cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/15545986
AI: spend hours finally figuring out the prompt that gets it to produce something specific. Eureka! 20 minutes later you use that prompt again to get that specific thing, but the moment’s gone, it gives you a banana instead of the flamingo you were expecting
“But certainly I can do something with this banana?” you think in a panic as your deadline rapidly approaches…
“After all, it is a lovely, three-fingered banana!“
That’s why prompt engineers exist. They’ll be trained to use a specific AI and know the ins and outs of it - until the next update. It’ll just create drones like those who can only use Adobe or Malus products and are stuck on Macs and Photoshop.
and that is bullshit because the same prompt does not produce the same response. So they’re just throwing stuff it a wall to see what sticks long enough for them to get paid
I spoke to a friend the other day that wanted some help with his dev project. I was surprised since he isn’t a dev and doesn’t even have a job in a tech related field. He said he wanted to make a simple thing and was using AI prompts to just fuck about a bit till he had something working. But he ran into some issues and wanted me to give him some pointers to get on the right track.
My man wanted to create a “simple” kanban system. I almost fell of my chair as he explained what he was wanting to create. A non devver isn’t going to create basically a Trello clone within a couple of hours and some AI prompts. He started with a frontend and got something hacked together which wasn’t really working or a good base to work from. And hadn’t even considered he would also need some kind of backend. He never heard of the difference between frontend and backend and just thought apps were apps that did it all.
I explained for what he wanted he would need a team of 15-20 to work for a couple of years to make something good. Not really a thing people do in their free time. I know your nephew created an “app” in a weekend in a hackaton, that doesn’t mean the world of software development is suddenly different from how it’s always been. He was bummed out, but was happy enough to just use Trello. And he could always keep fucking around with AI devving for fun, just don’t expect anything useful to come out of it ever.
Peoples perspective on software development is so weird these days. Especially since AI has come along, people just expect magic.
My mother-in-law is a veterinarian and once she asked me to create an app that would tell people whether a particular animal hospital was a good place to take their pets or not. She thought it was just something I could write in an evening since the UI would be pretty simple. She had no conception of the need for, like, a database of pet hospitals and where that database would come from and how it would be maintained and updated.
Did she want some features that weren’t part of Google/Apple maps / Yelp / etc?
If she’s frustrated with user reviews being about nonsense I get it but that’s a human problem, or at least not a system problem anyone’s been able to solve yet.
Yeah, she didn’t feel that online reviews were an accurate or reliable way to evaluate these places. She basically thought that every place but her own was a bucket of shit, so I probably could have actually given her what she wanted and just had the app give a thumbs down to everything except hers.
This is not somebody who can self host anything or setup something for himself. I do not know of any FOSS kanban solutions that are available as a SaaS solution. The available Trello free functionality suits his needs. Is there something wrong with Trello? It’s owned by Atlassian, which is an OK company I think?
If you have any good FOSS alternatives, I’d be happy to know about them and forward on the recommendation. But keep in mind most folk are not tech minded and won’t get very far with just a Github page.
You can use issues and issue boards in the free tier of GitLab. Not sure if that counts.
I mean I myself am not a dev, only did some programming in school but not like I would know how to program a backend or a frontend. 😅
I know even less about linux or networking but I setup an old laptop with LinuxMint and made a server out of it (I know LM isnt a good server OS but I am not good with the terminal, so thats the compronise I did). I now selfhost Jellyfin and some more stuff. I would probably be able to setup a trello like app in a afternoon, despite not being IT-trained
Are any of those FOSS alts actually as good as Trello?
That’s a genuine question. I’ve been trying to find a trello replacement and so far I’ve had no real luck.
But it is like magic…? I copy in a bunch of tables etc. from a datasheet and get out code to read and write EEPROM. I use that to read the content of the old BMS and flash a new chip with it. The battery is now working again, after the BMS had a hardware fault in the ADC, destroying the previous pack of cells.
I ask for a simple frontend and I get exactly that. Now I can program ESP32s and perfectly control then via a browser. No me shit interface with some touch pins.
I ask for code to run a simulation on head transfer… answer after some back and forth that is what I get.
What will it be able to give me in 5 years when it is already like magic now?
nothing. It can only do that because someone already did and it was in their training set.
Stop spreading this. It clearly comes up with original things and does not just copy and paste existing stuff. As my examples could have told you, there is no such stuff on the Internet about programming some specific BMS from >10 years ago with a non-standard I2C.
Amazing how anti people are, even downvoting my clearly positive applications of this tool. What is you problem that I use that to save time? Some things are only possible due to the time saving to begin with. I am not going to freaking learn HTML for a one off sunrise alarm interface.
I’ve yet to use AI in my workflows. Nothing against it, but I haven’t seen the value beyond maybe boilerplate code, in which case I prefer the tried-and-true copy, paste, and modify. Why have AI do that and introduce its own mistakes?
I have noticed younger developers using AI and sometimes I’ve had to help them with the mistakes it makes. It’ll just come up with modules and function calls that don’t exist. Felt like it was less precise version of stack overflow with less context awareness. Programmers that were too dependent on stack overflow were already coming up with poorly mashed together code and this may just be a more “efficient” version of that.
There is a long, long history in this industry, going back to COBOL, at least, of “just one magic tool, bro, and we can get all of the non-programmers to make their own software.”
It hasn’t happened yet
Having dealt with turning requirements into software for 25 years myself, I can say that it will never happen.
Primarily because most business people can’t even define the problems they’re trying to solve, let alone define a solution for it.
Half my job seems to be digging back up towards them to get at the real crux of any issue.
