Hacker News Reader

Comment by margalabargala | Hacker News Reader

Coding is now a lot like playing chess.

It's been decades since beating the best computer at chess was possible. But people still play, because they find it fun to get better at.

The major difference being that winning a chess game doesn't yield a permanent artifact that is useful, generally.

It's fine this person wants to journal about the things they do privately for fun. They clearly aren't writing for others to read their work.

View on HN

> It's been decades since beating the best computer at chess was possible.

LLMs can do an impressive job of writing code that meets some specification-but they still can’t beat humans at deciding what that specification should be. That’s especially true when it comes to non-functional requirements, e.g. what constitutes good coding style or good architectural choices.

> The major difference being that winning a chess game doesn't yield a permanent artifact that is useful, generally.

Chess has a single clearly defined “win condition”; coding doesn’t.

This is exactly it. I do not at all feel superfluous in my coding endeavours these days, even when I don’t write any code. If left to its own devices, Opus 5.5 would still fail at the things I want to achieve. It would produce what I would call the toy rocket, when I want the real NASA design. And it requires constant effort in my part to keep it on track to success.

> They clearly aren't writing for others to read their work.

I don't know, the prose and material is fine in my opinion. I do find the uncapitalized style a bit weird, but it's not something that stops me from reading it.

It's a major readability issue for me. I see it periodically and generally assume that person is writing for themselves. Which is fine. The alternative is they're deliberately trying to make things harder for their reader, which I assume usually is not the case.

i'm not gonna let my typing style be criticised when it's been a typing style i've used for previous very popular (even on HN!) articles about vuln research.

it's a choice of typing this way, i don't like typing super formally, just not my thing, i'd rather type casually and most of my articles are sort of braindumps of what i think as i go, but historically i've been complemented very much on this style and i like doing it

I don't see many compliments of it here.

The lack of capitals damages readability for others. It's also a writing style strongly associated with arrogance and pretentiousness; but a specific variety of it. Not surprised you've been complimented on some corners of HN.

Every person I've seen on HN who drops capitals is invariably an arrogant prick about it and other things. It's a strong enough calling card that to write that way and be otherwise would be like having a moustache and explaining everywhere "no, I just really like Charlie Chaplain".

Sometimes a little arrogance is good, no?

Sure, it can be.

Being arrogant all the time just in case you run into one of those situations is not a good thing.

It's a writing style. You associate it with arrogance and yet, it's not inherently arrogant. Someone who writes like that isn't being arrogant all the time just because they have a certain writing style. Everyone has their own writing styles, and while some are clearly less enjoyable than others to consume, we live in a society, not a factory producing experiences palatable to everyone.

Make up your mind.

A moment ago you were defending a little arrogance as good, now you're saying it isn't arrogant at all.

> while some are clearly less enjoyable than others to consume

We live in a society, which includes people who complain about the less enjoyable ones.

I still write better code than LLMs. It's just slower, and the quality difference is not usually worth the human effort.

but also, throw a weird variation of the game at the computer and it falls apart. Need something novel? llm's wont cut it. Doubly so if what is being done goes against established conventions, even if those are demonstrably wrong, to keep an llm from undermini g everything you first need to show it all the proof and evidence before it can be trusted to help, which for a complex problem can eaisly be 30-50% of co text limits.

LLM's are good at solved problems applied to known or similar to known applications, otherwise they're not going to match humans.

>They clearly aren't writing for others to read their work.

The author of the blog post and the OP who submitted the article are the same person.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com