Hacker News Reader

Comment by d3Xt3r | Hacker News Reader

Yes, mostly at work. But that's mainly because we're an MSP and our clients have a no-AI policy, but even otherwise, I don't imagine our clients will be very happy with us running agents against their systems/data or introduce unvetted slop into the environment.

At home, I manually create utility apps for personal and family use using niche languages like GAMBAS (a VB6 clone), and I've found that AI isn't really good at it. Besides, with the kind of simple utilities I make, it's far more easier to just do it myself than to fight with the AI (and then there's also the issue of long-term maintenance - if it's something I coded, it's far more easier for me to fix it, update it etc than to rely on AI for eternity).

View on HN

I build erp addons and module rewrites for clients and I barely type code anymore. Your clients' worry is right one, but in my experience it's also solvable usually. I've built tools to allow only read-only access to client ERPs and other enterprise systems and also giving agent's their own credentials and identity so work done by them across the application landscape is auditable.

I've designed a few languages of my own, it doesn’t get more niche than that. And models handle them surprisingly well, even ones from a year ago. The trick is to give the model a short cheatsheet of the syntax and some link to docs. Today I would create a skill for that. Might be worth trying with GAMBAS too. It is sad that GAMBAS is niche these days, it was very popular back in 2000s.

Why use niche languages if you don’t mind me asking?

Because they're quick/easy/fun. My main requirement was a RAD environment to quickly spin up GUI apps for my family - apps which are reasonably small and memory efficient (so no Java / Electron etc).

In the case of GAMBAS, I originally picked it up because I missed the days I used to code in VB6. I recall chruning out small utilities like it was no big deal (and I was still in school at the time)! So GAMBAS, as a spiritual successor to VB6, was a natural choice for me - and it's also cross-platform, which is great because some of my family members use Linux, whereas others use Windows.

Before GAMBAS I used to use Delphi, which had a similar RAD environment with Lazarus. But Lazarus is a bit clunky, compared to the polished experience of Embarcadero Delphi (which is Windows-only, unless you pay for cross-platform). So when GAMBAS came along, I first played around with it just for fun, but then over the course of time it became pretty solid and capable, so I switched to it full-time for my GUI needs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com