maxk42

It's Saturday in China.

I love classless CSS for rapid hand prototyping. LLMs are making this increasingly less necessary, but it's still great for creating tiny, performant CSS pages and some of the smaller ones can even be inlined in fewer bytes than it takes to make a 2nd round trip to the server to check if the asset has been updated. This is one of my secret weapons for creating web apps that load and render so fast you can feel the difference!

The status quo is people googling shit, finding either legalese they can't understand (but maybe think that they do) or information that was legitimate ten years ago (and is dangerously inaccurate today). If I ask a question and get an answer that's been inaccurate for years I'm going to have as much or more false confidence as an AI bot that misunderstands the source. The difference is the AI bot gets better with time instead of worse. It may not be perfect but it's a step in the right direction: Let them cook.

Of course the src directory is in VCS - it's arguably the entire point of the VCS. The entire project - including documentation - should be in VCS. Documentation is not source and should not be treated like it. But it is crucial to generating the source and always has been treated as a second-class consideration. Now that we have AI agents that can handle all the fine details of keeping the documentation up to date, I believe. We seem to be in agreement that docs should be under revision control. So the only point we seem to disagree on is where they go. My original claim was that they don't belong under the src directory. I still maintain that position. You could say that the broader point of the article was to put them under VCS and I started out with that position so there is no disagreement there. I just think it's poorly thought-out to place them under the src directory and it's even more shortsighted to place the docs in a subdirectory called 'md'. To me, these seem like the thoughts of someone who is just discovering how to craft code with the assistance of AI: They're good initial instincts, and potentially just a handful of completed projects away from a better solution, which is what people have been doing since before AI: Keep the docs separate. Keep them under revision. Keep them up to date. But documentation is not source, and even if you specify the project in intricate detail you're not going to get the same deterministic result by piping them through the same AI. And that's always been the way documentation has worked: It specifies things in as much detail as we can, but in the end someone has to translate that into source code. And typically the person writing that source code has to make decisions or trade-offs that were never specified in the docs. Now with AI agents we're able to back-port every line of reasoning into the docs and create much better and more up-to-date documentation, and that's exactly how I build with AI. But we're not able to treat the documentation as if it's a deterministic system that will generate the same outputs each time. Therefore it is meaningfully different from source code and should be treated as such. (Although it should be kept very close to the source code in a structure that is intuitive and appropriate for the project.)

In any event: If we're talking past each other or simply not understanding one another then I thank you for a respectful conversation.

I like how you wrote "the argument here is that maybe ad-hoc prompts is not the best way to capture that because you lose the instructions" as if you didn't begin this thread by contradicting my statement "Docs in VCS, yes." and claiming I missed the entire point of the post. It seems you've now agreed with me and yet still somehow wish to argue. I think you've missed the point of my post. You should reflect on that.

No, this is not a source file to be used to generate code. It's a spec to be used to build the code to - same as any other document. Aside from the fact that docs can be in any format - not merely .md - they do not belong in `src/`. Why? Well for one, many of my projects have multiple `src/` directories because they involve multiple binaries. But the documentation used to generate that source is in the project, not the `src/` directory of one of its binaries. I'm building a video streaming site that uses one server for the SFU, one server for the web interface, one server for the websocket connections, as well as STUN and TURN servers. None of the project works unless all these separate binaries are working together and communicating. Which `src/` directory should I place these markdown files in? What about the `.sql` files I use to spec out the database schema before passing it off to the LLM? What about the mermaid files, code snippets, `.txt` files, and data files used as part of the documentation project? Should they all go in `sfu/src/md/`? No. The project is one whole with multiple `src/` directories and they all require their own documentation. Beyond that they need access to each other's documentation so that when the agent is working on one part of the system it can still be aware of how the other pieces operate. Documentation should absolutely be under version control, but placing it in the `src/` directory is plainly the wrong call. And there is more documentation than just markdown. This was a shower thought that wasn't completely fleshed-out (and the article admits it wasn't) and never should've made it to the front page of HN.

Docs in VCS, yes. Docs in /src, no.

Westinghouse makes a line of "non-smart" TVs. A few obscure Chinese brands do also.

Sometimes the reasons people give are not the real reasons.

Shit. This was my last near-stock Android choice with great battery life. What's the alternative now? I hate Pixels and don't really want to give Google my info anyway. Is there something decent left?

Openrouter definitely supports vision models. Why would you have to give up vision?

My experience has been quite the opposite. I have done far better than my peers and have less debt. I wonder which country you're in?

Even if they are... road to hell and all that

After recently figuring out how to get CUDA running on Fedora I'm inclined to agree.

Seriously, GPUs are a mess and keeping LLMs from helping us use them properly is practically a crime.