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Comment by thimabi | Hacker News Reader

Can you share some examples of things you’ve been building with AI?

From your comments, I’d venture a guess that you see your AI-assisted work as a creative endeavor — an expression of your creativity.

I certainly wouldn’t get my hopes up for AI to make innovative jokes, poems and the like. Yet for things that can converge on specific guidelines for matters of taste and preferences, like coding, I’ve been increasingly impressed by how well AI models adapt to our human wishes, even when expressed in ever longer prompts.

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One example: as a trial, I wanted to work out how frequently an 1400 rated chess player can get a particular opening trap. I intended to check this for all the traps, so it needed to be fast. With a surprising amount of handholding, claude code downloaded the relevant file from lichess. Its method of computing the probability was wrong, so I told it the formula to use and it got the right answer, but incredibly slowly. I asked it to precompute and cache a datas structure for accelerating these queries and it splashed around ineffectually for a long time with sqlite while I made dinner. I came back and clarified that just sorting all the games in the rating range and pickling that list of strings was a fine datastructure, then use binary search to do the probability in log(n) time. It managed to use binary search in o(n) time so I folded and wrote the hot loop myself. this got the query back to ~1 ms.

In the end the agentic coding bit was garbage, but i appreciated claude’s help on writing the boilerplate to interface with stockfish

I use AI for coding - most of the projects I've built have been fun toys (chore tracking apps, Flutter apps to help my parents), but I've also built one commercial money making app.

I do agree - the models have good taste and often do things that delight me, but there's always room for me to inject my taste. For example, I don't want the AI to choose what state management solution I use for my Flutter app because I have strong opinions about that.

What’s the best state management in Flutter?

Oh no we've wandered into a flamewar...

I like Bloc the most!

Hah! My opinions are not so strong so no flaming here. I was genuinely just wanting your take as someone with strong opinions.

I’ll check out Bloc, thanks.

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