logoalt Hacker News

lionkorlast Tuesday at 7:39 AM0 repliesview on HN

A website that tracks when we last went on a weekend trip and other kinds of things, and reminds us with a cute friendly (not AI written) email when it's time to plan something again!

It really helps us to not forget to spend significant time with each other when life is busy.

A rant follows.

I've generated probably as many lines of code by this point as I've written myself over the past 5 years or so.

I found AI generated code mostly very frustrating, kind of low quality in its own way, and too complex. I have pages and pages of instructions to guide the agent(s) to do a better job at this, and it has gotten better, but the fundamental limit of this technology is tangible.

Like, okay, CPUs still get faster every year, and every now and then someone makes a breakthrough and we get a bump in speed from something. But when you write high performance code, you very quickly run into hardware constraints, like how fast information can move and how far away components are from the CPU cores themselves. People keep saying performance isn't THAT important, and that modern hardware is so fast and amazing, and that they struggle to even find a way to use all of their CPU cores and RAM with their little app or program or game. Yet here I am, writing code that will noticably speed up if I run it on a CPU with a little bit more L1 cache.

This is similar to how it feels to program with AI when you're reasonably competent (to put it mildly; I avoid the 10x developer label because comparison to others is very silly). Everyone keeps saying it's getting so much better, and it's so good, and worrying about code quality and architecture is dumb because we can move so fast it doesn't matter. Yet here I am, writing code by hand because I tried doing it with AI a couple times and it just doesn't hit the mark.

I'm not doing anything special, I just have high standards and a good amount of experience when it comes to software quality, performance, and maintainability, which is why I keep getting hired. I'm convinced that people who think their AI generated software is good are the same people who write short variable names and think it makes their software faster (hyperbole, but you get what I mean).

I can feel when I hit the limits of the hardware, and I can feel when I hit the limits of LLMs, and I know for both of them that a 2x increase in performance will not change what is and isn't physically possible.