Item — HN Reader

At some point the food-tax dropped from 10% to 5% which I guess is good for people who need to eat!

I still do a fair bit of z80 programming for myself, and I'm very familiar with the Spectrum so this was a nice article to see, but it's a bit underwhelming how well this seemed to go.

2 comments

…and it changed the default tax rate from 25% to 10%.

It’s still impressive, but it’s basically advanced autocomplete. You still have to read and check every line and make sure it is doing what you expect it to do.

covered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43387590

but yes, indeed you still need to watch it like a hawk when using it outside of a tight eval loop (ie. make all | make property-tests) and/or implement some other form eval loop on the original /spec generation.

The author says you have to trust the LLMs though for it to work... You can downvote this but read the articles conclusions first...

Yeah, this was pointed out to me after publishing. Specifically, when the ASM was converted over /specs, it incorrectly wrote the amount of sales tax to the specs. Thus, the z80 implementation took that incorrect /spec and made it happen. At this stage, I'm sure if I had put some more care/effort into transpiling something from the source (i.e., connecting two or more LLMs as a check on that process) to specs, this problem could have been avoided.

It could have been avoided, but you didn't notice the problem and therefore couldn't avoid it.

To me it looks like your comparison to Tesla FSD is much more apt than you realize. If you want the "magic" to work you have to trust it, and accept that it will run you over the cliff the first chance it gets.

If you're a true fan you'll then head to hackernews to explain that "if only i had stopped it from running me over the cliff, the technology would have been amazing".