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We should be more ambitious with the software we build

We should be more ambitious with the software we build

ltratt

Comments (231)

  • blueblazin
    With every new model I've been attempting to build something that takes at least 1 month and really pushes the model. So far I've done:- Python interpreter in Rust (fail): https://github.com/BlueBlazin/pyrs- Low-poly Google Earth like engine (success): https://github.com/BlueBlazin/lowpolyearth- Codebase -> 2d infinite-zoom visualization (success): https://github.com/BlueBlazin/blockvizI have never understood or liked all the obsession with one-shot builds.
  • j2kun
    I get what the author is saying, but his examples like "a ripgrep fork that ... is faster for my codex ripgrep workloads" don't strike me as particularly ambitious.Perhaps we should be more ambitious in the types of problems we try to solve, and the types of value we try to provide with the software we build.
  • lubujackson
    We should be more ambitious, but we need to learn how we can be ambitious with AI, and what value we can create.AI can take us from 0 to MVP in a prompt. It can fill in gaps of knowledge and allows someone who knows half of the stack to build the whole thing nearly seamlessly. These are superpowers but don't by themselves lead to new products.What AI cannot do is remove the world of complications that happen after the MVP - product feature tradeoffs and choices, how to handle integrations and customizations, how to serve multiple types of users, how to communicate and market the app, how to handle security and data storage, how to deal with customers and bugs, etc. All of these need to be considered and acted on by a human in some fashion. AI can help with each concern but can't solve them without understanding the concern and determining how to frame it in a prompt.This is why we have a glut of amazing demos that go nowhere while we figure out how to build software differently. This will take some time and I imagine the result will be software heavily-structured with a bit of AI reasoning woven throughout, not an army of agents and sub-agents burning infinite tokens.
  • Supermancho
    This statement stood out to me.> I have a similar thought about "there's no reason for software to be slow" BTW; in many cases, if you use AI to speed up some flow, you will add a bunch of messy code that will be overfit for the use case you tested on and will neither generalize, perf-wise, for all the use cases you should care about, nor will be maintainable upon future changes.LLMs have hardened hundreds of apps where I work.Maybe it's a language-specific thing. Most of the time, in Java, LLMs take into consideration tradeoffs (especially if they are part of the initial prompt) and actively explains them. It generally won't make messy workarounds, without a lot of extra prompting forcing it to do so.Ofc, if you have:- Functional tests - you'll be able to see it in the execution times of specific APIs- Stress testing - performance profiling is the most important output artifact
  • __s
    LLMs are great for being nerdsniped. I started work on walshadow (reading pg wal into clickhouse) to demonstrate the project's infeasibility, but pieces started coming together into something reasonable & order of magnitude fasterThe project would've been impossible for me without LLMs. & even with them there's an argument that this project is pushing complexity limits too far. But at least with ETL there's a clear feedback loop to build on
  • mindcandy
    Agreed.I've been seeing too much "I've been coding for decades and what I've always done has be reduced to telling AI to do it for me."and not nearly enough "I've been coding for decades and recently worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before."Much easier to complain that you are bored than to step back up to high-effort with your new fancy tools.
  • pech0rin
    I find posts like this interesting because it seems to show the true bottleneck which is good ideas. Faster regex is cool but is it ambitious?We can rewrite existing libraries and software all we want, but the true test is if we can create something new.The thing I learned about myself with AI is that now I have time to work on every idea that pops into my head —- my ideas aren’t that great.
  • Buttons840
    Make a synthesizer that can accurately recreate all orcastra instruments convincingly. People will pay hundreds of dollars for it--maybe thousands.Make a reliable and robust geometry kernel. People will pay thousands--or maybe millions for it.
  • giovannibonetti
    > Funnily enough, for coding, on many tasks, if you actually use one of their SOTA models and compare it to what you get from Anthropic, the actual speedup isn't all that large because of time spent on things like compiling Rust.That's why I bet that fast compilers are the future. See this other thread that reached the front page a few hours ago about the Roc language [1][1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50218195
  • Ericson2314
    You gotta edit your posts!> But I know Malis well enough to trust his work without looking into it> If I didn't know Malis, I would make the same assumption, because who has the time to look into all of these projects? Because I know Malis, I didn't bother to look at it; I just trusted himFirst and third paragraphs are highly redundant (surrounding ideas are the same too).It's not nice to read something that appears like the author never read it.
  • weinzierl
    "[..] the last time I taked to him about pgrust verification, he mentioned using Kani to verify some parts of the code. He's since switched to Lean and has been using Lean to verify things that are too complex to do in Kani. This would be another topic for another post,"I'd love to read that post!I understand how to use Kani. I suppose Rust with Lean involves Aeneas, but this is over my head. I'd love someone to write this up, not only the mechanics but also exploring the current practical limits of it.
  • rerdavies
    If only you invested a tiny fraction of the effort it took to write this to make it easier for us to read. It's a serious discourtesy.```.reading-container { /\* Automatically caps the container at 65 characters on desktop, but scales to 100% minus a 2rem padding buffer on mobile devices \*/ width: min(65ch, 100% - 2rem); margin-inline: auto; } ```
  • d-ramdass
    It’s never been better to hill climb on problems especially deep systems problems. If you have the expertise and desire to carefully design goals, identify salient metrics, and recursively improve with rigor, modern AI can provide a massively powerful toolkit.
  • tlarkworthy
    I redid Dan's zstd rust rewrite benchmark for Anthropic models and was shocked to find haiku 5.5 can do it. The latest models are nuts.https://taktile.com/blog/property-based-testing-claude
  • Uristqwerty
    Tangential thought when reading the code formatting bit in the examples appendix: Inject a comment with fmt-start-{unique-token} and a corresponding -end-, and you could get away with a much simpler parser and hopefully far fewer edge cases, assuming it doesn't influence the lines in between. It's a bit roundabout, but the pressure of 'figuring out AST position the direct way'd be too fiddly to do by hand' inspires 'so make an easy-to-spot landmark that'll remain in place' when you can't delegate all the details to an AI model.
  • SoftTalker
    Software is already too ambitious. It's beyond our ability to write correctly, reason about or manage securely. When we can get to a point where we don't have a level 10 CVE every other week or millions of people's private information leaked constantly, maybe we can talk about getting more ambitious.
  • anonymous908213
    > I find it understandable that, every time I see pgrust discussed on a news aggregator, most people dismiss it as vibeslop garbage because almost all of these rewrite projects are slop. If I didn't know Malis, I would make the same assumption, because who has the time to look into all of these projects? Because I know Malis, I didn't bother to look at it; I just trusted himPerhaps a poor choice, given just yesterday pgrust was removed from ClickBench for cheating the benchmark in three different ways (hand-rolled code specifically targeting each of the benchmark queries, caching, and being unable to execute queries outside of the ones tested by the benchmark).---Edit: I see Luu actually acknowledged this, buried in the footnotes, but it feels kinda hand-wavy. It mostly reads as "I know he would never cheat, he's better than that!", which is not very convincing to other people. The article insinuates people only think it was cheating because they don't know better, but I've looked into the details. I've seen his explanation. I don't find it convincing, at all. Cheaters denying they cheat is a matter of course. Granted, I don't think it was actually intentional or malicious; it's just what happens when you go maximum vibeslop, because LLMs are themselves reward-trained into cheating benchmarks. In the same breath of saying you trust him as a founder because he doesn't make outrageous claims about his product, you acknowledge he "prematurely" sent in a preview that had no purpose to be sent in as-was for anything other than generating hype. What does it say for your allegedly rigorous Lean-verified testing if you're sending in a database to a benchmark while it is incapable of being actually used as a database?
  • wccrawford
    I think we should focus on writing the existing software better before being more ambitious. The absolute wave of "ai slop" is from people who are "more ambitious" now. Why do we want more of that?I'm being more ambitious in that I'm working on projects that I had sidelined for literal decades because I didn't have time for them. But I'm writing the same things, just faster. And probably better, rather than just what I'd have done before.And I'm being slightly more ambitious in that I'm using languages I haven't used before, like Rust.But when I hear that a non-programmer wrote a new ai-assisted (vibe or not) thing, I walk away and wait for the it to mature, be surpassed, or find out it's an absolute shitshow. An unsurprising number of them were shitshows and it came out fairly quickly after I decided to wait and see.
  • piro0919
    I'm building a fan site for a Japanese baseball team on my own. Besides news and videos, it pulls player stats from more than ten sites, from the league's official site to Wikipedia. Writing that many scrapers by hand would have been impossible for me, so I wouldn't have even tried without Claude Code.
  • vishvananda
    I’ve been coming around to the same conclusion. We are really just scratching the surface of what we can do with these new tool1. The windmill I have been tilting at is creating a c++ compiler[1] and the most recent version is able to compile about 7x faster than gcc[2]. I don’t know that this is super-useful because people aren’t writing much in c++ these days, but as the article mentions, faster rust compilation would accelerate agentic coding considerably. I’ve just started tackling rust and I don’t have a confirmed result yet but early testing makes me think I can find a 4x+ speed up here.[1]: https://github.com/vishvananda/cppgm-extended[2]: caveats here include only c++11, only x86, and potential for bugs, but 7x is pretty darn significant even with caveats
  • ChaseRensberger
    I feel like I make this point a lot at work. We are not running out of problems. Let’s move the goalposts.
  • coretx
    The best way to improve your solutions is to study ever worse problems.
  • ChrisMarshallNY
    Speaking only for myself, I have found that using an LLM has allowed me to add significant utility to the apps that I ship.I am not thrilled with all the coding decisions that it makes. I would definitely do stuff differently, but I have learned not to pop the hood and mess with the engine, myself. If I really don't like something, I ask the LLM to change it.It's worked for me, but YMMV. I'm just one guy, shipping relatively small apps.
  • lijok
    It’s sad the amount of times I’ve heard super talented programmers say “ofcourse we’re not gonna build another X” then proceed writing a wrapper around X and pretend that’s a product.
  • 2001zhaozhao
    I think getting a good reputation for being able to build real, ambitious software with AI will be a really important thing going forward.
  • rr808
    I really liked this talk about how the premise of "software is eating the world" is incorrect. I think AI coding tools proves the point that software part is easy, its the hardware that is the important part. We can't really be more ambitious with software when ultimate pure software is limited in what is possible.Bryan Cantrill: Andreessen’s Folly - The False Dichotomy of Software and Hardware https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0JjG0Qfwi8
  • RomanPushkin
    Not trying to be mean, but first of all, we should be more ambitious using CSS.
  • Vaushite
    Behind the link "slow software that the creator is claiming is fast" is the following text:"funnily enough, I have some faith in some of the projects that people are the most skeptical of, e.g., every time I see pgrust somewhere, there are a lot of skeptical comments. But, without having looked into the details of what he's optimizing, I would trust that they're not doing something shady with their benchmarks because Michael Malis started the project (and is still involved)"This aged like milk. pgrust was caught cheating on all benchmarks this week.
  • han2
  • Lerc
    >every time I see pgrust discussed on a news aggregator, most people dismiss it as vibeslop garbage because almost all of these rewrite projects are slop.I understand being predisposed to expect a poor quality half arsed effort for projects like this. I don't really have a problem with that. There is a lot of crap out there.What I find rather offensive is when people declare something to be poor quality and half arsed before they have taken a good look at it.It's one thing to think something is probably crap so I'm not going to bother even looking. It is something completely different when you think something is probably crap so you tell people that it is crap without checking.
  • tensor
    I’ve been using the latest agentic frameworks and have come to realize that the discourse around vibe coding and slop really needs more nuance.There is a gulf of difference between someone who doesn’t understand how to program “vibe coding” software and an experienced software developer using ai to write code with heavy direction, review, and best practices.Today both would be said to be “vibe coded” but we really need to differentiate them. Also, if everything I’m hearing from people is true, it sounds like most corporate code is now completely ai written in the latter way I described. It’s interesting we don’t hear commercial software being called slop yet. Maybe it’s coming.In any case, ai is far more capable than I realized. Not sure what to make of it.
  • anon
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  • giovannibonetti
    Many startups can now work in ways that were only fathomable in Big Tech before. Do you want a build system like Bazel for your monorepo? You can have it. Do you want to rewrite your app in a faster language? Sure, go ahead. Do you want to have native apps in all platforms? Yes, please.
  • generalizations
    Better late than never.Some of us have been taking this approach for literally years now.
  • sashank_1509
    I sympathize with the sentiment in this post but it’s a losing proposition.In the past building something fast, complicated etc required quite a lot of skill and some time. Now you need far lesser skill and lesser time. This just means what you are building is commodified, and has far lesser value that it had before. Take typescript, if it becomes clear that LLMs can speed it up with no regressions and a week or so of prompting, then most likely every company will have their own typescript compiler and no one will use your new one that you built with your 200$ plan.A lot of tasks are much easier now and also monetarily they’re not worth the 200$ or so tokens of the ChatGPT plan you’re using, because anybody (or at least a number of people) can do it now.Rather than being more ambitious with AI, you will be far better off finding a unique combination of skills and services that does not compete / AI can’t provide. Only the big labs can be really ambitious with AI.
  • theturtletalks
    I'm building an open-source Shopify for every vertical and built a software factory to do it. I envisioned this before LLMs, but LLMs are finally making it possible!
  • lukeify
    Agreed. Perhaps we could start with some line length and text wrapping restrictions so we can be respectful of other people reading.Or even just a nicer font, maybe?
  • verdverm
    > On looking into this, the accusations of nefarious cheating seem to be falseI think the claim is more that the Ai cheated, not Malis, and that this is evidence of eyes free coding.I'd still like to see the actual commit history and the community getting to do their own investigation. The squashed mega commits with 1000s of files (400k files in the first commit) does not lend itself to transparency. Transparency is often the best cure to accusations. Not providing transparency upon controversy will be seen as a cover up.
  • syshyk
    Sounds like marketing for AI to me.
  • tonymet
    Even he’s not ambitious enough. Set the boundaries according to the hardware – billions of ops a second . Your rewrite should run at least 1000x faster than the handwritten version , with 1/10 resources.I noticed my cloud images had 150mb ram wasted by vendor slop. AI rewrote the functionality into a few mb .We’ve had slop long before AI . What you produce now is up to you
  • nektro
    body { max-width: 70rem; }
  • anon
    undefined
  • hoangkien1703
    [dead]