‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

One Month Without AI

188 points · 228 comments · saibotk

  1. austin-cheney · · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, I have never understood the over reliance on AI. Writing the code is not the challenge. The time it takes to push a new feature and test it out is often trivial, maybe a few hours.

    The real challenge is forming the new ideas in the first place and most of those new ideas coming either from using the code as a product or time spent maintaining and refactoring large code.

    Anyways, if you want to continue on the path towards regaining control and take it to the next level I wrote something similar here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.sharefile.systems&#x2F;be-brave-go-low&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.sharefile.systems&#x2F;be-brave-go-low&#x2F;

    1. XCSme · · focus · HN ↗
      Wriring the code is not the challenge, but it&#x27;s what was taking up most of the time. Not the typing itself, but also because I had to think of how to implement it.

      Now I can just say &quot;add 2FA&quot; and in 5 minutes, while I test something else, it is done.

      It also made iterations a lot faster, you can try something out, see how it feels, if it doesn&#x27;t work, you can just trash all the code and start again.

      1. anygivnthursday · · focus · HN ↗
        But you still have to review that 2FA code and that involves thinking through the implementation, right?
        1. XCSme · · focus · HN ↗
          No.

          Haven&#x27;t typed a line of code or read any code for over 6 months now.

          And I used to love coding and be a competitive programmer, but this is how &quot;coding&quot; goes nowdays.

          I have a mental model of what it would do, and how it would work, and I ask questions to confirm things and tell it to watch for specific gotchas. Then simply test the feature myself a bit.

          Security-wise, I think the latest cyber models are better than me anyway at finding vulnerabilitates and pentesting such features.

          Plus 2FA is a very common pattern, so it likely has in the training dataset many really good implementations.

          1. OccamsMirror · · focus · HN ↗
            You are abdicating your responsibility, which is fine for toy apps for yourself, but less fine when people expect that 2fa implementation to protect their accounts.
            1. Kiro · · focus · HN ↗
              I trust a modern model implementing a standard feature like this much more than 99% of the people I&#x27;ve worked with.

              People bash LLMs for overengineering but for this it&#x27;s what you want. Taking extreme edge-cases into account that a human would never bother with and obsessing over security.

              1. duskdozer · · focus · HN ↗
                The issue with LLM guarding isn&#x27;t that it&#x27;s &quot;excessive&quot; in outputting edge case handling, it&#x27;s that the result often ends up just suppressing an error that actually indicates there is a bug or that should be handled elsewhere in a different way.
                1. Kiro · · focus · HN ↗
                  While I&#x27;ve definitely experienced it I don&#x27;t think this is as much of a problem anymore. It&#x27;s very easy to add an instruction to projects where you want every error to lead to a top-level throw rather than be handled. I also find that when it does try to mitigate it does so gracefully with a path you would actually make if you had infinite time, but your instinct tells you it&#x27;s overkill.
Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.