Thread

1. Conlectus · 1790598456 · focus · HN ↗

   There’s a specific downside to LLM-based development that people can get neck deep in a new project without interfacing with the existing work in the field.

   In this case, this is basically a poorly specified implementation of half of XMPP. Of course, I half expect the LLM would have mentioned that at some point, but the repository does not.

   1. dale_glass · 1790601737 · focus · HN ↗

      Unfortunately XMPP is an absolutely terrible protocol. IRC's not much good either, but at least it has the excuse of being ancient and limited in what it wanted to achieve.

      I don't know how it just happens that sending text messages to people can manage to result in specs that are painful to implement.

      1. alwaysthiserror · 1790605261 · focus · HN ↗

         I once implemented the presence and basic messaging functionality of XMPP for a web site, using a braindead bridge (that I also wrote; so, the meaningful logic lived in the browser).

         Considering I'd never hosted an XMPP daemon and didn't know anything about the protocol (I'd used XMPP clients a little bit, but had never looked at the protocol) and got a server (that part, I didn't write), an auth connector for our website's authentication system (so the daemon would authenticate against that instead), prod-ready and the features I wanted all working smoothly and reliably in maybe three weeks of very part-time work (this'd be, like, 3-4 part-time days with LLMs now, tops, from the same starting point)... seems decent to me? I mean I did direct work with the protocol, didn't just glue together libraries, and it was pretty damn good. Also (and I know browsers seem to be retreating on this front, which sucks) being XML made it very nice to work with in a Web context, since you can just ask the browser to turn ~any XML into a DOM for you, and get a bunch of functionality for free.

         What's wrong with it?

         1. pmlnr · 1790611257 · focus · HN ↗

            These days complicated and/or complex == hard == bad.

            1. hnlmorg · 1790612591 · focus · HN ↗

               Which is understandable when messaging shouldn’t be a hard problem to solve.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.