logoalt Hacker News

headcanonlast Friday at 8:28 PM3 repliesview on HN

One thing I have been doing is breaking out of my long-held default mode of spinning up a react/nextjs project whenever I need frontend, and generating barebones HTML/CSS/JS for basic web apps. A lot of the reason we went with the former was the easy access to packages and easy-to-understand state management, but now that a lot of the functionality packages used to provide can be just as easily generated, I can get a lot more functionality while keeping dependencies minimal.

I haven't tried C or ASM yet, but it has been working very well with a C++ project I've been working on, and I'm sure it would do reasonably well with bare-bones C as well.

I'd be willing to bet it would struggle more with a lower-level language initially, but give it a solid set of guardrails with a testing/eval infrastructure and it'll get its way to what you want.


Replies

lelanthranyesterday at 4:30 PM

We used higher level programming languages because "Developer time is more expensive than compute time", but if the AI techbros are right, we are approaching the point where that is not going to be true.

It's going to take the same amount of time creating a program in C as it does in Python.

fud101yesterday at 3:12 AM

Pretty interesting take this. I wonder if there is a minimal state management we could evolve which would be sufficient for LLMs to use while still making it possible for a human to reason about the abstraction. It won't be as bloated as the existing ones we came up with organically however.

moron4hireyesterday at 3:39 AM

I mean, you're basically LLM-washing other people's code, then. All those UI components that other people wrote and at least expected attribution may not be libraries anymore, sure. But you've basically just copied and maybe lightly modified that code into your project and then slapped a sticker on it saying "mine." If you did that manually with open source code, you'd be in violation of the attribution terms almost all the licenses have in common. But somehow it's okay if the computer does it for you?

show 1 reply