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Comment by sigh_again | Hacker News Reader

>BTW, why the disparaging reference to "little toy apps"?

It's an unmaintainable, single use piece of software (that doesn't even implement the features, it just glues together already existing code) that any CS student could write in a week. Congrats on getting a really fast CS student I guess ? Not to mention the fact that perfectly viable, better alternatives are available in many places.

It's like me nailing two 2x4s together to make a shelf. Yeah, sure, I made it myself and I didn't need any woodworking knowledge, but let's just hope I don't put grandma's heavy china on it.

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As a professional 2x4 nailer and gluer, I assure you that I have a ton more deliverables for my client. The downside is that now I actually have to put some thought into my work; you know, put some engineering work into it.

The upside is that I can produce a shit-ton of one-shot code in record time, so I've got time to face the downside.

I had a Claude Project write a number of CLI tools that interact, eg

  search_documents "search term" --bm25 --table-prefix some_project | fulltext -hl -v | less

  search_documents "search term" --bm25 --table-prefix some_project | metadata

It inserts documents by piping paths into another script, eg,

  find /some/path/*.pdf | insert_documents --table-prefix some_project

The documents end up in a Postgres database with pg_search bm25, tsvector, and semantic embeddings (from a local model).

I would estimate that I only wrote 5% of the code in the project with the rest coming from the LLM.

Sure, it's just a few hundred lines of code but it's been stable and helpful to get through some very large tranches of discovery material.

I had Claude write me a Bash script for running prompts (and images) against Google Gemini this morning - I really like it for Bash, because I never committed any of the Bash idioms to memory myself. https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/prompt-gemini

Cool to see ParadeDB is now in Claude/ChatGPT :)

I think being able to build something in less than three minutes that would take a CS student a week is pretty worthwhile, personally.

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