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Similar argument to https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trusting-your-own-judge... , but I like this one better because at least it doesn’t try to pull the rhetorical trick of slipping from “we can’t know whether LLMs are helping because we haven’t studied the question systematically” to “actually we do know, and they’re shit”.
1. he talks about what he's shipped, and yet compares it to crypto – already, you're in a contradiction as to your relative comparison – you straight up shouldn't blog if you can't conceive that these two are opposing thoughts
2. this whole refrain from people of like, "SHOW ME your enterprise codebase that includes lots of LLM code" – HELLO, people who work at private companies CANNOT just reveal their codebase to you for internet points
3. anyone who has actually used these tools has now integrated them into their daily life on the order of millions of people and billions of dollars – unless you think all CEOs are in a grand conspiracy, lying about their teams adopting AI
Earlier quoted context omitted.
- superficial emotion - cliché phrasing - em dashes - abundant alliteration - all comments suspiciously similar in length - all posts pointing to the same website Does HN not have a policy against vapid AI comment spam? If not, it needs one. edit: It does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37617714
Watch out, HN. The em dash police are here. Hands up
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is something to sneeze at if you are 10-15% more expensive to employ due to the cost of the LLM tools. Claude Max is $200/month, or ~2% of the salary of an average software engineer.
Does anyone actually know what the real cost for the customers will be once the free AI money no longer floods those companies?
One thing I find frustrating is that management where I work has heard of 10x productivity gains. Some of those claims even come from early adopters at my work. But that sets expectation way too high. Partly it is due to Amdahl's law: I spend only a portion of my time coding, and far more time thinking and communicating with others that are customers of my code. Even if does make the coding 10x faster (and it doesn't…
The AI thing kind of reminds me of the big push to outsource software engineers in the early 2000's. There was a ton of hype among executives about it, and it all seemed plausible on paper. But most of those initiatives ended up being huge failures, and nearly all of those jobs came back to the US.
People tend to ignore a lot of the little things that glue it all together that software engineers do. AI lacks a lot of this. Foreigners don't necessarily lack it, but language barriers, time zone differences, cultural differences, and all sorts of other things led to similar issues. Code quality and maintainability took a nosedive and a lot of the stuff produced by those outsourced shops had to be thrown in the trash.
I can already see the AI slop accumulating in the codebases I work in. It's super hard to spot a lot of these things that manage to slip through code review, because they tend to look reasonable when you're looking at a diff. The problem is all the redundant code that you're not seeing, and the weird abstractions that make no sense at all when you look at it from a higher level.
I have to say I’m in the exact camp the author is complaining about. I’ve shipped non trivial greenfield products which I started back when it was only ChatGPT and it was shitty. I started using Claude with copying and pasting back and forth between the web chat and XCode. Then I discovered Cursor. It left me with a lot of annoying build errors, but my productivity was still at least 3x. Now that agents are better an…
Please re-read the article. Especially the first list of things we don't know about you, your projects etc. Your specific experience cannot be generalized. And speaking as the author, and who is (as written in the article) literally using these tools everyday. > But I’m just so floored how anyone could not be extracting the same utility from it. It feels like there’s two articles like this every week now. This is whe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is something to sneeze at if you are 10-15% more expensive to employ due to the cost of the LLM tools. Claude Max is $200/month, or ~2% of the salary of an average software engineer.
Does anyone actually know what the real cost for the customers will be once the free AI money no longer floods those companies?
Same for LLMs and AI: it is awesome for some things and absolutely sucks for other things. Curiously tho, it feels like UX was solved by making chats, but it actually still sucks enormously, as with crypto. It is mostly sufficient for doing basic stuff. It is difficult to predict where we'll land on the curve of difficult (or expensive) vs abilities. I'd bet AI will get way more capable, but even now you can't really deny its usefulness.
Ok. Claude Code produces most code at Anthropic. Theres an enterprise code base, with acute real needs. There are real, experienced SWEs. How much babysitting and reviewing is undetermined; but the Ants seem to tremendously prefer the workflow. Even crypto people didn’t dogfood their crypto like that, on their own critical path.
Does it? Or does their marketing tell you that? Strange that "most code is written by Claude" and they still hire for actual humans for all the positions from backend to API to desktop to mobile clients.
> How much babysitting and reviewing is undetermined; but the Ants seem to tremendously prefer the workflow.
So. We know nothing about their codebase, actual flows, programming languages, depth and breadth of usage, how much babysitting is required...