I just cannot come up with a good AI-is-actually-24/7-helping-me-out use case.
Please help: I wánt to need this!
Please help: I wánt to need this!
Here is a real use case: you are are responsible for some alerting channel. You have datadog/ cloud logging/ github all connected. You see a bunch of alerts come through while you are out and about and you prompt CC to investigate - Claude triages and says “all of the sudden you are getting time outs from this bank API your company partners with, this started an hour ago. It’s happening on ~15% of requests”. So you ping the guy at your company who does vendor relationships and go back to your weekend.
This is a non hypothetical example. Obviously it would be better if your job had a real on call rotation and more robust alerting and you wouldn’t be getting slack alerts on the weekend… but I take the approach this job affords me a lot of nice flexibility so it’s ok
I'm an account manager. My clients will phone at almost any time, weekends included, if they feel there issue wasn't yet looked at by the on call dev.
But yeah it’s kinda a zone where most weekends there’s no problems so it’s not a huge priority… until it is
This is something we of the HN bubble take for granted. Most of us know how to type quickly and use editors and use macros and program scripting languages and compose regexes.
The vast majority of programmers do not know those things. As such, AI speeds them up tremendously.
HN skews heavily toward the SF signature vc-hype tech-driven-dev style, always chasing the new thing, sometimes to the detriment of everything else.
Even if this style of development was a clear improvement over the classic "typing things with hands" style, the rest of the world would take a while to catch on.
I've been watching "How it's made" on Hulu to fall asleep at night.
I’m constantly surprised by how many things are made with human hands, despite the ability to automate.
How is Claude monitoring them for hours? Claude runs out of context and extremely long sessions are prohibitively expensive even according to Anthropic (after they dispense with the marketing bullshit of long running tasks)?
A single session running for multiple hours is prohibitively expensive, as per Anthropic. Regardless of whether it just waits for a prompt or does something.
Yup. They can't keep your workload in cache forever, or they would run out of cache for users.
> I wonder would starting new sessions and having to re-read the contexts and results anyway be any cheaper.
Yes, that's what they recommend
- Fuzzing with the goal for it to apply domain-specific and source-informed knowledge to choose specific fuzzing approaches.
- More generally, any optimization problem that benefits from domain-specific or source informed knowledge.
- Running Microsoft's SkillOpt [0].
I don't value my travel time at all, but it used to be wasted on travelling.
It could be for a personal project or hobby.
Having independently running processes from the computer you carry around offers benefits.
1/ Using GUI software. My agents are using headful Google Chrome and Figma. It helps a lot to have separate environment, which is not interfering my main machine.
2/ Running long processes (1h+), so I can leave main machine closed.
3/ Running intensive processes. I use Gemma, Whisper and Qwen, which could burn main machine CPU and resources.
Yes, surprisingly, this is something Google cannot do yet.
(I wish I was joking)
Make sure to spell PERFECTLY in all caps.
Which tests and optimizations do you propose to run after a night of supervised work when one of main things that all agents keep doing is "load all records from db , and filter them in memory"? It's now become so bad, I had to literally vibecode a separate linter for this. And that's just one of the problems.
but we do have sufficient AI to make a great product out of a great prompt.
garbage in -> garbage out hasn't gone anywhere.
so: much like to anyone that blindly complains that their compiler hates them : if you actually want help, provide information. If you just want to complain that the compiler is mean, scream at the sky.
plenty of people have figured out how to get this to work; more than enough to confirm that a straight <gambling-machine>/<hallucinatory-psychopath>/<random-number-generator> analogy is too simplistic to explain what we're working with.
> plenty of people have figured out how to get this to work
Plenty of people claim they have figured it out. In reality these people are full of shit and assume that if LLMs can produce working software, it's great working software. And also assume that LoC is a measure of quality.
Because without fail all the models keep doing this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962703
And you can only see that in your "great product" if you actually read the code and understand what's going on.
You see, there's your problem right there. You're vibe coding, which by definition literally means you're unwilling to look at the generated code. That's not what successful ai assisted software developers are doing. YOU HAVE TO READ THE CODE. Refusing to do that means you're not a serious programmer, you're outsourcing your thought and design and implementation, trying to get something for nothing by taking the easy way out, and you're going to get terrible results no matter what prompts you "engineer". There ain't no such thing as a free lunch (yet).
And while we're at it, to elaborate on what serf said: people mindlessly parroting terms like "stochastic parrot" to criticize llms without having read the actual paper that coined the term and understanding what it really claimed and how other papers responded to it means you're just a human stochastic parrot no better than what you're criticizing -- at least the llm has read all those papers and understands what "stochastic parrot" actually means in context. Ask it, it will be glad to explain!
Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? (FAccT 2021)
I guess you vibe-read what I wrote. Let me write it again for you: "I always have to correct its hallucinations during the day. Why would I ever let it run unsupervised overnight?"
It's right there on the label. If you didn't mean "vibe coded" then don't vibe write "vibecoded", and instead read what you wrote, then look up the meaning and spelling of the terms you are using, and do not neglect to correct yourself because it's not what you meant.
I have to correct typos like that all the time when I write them by hand. But making typos and having to correct them and having to look up the meaning and spelling of words does not make me complain about all human generated code and text just because it requires me to proofread what I wrote.
Reading what you wrote or what ai generated and looking up terms is all part of the process, because people and llms make mistakes. Vibe coding is not giving a shit about that, thinking it doesn't apply to you, and hitting "Accept All" without reading the code, by definition.
And if you can't accept that, then don't write or generate code or text, and don't complain about how you have to read what you and llms generate and correct it, and understand what words mean.
>I had to literally vibecode a separate linter for this
Why would you "literally vibecode" a linter and use it to review other llm generated code without reading the linter's code itself? That is "literally" vibe coding eating its own tail.
I take your emphatic use of the word "literally" to mean that you are "literally" using the well know definition of vibe coding as it was coined by Andrej Karpathy of OpenAI, which is "iterally" (and I quote):
>I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore.
Am I misunderstanding you, or are you vibe writing the wrong term without reviewing the meaning of your own words?
Here is the full literal quote so there is no room for confusion or claims of missing context:
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
>Andrej Karpathy @karpathy: There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
That is the "literal" widely understood and well defined meaning of what you wrote, but misspelled "vibecoding", according to the well known AI expert from OpenAI who originally defined and championed the term. Its meaning has not suddenly changed.
Only a vibe coder would vibe code a linter to vibe lint vibe coded code for them, without looking at ANY of that code themselves, by just hitting "Accept All" always. Because vibe coders by definition don't want to bother reading what they generated, don't care what it means, and still expect it to come out perfect.
Don't be a vibe coder, or a vibe writer, or a human stochastic parrot: read what you write and know the definitions of the words you use.
And if you're not a vibe coder, then don't claim to "vibecode": that's "not engineering" just "magical and wishful thinking", as you like to say.
>"I always have to correct its hallucinations during the day. Why would I ever let it run unsupervised overnight?"
And the answer to your question is: because you are using git, so you can look at the diffs before merging and deploying into production. You are using git and looking at the diffs, aren't you? Have you heard of PRs and code reviews? Or is that too much to ask of a "vibecoder"?
Because you keep vibe-reading what I write.
Here's what I literally started with: "I always have to correct its hallucinations during the day. Why would I ever let it run unsupervised overnight?"
Which means what? Oh. It says literally what it says.
Here's how I continued: "Which tests and optimizations do you propose to run after a night of supervised work when one of main things that all agents keep doing is 'load all records from db , and filter them in memory'?"
What does this mean? Oh, it means the literal meaning of the sentence. It also probably strongly implies that I actually look at the code produced by these things, as otherwise I wouldn't know things like "oh, the agent loads the whole db into memory and filters it into memory, we have to correct that".
You literally completely ignored all that and got irritated by just this sentence: "It's now become so bad, I had to literally vibecode a separate linter for this".
Because, see, I had to write a tool with the use of AI and run it against existing code, and correct it until it worked to my satisfaction so that I don't have to spend a lot of my time correcting a repeating error, so I automated the finding and the correction of a repearting error using a linter. And instead of writing that entire sentence I used the word "vibe-coded".
So no you've wasted a lot of breath arguing... what exactly is it that you arguing? Your inability to read what other people write? Functional illiteracy?
Edit. Since you're so keen on chasing me in other comments it's unsuprising that you again completely ignored the one comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965638 where I link this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962703 But sure. How dare I use the word "vibe-coding" incorrectly when it was coined by the Lord Our God Karpathy Himself.
So I dunno what to say, except it’s possible to write really solid code with LLMs.
> I also read my code regularly
So you're literally doing what I am talking about.