[Avicebron]

> I learned essentially nothing about building vector search. I wanted the feature more than I wanted to know how to build the feature

Opus/Anthropic is hands down the best in my experience. But using it feels like intellectual fast food (they all are), I hate the fact that I can build something like a neatly presentable one off spa tool (ty Simon) when I'm barely paying attention. it feels unsatisfying to use.

EDIT: because I'm rambling, I like "AI" as much as the next guy, probably more because I was there before it turned into LLMs"R"US, but I also like(d) the practice of sitting around listening to music solving problems with Scala. I don't know why we've decided to make work less fun..

[pastel8739]

“We” didn’t decide to make work less fun, others decided for us.

[fluidcruft]

I sort of disagree. It's somewhat like having hypercard again. You can build fun UI things and make machines do what you want them to do. You can care about the parts you want to care about and not sweat about the parts you don't want to learn in detail (yet). And Claude and codex make great guides/Sherpas.

There are just too many parts involved to do anything. For example today I built a simple data collection app to use on my phone that involves inventories with photos for a tedious workflow I have to do. I knew what I wanted but didn't know how to even choose which tools to bother learn. And just even trying things to see if an approach works or not without spending hours learning one thing or another or wading through the hell of web search is really great.

Things I learned today that I figure everyone else must know: if you want to take a photo from a webapp I guess you need https. So I decided to try mTLS (knew it existed but never had the time) so asked Claude to write me a short tutorial about setting it up, creating keys, importing them (including a cool single line trick of spinning up a python server and downloading the keys on my phone rather than find a USB stick or whatever). And then helping me figure out a path out of the suffering of Chrome and Firefox hating self-signed CA. But at least I figured out how to make Firefox happy. But it would insist on prompting me for the certificate for every htmx request. But chatting with Claude I learn caddy is pretty cool, it's go. Claude suggests an auth boxcar when I balk at adding auth and user management to my app because I think the webserver should handle all this shit (wtf is a boxcar? Claude clues me in). I tell Claude to use go or rust to build the boxcar because Jesus Christ "yay" build another service just to get a good damn customized CRUD app on my phone that can take a picture. Claude picks go which is fine by me. (Incidentally I can't write go, but I can read it and it's on my "to be learned" agenda and go seems safer than a pile of python for this simple thing) The boxcar was fine but Claude was struggling with getting headers to work in the caddy config. So while Claude is working on that I do a quick Google about whether caddy can have extensions because there has to be a better way to "if someone has authenticated successfully, give them a cookie that will last an hour so they don't have to mash the confirm about using the certificate for every goddamn htmx request" than spin up a web service. Interrupt Claude and suggest an extension instead of a boxcar. Claude's on board so we ditch the boxcar. Have Claude and codex evaluate the extension for security. They find important issues about things a jerk might do, fix them. So successful mTLS connections transition to session cookies. So my dumb CRUD tool doesn't have to worry about auth. Which it didn't have to do anyway except browsers say so etc because my phone is literally only able to access the server via VPN anyway.

Other things I have learned today that only wasted 5min of Claude's time rather than hours of mine: Firefox camera access can't control flash, focus or zoom. So call out to the native app instead.

This is all quite fun and the tool I'm building is going to really make my own life better.

Is there a better way to do this: probably.

[Avicebron]

>only wasted 5min of Claude's time rather than hours of mine

I mean will you (we) retain all that it did after a few months go by? You may say we don't need to, but that sounds a little shallow given we're both on HN. Do you remember Gatsby's criticism of "Summer People"?

[fluidcruft]

I don't even remember things I did two years ago unless I leave good breadcrumbs and documentation. I don't think it's particularly worse than pulling in some dependency or framework from GitHub that will be completely different next year anyway. And Google's prone to change anything in Android anyway. Mobile or web seems like a foundation of quicksand, it's not anything I care about. The real takeaway is I can be productive without wasting my time on all the damn churn by just-in-time learning aided by these tools.

I'm pretty sure I will remember how easy and correct it was to modify Caddy vs the months of putzing around building Rube Goldberg constellations of services crap that I did last year for a different thing and that even Claude wanted to do. I've done the whole wading through outdated blog posts and trying to read documentation on other projects that I was doing. Learning five different projects and having to maintain seven services running in docker just so that I can use a tool to capture photos and store them in a webapp that can only be used if connected to my own VPN is insane and it's why I am not a web developer. I will 100% remember what 200 lines of golang does after looking at it again. The 1000 lines of JavaScript that were and backend auth crap that no longer exists: good riddance.

And no I don't trust my memory about what Gatsby said about Summer people without looking it up. I read Gatsby 30 years ago.