11–20 of 42 posts
I recommend ignoring them. Despite VCs trying to spend it into existence, we aren’t going to have another internet level event in information technology and the smartphone+laptop combo is peak personal computing.
I think we are near the crest of this wave but that just means the next one is coming, though.
No. I use it constantly and get a ton of value out of it.
It’s ironic though. VB6 macros in excel was a major productivity win. Point and click forms an MBA could whip up in 20 minutes. Software development libraries used to be much faster to develop for with far less boiler plate.
LLMs as coding assistants are undeniably time saving devices, especially when working in languages/libraries/platforms/frameworks you aren't already very familiar with, or when needing to generate something very boilerplatey as a one-off.
I am not calling the technology useless by any stretch of the imagination, but its still just so wildly overhyped right now.
It is a pretty common occurrence these days for me to have a blog post open from some "AI industry thought leader" talking about how all developers will be out of work in a year while at the same time I have a Gemini window open and I'm just watching it absolutely flail on relatively simple things like generating a database query or a regex (that is novel and not something that's scattered all over its training set like a simple email validator).
And Gemini 2.5 is, IMO, the best of the models when it comes to programming assistance (having replaced Claude 3.5 which was IMO previously the best), at least for the areas I touch (lots of kotlin/KMP/Android/etc).
As goofy as Gemini sometimes gets it is far less frustrating than asking Claude 4 a question and watching it write out a whole ass answer but then correct itself like 7 times before finally coming to a shitty answer that is worse than 2 of the ones it wiped out while blowing through most of its context window on its loop of indecisiveness.
And relatedly... color me completely unsurprised that this thread got dumpstered off the front page so quickly. Gotta keep pretending like the singularity is going to happen next week.
:D
Another problem is that we're turning any problem into a black-box, which takes the fun out of problem-solving.
I am having a lot of fun learning about generative AI. It is just a bit thankless because I know the stuff I am building will be dead on arrival. So, I will not get any praise regardless on how well I do my job, maybe even get blamed.
But hey, after all the junior devs have been starved because no one wants to hire them, I will make bank once the next AI winter comes and companies desperately look for people who can actually code.
If you have your own company you can just weather it out and invest in good talent. Really a good position to be in.
Depending upon the niche that your software company services, you might be able to stand out in the market by not adding any AI features. At least if the HN crowd is anything to go by. I think there are situations where AI as it currently exists is absolutely a value add, but often it does seem like it's been shoehorned into an existing product just to ride the latest trend.
If AI lives up to its hype, which is a whole other subject, then I expect to see the two things I like about my job vanishing quickly - the pay, and the problem solving.