The human-in-the-loop is tired • Hacker News Board

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#181

Post by thinkindie » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

customguy wrote: post #152

iso1631 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote some software nearly 20 years ago, haven't touched it for over a decade. The code was terrible, but I don't care, it did the job, and people still use it despite a whole team of people who have tried to replace it with "elegant" code in frameworks which have come and gone. The reason people still use it is that it solves their needs, not the programmer's needs. The goal was to make the user's life better, not…

All you're saying is that for you only the destination ever mattered. But it's very apparent that is not true for a lot of people. And "solving needs" is kinda vague. We drank from lead cups for a long time, because perfect knowledge of material and biology was secondary to just having a cup. And no single sip from any lead cup killed or maybe even much harmed any person, but it all added and adds up. Of course the c…

It’s not just the destination - there are infinite shades of caring too much about every single line of code (spaces! Tabs! Inline open curly braces! Next line) and caring about the final result without attention to what is running under the hood.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#182

Post by encyclopedism » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #168

encyclopedism wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such a naive take, the joy of helping the customer ha! That's a situation your employer sets up for you! Try reading your sentence above and swapping in 'EMPLOYEE': 'These LLMs are like EMPLOYEES. The customer cannot tell the difference between EMPLOYEE painted and LLM generated at even a short distance. '

> That's a situation your employer sets up for you! Who says you need a boss or other human coworkers? Start your own consultancy and take 100% of the pie. The term "employee" evaporates in this context, as does an entire universe of lazy, negative tropes about work ethic, etc.

> Who says you need a boss or other human coworkers?

I didn't. However most people on here and around the world are employed I am merely pointing out that your employer dictates so much of what you do.

> Start your own consultancy.

Great, but realise then that you are talking about creating a business. Which is a whole other field altogether. You can have a business in software, or in legal, or mining etc. But that's a different conversation. It's about business and not about software or LLM's.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#183

Post by encyclopedism » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 2:06 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #167

encyclopedism wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such a naive take, the joy of helping the customer ha! That's a situation your employer sets up for you! Try reading your sentence above and swapping in 'EMPLOYEE': 'These LLMs are like EMPLOYEES. The customer cannot tell the difference between EMPLOYEE painted and LLM generated at even a short distance. '

The customer can absolutely tell the difference between a Caterpillar digger and a dude in it vs 100 dudes with shovels

Attempting to illustrate why your analogy is flawed and explain myself a little better I would add that there are quantitive things and qualitative things. If the object was to remove some volume of earth (quantitive) then whether it is moved by a Caterpillar or by 100 men with shovels does not matter.

If you're 'no longer looking at the code' or 'looping everything' then you are implicitly moving towards a more quantitive outlook of software development. How it does so becomes less and less meaningful and why would you even care?

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#184

Post by K0balt » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 2:13 PM UTC

Holy crap this piece is spot on. I’ve been trying to get my head around the weird thing that my work has become, and this article does a good job of painting the picture.

I’d add another dangerous bit; for some people (me) it has a side effect. Where before, if I spent 6 hours in deep hack, I felt like I had accomplished something, and I was mentally spent. I was done for the day, a job well done, not desiring or really capable of more productive work.

Now, the work is lower intensity, higher levels of abstraction, and I can do it for 16 hours a day, effectively, and still feel like I’m not done. I’m covering 6x the ground, but I feel like I accomplished less. It’s a bizarre productivity trap , fiending for dopamine like golemn fiending for the ring, exhausted but not spent, producing more than ever but never enough.

At least I’m not working for someone else, but sometimes I wonder if I would handle it better if I was?

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#185

Post by nojvek » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

Man. I wish they didn’t use AI to write an article about AI slop.

“The honest truth … worth naming”.

“But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention”

Perhaps this is human audit over a first AI draft. But had enough AI speak that it puts it off.

Just write like a human with human mistakes. That’s okay.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#186

Post by elmer2 » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

appplication wrote: post #32

> Here's a term for what I think is happening: the human reward function problem. In machine learning, a reward function tells an agent what good looks like. Writing code by hand was never easy, but it was full of small rewards. Solving a problem in your head. Understanding a gnarly bit of logic. Watching the code compile. The feeling of control. LLM-assisted programming has automated much of the work that generated…

This sounds like development/engineering will eventually go from a knowledge-based career to a factory worker, with a reduction in salary.

It takes way less knowledge and experience to guide an LLM, than it does to write it yourself. Especially if LLMs are already being trained on previous knowledge.

I'm already seeing people on Linkedin having almost no previous experience (or a Junior at best) getting hired as AI engineers.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#187

Post by encyclopedism » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

deaux wrote: post #178

encyclopedism wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's code built by an LLM it's almost inherently uninteresting in that 'anyone' can also generate the same slop. Beyond the initial novelty the 'achievement' really doesn't stretch that far. Your slop, my slop, their slop it's all 'slop' and no one can really care about slop. The novelty is wearing thin fast

Of course not, this makes no sense. It's the opposite, most of LLM generated apps are indeed uninteresting, yet it's not inherent at all. Most photos, most drawings, most human-written articles are uninteresting and have been so since forever. Nothing about that is inherent. And in the exact same manner, no, others can't generate the same thing. They physically can, but that has never been a barrier. If I make uninte…

I think you missed my point I'm not denying the code does not produce a function of effect. The code however is uninteresting because almost anyone can also generate it.

I'm interested in the source code to Quake but not in the source code to an LLM generated Quake equivalent, I love to hear about the Fast Inverse Square Root formula in Quake that Id software wrote but I'm unmoved by the generated LLM version.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#188

Post by baq » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

encyclopedism wrote: post #183

baq wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The customer can absolutely tell the difference between a Caterpillar digger and a dude in it vs 100 dudes with shovels

Attempting to illustrate why your analogy is flawed and explain myself a little better I would add that there are quantitive things and qualitative things. If the object was to remove some volume of earth (quantitive) then whether it is moved by a Caterpillar or by 100 men with shovels does not matter. If you're 'no longer looking at the code' or 'looping everything' then you are implicitly moving towards a more quan…

I'm saying I'd rather have a dude in a digger than a hundred folks who need to be supplied, some of them drunk, some of them thieves, some of them just plain bad at digging and only making a mess of the dig site.

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#189

Post by titanomachy » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

bad_username wrote: post #90

> Yes the code (sorta) writes itself, but the human reviewing, directing, and course-correcting feels worse, not better. I noticed the opposite. When reviewing and directing a colleague or subordinate, I spend probably 30% of my brain cycles, and 70% of my activation energy, to weigh the technical merit of my feedback against the human impact it will make: bruised egos, differing architectural convictions, correct an…

Maybe tech workers are going to evolve into a different species, immune to emotional arguments and no longer capable of mating with humans

Re: The human-in-the-loop is tired

#190

Post by datsci_est_2015 » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 2:45 PM UTC

DanielHB wrote: post #126

appplication wrote: post #32

> Here's a term for what I think is happening: the human reward function problem. In machine learning, a reward function tells an agent what good looks like. Writing code by hand was never easy, but it was full of small rewards. Solving a problem in your head. Understanding a gnarly bit of logic. Watching the code compile. The feeling of control. LLM-assisted programming has automated much of the work that generated…

You put it in a good way, I have been saying this for my partner that I don't fear my job is at risk. I fear I am going to hate my job soon. I am coping a bit by still doing stuff by hand, especially stuff where prompting the LLM doesn't save that much time. And what I call "adding good taste" to LLM output where I move things around to structure them in a more human-understandable way (by hand usually).

My cope goes one level further, I’m already seeing incidents where poorly designed code (not necessarily purely “vibecoded”) has made it extremely difficult to figure out why a system is failing. Errors like “SegFault” and “Driver unresponsive” still exist, and so far even $100 of AI credits don’t seem to be able to solve those issues.

I’m already personally seeing the diminishing returns of AI generated code, especially in light of the increase in token prices (or tokens required per task, both are the same).