prisenco

I found that "not interested" didn't work for me, that I had to explicitly state what I was interested in and only then did my suggestions become relevant. It will at times revert to slop and then I have to go through the process all over again.

| AI is orders of magnitude more useful and transformative than Facebook was in 2005

It better be, it's taken over 40000x the funding.

The question is not whether AI is useful, the question is whether it's useful enough relative to the capital expectations surrounding it. And those expectations are higher than anything the world has ever seen.

But why? What problem is this actually solving?

The birthrate is reducing everywhere, we produce more food than the current population can eat. The problem is not production, it's distribution.

With regard to Etsy, hand-made crafts don't scale so a VC-backed startup around them was never going to be able to resist this. Only hope would be a highly moderated and curated Craigslist-style website that was happy to pay the bills, pay some salaries and keep the lights on while maintaining integrity.

Craft fairs, though, no excuse or reason. There should not be profit maximizing at local craft fairs. They're a bellwether for the degradation of culture.

Understanding memory and using a debugger is hard but I'll take that over telling an AI my grandma will die if it does something wrong.

I use AI as a rubber duck to research my options, sanity-check my code before a PR, and give me a heads up on potential pain points going forward.

But I still write my own code. If I'm going to be responsible for it, I'm going to be the one who writes it.

It's my belief that velocity up front always comes at a cost down the line. That's been true for abstractions, for frameworks, for all kinds of time-saving tools. Sometimes that cost is felt quickly, as we've seen with vibe coding.

So I'm more interested in using AI in the research phase and to increase the breadth of what I can work on than to save time.

Over the course of a project, all approaches, even total hand-coding with no LLMs whatever, likely regress to the mean when it comes to hours worked. So I'd rather go with an approach that keeps me fully in control.

My question is why use AI to output javascript or python?

Why not output everything in C and ASM for 500x performance? Why use high level languages meant to be easier for humans? Why not go right to the metal?

If anyone's ever tried this, it's clear why: AI is terrible at C and ASM. But that cuts into what AI is at its core: It's not actual programming, it's mechanical reproduction.

Which means its incapabilities in C and ASM don't disappear when using it for higher-level languages. They're still there, just temporarily smoothed over due to larger datasets.

Which is why I'm more comfortable using AI as an editor/reviewer than as a writer.

I'll write the code, it can help me explore options, find potential problems and suggest tests, but I'll write the code.

Copyleft removes legal obligation but we're free to confer a social obligation.

When building out a new app or site, which means a percentage of zero users is zero.

Could be speed/efficiency was the wrong dimension to optimize for and its leading the industry down a bad path.

An LLM helps most with surface area. It expands the breadth of possibilities a developer can operate on.

Right, don't add complexity until you have to.

When building out a new app or site, start with the simplest solution like the html-only autofilters first, then add complex behavior later.

It's good to know these things exist so there are alternatives to reaching for a fat react component as the first step.

Of course. But people also have high uptime servers with long-running processes they barely touch.

| self hosting costs you between 30 and 120 minutes per month

Can we honestly say that cloud services taking a half hour to two hours a month of someone's time on average is completely unheard of?

I got the right answer but it was so easy I went in with doubt I had done it right.

Which I understand is my issue to work on, but if I were interviewing, I'd ask candidates to verbalize or write out their thought process to get a sense of who is overthinking or doubting themselves.

I'm referring to client-side javascript.

The Space Jam website from 1996 still renders perfectly almost 30 years later.

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

Those (document.layers and document.all) were both vendor-specific, neither were part of the w3c. I don't recommend ever writing vendor-specific code.

The w3c and standards have generally won so it's easier than ever to write to the standard.

Dare to dream and be bold.

Seriously, start a project and use only the standards. You'll be surprised how good the experience can be.

JSDoc is TypeScript.

I love it. I've had a hard time convincing clients it's the best way to go but any side projects recently and going forward will always start with this frontend stack and no more until fully necessary.

No, because layers of abstraction come at a cost and we have created a temple to the clouds piled with abstractions. Any option to simplify processes and remove abstractions should be taken or at least strongly considered.

Code written for a web browser 30 years ago will still run in a web browser today. But what guarantee does a build step have that the toolchain will still even exist 30 years from now?

And because modern HTML/CSS is powerful and improving at a rapid clip. I don't want to be stuck on non-standard frameworks when the rest of the world moves on to better and better standards.

They could have better ergonomics and I hope a successor that does comes out but they're really not that bad.

I haven't run into any steps that require one, there's always alternatives.

Do you have anything specific in mind?

I'm a fan of anything that allows me to build with javascript that doesn't require a build step.

Modern HTML/CSS with Web Components and JSDoc is underrated. Not for everyone but should be more in the running for a modern frontend stack than it is.

Everyone's suggestions feel designed to frustrate me. Instructions on how to cajole and plead that seem more astrology than engineering.

This is the pattern I settled on about a year ago. I use it as a rubber-duck / conversation partner for bigger picture issues. I'll run my code through it as a sanity "pre-check" before a pr review. And I mapped autocomplete to ctrl-; in vim so I only bring it up when I need it.

Otherwise, I write everything myself. AI written code never felt safe. It adds velocity but velocity early on always steals speed from the future. That's been the case for languages, for frameworks, for libraries, it's no different for AI.

In other words, you get better at using AI for programming by recognizing where its strengths lie and going all in on those strengths. Don't twist up in knots trying to get it to do decently what you can already do well yourself.

If you've seen Scrubs...

Also important is just how fast cheap hardware has gotten which means vertical scaling is extremely effective. People could get a lot farther with sqlite in wal mode on a single box with an nvme drive than they imagine. Feels like our intuition has not caught up with the material reality of current hardware.

And now that there are solid streaming backup systems, the only real issue is redundancy not scaling.