alt Hacker NewsYou're fooling yourself.
People yeating a (shitty) Github clone with Claude in a week apparently can't imagine it, but if you know the shit out of Rails, start with a good a boiler plate, and have a good git library, a solo dev can also build a (shitty) Github clone in a week. And they'll be able to take it somewhere, unlike the llm ratsnest that will require increasingly expensive tokens to (frustratingly) modify.
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I also did a native implementation of git so I could use an S3 compatible data store, your rails guru can't do that.
Objectively, my GitHub clone is still shitty, BUT it got several ways github is shitty out of my way and allowed me to add several features I wanted, no small one of which was GitHub not owning my data.
I don't know the shit out of Rails and I don't want to, I know the shit out of other things and I want the tools I'm using to be better and Claude is making that happen.
It's a little odd the skepticism to the level that people keep telling me I'm delusional for being satisfied that I've created something useful for myself. The opposition to AI/LLMs seems to be growing into a weird morality cult trying to convince everybody else that they're leading unhappy immoral lives. I'm exaggerating but it's looking like things are going in that direction... and in my house, so to speak, here on HN there are factions. Like programming language zealots but worse.
You're fooling yourself. It's very easy to get demonstrably working results in an afternoon that would take weeks at least without coding agents. Demonstrably working, as in you can prove the code actually works by then putting it to use. I had a coding agent write an entire declarative GUI library for mpv userscripts, rendering all widgets with ASS subtitles, then proceeded to prove to my satisfaction that it does in fact work by using it to make a node editor for constructing ffmpeg filter graphs and an in-mpv nonlinear video editor. All of this is stuff I already knew how to do in practice, had intended to do one day for years now, but never bit the bullet because I knew it would turn into weeks of me pouring over auto-generated ASS doing things it was never intended to do to figure out why something is rendering subtly wrong. Fairly straightforward but a ton of bitch work. The LLM blasted through it like it was nothing. Fooling myself? The code works, I'm using it, you're fooling yourself.