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Comment by flax | Hacker News Reader

"it mostly worked" is just a more nuanced way of saying "it didn't work". Apparently the author did eventually get something working, but it is false to say that the LLMs produced a working project.

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Well, yeah. It’s a more nuanced way of saying that because “it didn’t work” isn’t very useful nor descriptive.

What if it wrote all of the boilerplate and just let you focus on the important bit that deserves your scrutiny?

You could say I failed every single project I ever built because it took many iterations to get to the final deliverable stage with lots of errors along the way. So more nuance would be needed.

But when it comes to LLMs suddenly we get all gleeful about how negatively we can frame the experience. Even among HN tech scholars.

I dunno. Depending on the writer and their particularly axe to grind the definition can vary widely. I would like it to mean, "any fixes I needed to make were minimal and not time intensive."

It's more of "yeah it worked, but I had to do a lot of hand-holding" and "it passes the tests but I cannot tell if the code has memory leaks".

Actually, I can tell; I ran split on the C source and got things like this:

disk_space.c:144:16: Only storage bin.ref_bin (type void *) derived from variable declared in this scope is not released (memory leak)

So I'm looking into a Rust version with Rustler now.

I'd also recommend having a look at the Zig library for Elixir. For simple stuff, you can just inline, but support for pretty complex setups too.

Also comes with a built-in BEAM allocator so the runtime properly reports NIF memory consumption.

https://hexdocs.pm/zigler/Zig.html

Thanks, one day I'll look into Zig too, because I've been impressed with what Tigerbeetle has achieved with it! For now, I'm all-in on Elixir.

you can use zigler for a c nif, using easy_c (or c_src) options.

the big advantage is that it will automatically box/unbox to/from c values for you and generate sane error messages (which rustler does not, last i checked) when you pass incompatible terms in to the function.

on the other hand rustler lets you precompile (which is coming in a future version of Zigler)

What is your definition of "a working project"? It does what it says on the tin (actually it probably does more, because splint throws some warnings...)

I'd say 98% people who say they are programmer in market can't produce good as good as LLM can.

I think they can. They steal from GitHub and strip the license, same as an LLM.

the mostly-er it works, the harder it is to find out which tiny part does not work.

Ok. But what are you even reacting to? Who is saying that it produced a working product?

As you said, the very title of the article acknowledged that it didn’t produce a working product.

This is just outrage for the sake of outrage.

> As you said, the very title of the article acknowledged that it didn’t produce a working product.

Then why not say "mostly didn't work"? I read the article and that's the impression I got.

The OP's comment isn't an outage, it's more like you intentionally painted it as an outrage with a comment that reads more like an outrage.

Amen, thank you for noticing. The goal here was not to produce something of stellar quality, which is anyway out of the question as I don't have the skills/knowledge to evaluate anything other than "it returns the Elixir map I wanted". It was to see if this is feasible at all.

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