alt Hacker NewsI don’t think you’re being serious. Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written. Maybe you haven’t used a decent harness or a model released in the last year? It’s usually verbose, whereas I would try the simplest thing that could possibly work. However, it can knock out but would have taken me multiple weekends in a few minutes. The value proposition isn’t even close.
It’s fine to write things by hand, in the same way that there’s nothing wrong with making your own clothing with a sewing machine when you could have bought the same thing for a small fraction of the value of your time. Or in the same fashion, spending a whole weekend, modeling and printing apart, you could’ve bought for a few dollars. I think we need to be honest about differentiating between the hobby value of writing programs versus the utility value of programs. Redox is a hobby project, and, while it’s very cool, I’m not sure it has a strong utility proposition. Demanding that code be handwritten makes sense to me for the maintainer because the whole thing is just for fun anyway. There isn’t an urgent need to RIIR Linux. I would not apply this approach to projects where solving the problem is more important than the joy of writing the solution.
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> Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written.
I’m sorry but this says more about you than about the models. It is certainly not the case for me!
> The value proposition isn’t even close.
That's correct, because most of the cost of code is not the development but rather the subsequent maintenance, where AI can't help. Verbose, unchecked AI slop becomes a huge liability over time, you're vastly better off spending those few weekends rewriting it from scratch.
> Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written
Is that really true? Like, if you took the time to plan it carefully, dot every i, cross every t?
The way I think of LLM's is as "median targeters" -- they reliably produce output at the centre of the bell curve from their training set. So if you're working in a language that you're unfamiliar with -- let's say I wanted to make a todo list in COBOL -- then LLM's can be a great help, because the median COBOL developer is better than I am. But for languages I'm actually versed in, the median is significantly worse than what I could produce.
So when I hear people say things like "the clanker produces better programs than me", what I hear is that you're worse than the median developer at producing programs by hand.