[sutterd]

I am doing a solo project that is pretty big, meaning it is not something I could vibe code. I can do alot with AI that I could never do on my own, but I am not seeing several mulitples improvement in my productivity. I spend so much time doing what I call "AI wrangling", trying to get it to do what I want. Claude is writing all the javscript and python code, but ultimately I am programming in English. What is good is that it is effectively a very high level computer language, where the agent can implement a lot of underlying code with a short English description, often. But many other times it takes a lot of work to get what you want.

[matheusmoreira]

I measured an ~8x increase in the number of commits I've been pushing, and I've actually been trying to restrain myself. I could do a lot more if I stopped reviewing and editing the code. I think it's got more to do with my executive ability than raw productivity though. AI essentially cured my ADHD by making the execution of my ideas virtually painless.

[raptor99]

LOL "I measured an 8x increase in the number of commits Ive been pushing" is an absolutely useless statement

[matheusmoreira]

Subscribed to Claude a few months ago. I immediately started working with it on my programming language. Since then, I've implemented a compacting garbage collector, a size class based memory allocator, a unified value heap, deeply optimized hash tables and even implemented shapes like V8 and Self, redesigned the value representation, created a Common Lisp style condition system, implemented UTF-8 text decoding, refined the generators API, increased the number of tests from ~200 to ~1200 and improved the test suite to the point it runs all of those tests in parallel in under two seconds, implemented stack protection support, added an aarch64 matrix to the GitHub CI, fixed a zillion bugs, improved performance, perfected tail call optimization. I did so much stuff I'm probably forgetting some. And these aren't "lol just do it" prompts either, I'm putting effort into refining design and implementation. I review every line. Just finished designing safe hash table iteration in spite of mutability: generation counters that get bumped whenever the table is reallocated. It's actually gonna be more powerful than what other languages do. Next up on my todo list is to implement my language's unified pattern matcher, static allocation for all interpreter internal data in order to get rid of all initialization code and achieve nearly zero startup time, and then finally a bytecode interpreter to close the performance gap on the likes of Python.

Dramatically improved my static site generator Pugneum to the point it's better than markdown and added Atom and RSS feeds, used it to write several articles about my language. Pace is so fast I actually need to write those articles by hand in order to crystalize the knowledge I learned. If I don't I'm afraid I'll just forget everything. No LLMs for the articles themselves, but they sure as hell took all the pain away from writing them. Pugneum even has back references and table of contents generation now. Claude even helped me refine my website's CSS, something I'm not very good at.

Also created my own invoicing system for $DAYJOB so I can invoice companies from my terminal. Started a decompilation project for my cherished childhood games and I've already almost finished decompiling one game's engine after just a few days. Been working on my cyberdeck project too, this one's a bit slow because I got to the point where I'll actually need to spend money on it to move forward. All this inside the rootless development virtual machine system built on top of QEMU and systemd that I developed together with Claude, whose network isolation I'm currently hardening. Started reverse engineering my laptop again! And I'm actually making progress! Made a color scheme app for the keyboard LEDs controller I made many years ago, with loads and loads of color schemes! Found some kind of bug in my keyboard while doing it, in less than an hour I had the root cause and a fix applied locally, sent the fix to systemd, it got merged. Planning to ramp up my free and open source software participation as well now that exploring codebases is a breeze. Already have some mesa patches ready for upstream. Have been playing with strace since I use it so much.

Better?

[jimbokun]

I’m sure rapor99 is unimpressed while not being able to point to any similar accomplishments in their own work in the same timeframe.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

I'm building a memory safe programming language with a declarative concurrency model that's close to release.

There is ZERO chance I would ever be able to complete it on my own.

I doubt it'll get traction, but if it doesn't, I am pretty confident a future language will take the ideas for polymorphic synchronization and profile-guided optimization.

It has an easy version/mode of compilation that makes Rust's affine ownership accessible like a high-level scripting language, and it can progressively become more strict, where the compiler does ~99% of the work for you, and you just pick options as it finds issues (that it explains to you like you're 5) along the way.

Along the way, I also built a suite of tools that helps identify complexity better than anything I've seen (which was necessary to get the LLMs to be able to unslop themselves and write something that actually works).

I doubt the Ruby community shrugs it off, but time will tell.

[pizlonator]

How do you know it’s actually memory safe?

[onlyrealcuzzo]

I have ~5500 memory safety fuzz tests, four different test suites with between ~80%-99% line/branch coverage each, and the same design as Rust, and haven't found a memory safety issue in 4 weeks, and I'm still planning another ~4 weeks of testing before release, more if need be.

Rust had memory safety bugs well after release - IIUC all the way until after the 1.0 release.

So, it's highly unlikely to be perfect, but I think it'll be in better shape than Go or Rust were when they initially launched.

[mohamedkoubaa]

I have the same experience, though I feel myself getting better at wrangling over the past few months