I quit. The clankers won • Hacker News Board

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#201

Post by keiferski » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

I think it's probably accurate to say that the vast majority of writers throughout history were writing for an extremely tiny or nonexistent audience. My favorite example of this is Nietzsche, who basically had zero readership during most of his life, beyond a few close friends, and even had to personally pay to get his books published. He only posthumously became one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.

So while I do worry about AI's impact on blogging/writing/etc., I do think to some extent, you either love the process or you don't. If you only write in order to have readers, you're in the wrong game.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#202

Post by rickcarlino » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:06 PM UTC

LLMs can produce text information but they cannot have experiences. Writing about authentic experience is still a worth while endeavor. Expression of a preference is also an experience when framed correctly.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#203

Post by windward » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:06 PM UTC

pfisherman wrote: post #131

Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

Many of those skills have temporary value before they're incorporated into the models/harnesses

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#204

Post by coldtea » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:06 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #189

mikkupikku wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're fooling yourself. It's very easy to get demonstrably working results in an afternoon that would take weeks at least without coding agents. Demonstrably working , as in you can prove the code actually works by then putting it to use. I had a coding agent write an entire declarative GUI library for mpv userscripts, rendering all widgets with ASS subtitles, then proceeded to prove to my satisfaction that it does…

> Demonstrably working, as in you can prove the code actually works by then putting it to use. That's not how you prove that code works properly and isn't going to fail due to some obscure or unforessen corner case. You need actual proof that's driven by the code's overall structure. Humans do this at least informally when they code, AI's can't do that with any reliability, especially not for non-trivial projects (fo…

>That's not how you prove that code works properly and isn't going to fail due to some obscure or unforessen corner case.

So? We didn't prove human code "isn't going to fail due to some obscure or unforessen corner case" either (aside the tiny niche of formal verification).

So from that aspect it's quite similar.

>so most coding agents simply work their way iteratively to get their test results to pass. That's not a robust methodology.

You seem to imply they do some sort of random iteration until the tests pass, which is not the case. Usually they can see the test failing, and describe the issue exactly in the way a human programmer would, then fix it.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#205

Post by dmix » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:06 PM UTC

staminade wrote: post #95

Anti-AI articles like this seem to be the new "Doing my part to resist big tech: Why I'm switching back from Chrome to Firefox" genre that popped up on HN for a decade or so. If it makes you feel better, great, but don't kid yourself that your actions will make any difference whatsoever to the overall trajectory of AI adoption in IT or society.

Plus many of these articles seem maximized to attract attention on social media, which is its own machine.

Posting your most provocative and strong opinions in reaction to the latest controversy-of-the-week is what fuels the internet and culture more than anything these days. The attention economy demands hot takes mixed with preaching about every new thing.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#206

Post by giancarlostoro » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

I find it funny how clanker took off and everyone uses it. It was edited in a video where someone was otherwise saying something extremely racist (the more offensive version of the n-word). For those curious it involves a burger king hat, schizophrenia and an airplane, someone edited the n-word out and put clanker with AI (because why not insult AI by using AI?). I do wonder if the AI uprising will involve robots killing anyone who used clanker in a derogatory way and sparing everyone else.

Also, yes, I know the origin is Star Wars, but it went viral recently a very specific way.

The power of edgelord memes.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#207

Post by MetaWhirledPeas » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

pfisherman wrote: post #131

Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

> what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents?

Well, it's not. There's a small moat around that right now because the UX is still being ironed out, but in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel.

What will remain are the things that already differentiate a good developer from a bad one:

- Able to review the output of coding agents

- Able to guide the architecture of an application

- Able to guide the architecture of a system

- Able to minimize vulnerabilities

- Able to ensure test quality

- Able to interpret business needs

- Able to communicate with stakeholders

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#208

Post by mwigdahl » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

tripledry wrote: post #151

nicksergeant wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel I've upskilled in so many directions (not just "ability to prompt LLMs") since going all in on LLM coding. So many tools, techniques, systems, and new areas of research I'd never have had the time to fully learn in the past. I have a hard time believing any tenured developer is not actually learning things when using LLMs to build. They make interesting choices that are repeatable (new CLIs I didn't even know…

For me both are true at the same time. I vividly remember understanding how calculus works after watching some 3blue1brown videos on youtube, but once I looked at some exercises I quickly realized I was not able to solve them. Similar thing happens with LLMs and programming. Sure I understand the code but I'm not intimately familiar with it like if I programmed it "old school". So yes, I do learn more but I can't sha…

It's not just you. I feel the same thing, and I saw it in practice helping my son study for a chemistry test just last night. He had worked through a bunch of problems by following the steps in his notes and got the right answers, but couldn't solve them without the notes because his comprehension of why he was taking all the steps wasn't solid.

Once we addressed that, he did great solo. Working the mechanics of the problems with the notes helped, but it was getting independent understanding of the reason for each step that put everything together for him.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#209

Post by tasuki » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #162

tasuki wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've worked for 35ish companies It seems they were correct not to invest in your skills. I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!

If you include consulting that could easily be 10 companies a year...

Could easily be, yes. And they'd be right not to invest in OP's skills.

(To explicitly state the obvious: I'm not saying OP's a bad person for doing this, just saying the employers were right not to invest in them...)

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#210

Post by oompydoompy74 » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

mchaver wrote: post #178

jdefr89 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of hard to do because AI it shoved down your throat in one form or another virtually everywhere you go. I also think a lot of us Hackers are mourning the fact we spent many years mastering machines and programming just to have the skill devalued (at least from the publics perspective) nearly over night. I personally think it is more important now more than ever to understand technology. To be able to write code,…

I agree that humans should continue to value various forms of literacy even in the face of AIs that can do everything better than us. I too will continue to dig deeper into tech literacy. There was a Terence Tao paper recently that mentioned we are in a shift similar to the end of heliocentrism. It made clear that Earth is not the center of the universe, but Earth is still deeply valuable and important for humans. Mu…

I have some amount of hope that local open models with sufficient quantization are the future as hardware becomes more powerful and models become more optimized. I don’t think we will be living in thin client land forever. Human expertise and intelligence will continue to be important and anyone who says otherwise is being disingenuous.