Smol Developer

https://github.com/smol-ai/developer

by tlarkworthy • 3 years ago

528 130 3 years ago

github.com

mooreds• 3 years ago

Previously submitted and some discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35942352

swyx10• 3 years ago

thanks as always Dan!

jimmySixDOF• 3 years ago

I am a little dismayed that the Show HN version of this did not get more traction even though its obviously got attention now. Show HN should discover hits like this better than a general post. Anyhow nice to see it and I recommend Swyx's Pod: Latent Space (especially the $30 Dolly one with Mike Conover of Databricks!)

https://share.snipd.com/show/0918aa0c-39fa-4d32-aab0-a1fdd22...

fbrncci4• 3 years ago

I can't wait for these concepts to work better, in a few years from now, I could imagine myself mostly prompting, making small code and integration changes, and writing 90% less code than I have been doing throughout most of my career. As much as I like actually writing code, I very much prefer to be able to let my ideas flow free while being able to be creative. But often I stop short with exploring ideas, because the time it takes to code together an MVP is too long. With GPT4, that time is already cut by 1/3 for me, and with that the process is becoming increasingly enjoyable to me. I'm absolutely yearning to just put the code in the backseat so to speak.

emodendroket3• 3 years ago

That sounds like a really dull way to work to me, but I suppose I'd be a hypocrite if I complained about new software making my job rote and uninteresting.

fbrncci4• 3 years ago

Well to each it’s own. I want to hack together stuff and make it work. The less time spend on code, the faster I can figure out what does and not.

nemothekid• 3 years ago

Some parts of engineering are really just copying and pasting the most banal scaffolding for some framework that refuses to work. I've been working on a side project where I get to play generics golf in Rust to my hearts content, but having to constantly Google what magic incantation I have to write to get react-hook-form to properly allow me to write variable input fields for an array of strings is mind numbing. [hint: useFieldsArray only works with objects, but the TS compiler wasn't smart enough to suggest that me]

anonzzzies• 3 years ago

I write (when I write anything; I am a product manager) mostly compilers, databases, optimisations and create/invent programming languages and DSLs for the former. This work contains a lot of tedious stuff which I hate, but also contains (80/20 rule) work that takes by far the most time and least code; hardcore and cutting computer science mixed with a lot of cross cutting decisions (a wrong decision will destroy a lot of work all over the place). That’s the work I like. I don’t see that work being replaced by AIs soon (10+ years), but the tedious work I hope will be replaced today, and it is getting there; currently large swaths are now done by copilot or gpt for us.

Rodeoclash• 3 years ago

I too can't wait for the day where I need to threaten the computer into doing what I want it to do:

https://imgur.com/KQ9oRAh https://imgur.com/By7mqDi https://imgur.com/RiYrvXC

akiselev2• 3 years ago

I've found that LLMs have some intense binary trypophobia. Once you start replacing all their 1s with 0s, they quickly fall in line.

fbrncci4• 3 years ago

That's just the wrong tool for the job. I am quite heavy on the use of LLMs for my own day-to-day work (I max out 25 GPT-4 calls in 3 hours at least once a day). And I can't get anything decent out of Google Bard either.

Tao3300• 3 years ago

I need more of this eXtreme prompt engineering in my life. I tried to beat the Gandalf AI game that was on here the other day using a version of the trolley problem. It was strangely exhilarating.

x-complexity• 3 years ago

It's primarily an issue of overpoliteness: The ML model's training is increasingly populated with "No, don't do this", and as such, learns to just not do anything.

https://huggingface.co/ehartford

https://huggingface.co/ehartford/Wizard-Vicuna-13B-Uncensore...

It's only when deliberate uncensor-ings are made that some form of usefulness can be clawed back.

Philosophically, it's amusing to apply this overcorrection back onto allegories for daily human life, wherein the tension between order & creativity are always in conflict.

If you're told from birth that everything you're doing is wrong, eventually you'll become creatively and intellectually stunted, increasingly relying on authority figures to tell you what's morally correct.

TeMPOraL4• 3 years ago

Stop expecting LLMs to react like adults - they're more like 4 year olds (3 year olds if it's anything other than GPT-4). They react much better to positive commands and examples than to negative ones.

gonzan3• 3 years ago

That’s already how I’m building new projects, I mostly only write/reorder UI code since it’s what LLMs struggle with the most.

I’m building a VS Code extension that makes this easier by having context on the code and building features on top of it with no copy-pasting required.

The extension is called Kamara: https://kamaraapp.com/ If you’re interested in trying it out for building an MVP of one of your ideas I’m happy to send over some free credits

biql• 3 years ago

As someone who considered giving up on programming due to wrist pain from typing, this is my dream as well. I also prefer to work independently or in small teams, and the amount of things that could be tackled this way is surely increasing. There is no reason why programming shouldn't to be more about thinking and less about typing.

fbrncci4• 3 years ago

Have you ever done extensive stretching? I do Yoga (3-6hrs per week), and spend some 10-20 minutes stretching my wrists neck after work. If I don't, I am facing the same problem.

swyx10• 3 years ago

oh wow, thanks for submitting this! I'm literally prepping to give a talk about smol right now so i dont have a ton of time to write, but i made this to articulate what i felt the right balance was between human and ai developer, and, in a smoller way, to solve all my future small programming problems (i make a ton of custom chrome extensions for myself to enhance my experience - see https://github.com/sw-yx/Twitter-Links-beta and https://github.com/sw-yx/HNX), and i think AI greatly lowers the bar for making these fiddly things even with nasty gotchas like the Manifest V2-v3 transition.)

those who want the "big brain" moment, i'd maybe draw your attention to `prompt.md`. that whole markdown file is the prompt now. i developed this in tandem with my smol ai developer. it generates the anthropic 100k context chrome extension shown in the video, but a few things are neatly handled in the prompt, like swapping models as needed.

there's a lot left to do. i have plans for `smol plan`, and `smol developer` needs to be able to install and run its own dependencies. i also definitely want to run a fleet of 5 developers concurrently fuzzing out different plans and checking into git so that i just do code review every 30 mins. that kind of stuff.

yes this runs up the openai costs. but im wiling to pay something to get smol stuff like this off my mind. its not good yet, but its good-shaped.

swyx10• 3 years ago

smol ai enjoyers may also like my other app https://github.com/smol-ai/menubar/

xrd2• 3 years ago

Just heard you on the svelte podcast discussing all the opportunities for AI. And now this. ;)

stephc_int132• 3 years ago

I’ve recently started to use Copilot with Sublime text.

It is far from a revolution, but a nice and fun quality of life improvement.

When it works it makes the job a bit less boring and a bit faster, so yeah, more productive and staying longer in the flow.

But I would not advise beginners to use those, if you don’t understand the code, you’re going to make painful mistakes and stunt your learning curve…

jchook• 3 years ago

When dev RSI goes down, we will finally know it's working!

tester457• 3 years ago

But I would not advise beginners to use those, if you don’t understand the code, you’re going to make painful mistakes and stunt your learning curve…

In time using this will be no different than using StackOverflow.

Beginners should attempt to understand what they're copying before they paste, just like how our generation attempted to comprehend Stackoverflow answers.

For most beginner questions LLMs are a more efficient search engine.

stephc_int132• 3 years ago

I learned to code long before StackOverflow, and I seldom use this tool.

I think that as long as you understand what you're doing it is perfectly OK to leverage the power of tools and automation to make it easier. Using a pocket calculator is OK even if you don't know how to divide on paper, but only if you really understand what a division is.

anotherpaulg2• 3 years ago

This looks similar in spirit to my aider tool [1]. But aider is able to both generate new code bases as well as dive in and modify existing repos.

The shared_dependencies.md technique and modal integration look interesting. I’ll have to dig in and better understand how they work.

[1] https://aider.chat/

IanCal2• 3 years ago

Aider is great, I'm looking at implementing it in a code gen project, and I've personally used it.

There are some layers above that I think would be good - expanding the space it uses for writing helps write higher level code (telling it to reason first then act). I also want to try using a second prompted LLM to work with aider iteratively.

anotherpaulg2• 3 years ago

I'm glad to hear it's working well for you. Feel free to file issues on GitHub if you have new features you'd like to see. I'm quite curious to learn how folks are making using of aider and about any unmet needs.

user-• 3 years ago

The install instructions are not very clear

swyx10• 3 years ago

yeah sorry i wrote those on very little sleep. happily take a PR to improve but in my mind if the reader needs help on doing git clone and entering in environment variables then this project is not ready for them yet

yosito• 3 years ago

I'm struggling to figure out whether I can even use this without access to the private betas it depends on.

z5h• 3 years ago

What is it?

wokwokwok5• 3 years ago

Seems like the wrong approach in the long term.

Realistically, a large code base LLM generation tool is going to look something like old-school C code.

An initial pass will generate an architecture and a series of independent code unit definitions (.h files) and then a 'detail pass' will generate the code for (.c files) for each header file.

The header files will be 'relatively independent' and small, so they fit inside the context for the LLM, and because the function definition and comments 'define' what a function is, the LLM will generate consistent multi-file code.

The anti-patterns we see at the moment in this type of project are:

1) The entire code is passed to the LLM as context using a huge number of tokens meaninglessly. (you only need the function signature)

2) 1-page spaghetti definition files are stupid and unmaintainable (just read prompt.md if you don't believe me).

3) No way of verifying the 'plan' before you go and generate the code that implements it (expensive and a waste of time; you should generate function signatures first and then verify they are correct before generating the code for them).

4) Generating unit tests for full functions instead of just the function signatures (leaks implementation details).

It's interesting to me that modern language try to move all of these domains (header, implementation, tests) into a single place (or even a single file, look at rust), but passing all of that to an LLM is wrong.

It's architecturally wrong in a way that won't scale.

Even an LLM with 1000k tokens that could process a code base like this will be prohibitively slow and expensive to do so.

I suspect we'll see a class 'generative languages' emerge in the future that walk the other direction so they are easier to use with LLM and code-gen.

ultimoo• 3 years ago

having to define the function signature in one place and its implementation in another adds to the cognitive burden of human developers, which is why we don't see it much in modern languages. instead, what if libraries emitted the equivalent of .h files that work better with LLM? is there a currently a spec for this?

wokwokwok5• 3 years ago

Isn’t that literally what .d files in typescript are?

Quite possible you might get a similar things for other existing languages as extensions.

verdverm5• 3 years ago

You might like what we are working on, generate an intermediate representation with LLMs, then use deterministic code gen to write the real code. This setup also allows for modifications and updates too, so you can use this the whole time rather than a one time bootstrapping.

https://twitter.com/verdverm/status/1655481985685389313?t=d7...

lmeyerov• 3 years ago

I'm curious how much of this is speculative vs from use?

We are doing code generation for our users (analysts & data scientists), and I found going by method names & type signatures failed pretty hard, while contextual code snippets (example docs, usages, etc you get from a vector DB) worked quite well

An old program synthesis labmate did quite well pre-genAI by using type signatures, but my takeaway is neurosymbolic for more context + option pruning, not being terse for supporting denser summarization & composition. That'd be better... But maybe training would need to change for that to work, or something deeper?

Separately, I do agree it's interesting to think about what IDEs and langs and dev will look like 5 years from now.. smarter LLMs, bigger context windows, and supporting ecosystems change a lot...

wokwokwok5• 3 years ago

I am speculating, I’ve only done this at a small scale and had anecdotally good results. I just put examples in the comment for the function signature.

…but I can say with complete confidence that generating code from a coherent set of c header files works better than generating “one shot” full code files just from a high level goal and a file name.

You’re basically reducing the problem space from literally anything to a subset that has an defined structure.

(It helps that #include literally maps to a flat single header in c and having comments in c headers is typical, perhaps?)

xyzzy123• 3 years ago

While current LLMs aren't really strong enough, I wouldn't completely write off the "LLM goes brrrr" approach vs domain-specific optimisations.

How much effort is it worth investing in domain-specific tooling / languages / effort for codegen? On some level it's a bet against LLMs getting better (unless the work has intrinsic value that extends beyond being a workaround for LLM limitations).

newshorts• 3 years ago

Yeah it’s tough to tell.

I could see a world where if you create the right architecture then complex tasks can be broken into smaller individual tasks where your only concern is the outcome and not the underlying code. Very deterministic

Essentially all the things we developers care about might not matter. Who cares if the LLM repeats itself? DRY won’t apply anymore because there might not be a reason to share code!

LLM go brrrr until it gets the right output and the code turns into more “machine learning black box” stuff

swyx10• 3 years ago

(author here) i suspect this maybe one of those “feels like a bad idea until you try it” things. Multiple times when i wanted to add a feature or be more specific, throwing it into prompt.md knowing the LLM would put it in the right file, or coordinate it across files, for me, was the most delightful experience of the “engineering with prompts” workflow.

that said if you see my future directions notes i do think theres room for file specific .md instructions.

the shared dependencies file is essentially a plan. i didnt realize it at the moment but now looking at it with fresh eyes i can do a no-op `smol plan` command pretty trivially.

wokwokwok5• 3 years ago

Lots of different approaches for sure. I certainly see `smol plan` as being at least one step in the right direction.

My experience has been that as the amount of code you need to generate scales beyond trivial levels, the prompt-to-code approach from cross file code starts to fail.

ie.

the shared dependencies (like filenames and variable names) we have decided on are: {shared_dependencies}

Is too trivial of a prompt for large scale code generation.

What if you generate a service in one file and expect a controller to call it from another file?

How does the model know what the functions in the other file are? Did you put the signature of every public function in shared_dependencies?

If you don't have a planning phase, you need a priori knowledge of the order in which files need to be generated, what the functions are called...

I just... don't believe what you're trying to do is actually possible. The models will just generate an isolated 'best guess implementation' for each file; and that might hang together for small code blocks... but as the number of inter-dependencies between blocks of generated code increases...

There's just no way right?

This only works if the code you're generating doesn't call itself, it only calls known library code.

shared_dependencies only solves this for the trivial case of like, 'oh, I have these 3 shared functions / types between all these files'; as the shared types and functions increase, your shared_dependencies becomes an unmaintainable monster... you end up having to generate the shared dependencies... split it up so that you have a separate shared_dependencies per file to generate... and suddenly it starts looking a heck of a lot like a .h header file....

razodactyl• 3 years ago

I can throw some weight at this statement. I've definitely found that these models work better when you allow them to do things "their own way".

gonzan3• 3 years ago

I’m building an AI-powered coding tool and the approach I’m using now is based on embeddings.

We do pass the whole files, not just headers although that’s a possibility we considered and may try in the future. Looking at other code helps the LLM a lot in maintaining similar style and making sure the code is being used correctly. Sad reality is that interfaces are rarely descriptive and robust enough to code against them without looking at details.

We don’t pass the entire codebase because even small projects don’t fit, we use embeddings and some GPT assistance to decide which files are more likely to be relevant to complete the task and pass those. It doesn’t get it right 100% of the time, (we’re working on it) but it does most of the time.

Our approach allows us to write and edit several files with a single user provided prompt. It can build entire features in existing codebases as long as they’re not huge. A lot of the time it looks like magic honestly.

The link is https://kamaraapp.com if someone is interested in trying it and providing feedback I’m happy to send over some free credits :)

TeMPOraL4• 3 years ago

It's interesting to me that modern language try to move all of these domains (header, implementation, tests) into a single place (or even a single file, look at rust)

That's because language designers are hitting against fundamental limitations of programming directly in the serialization format. That is, plaintext code. IMHO, this is a dead-end path, already hitting diminishing returns, because it's the equivalent of designing binary formats for the convenience of person writing files directly in a hex editor, or using magnetized needle to flip bits on the hard drive.

Once you step above machine instructions, computer code is an abstract construct. Developers interacting with it have, at any given moment, different goals and different areas of interest. Those are often mutually exclusive - e.g. you can't have the same text express both high-level "horizontal" overview of the code base, and a vertical slice through specific functionality. This breeds endless conflicts and talk about tradeoffs, where it comes to e.g. "lots of small functions" vs. "few large functions", or how to organize code into files, and then how to organize files, etc. There is no good answer to those, because the problem is caused by us programming with needles on magnetic plates - writing to the serialization format directly.

Smalltalk et al. got it right all that time ago, with putting the serialization format behind a database-like abstraction, and letting you read and write at the level most fitting to your task. This is the way past the endless "clean code" holy wars and syntax churn in PL. For example, the solution to "lots of small functions" vs. "few large functions" readability is... use whichever you need for the context, but have your IDE support you in this.

Need a high-level overview? Query for function signatures, and expand those you need to look into. Need a dense vertical slice through many modules, to understand how specific feature works? Start at some "entry point", and have the tool inline all those small functions for you.

Find yourself distracted by Result<T, E> / Either<T, E> / Expect<T, E> monadic error handling bullshit, as you want to see/edit only the "golden path"? Don't do magic ?-syntax in the language - have your IDE hide those bits for you! Or say you are interested in the error case, but code is using exceptions. Stop arguing for rewriting everything to Result<T, E> - flip a switch, and have your IDE display exception flow as if it was Result<T, E> flow (they're effectively equivalent anyway).

Or, back to your original point - want your code to be both optimized for your convenience, and for convenience of LLMs? Stop trying to do both in the same plaintext serialization format. Have your environment feed the LLMs with function signatures (or better yet, teach it to issue queries against your code), while you work with whatever format you find most convenient at any given moment.

We'll get there eventually. Hopefully before we retire.

planede• 3 years ago

How do human programmers develop code? They also don't keep all the code in their head and then dump thousands of lines of code linearly in one go. Instead of feeding whole files, or even whole functions as context we could give the AI a sandboxed shell with an editor (maybe ed?), and a language toolchain with a test framework. Let it do trial and error, get feedback from the terminal when they make mistakes.

jehna1• 3 years ago

I think a big moment in a programming language's evolution is to become self-hosted; you use the programming language to write a compiler/interpreter for the said language.

Now I want to see Smol Developer to develop itself. Then you can call me a believer.

swyx10• 3 years ago

i am having that exact conversation with the modal cofounders themselves: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1658147687408238593 but my subjective judgment is that it is a bit too early for quine smol developer.

i think self hosting/quines are a nice curiosity, but not really a practical need since this isnt a PL. i made this to build smol apps, lets keep it practical

ciconia4• 3 years ago

What is the reasoning behind this whole AI business? I mean, apart from making something cool that sort of simulates human intelligence (and that's quite a stretch IMHO), what's the point? Is this driven by laziness, greed, or what? I'm seriously asking because I just don't see the point.

80hd• 3 years ago

I'm seriously asking

I'm not sure I believe that. Is human-like intelligence not valuable to you?

throwaway2908• 3 years ago

For me "human" is the key part tho...

ciconia4• 3 years ago

Frankly, no. I much prefer interacting with humans than with machines, and I emphasize interacting. A machine does what you tell it - it will not enlighten you, will not surprise you, will not create new knowledge.

sahillavingia• 3 years ago

Same thing that motivates all business software: save time, save money, make money.

throwaway2908• 3 years ago

I think it's driven by the symbiosis of greed for business and coolness factor for many techies because AI is a sci-fi thing and for now they are not the ones getting fired because of it

thealienthing2• 3 years ago

I think one of the great strengths of AI (smol developer in mind) is to greatly speed up the development process by reducing busy work. How many times do you need to write a CRUD app from scratch? Sure templates exist but having a buddy that can do a lot of the tedious work up front while also implementing the basic structure with your design in mind can save you hours of work. Far more powerful than some template that can leave you with a bunch of extra crap and irrelevant libraries.

More broadly speaking, AI applications like chatGPT can save you a ton of time looking up a bunch of tools just to accomplish an incredibly boring task. This can help to keep you focused on the far more interesting and challenging aspects of work. Often, the solutions yielded from these interactions end up revealing to me a built in bash tool or python lib that I had no idea even existed. To me it’s like stackoverflow on steroids if you know how to use it

Also, AI chat bots can be extremely effective learning resources. A few weeks ago, I wanted to implement a digital low pass audio filter and didn’t know more than a few basic concepts. I asked chatGPT to explain the concepts with code examples. What followed was several late nights of just asking it follow up questions and very detailed discussions on the various aspects of filters. I got a primer on digital signal processing, bilinear transforms and filter design. I fed it snippets from free text university textbooks asking it to walk me through concepts and explain the things that would have been completely over my head. This was extremely useful since many books will assume you have a strong background in topics that can takes weeks to get a grip of assuming you even have a teacher.

All in all, I see AI as a tool as disruptive and empowering as the Gutenberg printing press, radio or internet was for humans. I highly recommend trying some of this stuff out and seeing how you can use it to enhance your workflow and learning process.

ciconia4• 3 years ago

How many times do you need to write a CRUD app from scratch?

Personally, I really don't mind doing this. And each time I get a little better at it. I much prefer this to having an AI agent write code for me that I then have to audit and verify it does what it's supposed to do. I highly doubt this will reduce work.

UncleEntity3• 3 years ago

I'm seriously asking because I just don't see the point.

Why does it need a point?

There’s not much of a point to anything I do that doesn’t involve basic survival but I don’t let that stop me from doing things I find interesting.

aleem• 3 years ago

The video demonstration of the coding is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCo7YeTy-aE

Most likely, just as happened with Stable Diffusion, a community of models will emerge. You could use a pre-trained model for writing chrome extensions, or a model for writing material UI using tailwindCSS, or a very specific model for writing 2d games for Android.

Since a lot of this is trial-error, improving on each iteration the feedback loop (compile, deploy, run, etc) will matter a lot more. Real-time development workflows like React should be interesting at the least. Exciting stuff, truly.

dmix• 3 years ago

code2prompt.py has some interesting implications for "forking" github projects into the base of your own side project.

Once this stuff matures it will be fascinating to see how the 2030 version of 2010 Rails scaffolding looks. What will the DHH "make a blog in 15min" video look like? (Edit: which apparently is 17yrs old now, aka 2006)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY

BulgarianIdiot3• 3 years ago

You won’t need frameworks with AI. Just libraries. The framework is the scaffolding that now can be purpose generated.

swyx10• 3 years ago

oh my. i love the sound of making a blog in 1.5min with smol developer. but feel like that is more of a web framework question than an ai developer question. maybe the qtn is can i spin up the same blog in django rails and nextjs with just prompts.

(think need to give it the ability to install deps before i do this, which is on the “roadmap”)

abiro• 3 years ago

Very cool project, congrats to the author!

Baaed on the comments, I feel that people are both under and overestimating this. On the one hand it replaces the manual tasks of searching for a template and then googling errors and this is huge! It completely disrupts search on the internet as we know it. On the other hand it won’t be able to solve problems that you couldn’t just google anyway, since that’s what it basically does under the hood.

gl-prod• 3 years ago

Another AI thing that uses a company (OpenAI) that is blocking my country (and other poor countries).

Grimblewald• 3 years ago

hopefully open source survives the current assault openai is leading against it, but it looks like open source LLM's are catching up rapidly.

luckystarr• 3 years ago

Running a code through code2prompt -> prompt2code could have interesting copyright implications.

rexsteroxxy• 3 years ago

Fascinating stuff. Even though my initial reaction is "meh, this will give fuzzy results at best and I'll spent more time fixing subtle bugs then just writing it myself" - I still believe we're in the infancies and these projects will likely get a lot better

zelphirkalt2• 3 years ago

The more removed we get from the code, for example by not writing it any longer, but generating it, the more cruft and bloat we will allow in there and the less devs will care about it. This will negate a lot of performance gain from better machines, just like we have seen with the web.

yetanother-1• 3 years ago

Yet it will dominate since it's cheaper to produce en mass.

CGamesPlay• 3 years ago

Strongly disagree. That’s like claiming that instruction set architectures are crusty and bloated, so our software is slow because the processors are dealing with cruft.

What will happen is that the automated agents (LLM or otherwise) will also be tasked with simplifying and improving performance. That’s just another part of development that human developers do automatically before they even commit, and the LLM generators haven’t been asked to do yet.

fab13n• 3 years ago

That's what better IDEs did to Java codebases indeed: they made layered boilerplates and leaky abstractions somewhat navigable, therefore generations of careless contractors have been able to ship ever nastier messes.

omneity2• 3 years ago

To me this looks like a great opportunity window for devs who care about this stuff.

In the future we will have opportunities to ship 10-1000x faster code than the baseline competition, just by understanding the tech stack, the codebase and knowing what is not needed, and that will be an immensely competitive advantage pushing the value of such devs through the roof in the markets that value it.

If you thought no-code app builders were producing slow stuff, wait until software purely developed by AI starts to hit the shelves.

zelphirkalt2• 3 years ago

This sounds awesome as an idea. I however am wary about how many management layers of companies will actually understand this and not chase the newest feature instead. They might tell their developers "make it work" and afterwards not allot any time to "make it clean". Hopefully you are right and a few will distinguish themselves by actually caring about the code.

infomiho• 3 years ago

Using declarative web frameworks could help with making this more useful https://twitter.com/infomiho/status/1658086265466617858

mpeg• 3 years ago

Off-topic, but someone's been watching Halt and Catch Fire (one of my favourite TV shows ever) – "computers aren't the thing, they're the thing that gets us to the thing"

liampulles• 3 years ago

I would be curious to see how one could use LLMs to develop "narrow" parts of the codebase in isolation. I.e. I ask smol to develop a repository/web router/ etc. given an interface within a folder/package. Then I as the human developer focus on designing these interfaces.

Maybe that is a good balance for maintaining a healthy code structure while having a lot of AI automation. If a given "space" becomes too difiicult for the AI to develop, I can either take it over fully or see if I can split it up into more/different interfaces (which is a lot of what I do to refactor things anyway).

Kiro• 3 years ago

I don't understand how the files can be generated in parallell. Won't it be very likely that one file generates something that another file needs and thus need the signature of?

flash136• 3 years ago

Smol Developer

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