Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

"I feel like googling every step would be faster than trying to get it right with LLMs"

Why don't you give that a go? See if you can knock out a QR code reading UI in JavaScript in less than 3 minutes, complete with drag-and-drop file opening support.

(I literally built this one in a separate browser tab while I was actively taking notes in a meeting)

I say three minutes because my first message in https://gist.github.com/simonw/c2b0c42cd1541d6ed6bfe5c17d638... was at 2:45pm and the final reply from Claude was at 2:47pm.



That gist is pretty close to what I’ve been looking for; thank you! Examples of a chat session that resulted in a usable project are /very/ helpful. Unfortunately, the gist demonstrates, to me at least, that the models don’t know enough about the languages I wish to use.

Those prompts might be sufficient enough to result in deployable HTML/JS code comprised of a couple hundred lines of code but that’s fairly trivial in my definition. I’m not trying to be rude or disrespectful to you; within my environment, non-trivial projects typically involve an entire microservice doing even mildly interesting business logic and offering some kind of API or integration with another, similarly non-trivial API—usually both. And they’re typically built on languages that are compiled either to libraries/executables or they’re compiled to bytecode for the JVM/CLR.

Again, I’m not trying to be disrespectful. You’ve built some really great stuff and I appreciate you sharing your experiences; I wish I knew some of the things you do—you keep writing about your experiences and I’ll keep reading ‘em, we can learn together. The problem is that I’m beginning to recognize that these models are perhaps not nearly ready for the kinds of work I want or need to do, and I’m feeling a bit bummed that the capabilities the industry currently touts are significantly more overhyped than I’d imagined.


Here's a larger example where I had Claude build me a full Django application: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/8/django-http-debug/

I have a bunch more larger projects on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/

I do a whole lot of API integration work with Claude, generally by pasting in curl examples to illustrate the API. Here's an example from this morning: https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/prompt-gemini


Should probably add some time for finding the correct url for the jsqr library, since the LLM didn’t do that for you.


Yeah, add another minute for that. It was pretty easy to spot - I got a 404, so I searched jsdelivr for jsqr and dropped that in instead.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: