The point being made exactly that something beautiful has being cheapened.
It works great, but I can’t imagine skipping the refinement process.
Yes. I almost always end with "Do not generate any code unless it can help in our discussions as this is the design stage" I would say, 95% of my code for https://github.com/gitsense/chat in the last 6 months were AI generated, and I would say 80% were one shots.
It is important to note that I can easily get into the 30+ messages of back and forth before any code is generated. For complex tasks, I will literally spend an hour or two (that can span days) chatting and thinking about a problem with the LLM and I do expect the LLM to one shot them.
Compare that to the approach you're using (which is what I'm also doing), and you're able have have AI stay much closer to what you're looking for, be less prone to damaging hallucinations, and also guide it to a foundation that's stable. The downside is that it's a lot more work. You might multiply your productivity by some single digit.
To me, that 2nd approach is much more reasonable than trying to 100x your productivity but actually end up getting less done because you end up stuck in a rabbit hole you don't know you're in and you'll never refine your way out of it.
Interesting that radical abundance may create radical competition to utilize more abundant materials in an effort to maintain relative economic and social position.
"Then, within twenty minutes, we started ignoring the cows. … Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring"
First we got transparent UIs, now everyone has them. Then we got custom icons, then Font Awesome commoditized them. Then flat UI until everyone copied it. Then those weird hand-painted Lottie illustrations, and now thanks to Gen-AI everyone has them. (Then Apple launched their 2nd gen transparent UI.)
But the one thing that neither caffeinated undergrads nor LLMs can pull off is making software efficient. That's why software that responds quickly to user input will feel magical and stand out in a sea of slow and bloated AI slop.
More flour more water. More water more flour.
Investing in your understanding and skill, on the other hand, has nearly limitless returns.
and
> So make your stuff stand out. It doesn't have to be "better." It just has to be different.
equals... craft?
Isn't that what has always mattered a great deal
Therefore, it doesn’t affect my work at all. The only thing that affects my prospects is the hype about AI.
Be a purple cow, the guy says. Seems to me that not using AI makes me a purple cow.
But that isn't what the author is talking about. The issues is, your good code can be equal to slop that works. What the author says needs to happen is, you need to find a better way to stand out. I suspect for many businesses where software superiority is not a core requirement, slop that works will be treated the same as non-slop code.
AI is not worthy of trust, and the sort of reasonable people I want to deal with won’t trust it and don’t. They deal with me because I am not a simulation of someone who cares— I am the real thing. I am a purple cow in terms of personal credibility and responsibility.
To the degree that the application of AI is useful to me without putting my credibility at risk, I will use it. It does have its uses.
(BTW, although I write code as part of my work, I stopped being a full-time coder in my teens. I am tester, testing consultant, expert witness, and trainer, now.)
Until that slop that works leads to therac-26 or PostOfficeScandal2 electric boogaloo. Neither of those applications required software superior to their competitors, just working software
The average quality of software can only trend down so far before real world problems start manifesting, even outside of businesses with a hard requirement on "software superiority"
Then I copied the tool and data to a new directory and fully started over, with a more concrete description of the product I wanted in place and a better view of what components I would want, and began with a plan to implement one small component at a time, each with its own test screen, reviewing every change and not allowing any slop through (including any features that look fine from a code standpoint but are not needed for the product).
So far I'm quite happy with this.
For take #1 I said what tech to use and a high level description of the game and it's features. I guess I failed to mention this part, but when I threw take #1 away, I first used Claude + hand editing to update it to have a detailed description of each screen and feature in the game. So take #2 had a much more detailed description of exactly what was going to be built, but still, right in CLAUDE.md
I did also create a DEVELOPMENT-PLAN.md first with Claude and have been having it update it with what's been done before every commit. I don't know yet have a good idea of how impactful that part has been.
AI makes slop
Therefore, spend more time to make the slop "better" or "different"
[No, they do not define what counts as "better" or "different"]
Where's your moat? If you can create the software with prompts so can your competitors.
Attackers knowing which model(s) you use could also do similar prompts and check the output code, to speculate what kind of exploits your software might have.
A lawyer knowing what model his opposition uses could speculate on their likely strategies.
Turns out being able to write the software is not the only, or even the most important factor in success.
But what’s unique today becomes slop tomorrow, AI or not.
Art has meaning. Old buildings feel special because they’re rare. If there were a thousand Golden Gate Bridges, the first wouldn’t stand out, as much.
Online, reproduction is trivial. With AI, reproducing items in the physical world will get cheaper.
No. When you have a city full of old houses all from the same era, maybe even by the same architect, the new building still looks ugly. The old house looks beautiful, even when you have hundreds copies next to it.
Off-topic, but in biology circles I've heard this type of situation (where "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place" because your competitors are constantly improving as well) called a "Red Queen's race" and really like the picture that analogy paints.