Obviously security is the bigger issue, but reading through this, all I could think about was how many tokens it must have spent doing all that to fix 2 lines of CSS
Obviously security is the bigger issue, but reading through this, all I could think about was how many tokens it must have spent doing all that to fix 2 lines of CSS
Lines of code for a bugfix is a really bad proxy for effort required.
You should estimate how much time it would have taken a human
30 seconds or a minute? Look at the diff he links to: https://github.com/datasette/datasette-agent/commit/a75a8b72...
Every browser has an inspector that can show you which element is causing overflow. You walk through the tree, find the offender, and add min-width or overflow. Zero tokens, just like in the old days!
Now, granted, because the garbage LLM code he’s working with has CSS inside HTML inside JavaScript inside Python (I wish I were kidding), finding the styles in his codebase might’ve taken a minute. But even then!
Yeah looking at that diff it should be very quick. My point was mostly that it was a bad metric, not if was correct or not in this particular case. I'm sure everybody's had a bugfix that took days to debug and it was just a couple of lines to fix.
Or sometimes a fix is obvious, but because it requires changing the code of a dependency, it's actually quite tedious to implement.
I was thinking of this too. It did all that what not only for a single line that is a simple thing even for someone new to web coding. That's to say the process matters more.
> Zero tokens, just like in the old days!
because you zero rate your own human attention, which you should value
Alas, LLMs require more attention, not less.
A small diff /= a small change! They are completely separate things. Quite often a small diff is hours of actual work. Even in this case _finding_ those lines could have taken work - we don't really know.
Did you actually look at the diff, though? That’s the kind of change you make 10 times a day while working on frontend. It is a tiny change.
I looked at the screenshot and for the rest of the article wondered if it would be as simple as `overflow-x: hidden`.
And to my surprise it was.
This would’ve take a frontend dev 10 seconds to deduce and another 10 seconds to confirm.
The thing that puzzles me is that I would expect overflow-x: hidden to result in text typed into that textarea being wider than the page and being invisibly truncated on the right hand side.
But that's not what happens. And in fact, when you start typing in the textarea the horizontal scrollbar vanishes - it's only there when the textarea is empty.
Am I misunderstanding anything here? Seems like it's some weird Safari bug, since Firefox and Chrome don't have the problem.
It probably has to do with other styles assigned to the textarea, maybe the ::placeholder as it hides when typing (I assume on focus)
In any case. In the screenshot the scrollbar is inside the textarea as it aligns with the resize control on its right. This is basically all the info needed to deduce the textarea overflow is the culprit.
But could be that the overflow-x is just a bandaid hiding the issue causing the overflow in the first place, like crazy styles on the placeholder.
I mean - that looks like a pretty easy CSS fix to play around with in developer tools, and I'm not even a frontend person. Maybe a few minutes max?
5 minutes if you know CSS. And if you don’t, about the time for you to ask someone that knows CSS. In the worst case, the amount of hours to learn CSS.
So if you’re doing web pages, learn CSS.
Generally, if you’re doing something that directly involves X, learn how X works.
ADDENDUM
In most jobs, you’re going to be involved in only a few distinct technologies, learn those well and life is going to be easier. And most are transferable to the next job.
ain’t no one learning all of that
It’s simple: if you have to fix 2 lines of CSS you should definitely not use Fable. Only use it for complex and long running tasks :)
I don't think it's that simple. (I generally agree with you; I just that that oversimplifies.)
Another model might have used fewer tokens, but come up with a fix that was 1000 lines when the right fix was only 2 lines.
$12 worth, it seems
Imagine telling someone in 2015 that you can just tell your computer to fix a 2-line CSS bug and it only costs $12
'only'? A web developer did not cost 12*30=360$ an hour in 2015, and that's assuming that going "ugh, whatever. I'll just hide the problem with overflow:hidden instead of finding the underlying cause" takes him or her 2 minutes and isn't already the dev's initial reaction
Another way of looking at it is using as much electricity as a normal person in a high-income country uses across ~3 days to add overflow:hidden in the end. Of course, the path to get there did a lot more, but you don't know that beforehand if you don't take a quick peek and make an architectural decision about what the solution should be that gets implemented
Or even in 2026. You absoutely will pay a human that for that work.
The author is an AI hype merchant and doesn't pay for his own tokens.
I pay $100/month to Anthropic and $100/month to OpenAI at the moment, plus whatever I spend on their APIs (usually less than $20/month for each, I use the subscriptions for most things.)
A couple of months ago I was paying $200/month for Anthropic and $20/month for OpenAI. I decided to split it evenly to get full access to both of their offerings.
I've actually chosen not to sign up for their free plans for open source maintainers, because paying the regular subscription price feels more honest, given that I write about them so much.
I do have the free GitHub Copilot for open source maintainers deal - I've had that for years. Given how much code I have published on GitHub over the decades I feel less conflicted about that one.
I sometimes get preview access to models, which includes the ability to use them for free during the preview. That comes with a big catch though: I can't publish any of the code that I write using those previews while the model is still unreleased.
As a result I don't use those preview tokens much at all, because the vast majority of my work is open source and I don't want restrictions on when and where I publish the code I'm producing.
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Your loss.
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Im faster than all these llm freaks. Im not convinced its faster to use llms, except maybe boilerplate (who cares).
People can just be lazy and seem productive now, they're still lazy.
We have people that now need access to hundreds of thousands in hardware to write an email. Miss me with that, im not frying my brain and becoming dependent on having access to a billionaires thinking machine.
Im also not going to fry my brain with a local think for me machine either. I want to be more valuable than the hardware I have access too.
It seems that you've not worked out how to harness the LLM as a tool to improve your qualified knowledge and abilities in a domain, and have instead focused on whether or not its a crutch for lack of knowledge or laziness.
When paired with your skill and knowledge, it is a force multiplier. You maintain control, the ability to direct, structure, strategise, and refine.
That some are using it as the entire brain does not mean that this is how everyone is using it, or how you must use it. The models can be fantastic at breaking past certain issues, surfacing qualified information, and surfacing related distributed information to help you acquire it and pick up what you need on niche topics quickly. Something as basic as copilot hooked into sharepoint can make life a lot easier when you are in a big org. Something like claude code or codex can be great at hunting down issues in an unfamiliar code base rapidly. Whether or not you outsource the thinking component is entirely up to you, but ignoring the productivity side of the tool because it can do some of the thinking is a case of focusing too hard on the negative.
Im not denying its usefulness for Q&A on docs/code as a search tool. Im talking about people who use it design and write their code, people who are offloading problem solving altogether, they aren't faster.
Yea man. That is what sensible people do. Use these as a better search, and use it to lookup, and learn stuff while YOU do stuff.
And make maximum use of it to learn as much as possible, while it lasts...
Yeah there are some tasks which it is a definite speed-up but I think overall its probably only marginally beneficial. Which is why, ~6 months into 10x productivity we aren’t seeing ai boosters shipping 5 years worth of software.
It’s possible to produce 10x the lines of code.
But that’s not the same as producing 10x functionality that will be used or is wanted by users or customers.
I understand this perspective. I'll just note that as the abilities increase, the intent is to have some non -coding IC or TPM/manager literally just managing some LLMs and cutting out some software engineers. The goodness is specifically to wholly replace people who code first and foremost, at least partially. It just has to cost less tokens than the equivalent wage is the pricing goal.
And people who use LLMs to talk for them (e.g. email, slack) are deplorable. A completely disrespectful use case in my view.
The desire to get rid of software engineers is bizarre - because at the root of it, developers were there not to just write the code, but to ask right questions and based on these question build right things.
I've met in my professional life some managers or other middlemen who would be profoundly incapable of producing correct software no matter how smart of an AI agent they have access to. One of those - you don't know what you don't know.
But, I guess this is the world we live in now. Going to be Mortal Kombat for positions in companies where software engineers are actually valued.
It depends a lot where you work because there are lots of companies in the world where the business analyst does all of that and the developers exist to mindlessly translate their docs into code.
That sounds like an unmotivating working arrangement. It’s so rewarding to understand a customer need and help with the design and implementation of the feature.
There's a reason I didn't stay in that domain, let me tell you.
Having worked in places across both extremes (software engineer doing lots of other things including BD, hardware, ops, etc. to just being a JIRA ticket machine monkey), I am suspicious that HN readership is biased towards the former and frankly the bulk of "software engineers" in the world _willingly_ exist in the latter category. I didn't experience the latter until later in my career and God Almighty was it uncomfortable, but I think if AI were to displace some subset of "software engineers" it would those (they also seem to overwhelmingly dislike writing any prose whatsoever, which to me is a major tell). Many, many software engineers outside of hotshot shops seem either incapable or profoundly averse to "asking the questions" as you say.
Most here on HN know sweatshops exists but seemed they think not people work there or use them. I have worked with (via clients who used them) programmers in enormous buildings in Bangalore, who have a camera behind them so you can watch your people 247 and who just mindlessly transform jira tickets into code; I keep saying; there is zero use for all those millions of people at all; seems HN does not believe that because they seem to not believe these people exist. I worked with many over the past 30 years and by far most have no real clue what they are doing so I also doubt they can be re educated for a new co existence with LLMs.
You're fighting a battle you can't win. Doesn't care what you think about those using LLMs, they will outproduce you and in corporate environments, shipping things is paramount. If I can ship 5 more things simultaneously with AI, I'm going to beat you even if you think you're creating "better" software.
Example of whats been shipped?
Okay. I rebuilt my website in ~a month with the help of Opus 4.7/.8 and it would have taken me, unaided human, at least 6 months. Link's in my bio if you care.
Satisfied now? Will you stop asking this question? Thought not.
So look. I’m not trying to be a dick I promise.
But I took a look at your site and I don’t know if a month would be impressive for a new and unaided dev. It looks nice but yeah.
If you’re not a dev that’s totally cool but like… all I’m saying is this may not hit like you want it to.
I'm looking at something fairly standard that can be made with a SSG. The "Written by humans" footer gave a good chuckle tho.
I use Astro but it's not static, I server-render. There's a whole bunch of other stuff once you're signed in.
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I could have written this site plus the browser to render it in six months...
Seriously a month? I could write a SSG itself to produce this site in a month.
lmao
Why would this have taken 6 months? No offense, but this is a few days work without llms (assuming the content already exists). This should not have taken a month.
Also, not trying to be an asshole. Props for not making it look like every other llm generated slop site, Its just not a great example.
I asked claude to crawl the website and summarize its findings, took about 10minutes. I'm not sure I would've done it faster, but i have no doubt you couldve done it in 5, and grokked the pages faster than an llm too. but anyway heres what claude said:
That's not a terrible read of the site's tech. It over-sells it a touch – I use Umami for analytics, for example – but yeah, auth, payments, entitlement-gated downloads, those downloads adapt to the app you've selected in your settings, yada yada.
I never said I was a good dev! That's why it would have taken me 6 months. To pretend that I could have done it in days is just silly.
My point – site roast over – is that it's absurd to suggest that LLMs don't help anyone 'ship' faster. Like them or not, it's a fact that they do.
At this point, why would anyone in their right mind respond to this question and paint a target for all manner of negativity ranging from snark to harassment to malicious action?
the quantum slop argument : "yeah it's everywhere but no one ships it."
They don't out perform me though...
Consider this. U have a website. U have to translate to xx languages. Can u write it faster than an AI? If so how much faster can u do this?
Is it valuable to u? Is it valuable to a Chinese person? A Spaniard?
Google Translate counts as AI.
Don't feed the troll.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
I'm convinced this is going to be the summary of the 2020 decade...
If we're in a simulation, maybe it's a simulation about the dangers of AI.
If we're in a simulation, we are AI. But someone could be studying what happens when AI makes its own AI.
They will 'soon' (few 1000 years max) shut us down probably.
This one of the places to manufacture the consent for that to take place, because we are commenting within an organization that has given the money to ensure it that what could be is done. Most people clapped and made money, who cares what happens next, making money is the only good that matters.