The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI(darylcecile.net)
24 pointsby mooredsan hour ago3 comments
  • tim-projects8 minutes ago
    Prototype? Why stop there..
  • rossjudson26 minutes ago
    I'm truly hopeful that AI will open a new of prototyping. Back in the day, prototyping was how you figured out what to build, you'd very deliberately toss the entire first (or second!) version, and you'd plan to do that.

    High quality ensued. Usually ;)

  • righthandan hour ago
    But is it really any faster than using an already existing code generator/scaffolding tool? How do you know your project isn’t just a regurgitation of another repository? Would it be just as fast to clone some existing project and hack on it?

    These are the questions everyone seems to be ignoring and saying “only LLMs can make projects quickly” but ignoring everything those LLMs are built on (your llmis probably calling a code gen tool).

    For the at work side, I personally haven’t experienced any disadvantages or missed any project deadlines because I didn’t use an LLM, so what does velocity get me? Thumb twiddling time?

    • dataviz100035 minutes ago
      It reminds me of Drupal circa 2009.

      I was thinking the other day how much better Drupal is. Want a online store? A few commands and bam, online store. Want a newspaper? A few commands and bam, newspaper with publishing workflows, user management, and caching.

      Using coding agents isn't much different. There are several things the models are trained to do very well and a few commands will get something. If the developer wants to move the project beyond that, it requires domain knowledge and a lot of hacking.

      I wonder if the coding agents will move towards the Drupal model where they create interchangeable components with common interfaces. Like Drupal the coding agents never provide anything truly inovative that hasn't been done before.

      • mooreds31 minutes ago
        > If the developer wants to move the project beyond that, it requires domain knowledge and a lot of hacking.

        Reminds me a bit of this blog post[0].

        I remember doing a Drupal project around that time and being astonished at how powerful it was.

        I also remember feeling more like a technician connecting various components than like a software engineer, writing code.

        I totally saw the value for the client but I really disliked my experience, so I avoided it afterwards.

        0: https://www.rickmanelius.com/p/the-website-rfp-and-the-impos...

      • anonzzzies26 minutes ago
        Drupal and WP etc all have plugins to switch stuff on in minutes, however, customising and making it as your client wants would take a lot of time. WP shops we work with for clients (we need to integrate some times) take weeks to get some plugin to do what they want by adding tags and config options.
      • righthand27 minutes ago
        It might centralize around a specific framework but I think part of the problem is that people want to generate their own framework or at least not care about what the framework is/does/can do. They treat the LLM as the framework which can be non-deterministic and structureless.
    • anonzzzies29 minutes ago
      > But is it really any faster than using an already existing code generator/scaffolding tool?

      Yes, very much so. Our team was fast with those tools and created many of our own before this LLM AI (we used other AIs though to go faster), however it still took weeks to months from idea to launch; the same complexity now takes days, including everything. We already had rigorous processes and those really help now moving at speed. No way anyone can beat this except better AI.

      • righthand24 minutes ago
        But “are you really moving at speed after you generate the majority of your application?” is my other point. If you were to start working somewhere with an existing product the changes you would apply are more than likely incremental. What is the advantage of using LLMs to change 1-10 lines of code on average? How do you measure the ROI for that?

        What did the time savings gain you? A quicker release date? How can you prove that? “This would have taken weeks” is the old problem of project time estimation. How can I take any engineer seriously that they think they know it saved weeks?

    • hparadiz11 minutes ago
      Yea cause it's done while you're still reading the docs for your code generator. lol
      • righthand4 minutes ago
        Then how much time do you spend debugging and fixing the generated code? lol