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roughlyHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

If you've got your product manager hat on, being able to quickly prototype designs and interactions …

… If you've got your product manager hat on, being able to quickly prototype designs and interactions can make a huge, huge difference in what kind of feedback you get from your users - "hey try this out and let me know what you think" as opposed to "would you use this imaginary thing if I built it?" The point is to poke at the toy, not build something durable. Same with the MVP/technical prototyping - usually the question you're trying to answer is "would this work at all", and letting the LLM crap out the shittiest version of the thing that could possibly work is often sufficient to find out. The thing is, I think these are all things good engineers _do_. We're not always painting the Sistine Chapel, we also have to build the rest of the building, run the plumbing, design the thing, and try to get buy-in from the relevant parties. LLMs are a tool like any other - they're not the one you pull out when you're painting Adam, but an awful lot of our work doesn't need to be done to that standard.

Original discussionVibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature147 source comments · at import
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TP
tptacekHN

Real subtle. Why not just write "there are good programmers and bad programmers and AI is good for bad programmers and only bad programmers"? Think about what you just said about Mitchell Hashimoto here.

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TP
tptacekHN

I can't get past the framing that "people who like the act and craftsmanship" feel AI is negative, which implicitly defines whatever Mitchell Hashimoto is doing as not craftsmanship, which: ghostty is pure craftsmanship (the only reason anyone would spend months writing a new terminal). No, I think my response was fair, if worded sharply. I stand by it.

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roliszHN

First, I agree with tptacek that Ghostty is a work of craftsmanship. Mitchell is a very talented dev and he says he greatly benefits from using AI. On the other hand I understand your point that some people got into coding because of coding and they like doing that manually. Unfortunately, we're not being paid to do what we like, but to solve problems with code. What we like is usually a hobby. Software engineering had a golden run for 20-30 years where we were paid well to do things we enjoyed doing, but unfortunately that might change. As an analogy, think about woodworking: there's craftsmanship in a nice wood table, but at the end of day I won't pay thousands of dollars for one, when a couple of hundred dollars will buy me a good enough one from IKEA (maybe you're not like that, but the general population is).

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vidarhHN

They're far more than junior interns. I've had a long languishing project to build an ahead-of-time Ruby compiler. It started as a toy, and a blog series, and I then mostly put it on ice about a decade ago, except for very occasional little rounds of hacking. It self-hosts, but is very limited. A week or so ago, I gave Claude a task of making it compile rubyspecs. I then asked it to keep making specs pass. I do need to babysit it, but it's doing debugging and work no junior I've ever worked with could be trusted to do. It knows how to work with gdb, and trace x86 assembler. It understands how to read the code of a complex compiler, and modify code generation and parsers that even I - who wrote it in the first place - sometimes find challenging. It's currently (as I'm writing this) working its way through adding bignum support. Which in Ruby is tricky because it now no longer splits it in…

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