[dofm]

It sometimes feels to me that cloud AI providers have convinced people that cloud AI is worth it because of all the ways people have been able to use cloud AI to write blog posts about using cloud AI to make cloud AI more efficient for something that they haven't shipped yet and aren't really ready to talk about.

[resonious]

Trust me there are plenty of us using cloud AI to actually ship stuff. We just aren't writing blog posts about it.

[BLKNSLVR]

... replying to internet comments to reassure the fact that cloud AI is worth it because we're 'this close' to shipping a product that allows more efficient usage of cloud AI ...

But seriously, a friend of mine has been both amazed and frustrated in equal measure by cloud AI, and I think the frustration part is resultant from the new precedent set by the amazing parts.

... his project is as-yet unshipped.

[dominotw]

what did you ship?

[ncphillips]

I’ve used it for several improvements to our wysiwyg. I was able to refactor to a much more cohesive architecture that is making future work much easier/safer. We got a fzf like search algorithm for an autocomplete that includes marking which characters matched. It fixed some jank performance issues I was struggling to track down.

Fixed small several bugs last week without even open the editor. It wrote tests that confirmed the bugs, then fixed them. Then I manually confirmed as well.

It built a double entry event log. A single application event produces two logs, one for the person doing the action, one for the person being acted upon.

For a nasty problem we have, we had AI prototype 2 different solutions. Then we reveiewed them as a team. We threw those out but it was very helpful input into our decision making.

[zabzonk]

> I’ve used it for several improvements to our wysiwyg. I was able to refactor to a much more cohesive architecture that is making future work much easier/safer. We got a fzf like search algorithm for an autocomplete that includes marking which characters matched. It fixed some jank performance issues I was struggling to track down.

so, basically did some vague, almost incomprehensible stuff. seems par for the course.

[dpark]

How was any of that incomprehensible? They gave a list of some actual things they shipped. The hand wavy dismissal where you pretend they didn’t say anything just exposes your bias. You don’t want to hear a success story so you don’t.

[zabzonk]

how do you ship a "wysiwyg"?

and my point is he is doing the hand-waving. i'm quite happy to hear success stories - we get so few concrete ones here.

[resonious]

Just features for the client. The same stuff I was shipping before but much faster and more stable.

[password4321]

Most of "What are you working on?" is AI assisted; not much is shipped.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=working%20author%3Adavid927&so...

[Thanemate]

Checking all the past "what are you working on?" threads just to realize that, somewhere in August 2024 stuff just exploded and the average thread goes reached ~1000 messages, from ~50 pre-August.

[dominotw]

Tons of ppl got into CS in last few years worldwide.

[fc417fc802]

I don't think that explains it. CS has been an extremely popular degree for at least the past 20 years. Not to mention coding bootcamps and the like.

The obvious notable event circa 2024 was LLMs becoming reasonably useful for code assistance (IMO and IIRC OFC).

[properbrew]

https://whistle-enterprise.com

[Schiendelman]

I've shipped (to TestFlight) a fairly fun video game that's tricking my friends into working out: https://reverdure.yourstrategy.co

[tracerbulletx]

I shipped this shader based video compositor as part of a bigger project ive been working on since before LLMs but the compositor was 100% ai and it works fantastically. It's not a huge project but I and a number of my users use it. https://lowkeyviewer.com/studio/

[cgio]

I did ship a quite efficient quantum simulator as a toy out of other work (and a block truncation certificate as a side-product). https://github.com/cgiogkarakis/qut

[6510]

Thinking about it a better question [for me] would be what might have but didn't ship because of LLMs.

[ncphillips]

That’s an interesting question, in particular because I don’t think I have a single example

[dofm]

I have been thinking about this for a while, because I personally need a career pivot but I was going to move into personalised training, and I think AI likely really messes with the viability of that.

[stavros]

Whenever I've answered this question, the reply was always "this is shit", so I don't bother now. Bad faith questions just shouldn't be answered.

[dofm]

If you characterise questions as bad faith so you don’t have to answer, sure.

Since this is my thread, and since I am an exasperated freelancer who has made most of his post-dot-com career from writing exactly the kind of quite small, simple, unambitious, often internal things for smaller customers that nobody would confuse with anything cool, who is trying to understand how AI is going to make his life any better when it’s so opaque, fast moving, poorly documented and full of unverifiable claims battling unverifiable claims, let me assure you that the following question is not being asked in bad faith:

What did you ship?

[stavros]

I've shipped small, simple, unambitious internal things for our company that saved people lots of time, and I've shipped them in minutes rather than the a day or two they used to take.

I've just shipped a migration from our old auth service to the new one in a week, a migration that we've put off for three years because it would take the team months to finish.

I've shipped small side-projects that I'm the primary (and usually only) user of, but they now take me two days rather than weeks of effort and learning (e.g. https://www.writelucid.cc, https://pine.town, https://stavrobot.stavros.io, https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula).

I've made changes in OSS apps that I just wouldn't have made otherwise (https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/pulls/skorokith...), and even some closed-source ones (https://www.stavros.io/posts/adding-a-feature-to-a-closed-so...).

I've shipped hardware projects that would have taken me months of learning in a few days (https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/).

How's that?

[dofm]

Thank you for the details! These are precisely the kind of things I want to hear about because they are self-contained and I can judge against the kind of stuff I do.

I am quite interested in experimenting with it for migrations, because for example I have a set of sites written in older Nuxt and Vue and Buefy that need refreshing (and the frontend ported to that UI-agnostic Buefy replacement whose name escapes me at the moment but begins with “ou” I think). These migrations won’t happen any other way (small customers won’t pay for that) so I am open to whether tooling can reduce the cost I have to swallow. LLMs I have tested (including local models) seem to support the idea that this will be doable but I am a little out of the loop with the projects so I haven’t got back to this yet.

The hardware thing looks great; I am a sort of distracted maker and FreeCAD nerd but I often need a nudge to get started and I have found an LLM chat to help there a little bit (though it cannot answer some questions if I don’t have the specific vocabulary).

Writelucid is definitely cute.

I think you should not be put off talking about these things because whether people agree with you or not about whether they are important, they can at least measure against them.

[taosx]

This is exactly why people shouold share what they are doing with ai, so we know whwn it works, the scope, tech...etc. Thank you for sharing.

[galangalalgol]

I don't use it to ship whole products. I have it do some tasks.

I have it code dsp techniques in journal articles I hand it. I have it create the unit tests, pipelines documentation. Then I manually verify the test cases aren't wrong and run the tests. If they pass it does what I wanted and I start looking at the code quality. It varies from being better than I could have done it to being objectively bad. I fix it if it needs fixing, then I'm done.

I have also pointed it at issues in our backlog and it usually finds the subtle logic errors underlying the behavior in the issue.

I haven't started and entire product from zero and shipped it. Mostly because I haven't started a new product since it was capable of that. But also because it has a scale beyond which I don't find it as useful. I have used it for an entire repo, but in the crates.io or npm scale of repo, not boost scale.

[ncphillips]

I work at a 6 year old startup. Essentially every feature and bug fix we’ve shipped in the last year has had LLMs involved. Every project plan involved AI, either for writing or for codebase research. For code review we get AI to do the first pass.

[itishappy]

Why assume bad faith? I've witnessed a barrage of "proof of concepts" at my dayjob by folks who have zero intention of ever hooking up their dashboard to our actual messy data. Shipping is still a major barrier. Is your experience meaningfully different?

[Forgeties79]

This just feels like a bad faith comment designed to spike the conversation entirely.

[speedster217]

Agreed. AI has been "just trust me bro" for so long. People need to show receipts instead of spreading vague hype

[Forgeties79]

Especially given the wildly unsustainable rate of investment.

[dominotw]

shipped = paying real users ( or a non profit with users)

doesnt matter what subjective opinions are.

shipped is not pushing something on github.

[dofm]

My definition would be "users waiting for it who received it"; that's the one that fits the broadest real world definition of the word. Not everything is an organisation, not everyone is paying.

[lovich]

If the only user is the author, then I don’t see a meaningful distinction between shipped and not shipped. It’s like a blacksmith who said they invented a new tool with great value but they built it themselves and no one else is willing to use it because it’s so customized to their workflow.

Edit: I’ll add a caveat that I’d agree it was shipped if it’s making the author money even if they are the only user, but otherwise it all smells like dotcom era Pets.com level of selling a dollar for 99 cents and claiming it’s the future.

[aytigra]

Many very well made software written without any AI was never "shipped" because there were no people who wanted to pay for it, many very poorly made software was shipped because demand and marketing did the job.

So evaluating software by "shipped or not" is just useless.

[apparent]

I have used AI to ship software that users pay for.

[apparent]

What a weird thing to downvote without comment. You doubt this? I am literally using AI right now to update software that generates tens of thousands of dollars of revenue annually.

[ch4s3]

My team redid a bunch of our ETL. I personally built a programming language that you can download and use, and I’m about to release an iOS app(in a few weeks).

[girvo]

operatorsval.gg

Which is basically a fancy calendar and team management system for my Valorant Premier team haha

It’s on my GitHub as operators-premier-manager but note it is not great: it serves its purpose which is to wrangle my team to show up for practice and scrims

[ksaun]

I'm hesitant to respond, because I haven't shipped yet and I haven't shown any evidence. But I am close enough to completion that I am certain Claude's work will be sufficient to ship.

I'm making a fairly simple game, a single player 2D roguelite strategy game. More context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886151

From an implementation perspective, it is about 80% complete, where by "complete", I mean "adequately polished such that I could ship it." (I'm not interested in providing evidence of my claim at this time, and you are welcome to not believe me.) Most of the remaining 20% are optional game modes I could choose to cut (and may, for gameplay reasons).

I do not contend that the code is excellent. But to whatever extent the code is "slop", that has not meaningfully inhibited the ongoing development or caused noticeable issues with the player experience.

The game is not especially ambitious, but it's something I would have been unable to create without genAI. The version of me that could have made it without genAI would have taken > 10x as long to get as far as I've gotten.

[kittoes]

https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.World...

"Shipped" is a bit strong in my case, but I think this counts as something that isn't mere slop.

[dandellion]

One sentence into that readme I can tell you that yes, it most definitely counts as slop.

[kittoes]

That's fair critique, the README itself is indeed slop explicitly written by bots for bots. What it actually does and how it works is actually pretty neat if you care to look.

[Chris2048]

Then.. why would you link to the readme if you know it's slop? What's the point of a slop README?

[lenkite]

Jesus Wept. Software engineering is dying at the moment and everyone has AI Glitz in their eyes.

[kittoes]

Dying? Really?

https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.Maths...

Some of us aren't just slopping it up like @theo and all the other AI influencers are, as I developed nearly every single line of this by hand over the span of the past decade. Agents recently became capable of factchecking it and helped find bugs that my other unit testing never caught. Software engineering has never been more alive!

https://gist.github.com/Kittoes0124/6827d08e457c1c8b790422af...

This is a snippet I wrote years ago to help me study different formulations of the equation ((1 + √5) / 2). There was this thing I could "see" in there that would allow me index into these sequences, and whole families of others, in O(1) time. The problem is that I still don't know enough maths to derive the exact object that I want from the nonsense that I have.

https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.Maths...

This is the reformulation of that snippet into a proper object, distilled using Fable and Sol. Unlike BinaryIntegerFunctions, I didn't write a line of this and I'm quite happy with that. It's been a slog for so long... being able to let these agents toil away at all the off-by-one type noise is just nice. I get to focus on an actual product for once instead of manufacturing every single nut and bolt myself.

[inigyou]

... What is it? A game, apparently? There are no screenshots. Is the game fun?

[kittoes]

It's not a full game yet, but the substrate on which I am building one. It implements a completely deterministic SDF VM rendering engine that allows edits in real-time at acceptable performance levels. The engine is essentially folded in on itself as the editor is the game; assuming that an editor mode was actually defined in the world document. It's a lot...

https://claude.ai/code/artifact/382aee8a-3a3b-4cf8-801f-3ddb...

[breuleux]

Part of the issue with "shipping" AI-generated code is, what's the value of shipping something that your prospective customers could just make for themselves? Shipping a product used to be the gold standard of value, but I'm not sure it is anymore, the zeitgeist just yet has to catch up.

I think it does have pretty good value when you are your own customer, because you can make exactly what you need. For instance, I'm using it to make a web playground in which I can test the board game I'm designing, instead of asking people to pay for, and install Tabletop Simulator. I'm satisfied. I can tell the code sucks without even looking at it. But I wouldn't have had the time to do this myself, the token cost isn't prohibitive, and it works fine.

[shepherdjerred]

Most people still prefer products over building their own thing, even if the barrier is lower.

As an example consumer 3D printing hasn’t had much impact on manufacturing

[dofm]

This is a bit of a year-of-linux-on-the-desktop question.

Desktop 3D printers are tools; I know many people using them to support their making. And they've utterly changed manufacturing on another level (simply because of their ability to surface a prototype).

It will get better and better and better and still never replace mass production, but mass production will be changed by it.

Not least because of the fundamental shift in availability of the tools to make tools. The productised desktop CNC market is wild and it owes almost its entire existence to the change in the market driven by 3D printing.

[shepherdjerred]

Sorry I am not saying that X technology is not important, transformative, etc.

I am saying that the average person is going to want to just have things that work. They are not going to want to have a hobby of using X technology.

It doesn't matter how much you lower the barrier to entry on making apps, websites, games, whatever. Most people are just going to want something that is ready and off-the-shelf.

I mean, why do people pick an iPhone over a cheaper Android even if they are functionally similar? Aside from the (valid) green-bubble/social aspect, it's a much more polished product.

[oggreen]

The reality however is that unless you're spending tens of thousands on hardware or setting up cloud instances you can't run anything near close to state of the art.

In almost all cases right now, a subscription with a cloud AI wins.

[fragmede]

> In almost all cases right now,

What sort of benchmark or test would convince you that "almost all" is more like "your weird set of cases" and nowhere near "almost all"?

[inigyou]

Or "not even your cases but you got psychosed to think it does"

[Xalutiono]

My companie spends a few million per month in token.

For me personally, the only reason why i don't use it 24/7 is cost.

Token costs, energy cost, usage limit due to token/subscription cost.

[seanmcdirmid]

People busy building shippable things are generally too busy to blog about it. It is selection bias in its most classical meaning.

[parasti]

Yes, it's the Youtube phenomenon - often when looking for domain-specific videos on Youtube I tend to find videos by professional Youtubers not videos by professional domain specialists (overlap is very rare but occasionally you can find a domain specialist Youtuber who applies their domain knowledge to making Youtube videos).

[jscottbee]

I agree there... I hate the posts that rattle on about non-real-world work. Real world now (for me anyway) is maintaining legacy code, fixing issues, and new development. Now, some of the problems others have with AI are super crappy prompts with no real info other than "do this". I look at myself now more as a software designer and an architect, and the AI as a paid consultant. I give detailed specs and designs. The models are getting better at real deep code and legacy, but there are still holes. BUT give the AI a fighting chance with real detail in the prompts.

[nojito]

Cloud AI is 100% worth it. We've been able to do so much more with so much less.

[inigyou]

Examples?

[nojito]

a massive number of data engineering agents. We are able to stand up, test, audit, deploy data pipelines much more efficiently with the foundational models.

[inigyou]

Examples of them being useful?

[nojito]

Happier engineering teams? Happier end users of the data?

What does useful mean to you?

[inigyou]

So far you've only explained that AI made your coworkers happier. That's fine, but weren't we talking about productivity? Doing more with less?