It would be trivial to have a pre-flight convo with an llm to guide the user thru module choices. "Build a site" -> "ok, describe the purpose" -> "local council in XYZ location" -> "that implies you won't need localization since XYZ has a monolingual government" -> "english and catalan localization please".
Right now, you prompt and it builds using assumptions, and we prompt to adjust. I think it would be great to be able to pre-load a set of assumptions.
Everyone assumes that carefully crafting a specific AI architecture with bits and pieces bolted together based on their human intuition is necessarily superior to simply using a bigger monolithic AI model. It turns out that the opposite is true, and has been demonstrated over and over again.
The bitter lesson is this: You can simply ask a frontier model to do the things you suggested, in a few terse lines of English. Dump a few lines in AGENTS.md and you are good to go.
Your approach is to "fiddle with inadequate tools" for weeks or months until you can finally attain a pale imitation of what the frontier models can do effortlessly.
It's the classic "But I can customise EMACS endlessly, why would I use an actual IDE?" argument all over.
I get it. You don't feel ownership over someone else's AI. You don't feel involved, you don't feel like you have agency.
It's like LEGO or IKEA furniture: study after study has shown that people enjoy things more if they "put it together themselves", even if fundamentally the thing is worse and/or still essentially nothing more than plastic made in a factory.
You don't _have_ ownership of someone else's ai, and that comes with real risks.
Security risks, privacy risks, business risk.
They might rug pull you, they might charge you more, or like atrophic, silently corrupt the answers, or code...
The labs are happy to jump on any emergent capability the scaling and training impart: generate prose, teach you things, cyber security, design, code, etc.
Do you really think that the frontier labs won't turn a popular capability, or trend they notice, into a first party tool if the ROI seems there? If it's your own private ai in your datacenter, you can keep it all secret, and not lose your business.
On the bitter lesson you're right of course:), wish I had a super computer to just scale that instead.
A) You can always self-host something like Kimi, DeepSeek, or GLM.
B) Just because you use a specific proprietary AI for programming doesn't actually bind you to that provider in any meaningful way. The authored code remains even if you stop paying them!
Of course, if you use AI as an active component in some sort of service, then the EULA, rug-pulls, etc... suddenly start to matter. That's a different story.
I think I agree with the bitter lesson, but I wish I weren't :)
> A) You can always self-host something like Kimi, DeepSeek, or GLM.
I mean, one could rent-a-box for, like, 10$$ per hour? Agentic loop development gets really expensive at scale with larger models, like, if you want to A/B test two tool schemas to see which works better, and you run 100 benchmarks...
But why are you so convinced the bitter lesson is true, and it's not just a temporary lead? Proper agent loops and RLVR are like, 3 years old at this point? At some point, right, the compute can't scale it out further? And at _that_ point the lead position might go back to: highest compute + smartest designed smarts.
Against my somewhat better judgement I'm currently "assembling small AI pieces" :(, for lack of access to unrestricted models for offensive security work and, ehh, funds. It's _okay_ so far, I'm running private benchmarks and look at the trajectories. To be perfectly honest, qwen is _really_ doing well, finishing quite complex chains without a lot of smarts in the prompt. Just "Go pwn {server}, use these {tools}".
But, there are some smarts embedded in those tools. Helpful errors, retries, benchmarked/handy representation. Strict validation of what the model tries to do, etc.
> The authored code remains even if you stop paying them!
This is true, but my point is that they will outcompete you if you happen to stumble on something that actually makes good money using LLMs and becomes popular. Obviously, if you don't then they won't.
> Of course, if you use AI as an active component in some sort of service, then the EULA, rug-pulls, etc... suddenly start to matter. That's a different story.
That's the plan hehe
That paragraph sets me off. I’ll take Vim and Emacs over VSCode and Eclipse any day.
> Visual Studio Code (commonly referred to as VS Code)[11] is an integrated development environment
Unless you were just going for a sick burn on vscode, in which case carry on :)
There’s no need to bring religion into this.