I don't care how well your "AI" works • Hacker News Board

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#471

Post by hobofan » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC

billy99k wrote: post #380

pksebben wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely progressive, but definitely not luddite [0]. Anti-capitalist for sure. I struggle with this discourse deeply. With many posters like OP, I align almost completely - unions are good, large megacorps are bad, death to facists etc. It's when we get to the AI issue that I do a bit of a double take. Right now, AI is almost completely in the hands of a few large corp entities, yes. But once upon a time, so was the i…

How are unions any better than mega corps? My brother is part of a union and the leaders make millions. He's pigenholed at the same low pay rate and can't ever get a raise, until everyone in the same role also gets a raise (which will never happen). It traps people, because many union jobs can't or won't innovate, and when they look elsewhere, are underskilled (and stuck). You mention 'deepseek'. Are you joking? It's…

The top of megacorps make 4-6 orders of magnitude more than labor union leaders. To claim that there is no difference is mindboggeling.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#472

Post by an0malous » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 4:58 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

I think comments like yours should include what salary range, industry, and company size your job entails. The last few years have been absolutely miserable for me at Series A YC startups

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#473

Post by AndrewKemendo » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 4:59 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #304

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your org is blindly data/metric driven Are there for profit companies (not non profits, research institutes etc…) that are not metric driven?

“Blindly” is the operative word here.

That’s almost an oxymoron

You can’t be data driven and also blind to the data

You might be optimizing for the wrong thing, but it’s not blind, it’s just a bad “model”

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#474

Post by nasmorn » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 5:00 PM UTC

andai wrote: post #447

cool_dude85 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just as we shouldn't be contemptuous of a woodworking craftsman using a table saw. Some tools are table saws, and some tools are subcontracting work out to lowest cost bidders to do a crap job. Which of the two is AI?

I've been programming for 20 years and GPT-4 (the one from early 2023) does it better than me. I'm the guy other programmers I know ask for advice. I think your metaphor might be a little uncharitable :) For straightforward stuff, they can handle it. For stuff that isn't straightforward, they've been trained on pattern matching some nontrivial subset of all human writing. So chances are they'll say, "oh, in this situ…

AI doesn’t program better than me yet. It can do some things better than me and I use it for that but it has no taste and is way too willing to write a ton of code. What is great about it compared to an actual junior is if i find out it did something stupid it will redo the work super fast and without getting sad

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#475

Post by carlosjobim » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 5:00 PM UTC

fileeditview wrote: post #325

carlosjobim wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't programmers think of stepping down from their ivory towers and start making small apps which solve small problems? That people and businesses are very happy to pay for? But no! Programmers seem to only like working on giant scale projects, which only are of interest to huge enterprises, governments, or the open source quagmire of virtualization within virtualization within virtualization. There's exactly o…

I don't think programmers are the issue here. What you describe sounds to me more like the typical product management in a company. Stuff features into the thing until it bursts of bugs and is barely maintainable. I would love to do something like what you describe. Build a simple but solid and very specialized solution. However I am not sure there is demand or if I have the right ideas for what to do. You mention in…

There's a whole bunch of apps for invoicing, but if you try them, you'll see that they are excessively complicated. Probably because they want to cover all bases of all use cases. Meaning they aren't great for any use case. Like you say.

The invoicing app in particular I was referring to is Cakedesk. Made by a solo developer who sells it for a fair price. Easy to use and has all the necessary functions. Probably the name and the icon is holding him back, though. As far as I understand, the app is mostly a database and an Electron/Chromium front-end, all local on your computer. Probably very simple and uninteresting for a programmer, but extremely interesting for customers who have a problem to solve.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#476

Post by idiotsecant » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 5:00 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #442

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities. This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old…

>Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. At some point people started universally accepting the idea that any sort of gatekeeping was a bad thing.I think by now people are starting to realize that this was a flawed idea. (at best, gatekeeping is not a pure negative; it's situational) But, despite coming to realize this I think…

Your point is that the hacker ethos involved ... Fewer people being excited about programming? I don't think we experienced this on the same planet.

Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI. The wrong turn we took was letting business overtake joy. That's a decision we can undo today by opting out of that whole ecosystem.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#477

Post by AndrewKemendo » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 5:01 PM UTC

intothemild wrote: post #281

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your org is blindly data/metric driven Are there for profit companies (not non profits, research institutes etc…) that are not metric driven?

Most early stage startups I've been in weren't metric driven. It's impossible when everyone is just working as hard as they can to get it built, to suddenly slow down and start measuring everyone's output. It's not until later. When it's gotten to a larger size, do you have the resources to be metric driven.

Every early stage startup is absolutely metric driven: keeping the business alive based on Runway

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#478

Post by aprilthird2021 » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 5:01 PM UTC

chemotaxis wrote: post #366

easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

> It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. It happens, but I think it's pretty uncommon. What's a lot more common is people getting called out for offloading tasks to LLMs in a way that j…

I'm looking at code at my tech job right now where someone AI outsourced it, didn't proofread it, and didn't realize a comparison table it built is just running over the same dataset twice causing every comparison to look "identical" even when the data isn't

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#479

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 5:02 PM UTC

recursive wrote: post #383

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not ads, honestly. It's quality. The tool being designed to empower the user. Have you ever seen something encrusted in ads be designed to empower the user? At least, it necessitates reducing the user's power to remove the ads. Yes, a number of ad-supported sites are designed to empower the user. Video streaming platforms, for example, give me nearly unlimited freedom to watch what I want when I want. When I w…

> Video streaming platforms, for example, give me nearly unlimited freedom to watch what I want when I want. But they'd prefer if it was shorts.

No, they wouldn't. On Youtube, for example, videos were consistently trending longer over time, and you used to see frequent explainers (https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-video-extra-long/) on why this was happening and how Youtube benefits from it. Short-form videos are harder to monetize and reduce retention, but users demand them so strongly that most platforms have built a dedicated experience for them to compete with TikTok.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#480

Post by pixl97 » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 5:02 PM UTC

terminalbraid wrote: post #444

MrDarcy wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a hacker and I’d show respect to that latter person if they did the subcontracting and reviewed their craft well.

But you wouldn't call them a craftsperson because they didn't do any craft other than "be a manager". Reviewing work is not on the same plane as actually creating something.

Why are we crafting code?

Simply put most industries started moving away from craftsmanship starting in the late 1700s to the mid 1900s. Craftsmanship does make a few nice things but it doesn't scale. Mass production lead to most people actually having stuff and the general condition of humanity improving greatly.

Software did kind of get a cheat code here though, we can 'craft' software and then endlessly copy it without the restrictions of physical objects. With all that said, software is rarely crafted well anyway. HN has an air about it that software developers are the craftsman of their gilded age, but most software projects fail terribly and waste huge amounts of money.