Hacker News: larve

I think that due to the nature of language, often the prompting technique that you use is indeed the best, for you, since it allows you to express yourself “naturally” and thus have more consistent and effective session with a model adopting a similar style and using similar abstractions when building.

New comment by larve in "Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up"

larve — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 17:00:25 +0000

I'm always a very serious person while I wait for people to join the stream. I'm sorry you weren't impressed, but tbf that's not really my goal, I just like building things and yapping about it.

New comment by larve in "Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up"

larve — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 12:28:04 +0000

Not sure what you mean? This was a demo in a live session that took about 30 minutes, including ui ideation (see pngs). It’s a reasonably well featured app and the code is fairly minimal. I wouldn’t be able to write something like that in 30 minutes by hand.

New comment by larve in "Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up"

larve — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 12:17:46 +0000

Since I get downvoted because I guess people don’t believe me, I’m sitting at breakfast reading a book. I suddenly think about yaml streaming parsing, start a gpt research, dig a bit deeper into streaming parser approaches, and launch a deep research on streaming parsing which I will print out and read tomorrow at breakfast and go through by hand. I then take some of the gpt discussion and paste it into Manus, saying:

“ Write a streaming go yaml parsers based on the tokenizer (probably use goccy yaml if there is no tokenizer in the standard yaml parser), and provide an event callback to the parser which can then be used to stream and print to the output.

Make a series of test files and verify they are streamed properly.”

This is the slot machine. It might work, it might be 50% jank, it might be entire jank. It’ll be a few thousand lines of code that I will skim and run. In the best case, it’s a great foundation to more properly work on. In the worst case it was an interesting experiment and I will learn something about either prompting Manus, or streaming parsing, or both.

I certainly won’t dedicate my full code review attention to what was generated. Think of it more as a hyper specific google search returning stackoverflow posts that go into excruciating detail.

https://chatgpt.com/share/68b98724-a8cc-8012-9bee-b9c4a77fe9...

https://manus.im/share/kmsyzuoRHfn1FNjg5NWz17?replay=1

New comment by larve in "Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up"

larve — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:44:13 +0000

You can look at my GitHub, and I stream full unedited sessions on https://youtube.com/@program-with-ai

New comment by larve in "Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up"

larve — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:43:17 +0000

Trivial is a pretty big word in this context. Expanding an idea into some sort of code is indeed a matter of waiting. The idea, the prompt, the design of the overall workflow to leverage the capabilities of llms/agents in a professional/long-lived codebase context is far from trivial, imo.