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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#211

Post by jimbokun »

dstroot wrote: post #99
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. If I engineer a bridge I know the load the bridge is designed to carry. Then I add a factor of safety. When I build a website can anyone on the product side actually predict traffic? When building a bridge I can consult a book of materials and understand how much a material deforms under load, what is breaking point…

We have a long way to go but large software companies have gotten really, really good at scaling to handle larger and larger traffic loads. It's not like there are no materials to consult to learn current best practices, even if there are still more improvements to be made.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#212

Post by abletonlive »

metobehonest wrote: post #106
abletonlive wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Climate change would be a big one. That's generous. Climate scientists were right, climate doomers were definitely wrong. Society is mostly unchanged due to climate change. That's not to say climate has no effect, but it is certainly still not some doomer scenario that's played out. New York and Florida are most certainly not underwater as predicted by the famous "Inconvenient Truth". People still live in deserts j…

The CO2 concentration continues to climb year after year, at an accelerating rate. The world hasn't ended yet because it's still 2026 but it doesn't mean it won't. We're on a hothouse earth trajectory. All signs point to you not being aware of serious climate research and hanging on to a naive Steven Pinker "everything is always improving" outlook.

> The world hasn't ended yet because it's still 2026 but it doesn't mean it won't.

All signs point to you being a doomer that is excellent at moving the goal post. "If it doesn't happen tomorrow surely it will happen the next day."

You can do this until the end of time. A waste of brain cycles for anybody with a real job. This is the exact same pattern for every single kind of doomer and they are all wrong in the exact same way over and over. You still can't name a single doomer point of view that has played out to some kind of catastrophic society collapsing event accurately.

It's always "it's coming" eventually.

Running out of oil, overpopulation, financial system collapse that sends us back to the dark ages, climate change that causes everybody to move migrate to Colorado, a coronavirus that permanently makes us board up indoors. None of it ever plays out the way you doomers fantasize about it playing out.

When some kind of catastrophic society collapsing event happens it's most likely going to be because of something that is not in the mainstream consciousness.

If doomers were good at predicting these events and how it will play out they'd all be rich as hell, but no, they are for the most part a bunch of broke whiners. (Except for those doomers that have made their wealth off of scaring people)

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#213

Post by vinyl7 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #165
perrygeo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to sha…

>> The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly? Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? This is because all the low-hanging fruit ha…

It may exist (with a loose term of exist) but they are all mostly garbage. There's still plenty opportunity to make non-garbage version of things that already exist

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#214

Post by abletonlive »

tock wrote: post #91
abletonlive wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- NFTS doomers? I mean I appreciate the humor here. - Surveillance schizos - Society still works - Global Pedophile Cabal schizos - Again, funny use of 'doomers' but that's what the current society seems to be run by so I wouldn't say it's fitting for doomerism. - People who predicted the flood of people entering Software via bootcamps, etc. would never cause any problems because their god of software is consuming th…

What do you think is a valid doomer warning that came true? Or do you think literally everything that is pessimistic is doomerism?

You're asking the wrong person. I haven't seen a single example of a doomer warning that came true. Can you provide one? It seems like society still exists when I look out the window and the impact that doomers assert are greatly exaggerated in every instance.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#215

Post by Aurornis »

Towaway69 wrote: post #124

What the article doesn't touch on is the vendor lock-in that is currently underway. Many corps are now moving to an AI-based development process that is reliant on the big AI providers. Once the codebase has become fully agentic, i.e., only agents fundamentally understand it and can modify it, the prices will start rising. After all, these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup on their investments.…

> the prices will start rising. After all, these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup on their investments.

I would bet a lot of money that the price of LLM assistance will go down, not up, as the hardware and software advance.

Every genre-defining startup seems to go through this same cycle where the naysayers tell us that it's all going to collapse once the investment money runs out. This was definitely true for technologies without use cases (remember the blockchain-all-the-things era?) but it is not true for businesses that have actual users.

Some early players may go bust by chasing market share without a real business plan, like the infamous Webvan grocery delivery service. But even Webvan was directionally correct, with delivery services now a booming business sector.

Uber is another good example. We heard for years that ridesharing was a fad that would go away as soon as the VC money ran out. Instead, Uber became a profitable company and almost nobody noticed because the naysayers moved on to something else.

AI is different because the hardware is always getting faster and cheaper to operate. Even if LLM progress stalled at Opus 4.6 levels today, it would still be very useful and it would get cheaper with each passing year as hardware improved.

> I'm sure the pro-AIs will explain that technology will only get cheaper and better and that fundamentally it ain't an issue. Just like oil prices

Comparing compute costs to oil prices is apples to oranges. Oil is a finite resource that comes out of the ground and the technology to extract it doesn't improve much over decades. AI compute gets better and cheaper every year because the technology advances rapidly. GPU servers that were as expensive as cars a few years ago are now deprecated and available for cheap because the new technology is vastly faster. The next generation will be faster still.

If you're mentally comparing this to things like oil, you're not on the right track

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#216

Post by pkilgore »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #156
slopinthebag wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great shout because I'm sure a lot of people would otherwise just discredit this take as just another anti-ai skeptic. But he probably has more experience working with LLM's and agents than most of us on this site, so his opinion holds more weight than most.

If you were going to dismiss an argument because of who it comes from rather than its content, that is a flaw in your thinking. The argument is correct, or it isn't, no matter who said it.

Appeal to authority, the logical fallacy, is not attempting to claim that authority is irrelevant or has zero signal whatsoever.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#217

Post by apsurd »

jimbokun wrote: post #204
abustamam wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point. I've seen people with really complex AI setups (multiple agents collaborating for hours). But what are they building? Are they building a react app with an express backend? A next js app? Which itself is a layer on top of an abstraction? I haven't tried this myself but I'm curious if an LLM could build a scalable, maintainable app that doesn't use a framework or external libraries. Could be dang…

When it comes time to debug would you rather ask questions about and dig through code in a popular open source library, or dig through code generated by an LLM specifically for your project?

If the LLM doing it, it doesn't matter, isn't that the point?

Not saying I personally believe in this scenario, but everything I've heard supports the idea that code is no longer for humans to consume.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#218

Post by jimbokun »

simonw wrote: post #27

Useful context here is that the author wrote Pi, which is the coding agent framework used by OpenClaw and is one of the most popular open source coding agent frameworks generally.

> “Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor...I am Pagliacci.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/141645-heard-joke-once-man-...

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#219

Post by mememememememo »

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…

Depends on your prod.

For an early startup validating their idea, that prod can take it.

For a platform as a service used by millions, nope.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#220

Post by enraged_camel »

vinyl7 wrote: post #213
enraged_camel wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly? Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? This is because all the low-hanging fruit ha…

It may exist (with a loose term of exist) but they are all mostly garbage. There's still plenty opportunity to make non-garbage version of things that already exist

This is technically true but also a bit naive. Established incumbents are very difficult to dislodge with merely a better version of their products. This becomes more true the larger the product and the average customer size. A good example is QuickBooks, which is a really janky accounting/bookkeeping software that is almost universally hated, but newer and better solutions haven't been able to capture much market share from it.
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