We’ll see what the future holds but as an old timer, using LLMs to creat applications seems exactly the same as:

Python/JS and their ecosystem replacing OS hosted C/C++ which replaced bare metal Assembly which replaced digital logic which replaced analog circuits which replaced mechanical design as the “standard goto tool” for how to create programs.

Starting with punchcard looms and Ada Lovelace maybe.

In every case we trade resource efficiency and lower level understanding for developer velocity and raise the upper bound on system complexity, capability, and somehow performance (despite the wasted efficiency).

Well said .. Hope the pile of complexity accumulated would not be a time bomb ...

To be fair, that ship has sailed years ago in many areas of programming, even without LLMs...

I learned to drive before in-car GPS was widely available, at least where I lived.

Going to some new place meant getting a map, looking at it, making a plan, following the plan, keeping track on the map, that sort of thing.

Then I traveled somewhere new, for the first time, with GPS and a navigation sofware. It was quite impressive, and rather easier. I got to my destination the first time, without any problems. And each time after that.

But I did remark that I did not learn the route. The 10th time, the 50th time, I still needed the GPS to guide me. And without it, I would have to start the whole thing from scratch: get a map, make a plan, and so on.

Having done the "manual" navigation with maps lots of times before, it never worries me what I would do without a GPS. But if you're "born" with the GPS, I wonder what you do when it fails.

Are you not worried how you would manage your apps if for some reason the AIs were unavailable?

I was told a similar thing when a mentor discovered I didn’t know how to wire-wrap my own CPU from scratch.

AI is much less reliable. Heck, it could go down like GPT went down in quality after the first 2 month: Services could in an instant become less good.

Nobody’s forcing you to use someone else’s service though.

they are if that's the only way you know how to create something

When there's demand, it will be made reliable through supply. Internet and connectivity weren't really that reliable either 20 years ago. I'm simplifying it heavily, but discarding AI's usefulness and how it lowers the barrier of empty isn't a good idea for the future.

You have to temper your ambitions. Choose languages it understands really well (typescript or python). Choose easier deployment solutions (vercel over docker). Be specific about the versions you’re using (“I’m using nextjs 14 with app router”)

Pretty sure people I remember similar conversations happening when people decided to produce content for YouTube full time, lean into Node.js as a dev stack, or build iOS apps.

Make hay while the sun shines, friends. It might not last forever, but neither will you!

One can't "lean in" to an activity. You're either doing it or not.

After 50x? I use GPS too, but I definitely learn the route after a few times with it. There are probably a class of people who don’t ever learn it, but I feel like this has to be a minority.

It definitely takes me longer. Pre-GPS, I might need a map (or at least notes) to get somewhere, but then I could most likely find my way back on my own. Using GPS to get somewhere, I'd be lost trying to get back without it.

I think that because with a map you are looking at street signs/names, etc. both in advance to plan the route, and much more actively and intently while driving to figure out "do I turn here" and you just remember that stuff. Where as a GPS says "turn right at the next light" and you really don't remember any context around that.

'Attention is All You Need'

I learn when I get lost and go around the circles a few times.

> The 10th time, the 50th time, I still needed the GPS to guide me.

If anyone else is frustrated by this experience, I've found that changing the setting in Google Maps to have the map always point north has helped me with actually building a mental model of directions. I found instead of just following the line, it forced me to think about whether I'm going north, south, east, or west for each directions.

So much this! GPS ego perspective directions prevent developing any kind of mental model.

It's the same reason I hate that trains in Germany now only show when the next train comes. When I was a kid they would show the time and optionally the delay. I always knew when each train was coming because you learn the schedule automatically. Now it's impossible to automatically build that mental model.

Wondering around a new city today I had a similar thought.

Prior to an iPhone I’d have the general lay of a city memorised within 10min of landing, using a paper tourist map, and probably never feel disoriented, let alone lost.

This morning I walked 2 blocks further than needed (of a 1 block walk) because I wasn’t at all oriented while following Google maps.

I won’t spell out the AI comparison, other than I think more “apps” will be created, and predictable “followed the GPS off a bridge” revelations.

I learned to code during when internet access was limited to about 1hr/week, extremely slow, and unreliable. But now without inherent I just can’t get any work done. I guess it’s same for a good chunk of people.

I never worried about what would happen if internet were to become unavailable. Given that it’s become one an essential service I just trust that powers that be will make sure to get it back up.

But the internet will change too. Many people feel cheated that all their contributions were gobbled up by big tech and used to train their models without any remuneration or credit. In my life I experienced a very open internet but the closing down trend has started already.

Genuine question: Do you feel like you're learning the language/frameworks/techniques well? Or do you feel like you're just getting more adept at leveraging the LLM?

Do you think you could you maintain and/or debug someone else's application?

Not as much as I would have if I was writing everything from scratch. But then again, my goal isn’t to be a coder or get a job as a coder - I’m primarily a marketer and got into coding simply because I had a stack of ideas I wanted to experiment with

Most of the things I’ve built are fun things

See: GoUnfaked.com and PlaybookFM.com as examples

PlaybookFM.com is interesting because everything from the code to the podcasts to the logo are AI generated

How much time did you spend on getting it working especially for playbookfm?

Less than a week, tops. The hard part was the content - curating the resources for creating the podcasts

I’ve had the same experience, except helping complement build components or scripts.

Everyone on HN tells me how LLMs are horrible, yet I’ve saved literally hundreds of hours with them so far. I guess we’re just lucky.

Look at the replies on my comment

This place is far gone. Some of the most close minded, uncurious people in tech

I don’t think this place deserves to be called “Hacker” News anymore

We have different definitions of hacker.

I played around with LLMs... Found they aren't very useful. Slapping a project together to ship isn't what hacking is about.

Hacking is about deeply understanding what is actually happening under the hood by playing around, taking it apart, rebuilding it.

When the craze started everyone here were out looking for ways to escape the safeties of the LLMs, or discussing how they are being built etc.

This comment thread is about using the technology to slap a thing together so you can sell it. There's no exploration of the topic at hand, there's no attempt to understand.

I'm trying to think of a decent analogy but can't think of one but this smacks of a certain type of friend who finds a technology you have been hacking on and makes it so unbearable that you actually just lose interest...

So almost every person on here is not a hacker since I’ve met very few people here who are knowledgeable about EE, computer architecture, compiler technology, or heck even how browsers work. Of course there are some, but HN is mostly about slapping together technology to sell your startup.

Don't correlate hackernews and YCombinator.

I am perfectly aware of the owner here but there is usually at least one or two posts a day here that has what I call a "hacker culture".

There are so many frameworks, especially on the web and in Javascript, that I have absolutely zero interest in learning.

In fact, my main reason for not doing any web development is that I find the amount of layers of abstraction and needless complexity for something that should really be simple quite deterring.

I'm sure e.g. React and GraphQL allow people to think about web apps in really elegant and scalable ways, but the learning curve is just way more than I can justify for a side project or a one-off thing at work that will never have more than two or three users opening it once every few months.

The more important question that programmers, who are not product makers, often miss is: Are you solving real problems?

It's a slightly orthogonal way of thinking about this but if you are solving real problems, you get away with so much shit, it's unreal.

Maybe Google is not gonna let you code monkey on their monorepo, but you do not have to care. There's enough not-google in the world, and enough real problems.

What do you do if your app has a bug that your LLM isn't able to fix? is your coding experience enough to fix it, or do you ship with bugs hoping customers won't mind?

If customers do mind then at best it's an opportunity cost (less people will buy). Shipping with bugs > not shipping, simple as.

You better hope no bugs expose you to liabilities like runaway cloud costs or mishandling sensitive data

Yeah SaaS is a different beast. Lots of areas worth hardening. Not really for customers but mainly for yourself. But desktop apps, mobile apps, self-hosted stuff, games, CLIs, libraries - you don't really have to worry about much.

You start over from scratch /s(50%)

What does anyone do if they have a bug they don't know how to fix?

Find a way to work around it.

What I see is people using llm to make a new app without the bug

There's always a bug, you just haven't found it yet

What's the point of this question?

Everybody ships nasty bugs in production that he himself might find impossible to debug, everybody.

Thus he will do the very same thing me, you or anybody else on this planet do, find a second pair of eyes, virtually or not, paying or not.

Presumably what is possible for a person with 6 months of experience is rather limited.

The idea as I understand it is that he achieved apps that he would not be able to write by himself, with the help of AI. That means that it is possible to have bugs that would be reasonable to fix for someone who built the app using their own knowledge, but for the junior they may be too hard. This is a novel situation.

Just because everyone has problems sometimes does not mean problems are all the same, all the same difficulty. Like if I was building Starship, and I ran into some difficult problem, I would most likely give up, as I am way out of my league. I couldn't build a model rocket. I know nothing about rockets. My situation would not be the same as of any rocket engineer. All problems and all situations and all people are not the same, and they are not made the same by AI, despite claims to the contrary.

These simplifications/generalisations "we are all stochastic parrots" "we all make mistakes just like the llms make mistakes" "we all have bugs" "we all manage somehow" are absurd. Companies do not do interviews and promote some people and not others out of a sense of whimsy. Experience and knowledge matters. We are not all interchangable. If LLMs affect this somehow, it's to be looked at.

I can't believe LLMs or devs using LLMs cand suddenly do anything, without limitations. We are not all now equal to Linus and Carmack and such.

I haven’t encountered any serious bugs - mostly because I know what I’m capable of and what Sonnet is capable of. I don’t tackle things that are far too ambitious and focus on ideas I want to experiment with or ideas I can build the MVP for

If I do encounter situations that Sonnet can’t fix - usually because it has outdated knowledge - I just read the latest documentation

> Everybody ships nasty bugs in production that he himself might find impossible to debug, everybody.

No.

Some people haven't realised it yet.

Which would be a lot better than knowingly releasing in production code with important defects.

I haven't seen anybody, regardless of org, procedures or whatever to never ship a bug he himself could not debug.

Hell, I don't even see it happening in OS space with dozens of eyes on years-long PRs.

It just happens.

At some point you'll write and ship a bug that you yourself can't debug in an appropriate time frame alone and needs more eyes.

Those things are not not even comparable in the quality output and if you see them as equals this seriously harm your credibility in this topic. This won't change in next decade+. For some use cases thats good enough quality, till you have any actual issues your smart code tools can't handle. Till people start suing you because your half-baked app caused them a real, serious financial loss and they have a true vengeance in their eyes (smaller companies or individuals often take such harm from outside very personally).

Any serious company paying serious bucks won't accept this, in 2024 they know darn well how bad software can bite massively back, some of them like banks or whole Silicon valley run whole business on software. But its true that there is a massive space outside such cases where this cca works, I've never worked there so can't judge.

In your opinion as a newer dev, what were the most complicated things that sonnet was able to do and was not able to do?

I'm not saying you're wrong at all or in disbelief -- but I've spent lots of time with Claude 3.5 trying to prototype React apps and not even full fledged prototypes -- and I can't get it to make anything bug free somehow.

Maybe I'm "holding it wrong" -- I mean using it incorrectly.

True it renders quite interesting mockups and has React code behind it -- but then try and get this into even a demoable state for your boss or colleagues...

Even a simple "please create a docker file with everything I need in a directory to get this up and running"...doesn't work.

Docker file doesnt work (my fault maybe for not expressing I'm on Arm64), app is miss configured, files are in the wrong directories, key things are missing.

Again just my experience.

I find Claude interesting for generating ideas-- but I have a hard time seeing how a dev with six months experience could get multiple "paid" apps out with it. I have 20 years (bla, bla) experience and still find it requires outrageous hand holding for anything serious.

Again I'm not doubting you at all -- I'm just saying me personally I find it hard to be THAT productive with it.

Agreed. LLMs can give you ideas on how to get there, but you still need foundational knowledge of the language or framework to extend the code it generates.

would you be willing to share any of your chats? Like say the docker one?

That one was for work - but let me try again on an example project and I'll share it sure.

You have to temper your ambitions. Choose languages it understands well. Deploy on vercel. Specify exactly what you’re working with (“I’m using nextjs 14 with app router”)

I think the front end is the most interesting place right now, because it’s where people are making stuff for themselves with the help of LLMs.

The browser is a great place to build voice chat, 3d, almost any other experience. I expect a renewed interest in granting fuller capabilities to the web, especially background processing and network access.

That seems a bit too much to ask, I want the piece of mind of knowing the browser keeps isolated sandboxes, if that philosophy changes I would be very uncomfortable using the browser.

How about we go back to thick clients, with LLMs the effort required to do that for multiple operating systems will also be reduced, no?

Can you share some examples?

ThumbnailGenius.com (has a ton of new features I haven’t pushed yet as I wait for approval from a payment processor)

MetHacker.io (has a lot of features I had to remove because of X API’s new pricing - see /projects on it)

GoUnfaked.com

PlaybookFM.com

TokenAI.dev (working with blowfish to remove the warning flag)

Are you sharing your process anywhere (like on YouTube)? I’d be really curious to see behind the scenes of how you’re building these types of products. For example, are you just using Claude or Claude with Cursor (or something else)?

I think I should create a video showing it

Usually its v0.dev for the basic UI and then just prompting cursor

Thank you for sharing these. So many people talk in superlative terms about the stuff they did with AI and give no details. It's very hard to gauge what they actually achieved.

Good job, I suppose, but the existence of all of these, and the fact you're able to pump them out so quickly, is genuinely depressing.

There was a time when mathematicians wrote LISP programs and other humans translated them into machine instructions. Then one day someone wrote a LISP program to do this, and had one of the translators translate it.

A compiler was born.

Think of Claude as a compiler which compiles NLP text instructions into functional code.

I don't mind tools that empower programmers or even less technical people to build products. I use these tools myself in minor ways, even though I find them to be more of a nuisance than actually helpful.

What I find depressing is how quickly someone with minimal experience can flood the web with low quality services, in search for a quick buck. It's like all the SEO spam we've been seeing for decades, but exponentially worse. The web will become even more of a nightmare to navigate than it already is.

Could you please explain why? I'm trying to think how is it depressing and can't come up with anything.

Because we don’t believe it’s equal quality to our job, so we see cheap competition arriving with swathes of bad products, but no way for customers to distinguish what makes quality. Plus we all create bugs anyway.

It's not really that. The quality of these tools will probably increase, and I'm fine with more competition, and with less experienced developers being empowered to build their own products.

What is depressing to me is that the products showcased here are essentially cookie-cutter derivatives built on and around the AI hype cycle. They're barely UI wrappers around LLMs marketed as something groundbreaking. So the thought of the web being flooded with these kinds of sites, in addition to the increase in spam and other AI generated content, is just depressing.

I find that part depressing as well, like who would even listen to gen AI podcasts? Not even vetted by a person but just pumped out as filler like it’s some kind of soil fertilizer. There is already so much good human made content on the web for nearly free if you only look. No doubt this AI slop will get in out way even if we don’t want it, but think of the effect this slop is going to have on younger generation.

Why is it depressing? I find it exhilarating

I’m able to bring ideas to life that I could only think about before

Honestly? These were ideas that you put a lot of thought into?

All your sites are essentially wrappers around LLMs. You don't disclose which models or APIs you use in the backend, so did you train your own models, or are you proxying to an existing service? Your T&C and Privacy Policy is generic nonsense. What happens to the data your users upload?

ThumbnailGenius.com has an example thumbnail of a person with 4 fingers. I honestly can't tell the difference in the comparison between Midjourney, Dall-E and your fine-tuned models. MetHacker.io is not loading. GoUnfaked.com claims to have royalty and copyright-free images, which is highly misleading and possibly illegal. PlaybookFM.com is another effortless wrapper around NotebookLM or a similar LLM. TokenAI.dev is non-functional and seems like a crypto+AI scam.

I'm sorry to be so negative, but if you're going to leverage AI tools, at least put some thought and effort into creating something original that brings value to the world. I think you'll find this more rewarding than what you're doing now. Quality over quantity, and all that.

These are not the things I wanted to create, but its better to ship out something than waste months just building something and never shipping. I did that with MetaHacker which, under the hood, is very capable. But because I spent so much time building it, I never got around to marketing it or monetizing it, so much of it is abandoned and only 1/10th of it is live for end users.

So for my future projects, I told myself I will only spend at most a month working on them. Learn to launch and get users before spending months just building

There are much bigger, more creative ideas I want to tackle, but before that, I want to get the hang of actually building something from scratch

I spent almost ten years as a b2b marketer. All the clients I worked with were established businesses that needed some scale and direction.

I quickly learned that growing a 10M ARR business with established pipelines is a whole lot different than building something from scratch. This is my attempt to go from 0 to 1 as fast as possible and learn as much as I can before diving into bigger things

> its better to ship out something than waste months just building something and never shipping.

I agree with you there.

> There are much bigger, more creative ideas I want to tackle, but before that, I want to get the hang of actually building something from scratch

Fair enough. And good on you for doing a career shift and learning new skills. I don't want to tear down your efforts.

I just think we disagree on the approach. You don't need to ship a half-dozen cookie-cutter web sites with minimal effort. Sometimes it pays off to really think about a product-market fit—something you should be familiar with as a marketer—and then spending more than a month working on that idea. You'll learn new skills along the way, and ultimately shipping something will be a much more valuable achievement. Besides, shipping for the first time should just be the start of a project. If you're really passionate about the project and building a customer base, then the hard work only starts there. Currently the impression these sites give off are quick cash grabs or downright scams. But good luck to you.

Well, I've had dozens of signups every day for ThumbnailGenius depsite 0 marketing. Whatever I'm doing, people seem to like it. I had way more data on it about thumbnails (including an index of 100k thumbnails) but had to remove that because YouTube didn't like it.

I can't see why any of these would seem like "scams" because I'm not asking for money for any of them except for ThumbnailGenius. Not sure how a free product can be a scam or a cashgrab?

And I don't know how familiar you are with YouTube, but most serious creators typically take multiple pictures of themselves, then get multiple thumbnail variants created by an editor. A good creator will typically spend hundreds of dollars just testing out variations to see how they "look". AI just makes it easy to create the variations and visualize different ideas.

Most of the users end up visualizing 20-30 ideas, then picking 1-2 and actually creating them in real life. It's a massive time and money saver

With the lower barrier to entry comes dozens of nearly "apps" that are nearly indistinguishable from each other.

ThumbnailGenius

There's already several sites that generate YT thumbnails with AI:

https://vidiq.com/ai-thumbnails-generator/

https://www.testmythumbnails.com/create-thumbnails-with-ai

PlaybookFM

AI Podcasts have been a thing for a while - though I can't imagine who finds listening to TTS voices with LLM content particularly engaging over a genuine person who puts time and effort into crafting an engaging personality.

GoUnfaked

I don't really understand the point of this one - it generates photorealistic AI pictures? Isn't that exactly what Getty Images AI, Freepik, etc. are all doing already?

Good luck - but this feels like a very "spray and pray" approach to development. It feels like it has the same probability to generate genuine income as people who try to start Patreon pages for their AI "artwork".

I have at least 10 people signing up for thumbnailgenius every day when I haven’t even started marketing it

So hey, maybe its not revolutionary, but some people find it useful enough

Which is fine by me. Maybe you can tackle changing the world. I’ll just focus on being useful enough to some people

Thanks. That is interesting. Did you use AI for just the front end components, or were you also able to reliably use the output for the ML portions, or were those simply offloaded to other services via API call?

The most impressive part of this is your ideas, btw. I don't think for most people LLM's are nearly as effective, because they can't think of use cases.

If there are complaints who is going to fix it? :-)

Every time I see claims like this, I instinctively click on the user's profile and try to verify if their story checks out.

>I played around a lot with code when I was younger. I built my first site when I was 13 and had a good handle on Javascript back when jQuery was still a pipe dream.

>Started with the Codecademy Ruby track which was pretty easy. Working through RailsTutorial right now.

posted on April 15, 2015, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9382537

>I've been freelancing since I was 17. I've dabbled in every kind of online trade imaginable, from domain names to crypto. I've built and sold multiple websites. I also built and sold a small agency.

>I can do some marketing, some coding, some design, some sales, but I'm not particularly good at any of those in isolation.

posted on Jan 20, 2023, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34459482

So I don't really understand where this claim of only "6 months of coding experience" is coming from, when you clearly have been coding on and off for multiple decades.

you do know that there are other kinds of freelancing apart from coding, right?

I think the comment is fair. The poster came across as inexperienced with programming when in reality they have a decade plus experience.

I trust experience people can make better use of these tools because ideally they should have a foundation of first principles to work off of whereas inexperienced people jumping straight into LLMs may not be fully understanding what is happening or what they are given.

I don’t have a decade of coding experience. I do have almost two decades of internet experience, especially marketing. I had an aborted attempt at learning to code back in 2013-14, but I never stuck around, mostly because I was freelancing as a content marketer (GrowthPub.com)

My first real coding experience was when I joined a bootcamp (Code.in bootcamp) in 2022. Only reason I could stick around this time was because I had a chunk of change after selling my agency and had nothing else to do

I’m a humanities grad for what its worth