211–220 of 605 posts
Why is so much invested in AI but not in fusion power?
Investment in fusion is huge and rising. ITER's total cost alone will be around $20b. And then there's Commonwealth Fusion, Helion, TAE and about a dozen others. Tens of billions are going into those efforts too.
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It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and seeing so many comments from programmers that are excited to not have to write code. It's depressing.
I suspect, rather strongly, that what really specifically wears programmers down is boilerplate . AI is addressing that problem extremely well, but by putting up with it rather than actually solving it. I don't want the boilerplate to be necessary in the first place.
> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?
It's not. And if your team is doing this you're not "advanced." Lots of people are outing themselves these days about the complexity of their jobs, or lack thereof. Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for them.
It really comes mostly down to being able to concisely and eloquently define what you want done. It also is important to understand what the default tendencies and biases of the model are so you know where to lean in a little. Occasionally you need to provide reference material.
The capabilities have grown dramatically in the last 6 months.
I have an advantage because I have been building LLM powered products so I know mechanically what they are and are not good with. For example.. want it to wire up an API with 250+ endpoints with a harness? You better create (or have it create) a way to cluster and audit coverage.
Generally the failures I hear often with "advanced" programmers are things like algorithmic complexity, concurrency, etc.. and these models can do this stuff given the right motivation/context. You just need to understand what "assumptions" the model it making and know when you need to be explicit.
Actually one thing most people don't understand is they try to say "Do (A), Don't do (B)", etc. Defining granular behavior which is fundamentally a brittle way to interact with the models.
Far more effective is defining the persona and motivation for the agent. This creates the baseline behavior profile for the model in that context.
Not "don't make race conditions", more like "You value and appreciate elegant concurrent code."
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> This and the fact that the end result is so poor isn't really selling your argument very well If you ever find yourself at the point where you are insulting a guy's passion project in order to prove a point, perhaps have a deep breath, and take a step back from the computer for a moment. And maybe you should look deep inside yourself, because you might have crossed the threshold to being a jerk. Yes, my site has is…
Look, buddy. You propped yourself up as an Experienced Dev doing cool stuff at Profitable Startup and don't understand Advanced Programming, and your entire argument is that you can keep doing the same sort of high quality(FSOV) work you've been doing the past 10 years with AI, just a lot faster. I'm just calling spade a spade. If you didn't want people to comment on your side project given your arguments and the top…
I can understand to some degree it would be chafing that I described myself as working at a SF Series C startup etc. The only intent there was to illustrate that I wasn't someone who started coding 2 weeks ago and had my mind blown by typing "GPT build me a calculator" into Claude. No intent at all of calling myself a mega-genius, which I don't really think I am. Just someone who likes doing fun stuff with AI.
And, BTW, if you reread my initial comment, you will realize you misread part of it. I said that "Advanced Programming" is the exact opposite of the type of work I am doing.
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It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and seeing so many comments from programmers that are excited to not have to write code. It's depressing.
There are three takes that I think are not depressing: * Being excited to be able to write the pieces of code they want, and not others. When you sit down to write code, you do not do everything from scratch, you lean on libraries, compilers, etc. Take the most annoying boilerplate bit of code you have to write now - would you be happy if a new language/framework popped up that eliminated it? * Being excited to be ab…
I personally don't like it when others who don't know how to code are able to get results using AI. I spent many years of my life and a small fortune learning scarce skills that everyone swore would be the last to ever be automated. Now, in a cruel twist of fate, those skills are being automated and there is seemingly no worthwhile job that can't be automated given enough investment. I am hopeful because the AI still has a long way to go, but even with the improvements it currently has, it might ultimately destroy the tech industry. I'm hoping that Say's Law proves true in this case, but even before the AI I was skeptical that we would find work for all the people trying to get into the software industry.
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It's not. And if your team is doing this you're not "advanced." Lots of people are outing themselves these days about the complexity of their jobs, or lack thereof. Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for them.
I beginning to think most "advanced" programmers are just poor communicators. It really comes mostly down to being able to concisely and eloquently define what you want done. It also is important to understand what the default tendencies and biases of the model are so you know where to lean in a little. Occasionally you need to provide reference material. The capabilities have grown dramatically in the last 6 months.…
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Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm. To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I…
Is your redesign live for chipscompo? Because if so, and absolutely no offence meant here, the UI looks like it was built by an intern. And fair enough, you sound like a backend guy so you can't expect perfection for frontend work. My experience with AI is that it's great at producing intern-level artifacts very quickly and that has its uses, but that certainly doesn't replace 95% of software development. And if it's…
The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll. It's true that the technology currently works as an e…
> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?
At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it fa…