Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

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I've shipped small, simple, unambitious internal things for our company that saved people lots of time, and I've shipped them in minutes rather than the a day or two they used to take.

I've just shipped a migration from our old auth service to the new one in a week, a migration that we've put off for three years because it would take the team months to finish.

I've shipped small side-projects that I'm the primary (and usually only) user of, but they now take me two days rather than weeks of effort and learning (e.g. https://www.writelucid.cc, https://pine.town, https://stavrobot.stavros.io, https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula).

I've made changes in OSS apps that I just wouldn't have made otherwise (https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/pulls/skorokith...), and even some closed-source ones (https://www.stavros.io/posts/adding-a-feature-to-a-closed-so...).

I've shipped hardware projects that would have taken me months of learning in a few days (https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/).

How's that?

Thank you for the details! These are precisely the kind of things I want to hear about because they are self-contained and I can judge against the kind of stuff I do.

I am quite interested in experimenting with it for migrations, because for example I have a set of sites written in older Nuxt and Vue and Buefy that need refreshing (and the frontend ported to that UI-agnostic Buefy replacement whose name escapes me at the moment but begins with “ou” I think). These migrations won’t happen any other way (small customers won’t pay for that) so I am open to whether tooling can reduce the cost I have to swallow. LLMs I have tested (including local models) seem to support the idea that this will be doable but I am a little out of the loop with the projects so I haven’t got back to this yet.

The hardware thing looks great; I am a sort of distracted maker and FreeCAD nerd but I often need a nudge to get started and I have found an LLM chat to help there a little bit (though it cannot answer some questions if I don’t have the specific vocabulary).

Writelucid is definitely cute.

I think you should not be put off talking about these things because whether people agree with you or not about whether they are important, they can at least measure against them.

You're welcome! LLMs definitely help with the migrations, there were definitely a few iterations because the surface area was massive, but overall it took the project from "will never be prioritised" to "I can work on it on and off when in boring meetings", which was a massive win.

I haven't found that LLMs help with CAD at all, but YMMV.

As for sharing here, the last time I shared something with "here's something I made with LLMs", the reply was "it shows", and that's just the latest instance. It just puts me off the whole thing.

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48916013

Oh I definitely don't expect them to help with CAD and nor would I want them to — I really enjoy knowing FreeCAD.

It's more the microcontroller choice, broad components, all that.

The main areas I find LLMs struggle with research, I struggle with research too. I am a pretty solid researcher and I find it validating, in fact, to find that a more brute-force-trained thing is not better than me.

I see your point about the snarky reply; I must admit I have probably in the more distant past been somewhat snarky but I stopped commenting like that whenever I spot myself doing it because I know it is dispiriting.

(The other reply, re: early and late stages, is the kind of substantive question that lingers in my mind).

Anyway I just want to reiterate my thanks: I am sort of cynical about this, in that I believe the technologies may have their uses, but I have no time for the cult and the hype train, so it is nice to see anyone talking about actual things.

By the way, I've written up my workflow if that interests you: https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/

> I can work on it on and off when in boring meetings

That’s not a sign of a healthy org. If you’re in a meeting it’s disrespectful not to be present. If you think a meeting is not useful you should reject it.

Sometimes I'm in a meeting where the item being discussed doesn't relate to me, and that's a good chance to put another turn in the LLM.

This is exactly why people shouold share what they are doing with ai, so we know whwn it works, the scope, tech...etc. Thank you for sharing.

I concur. I really want to see this from the "small stuff" upwards, which is probably why my own interest starts with local models and grows outwards, but all of these things are worth hearing.

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