Yeh, fair question.
Recently I built a Non Linear Editor for Vimeo VODs.
The server downloads the VOD, extracts key frames using FFMPEG, allows the user to create a bunch of sections and where they get uploaded to, then FFMPEG does a stream copy to extract those sections, and then upload them.
I knew all of that was possible. I had never done HTML5 video players, I had never spawned FFMPEG from typescript, there was a lot of html/CSS that I didn’t have experience with.
Previously, I would have passed on this work.
But after defining a plugin system for source/destination (so it can be used with YouTube or whatever), and splitting each stage into workers, the code itself is fairly easy to evaluate.
I didn’t need to know how to get to the result, I just knew what shape the result should look like so I could drive the LLM, and then I just had to read the result and google anything I didn’t understand.
And ultimately, I don’t really care “if it’s good or not”. The definition of “good” is that it works and is robust. Other than that, it’s looking for code smells.
I guess I am lucky that most of my work is “one and done” instead of long-term support.
Yeah ok fair, for “one and done” projects I do indeed believe that LLMs can be a useful tool. For maintainable code instead of write-once code, which is what I am 99% working with, I believe they suck. So my definition of “good” would be a lot stricter.
Yeh, fair question.
Recently I built a Non Linear Editor for Vimeo VODs.
The server downloads the VOD, extracts key frames using FFMPEG, allows the user to create a bunch of sections and where they get uploaded to, then FFMPEG does a stream copy to extract those sections, and then upload them.
I knew all of that was possible. I had never done HTML5 video players, I had never spawned FFMPEG from typescript, there was a lot of html/CSS that I didn’t have experience with.
Previously, I would have passed on this work.
But after defining a plugin system for source/destination (so it can be used with YouTube or whatever), and splitting each stage into workers, the code itself is fairly easy to evaluate.
I didn’t need to know how to get to the result, I just knew what shape the result should look like so I could drive the LLM, and then I just had to read the result and google anything I didn’t understand.
And ultimately, I don’t really care “if it’s good or not”. The definition of “good” is that it works and is robust. Other than that, it’s looking for code smells.
I guess I am lucky that most of my work is “one and done” instead of long-term support.
Yeah ok fair, for “one and done” projects I do indeed believe that LLMs can be a useful tool. For maintainable code instead of write-once code, which is what I am 99% working with, I believe they suck. So my definition of “good” would be a lot stricter.