Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 505 posts

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#21

Post by guzfip »

abletonlive wrote: post #18
markus_zhang wrote: post #13

If there is anyone who absolutely should slow down, it's the folks who are actively integrating company data with an agent -- you are literally helping removing as many jobs as possible, from your colleagues, and from yourselves, not in the long term, but in the short term. Integration is the key to the agents. Individual usages don't help AI much because it is confined within the domain of that individual.

> If there is anyone who absolutely should slow down, it's the folks who are actively integrating company data with an agent -- you are literally helping removing as many jobs as possible, from your colleagues, and from yourselves, not in the long term, but in the short term. I'm one of those people and I'm not going to slow down. I want to move on from bullshit jobs. The only people that fear what is coming are thos…

> I want to move on from bullshit jobs.

So are you aiming for death poverty? Once those bullshit jobs go, we’re going to find a lot of people incapable of producing anything of value while still costing quite a bit to upkeep. These people will have to be gotten rid of somehow.

> and think we are going to run out of things to do, or run out of problems to create and solve.

There will be plenty of problems to solve. Like who will wipe the ass of the very people that hate you and want to subjugate you.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#22

Post by latchkey »

pixl97 wrote: post #20
ketzo wrote: post #6

I think the core idea here is a good one. But in many agent-skeptical pieces, I keep seeing this specific sentiment that “agent-written code is not production-ready,” and that just feels… wrong! It’s just completely insane to me to look at the output of Claude code or Codex with frontier models and say “no, nothing that comes out of this can go straight to prod — I need to review every line.” Yes, there are still iss…

We live in a world where every line of code written by a human should be reviewed by another human. We can't even do that! Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever.

> Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever.

I'm one-shotting AI code for my website without even looking at it. Straight to prod (well, github->cf worker). It is glorious.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#23

Post by miltonlost »

ketzo wrote: post #6

I think the core idea here is a good one. But in many agent-skeptical pieces, I keep seeing this specific sentiment that “agent-written code is not production-ready,” and that just feels… wrong! It’s just completely insane to me to look at the output of Claude code or Codex with frontier models and say “no, nothing that comes out of this can go straight to prod — I need to review every line.” Yes, there are still iss…

You say it's borderline archaic. I say trusting agents enough to not look at every single line is an abdication of ethics, safety, and engineering. You're just absolving yourself of any problems. I hope you aren't working in medical devices or else we're going to get another Therac-25. Please have some sort of ethics. You are going to kill people with your attitude.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#24

Post by kemiller2002 »

badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

Maybe back in the beginning, but I don't think it's an engineering discipline now. I don't think that's bad though. I always thought we tagged on the word "engineer" so that we could make more money. I'm ok with not being one. The engineers I've known are very strict in their approach which is good since I don't want my deck to fall down. Most of us are too risky with our approach. We love to try new things and patterns, not just used established ones over time. This is fine with me, and when we apply the term "engineer" to work, I get a little uneasy, because I think it implies us doing something that most of us really don't want to do. That is, absolutely prove our approach works and will work for years to come. Just my opinion though.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#25

Post by markus_zhang »

abletonlive wrote: post #18
markus_zhang wrote: post #13

If there is anyone who absolutely should slow down, it's the folks who are actively integrating company data with an agent -- you are literally helping removing as many jobs as possible, from your colleagues, and from yourselves, not in the long term, but in the short term. Integration is the key to the agents. Individual usages don't help AI much because it is confined within the domain of that individual.

> If there is anyone who absolutely should slow down, it's the folks who are actively integrating company data with an agent -- you are literally helping removing as many jobs as possible, from your colleagues, and from yourselves, not in the long term, but in the short term. I'm one of those people and I'm not going to slow down. I want to move on from bullshit jobs. The only people that fear what is coming are thos…

If you don't want to slow down, maybe accelerating is the second better option for ordinary people.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#26

Post by gedy »

It's not even the complexity which, you have to realize: many managers and business types think it's just fine to have code no one understands because AI will do it.

I don't agree, but bigger issue to me is many/most companies don't even know what they want or think about what the purpose is. So whereas in past devs coding something gave some throttle or sanity checks, now we'd just throw shit over wall even faster.

I'm seeing some LinkedIn lunatics brag about "my idea to production in an hour" and all I can think is: that is probably a terrible feature. No one I've worked with is that good or visionary where that speed even matters.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#28

Post by abletonlive »

guzfip wrote: post #21
abletonlive wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there is anyone who absolutely should slow down, it's the folks who are actively integrating company data with an agent -- you are literally helping removing as many jobs as possible, from your colleagues, and from yourselves, not in the long term, but in the short term. I'm one of those people and I'm not going to slow down. I want to move on from bullshit jobs. The only people that fear what is coming are thos…

> I want to move on from bullshit jobs. So are you aiming for death poverty? Once those bullshit jobs go, we’re going to find a lot of people incapable of producing anything of value while still costing quite a bit to upkeep. These people will have to be gotten rid of somehow. > and think we are going to run out of things to do, or run out of problems to create and solve. There will be plenty of problems to solve. Li…

Name a single time doomers were right about anything. Doomers consistently overstate their expected outcome in every single domain and consistently fail to predict how society evolves and adapts.

Again:

The only people that fear what is coming are those that lack imagination and think we are going to run out of things to do, or run out of problems to create and solve.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#29

Post by SoftTalker »

badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

> I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was.

It isn't. Show me the licensing requirements to be a "software engineer." There are none. A 12 year old can call himself a software engineer and there are probably some who have managed to get remote work on major projects.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#30

Post by stuffn »

badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

Largely a problem of VCs and shareholders. After my 12th year of "we'll get around to bug fixes" and "this is an emergency" I realize I am absolutely not doing anything related to engineering. My job means less than the moron PM who graduated bottom of their class in . The lack of trust in me despite having almost a life in software is actually so insulting it's hard to quantify.

Now I barely look at ticket requirements, feed it to an LLM, have it do the work, spend an hour reviewing it, then ship it 3 days later. Plenty of fuck off time, which is time well spent when I know nothing will change anyway. If I'm gonna lose my career to LLMs I may as well enjoy burning shareholder capital. I've optimized my life completely to maximize fuck off time.

At the end of the day they created the environment. It would be criminal to not take advantage of their stupidity.

Post reply on HN