[htfu]

Probably the best we can hope for at the moment is a reduction in the back-and-forth, increase in ability to one-shot stuff with a really good spec. The regular human work then becomes building that spec, in regular human (albeit AI-assisted) ways.

[ErroneousBosh]

Is the "back and forth" thing normal for AI stuff, then? Because every time I've attempted to use Claude or Copilot for coding stuff, it's been completely unable to do anything on its own, and I've ended up writing all of the code while it's just kind of introduced misspellings into it.

Maybe someone can show me how you're supposed to do it, because I have seen no evidence that AI can write code at all.

[htfu]

Very much normal yes. This is why I've been (so far) still mainly sticking to having it as an all-knowing oracle telling me what I need to know, which it mostly does successfully.

When it works for pure generation it's beautiful, when it doesn't it's ruinous enough to make me take two steps back. I'll have another go at getting with all the pure agentic rage everyone's talking about soon enough.

[jazzyjackson]

Step 1: deposit money into an Anthropic API account

Step 2: download Zed and paste in your API Key

Step 3: Give detailed instructions to the assistant, including writing ReadMe files on the goal of the project and the current state of the project

Step 4: stop the robot when it's making a dumb decision

Step 5: keep an eye on context size and start a new conversation every time you're half full. The more stuff in the context the dumber it gets.

I spent about 500 dollars and 16 hours of conversation to get an MVP static marketplace [0], a ruby app that can be crawled into static (and js-free!) files, without writing a single line of code myself, because I don't know ruby. This included a rather convoluted data import process, loading the database from XML files of a couple different schemas.

Only thing I had to figure out on my own was how to upload the 140,000 pages to cloudflare free tier.

[0] https://motorcycledealer.com/

[ErroneousBosh]

> Step 4: stop the robot when it's making a dumb decision

Yeah I can't stop myself when I'm about to make a dumb decision, just look at my github repo. I ported Forth to a 1980s sampler and wrote DSP code on an 8-bit Arduino.

How am I going to stop a robot making dumb decisions?

Also, this all sounds like I'm doing a lot of skivvy work typing stuff in (which I hate) and not actually writing much code (which is the bit I like).

[hyperadvanced]

The robot will output text like “Oh, I see, the user wants me to make a Lovecraftian horror with asynchronous subprocess calls instead of HTTP endpoints, so I better suggest we reinstall the dependencies that are already installed so we can sacrifice this project to Mammoth”

It is at this point where you can say “NONONO YOU ABSOLUTE DONKEY stop that we just want a FastAPI endpoint!!” And it will go “You’re absolutely right, I was over complicating this!”

[jazzyjackson]

Correct.

I did waste about 20 minutes trying to do a recursive link following crawl (to write each rendered page to file), because Opus wanted to write a ruby task to do it. It wasn’t working so I googled it and found out link following is a built in feature of cURL…

[hyperadvanced]

I catch enough of these weird things where I don’t fully understand why it chose to do something, but understand that there’s a simpler way, where I tend to be skeptical of using it for anything I couldn’t do myself but am just too lazy to go in and punch the keys for. On that front, it’s great

[verdverm]

Step 1 is where Anthropic lost me.

1. If you don't use it soon enough, they keep it (shame on them, do the things you need to in order to be a money transmitter, you have billions of dollars)

2. Pay-go with billing warning and limits. You can use Claude like this through Google VertexAI

[littlestymaar]

> I spent about 500 dollars and 16 hours of conversation to get an MVP static marketplace

If I wasn't already convinced that agentic tools were slot machines, here's a very strong argument in favor of that theory…

[8note]

there's a lot of back and forth for describing what you actually want, design, the constraints, and testing out the feeback loops you set up for it to be able to tell tell if its on the right track or not.

when its actually writing code its pretty hands off, unless you need to course correct to point it in a better direction