I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens
quesma.com154 points by bkotrys a day ago
154 points by bkotrys a day ago
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.
Trust me there are plenty of us using cloud AI to actually ship stuff. We just aren't writing blog posts about it.
... 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.
what did you ship?
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.
> 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.
Just features for the client. The same stuff I was shipping before but much faster and more stable.
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
Most of "What are you working on?" is AI assisted; not much is shipped.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=working%20author%3Adavid927&so...
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.
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/
I've shipped (to TestFlight) a fairly fun video game that's tricking my friends into working out: https://reverdure.yourstrategy.co
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
Thinking about it a better question [for me] would be what might have but didn't ship because of LLMs.
That’s an interesting question, in particular because I don’t think I have a single example
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
You're welcome! LLMs definitely help with the migrations, there were definitely a few iterations because the surface area was massive, but overall it took the project from "will never be prioritised" to "I can work on it on and off when in boring meetings", which was a massive win.
I haven't found that LLMs help with CAD at all, but YMMV.
As for sharing here, the last time I shared something with "here's something I made with LLMs", the reply was "it shows", and that's just the latest instance. It just puts me off the whole thing.
> I can work on it on and off when in boring meetings
That’s not a sign of a healthy org. If you’re in a meeting it’s disrespectful not to be present. If you think a meeting is not useful you should reject it.