problem for me is that the incentives, so to speak, is to wow people with the Old World software but with “see, no brain”. And in turn you get two-hundred projects like that for every piece about rethinking software. And those pieces might just be at the zygote idea level. Could it be done? Yeah maybe.
But the biggest problem is that this is not what GenAI or agentic AI is for. I don’t think it’s even debatable, even if you think the AI Cretins that a few years ago said that they will take everyone’s jobs out in public just changed their minds. Because the valuations and capital invested is to the point that they have to, really, make it possible to slash entire payrolls across sectors. If not they simply don’t get enough money back and the whole thing crashes.[1] And if you need these frontier models at subsidized electricity costs and not just the ones that can run on your desktop, either there is crash and no more frontier models or you are out of a job.
And then where are the people that care so much about software?
They are no where to be seen. All that are left are business people. To see business people software just open up any program from Established Tech, or any program from non-Tech but where they want to sell you something. There is apparently (let’s use revealed preference here) no business need to software that is good, stable, conforms to anything, or is nice to use. Because that cares so much about software person might want to make legible the prices on offer, the exact specifications, discovery—all things that business people want to frustrate in order to maintain information asymmetry.[2]
As for compilers and interpreters and such. Okay, for who? Sure. Some people believe that they are in the 999‰ of developers. And now AI can finally vanquish those mediocre developers and productivity-boost 999‰ developers so that they get to sit at the right-hand side of the other worthy and hard-working cohort, uh, the people who had money and dumped it into AI. And they might even double their pay because thinking and making connections at that level would just boil all the lakes if they tried to build an AI to do that. And what will they do with that power? Hmm, follow orders and keep making business software? Just looking at history here.
[1] Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI
[2] ibid
Even he’s not ambitious enough. Set the boundaries according to the hardware – billions of ops a second . Your rewrite should run at least 1000x faster than the handwritten version , with 1/10 resources.
I noticed my cloud images had 150mb ram wasted by vendor slop. AI rewrote the functionality into a few mb .
We’ve had slop long before AI . What you produce now is up to you
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Agreed. Perhaps we could start with some line length and text wrapping restrictions so we can be respectful of other people reading.
Or even just a nicer font, maybe?
We should have been more ambitious with software even before LLMs. I mean if we were we would not have Electron, and only linux as the only alternative OS.
And may be we should have been more ambitious with hardware too, and have a mobile and VR platforms that is not tied to malicious corporations...
I think we should be more ambitious with the font size we use…