241–250 of 812 posts
You can infer a developer's position on AI with 100% accuracy if you ask them a related question about the customer and how much overtime they'd be willing to pull to meet a deadline for one of their internal projects. It's the same question, just worded a lot differently.
The general form is probably something like "are you willing to sublimate your ego in order to care for the parties who ultimately justify your compensation/career?"
Having seen bad (human) code behind award winning products, and good (human) code take so long the investors get cold feet, yes.
Some people claim (or seem) to know which corners can be safely cut. But what I've seen suggests those who cut corners got lucky, rather than using skill to know what could be safely ignored.
The other side of this is that I have come to view things like "Clean Code", "SOLID", "VIPER", and use of mocking in unit tests, the same way as self-help books: survivorship bias.
GenAI in code is likely to give us enough feedback fast enough that we can turn the survivorship bias of SWEng self-help guides into actual science; but unless progress stops suddenly (could happen any time if investments stop), humans coders aren't likely to be the beneficiaries of this research.
It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from the following megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 . Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to brin…
I expect the people in here to be domain experts, understand simple concepts like closed loop water cooling, deterministic vs non-deterministic systems, maybe some basic concept of how a GPU and vector math works and most notably the exponential pace that it’s becoming both more capable and more efficient.
Unfortunately, like OP that’s not the case and it’s the same talking points I could read in my local paper. Then everyone’s talking points change in unison like they are waiting on the latest instructions from headquarters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
^^^ Yes, exactly this! ^^^ I'm personally amazed by what "A.I." is actually capable of, but I have a fairly solid understanding of what's going on "under the hood" of it, and therefore have somewhat realistic expectations of it. Then I see folks go overhyping it's capabilities because they've drunk themselves stupid on the lies they've been told about what it is and what it's capable of (and it's simply not capable o…
Sounds like me. It's awesome. Only the sheer amount of very clear fraud and the way an entire way of people who, not too long ago, where barely functional, have jumped on the bandwagon (same as with crypto) just sours me on it. That and Jenson screwing those of us who made him over the last decade. It'll be better once the fraudsters are in jail and once we're able have boxes with ~1TB ram running off of our solar in…
Well... It's got that potential, that's for sure. It could pretty easily be pushed straight past that line into "awesome" if not for those absolute clowns "at the top" holding it all back decades behind where it should be, all to play their little game of "He who dies with the most money wins" at the eventual expense of all life on Earth (at the rate they're going). It's just so sad the petty misuse and waste of resources the ultra-richest of the rich are choosing to be. Actively working against the betterment of themselves and the world around them, for the most insane reasons, when they could be using all this amazing tech to build a genuinely better world for themselves and everyone else.
Honestly, I look at where technology's gone since my early days (300baud acoustic phone modems, 64kilobytes of RAM, 1Mhz 8bit CPU days) being utterly fascinated by how actual science was so quickly catching up with science fiction (Star Trek being one of my bigger influences in that area of interest), and I see so many truly amazing things that we've invented / built along the way; if we were a more cooperative society instead of "Law of the Jungle" hostile greed-driven society, we'd already pretty much have that Star Trek reality today (minus the faster than light travel bit, as that's apparently "impossible" according to current theory and math AFAIK).
We've already got a bunch of Star Trek level tech, and we could have most of it I suspect. 3D printing? Not terribly far off from ST: TNG "replicators". LLMs? Not too far off from the Star Trek computer interface. Smart Phone? Pretty much a Star Trek PADD (tablet computer). Tricorder? Well... Smart Phones are gettin' pretty close. A few more fancy sensors would pretty much do it. Holodeck? Well, that one's a bit more tricky, but who knows where VR would be today in a society that wasn't totally 100% beholden to the cult of money?
I don't think it is a large number of people creating this perception, I think it is more their depth of feeling about the issue. I am often struck by the similarity with bigotry about migrants, where they are portrayed as unreliable and undtustworthy entities that are threatening jobs. Simultaneously arguing their inability and ability are problematic. You have a second vein of behaviour that object on more religiou…
It is truly vile to compare concerns about LLMs to anti-immigrant discrimination.
But when the message coming from people is "We don't want that kind around here" then it falls much closer to the mark.
Humans are trained for easy wins, not thinking about long term consequences and assuming risks will not play out. It's the lethal trifecta of emboldening our worst characteristics.
Not only that the majority of problems that we have with software engineering are self-inflicted and everyone has forgotten that they don't have to be. All this does is allow us to operate the pile of shit we built over the last 25 years with somewhat less efficiency than we did 25 years ago.
The customer does indeed care that the product works. But the engineers should care what they build and with what. And they don't any more. The status quo is using a statistical model to assemble a pile of trash.
Go back 30 years and I single-handedly built a full custom ERP system for a company in 3 months without an LLM in sight, with no internet connection and thus without pulling a single dependency off the internet.
Add the me-too culture over the top "we have to have an AI proposition" and it's a gold rush but the gold is muck.
On the other hand, it’s frustrating to see the trend and tools go towards vibecoding and fully agentic development. Many of us have also been in the business of inheriting (and supporting) code, so it goes against the grain when non-developers produce something without even attempting to understand how it works. Because we’ve been there in the trenches trying to diagnose and debug a serious problem out of hours under pressure, and know how essential it is to have a decent mental model of how it is meant to operate.
As a personal anecdote, I was working in an area with someone business-focussed and not particularly technical. There was some functionality we had been discussing, and one day they wanted to discuss it on a call. They then went on to demo something that seemed to have a working implementation of all the features we had been discussing, and more. I was curious, so asked them to screen share the code… at which point they started to get a bit cagey. I managed to get them to show it to me, and it turned out they had vibed the whole system as a single massive React component. And had no clue how any of the code worked. I told them I couldn’t possibly integrate that massive ball of spaghetti, and we agreed to treat it as a throwaway demo prototype and develop any production system properly. That sort of mess is inevitable when banging Accept All like the LLM is a casino slot machine.
So personally, I have spent the last few years trying to amplify my skills and experience with these tools rather than bury my head in the sand. Three decades as a freelance consultant developer (with several stack pivots) has taught me that new technology trends don’t simply vanish if they are providing at least some business value. Don’t wait for all this to go away, because that day will never come.
I also think this technology makes us all generalists, unless somebody’s specialist knowledge and skills are very deep and highly unusual. It won’t be so easy to be a backend-only guy who doesn’t touch frontend, when your project stakeholder thinks he could have a stab at it with his free Claude account.
On my journey with this tooling I’ve struggled to find the line between how much I write versus how much I generate, and tried to maintain the balance between velocity and quality. I gravitate towards a workflow of insisting that I understand and approve every diff, and use the knowledge ingested by the LLMs to keep learning, and try to be sensitive to when the convenience has become laziness and there’s a danger of de-skilling. I combine my experience and instincts with the new powertools and feel that we are greater than the sum of our parts. I just have to hope that when this all settles down a bit, there’s a solid market for that type of work rather than being replaced by non-technical vibecoders with only velocity to offer (back in the day we used to refer to them as cowboy coders, but same idea).
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
It’s takes like this that remove the nuance completely and ignore so many facets of the debate. That being said, let’s assume this is true because I think vibecoding a CRUD app does make this realistic on the face of it. When I say vibecoding I mean prompting and dropping, not reading the code.
You do your adversarial reviews with multiple agents, you have your UX agent look over it, your security agent etc. Under the hood there are architectural issues. The code is probably passable, but rough.
You release, customers start using it for their business that they depend on for income. Issues start cropping up, you burn more and more tokens to fix the issues as they come up. Expedience starts sacrificing quality even still, architecture (if there was any) starts being violated and it degrades more and more.
I consider myself a professional, I would never want to end up in a situation like this for mission crititcal products. So, what do I do? I read the output, I make sure I understand it. Why? I care about my customers and secondarily I’m the one with the pager when something breaks down.
Now, for some fun hobby project to track my hobby paints for Warhammer… who cares? I agree. I have used Claude for such projects and not really cared. But your statement does not hold up in the enterprise world with mission critical software.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
This is reductive. You’re assuming people’s concern is “elegance”. It isn’t solely elegance. It’s domain understanding. It’s quality over all. It’s being a professional.
Writing the code was never the slow down for large scale enterprise products.
It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from the following megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 . Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to brin…
Saying that society is divided on AI therefore HN, being society, should also be divided is an absurd take. I expect the people in here to be domain experts, understand simple concepts like closed loop water cooling, deterministic vs non-deterministic systems, maybe some basic concept of how a GPU and vector math works and most notably the exponential pace that it’s becoming both more capable and more efficient. Unfo…