Surprised no mention of futel
Readit Newsharper commented on Engineer restores pay phones for free public use npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/andsoitis
harper commented on Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly writewithharper.com... · Posted by u/ReadCarlBarks
nice name!
> [Harper Reed] cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works.
That just strikes me as an odd thing to say. I’m convinced that this is the dividing line between today’s software engineers and tomorrow’s AI engineers (in whatever form that takes - prompt, vibe, etc.) Reed’s statement feels very much like a justification of “if it compiles, ship it!”
> “It would be crazy if in an auto factory people were measuring to make sure every angle is correct,” he said, since machines now do the work. “It’s not as important as when it was group of ten people pounding out the metal.”
Except that the machines doing that work aren’t regularly hallucinating angles, spurious welding joints, etc.
It was not a strong metaphor! Can't win them all.
You are correct tho. I do think that we are approaching the point of "If it compiles, ship it"
I'm a bit confused here, what promt do you use to start Aider and how do you just let Aider run wild so you can play cookie clicker?
the prompts are generated from the planning steps. If you were to follow the prompts in the planning phase, you would get output that is clearly the "starting prompt"
that is the first thing you send to aider.
also - there was a joke below, but you can do --yes-always and it will not ask for confirmation. I find it does a pretty good job.
Aider, a tool he uses, can do that automatically. He could just use that feature.
Yea - i have had OK luck with the architect mode. but was using that as part of this (using deepseek for reasoning) and it good. but oh so slow.
Ultimately, i would love to just use one tool
> Legacy modern code
As opposed to Vintage Pioneer code?
in my experience, there is quite a spectrum of legacy code.
Legacy modern code would be anything from the last 5-10 years. Vintage Pioneer code (which i have both initialized, and maintained) is more than 20 years old.
I am trying not to be a vintage pioneer these days.
If I have to go to this much effort, what is AI buying us here? Why don't we just put the effort in to learn to write code ourselves? Instead of troubleshooting AI problems and coming up with clever workarounds for those problems, troubleshoot your code, solve those problems directly!
the speed is way faster. I am a good programmer with more than 25 years of professional experience. The AI is a better programmer in every way. Why do it myself when i can outsource it and play cookie clicker?
The real thing that sold me is the entire workflow takes 10 minutes to plan, and then 10-15 minutes to execute (let's say a python script of medium complexity). after a solid ~20-30 min I am largely done. no debugging necessary.
it would have taken me an hour or two to do the same script.
this means i can spend a lot more time with the fam, hacking on more things, and messing about.
I find making the LLMs think and plan the project a bit worrying, I understand this helps with procrastination but when these systems eventually get better and more integrated, the most likely thing to happen to software devs is them moving away from purely coding to more of a solution architect role (aka Planning stuff), not taking into account the negative impact of giving up critical thinking to LLMs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43057907
Other than that a great article! Very insightful.
I actually think it is going to be way worse than you are suggesting. I think that the LLM codegen is going to replace most if not all of software eng workflow and teams that we see today.
Software is going to be prompt wrangling with some acceptance testing. Then just prompt wrangling.
I don't have a lot of hope for the software profession to survive.
Spelling nit:
“Over my skis” ~ in over my head.
“Over my skies” ~ very far overhead. In orbit maybe?
fixed! thanks
Question to folks with good workflows: Are you using tools like DSPy to generate prompts? Any other tools/tips about managing prompts?
i really wanted to use DSPy to generate prompts, but it wasn't quite as compatible with my workflow as i wanted. I love the idea tho - code instead of strings.
i will dig in again. It is an exciting idea.