from Hacker News

What we learned copying all the best code assistants

by stevekrouse on 1/3/25, 2:45 PM with 82 comments

  • by ajhit406 on 1/4/25, 5:42 AM

    One consideration not mentioned is around developer sophistication. Steve alludes to the expansion effect of CodeGen ("there are millions and maybe billions who are jumping at the chance to code"), but doesn't consider that the vast majority of these people don't know about arrays, data structures, memory, containers, runtimes, etc, etc...

    To me, that's the most important consideration here. Are you targeting professional devs who are enhancing their current workflows iteratively with these improvements? Or re-thinking from the ground up, obfuscating most of what we've learned to date?

    Maybe we need to trudge through all of these weeds until software creation hits its final, elegant form where "Anyone Can Code".

    Maybe the old Gusteau quote is actually fitting here:

    "You must be imaginative, strong-hearted. You must try things that may not work, and you must not let anyone define your limits because of where you come from. Your only limit is your soul. What I say is true - anyone can ̶c̶o̶o̶k̶ code... but only the fearless can be great."

  • by viewhub on 1/3/25, 10:47 PM

    Windsurf + Haskell w/ CLI tools has been pretty amazing. Windsurf's agent will loop for minutes on its own to figure out the right structure of a program. You just need to tell it to:

    - use the hoogle cli to search for the right types and functions

    - include a comprehensive test suite

    - run a build after every code change

    - run tests after every successful build

    GHC + a Claude-based agent is a thing to behold.

  • by drawnwren on 1/4/25, 2:10 AM

    > The next big thing was Cursor. I must admit that I never personally fell in love with it, but given how many people I respect love it, I think that’s a me-problem

    I've met so many engineers who have said exactly this. There are clearly some group of people obsessed with Cursor, but it's interesting to me how alien they seem to the majority of people using ai codegen right now.

  • by stevekrouse on 1/3/25, 9:04 PM

    This post is the latest in a series about Townie, our AI assistant.

    Our first had a nice discussion on HN: https://blog.val.town/blog/codegen/

    The other posts in the series:

    - https://blog.val.town/blog/townie/

    - https://blog.val.town/blog/building-a-code-writing-robot/

  • by simonw on 1/3/25, 9:05 PM

    It's really interesting seeing the progression here, integrating AI-assisted coding tools into something like Val Town is a great arena for exploring different patterns for this stuff.

    Worth checking out their Cerebras-powered demo too - LLMs at 2000 tokens/second make applying proposed changes absurdly interactive: https://cerebrascoder.com/

  • by furyofantares on 1/3/25, 10:30 PM

    I wonder if you didn't try cursor's Composer tab, especially set to Agent?

    I didn't care that much for cursor when I was just using Chat but once I switched to Composer I was very happy, and my experience is in total disagreement that it's not so good for smaller projects.

    They also must have a good prompt for diff-based completions, I don't know how hard it is to extract that.

  • by mritchie712 on 1/3/25, 11:05 PM

    > The biggest problem with all current codegen systems is the speed of generation

    I don't see this complained about nearly as much as I'd expect. Groq has been out for over a year, I'm surprised OpenAI not acquired them and figured out how to 10x to 20x their speed on gpt4.

  • by afro88 on 1/3/25, 9:37 PM

    I'm interested in what stopped you from finishing diffs and diff based editing. I built an AI software engineering assistant at my last company and we got decent results with Aider's method (and prompts, and hidden conversation starter etc). I did have to have a fallback to raw output, and a way to ask it to try again. But for the most part it worked well and unlocked editing large files (and quickly).

  • by siscia on 1/4/25, 11:36 AM

    I am very biased on this topic.

    I have started using AI coding assistant and I am not looking back.

    This comes from an engineer that KEEP telling the junior on his team to NOT use GenAI.

    The reality is that those tools are POWER TOOLS best used by engineers very well versed in the domain and in coding itself.

    For them, it is really a huge time saving. The work is more like approving PR for a quite competent engineer than writing the PR myself.

    My tool of choice is Cline, that is great, but not perfect.

    And the quality is 100% correlated to:

    1. The model

    2. The context window

    3. How well I prompt it.

    In reverse order of importance.

    Even an ok model, well prompted gives you a satisfactory code.

  • by seveibar on 1/4/25, 5:38 AM

    Val town has been a huge inspiration for the tscircuit site which is basically a typescript playground for electronic design. We extensively use codemirror-ts which was created by Val town and enables typescript autocomplete inside a codemirror editor. I didn’t know about codemirror-codeium but ill definitely look at integrating that as well!

    It’s absolutely true that we are in a race for online editors, I feel fatigued competing for ai features instead of building core product features, but since my framework is new, it’s not known by any major LLM providers, so our users can’t get ai assistance unless we build something ourselves.

    @stevekrouse huge shout out for your team’s open source work, hoping to help contribute upstream at some point!!

  • by fudged71 on 1/3/25, 10:37 PM

    I really enjoyed Steve’s guest appearance on Dan Shipper’s AI & I https://open.spotify.com/episode/6hoiweWkAv84zYTC8DAi5B?si=C...

  • by mkagenius on 1/4/25, 2:41 PM

    > For starters, we could feed back screenshots of the generated website back to the LLM. But soon you’d want to give the LLM access to a full web browser so it can itself poke around the app, like a human would, to see what features work and which ones don’t.

    We've had some success[1] with the screenshot to actions - using Gemini/Molmo and ADB on phones. And human like decisions was made by GPT 4o. It also recalibrates itself and says "oh we are still at the home screen, let's find the gmail app first"

    1. https://github.com/BandarLabs/clickclickclick - Letting AI control/use my phone.

  • by polote on 1/3/25, 11:28 PM

    Kinda got the the same conclusion than OP building in the same space. There is so much innovation going on currently that whatever you do today, two other people will do better tomorrow. Which is a good news for us but difficult time for builders.

  • by amelius on 1/3/25, 11:22 PM

    When can AI do refactors that encompass multiple files or an entire project?

  • by rtruzq on 1/4/25, 12:35 PM

    "Is this fast-following competitive or is it collaborative? So far it’s been feeling mostly collaborative. The pie is so freaking large — there are millions and maybe billions who are jumping at the chance to code — that we’re all happy to help each other scramble to keep up with the demand."

    The pie for whom? For drug dealers who give power users their LLM fix so they feel smart and can fake it?

    The pie is certainly shrinking for software engineers, as evidenced by the layoffs. Cocky startup founders may be next.

  • by antoniojtorres on 1/4/25, 11:03 AM

    I’m a val.town user and townie has been really nice in conjunction with having stuff working and hosted right away, it hits the sweet spot for speed and flexibility. Tough call to make on whether to continue pursuing it, excited to see what you do!

  • by kfarr on 1/4/25, 6:09 AM

    Love the openness and candor of this post!