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vitally3643HNSource author
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That's because you're treating the problem as an engineer instead of an "influencer" or "10xer" or …

That's because you're treating the problem as an engineer instead of an "influencer" or "10xer" or whatever. You're treating it as a problem to be solved with engineering and AI is merely a tool to do so. It is, in my experience, vanishingly rare for an engineer to have a problem that needs to be solved with multiple hours of unattended AI code generation. I've only found one single application where it makes even the slightest amount of sense to have an AI grind away for hours on end. I'm reverse engineering a widget which contains five separate firmware images. I've dumped the binary from the widget and I set the AI to decompile and reverse engineer these interrelated firmware projects. It's a compelx task, but very well bounded. It's not complicated work, but it's a lot of work, and the end result is a C-shaped pile of text that is only informative, it never would be compilable on its own even if I did it by hand. The quality of the output is tightly bounded by the input assembly and the overall output artifact is documentation in the shape of code. …

Original discussionAI Coding at Home Without Going Broke294 source comments · at import
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tunesmithHN

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a change. Then I ask it to commit and recommend the next step based off the spec. Oftentimes I have to "approve" an out-of-sandbox request anyway. I haven't found anything that requires running all night. I could tell it to one-shot a big plan but given how often I realize I want an intermediary thing to be slightly different it seems like a waste of effort. I'm guessing the next thing I should probably look into is some sort of machine vm I can tunnel my codex-gui requests to…

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rbalickiHN

I'll add another use case for letting an AI go ham: many small, atomic refactors where the name of the game is never breaking anything. My personal OSS projects don't have the scale to necessarily make this worth it, but at work I run three pipelines using Barnum ( https://barnum-circus.github.io/ ). First, one that ingests files, identifies refactors (from a pre-approved list), and places a precise description of the refactor to be done in a queue; second, one that reads from said queue, implements and creates PRs (there is a lot of "check that the PR is correct" here as well); and a third that babysits PRs until they land. I've landed hundreds of PRs in this way, with very little effort on my part.

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plaguuuuuuHN

How do you keep the info the AI generates concise? I'm grappling with this at the moment, getting it to do design or reverse engineering work, during investigation it makes the wall of text bigger rather than consolidating. It can never pause and create abstractions properly. This is on Opus which starts getting wordy and performative on goals it can't easily verify.

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