I mean a program (series of herbal supplements) that can cure gut inflammation and help with digestion, and in some circumstances get rid of parasites. Herbal medicine, things that other cultures have been doing for thousands of years. Do I have to prove that turmeric lowers inflammation in the body? What is going on in this thread lol.
“gut cleanse” obviously is a trigger phrase on HN it seems.
Genuinely curious as someone who wants to improve… what the hell do you talk about?
I’m trying to picture the random people I encounter while walking my dog, for example. Neighbors who I don’t know. That’d be a great place to start up a convo as I walk by but I draw a complete blank.
The weather?
Do some self disclosure? Or make something up? Be silly?
"oh it's such a nice day innit? It's a shame the lizard people won bingo but we'll get them next time eh?"
Be silly, get a laugh, and hopefully things unfold from there. Give a compliment! Or share something you're excited about. Imo Self-disclosure is the simplest route towards spurring conversation.
Think of conversation as a medium through which gifts are given. Through giving gifts, bonds are forged.
1. Talk about them. Start by paying attention to them. Then when you notice something that was clearly an intentional choice on their part, say something nice about it. Listen carefully to what they say, and follow up in response without filtering yourself.
2. Talk about us. Notice some aspect of experience that you are both sharing. The weather is the most popular and safest topic.
I don’t know about others but a big reason I went into software development (whether I want to admit it or not) is because I am “naturally” not very skilled in talking to, or dealing with , people.
While I’ve done very well in tech, the truth is, lacking this skill has only been a detriment.
The problem at this point is I truly don’t like random people, and I have no idea how to fix that. Often people are rude, inconsiderate, selfish, etc. the canonical example is being in a row at the grocery store, walking down the row, someone’s cart is just way out in the center blocking your path, and as you approach, they do nothing.
Anyways “people skills” are definitely a SKILL and one I’ve avoided to my detriment over the years. Need to work on that.
Building wrapper apps on top of LLM APIs takes barely more knowledge and training than normal frontend and backend dev works.
If you want to develop your own models, that’s probably the next layer where you need to learn about training, etc.
Even deeper is Ai research… once upon a time LLMs were not the bleeding edge… it takes research often times theoretical and steeped in physics and math to develop your own “ai”
Due to the increasing difficulty of scaling up training, it appears the gains are instead being achieved through better model training which appears to be working well for everyone.
there’s something of a paradox there. Reduce the context window and work on smaller/tightly scoped requests? Isn’t the whole value proposition that I can work much faster? To do that, I naturally try to describe what I want at a higher, vaguer level.
That's where something like openspec and beads come in. You work high level, create a spec and break it down into beads (small tasks). Your main agent then spawns workers that perform a task with limited scope.
I’m an “old school programmer” just like you, but still use Claud code.
For greenfield projects it’s absolutely faster to churn out code I’ve written 100 times in the past. I don’t need to write another RBAC system, I just don’t. I don’t need to write another table implementation for a frontend data view.
How Claud helps us is speed and breadth. I can do a lot more in shorter time, and depending on what your goals are this may or may not be valuable to you.
What kind of projects are you working on that aren't amenable to the sort of code reuse or abstraction that normally addresses this sort of "boilerplate"?
There are lots of projects like that, especially when doing work for external clients.
Very often they want to own all the code, so you cannot just abstract things in your own engine. It then very easily becomes the pragmatic choice to just use existing libraries and frameworks to implement these things when the client demands it.
Especially since every client wants different things.
At the same time, even though there are libraries available, it’s still work to stitch everything together.
For straightforward stuff, AI takes all that work out of your hands.
Writing boilerplate code is mostly creative copy-pasting.
If I were to do it, I would have most of the reusable code (e.g. of a RBAC system) written and documented once and kept unpublished. Then I would ask an AI tool to alter it, given a set of client-specific properties. It would be easier to review moderate changes to a familiar and proven piece of code. The result could be copied to the client-specific repo.
The author of the initial comment mentioned that customers of contract work prefer code which is 100% theirs, purpose-written, not a dependency, even vendored.
I’m always suspicious of comments like yours. You’re written the same thing 100 times in the past and don’t have the base on a snippets manager or a good project you can get the implementation from? Did you really rewrite the same thing 100 times and are now preferring to use a tool which is slower and more resource intensive than just having been a little bit efficient in the past in saving something you reuse all the time?
Your questions have been the focus of religion since the dawn of humanity. I don't see how you can think nobody tries to figure this out or considers the question.
Go ahead, begin. What do you say about it? I could find the Wikipedia page, and put a name on the question I guess, some philosopher must have written some discussion of the matter. I kind of doubt it went anywhere.
You are commiting category error. "Why are we here/why does anything exist" implicitly assumes an impetus, a do-er with motivations. And "what IS this reality" contains it's own answer(and the refusal to accept it): It is 'this reality'. It is IS-ness itself. It's like saying "Perfectly describe the entirety of Moby Dick, leaving out not a single word or punctuation", and refusing when someone hands you the book.
Buddhism, Yoga, the more esoteric parts of the Abrahamic religions and many more all have you covered with an extensive corpus if you want people who are asking the same questions you are.
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