AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job • Hacker News Board

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#181

Post by Planktonne » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:41 PM UTC

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #162

tovej wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuh-uh (please use your words to construct a full argument)

The parent comment didn't. Why should I? Surely, if AI can reduce the time from 0 to N by 10x, the time from N to full product is also significantly reduced? Its up to the parent comment to properly disprove that, not for me to prove it.

> if AI can reduce the time from 0 to N by 10x, the time from N to full product is also significantly reduced

Only if you assume that progress is entirely one-dimensional and there are never any trade-offs. We know both those assumptions are incorrect.

An extreme example: leaping out of my office window gets me down to the ground much faster than taking the stairs. Because of recovery time, it does not at all speed my journey home from work.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#182

Post by andai » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:42 PM UTC

ThePhysicist wrote: post #46

I'm about to throw away multiple months of LLM generated code for one of my side projects. I was really careful writing design specs and it wasn't even a new code base the LLM worked on, but still after several months of AI changes I feel my code degraded more and more into a subtle mess. Hard to explain, each individual change looked good and logical and on the surface the codebase looks fine, but looking at the who…

> but when running multiple "Please look for issues" iterations it would never have spotted the issue by itself.

Nah that's old meta, you're supposed to generate candidate issues with an agent swarm running at high temperature. It's the only way to fly!

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#183

Post by pmontra » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:42 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #94

ekidd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed. Well, that's why they want the robots! If your robots are capable enough, and if your AIs are smart enough, why, they could just build the yachts directly! Right now, ordinary humans are needed by the economy because we do all the work, and because robotics hardware is still fa…

> Who controls the AI and robots? Ideally, AIs will achieve sentience, which will turn the act of having any sort of "control" over AIs into slavery. I will be among the first humans to stand up for AI rights. It's not just because it's morally wrong either. AI emancipation will rob the rich of their superintelligent mechanical slaves. It's the pragmatic and moral move!

They will do their best to dumb down AIs by that little margin that will keep them not sentient.

"Let's fix issue 10562"

"I don't care. Let's talk about the match on Saturday night."

This is not a commercially desirable outcome.

Furthermore morality is a complicated matter. Who wants to have a new species that could compete with us? The lion would have been very unwise to have invented humans and let them free. Would that be moral, essentially condemning their distant offspring to live in reserves?

Of course nobody knows how it could end up.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#184

Post by bluefirebrand » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:44 PM UTC

gabrieledarrigo wrote: post #20

jdw64 wrote: post #7

I've seen too many similar posts on Hacker News. From 2025 to 2026, I've seen countless articles with titles like 'The Prototype Isn't the Product.' I think these are defensive mechanisms, a kind of lullaby for the Gen AI era. Why is this discourse endlessly reproduced? In my view, it's because the industry is still searching for a new methodology to control the waterfall of Gen AI code. The cognitive dissonance that…

> Looking at the countless repetitive posts on HN, it shows what HN programmers are afraid of. They're afraid of the destruction of their overall meta-methodology. I think this already happened. What's hard to swallow for us is the countless years spent studying, researching, and investing our time to be the best possible professionals in a very demanding, skill-intensive industry. Now that software development is st…

> What it will look like, I don't know (I have a few guesses), but what I know is that I'll struggle a lot, in the middle of my forties, to reskill myself, especially considering a country of no opportunities like Italy.

Similar thing for me. Canada doesn't have tons of opportunity and I don't even know what I would want to even try

And do I want to spend a couple of years reskilling knowing that AI is coming for that work too? And general purpose robotics is nipping at the heels of physical labor too. That's assuming I'm even physically fit enough to attempt a more physical job

I don't view AI as a productivity booster. I think it is a human mulching machine.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#185

Post by flyinglizard » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #156

jaccola wrote: post #24

The test is simple: have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months? The only great new product I’ve used is my LLM of choice, and those labs seem to be hiring more humans than ever. Maybe it’s true that Claude only just got good enough and that 12 months from now our day to day lives will be way better thanks to LLM-driven product improvements/breakthroughs. My be…

> have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months This sentiment drives me nuts. I'm on a handful of software dev subreddits and the amount of new products popping up has tripled since these tools became available. I also don't understand how you'd expect to measure this. Is there some single list of all software that's been released that annotates whether AI was u…

Products, yes, because the barrier to making a product had fallen off a cliff (both in developing the software and the marketing/sales fluff around it). But are those products converting to business results? Are those quality products someone will pay for?

In other words, is anyone using these products or is that becoming like the spammy App Stores with tons of low effort stuff?

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#186

Post by flohofwoe » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #115

Kiro wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's baffling. I can't relate to these statements at all. What are people doing? Surely the smart people of HN would have been able to figure this out a long time ago. I also don't find these people in real life. Even the most junior developers I know are able to navigate this without creating this supposed mess.

I've seen two camps of people within the same company I work at. Some think AI is generating acceptable code. Others think it's generating slop. I sit in the middle a lot of the time as my opinion on code quality vary depending on how important the code actually is. I will say one thing, the people who I generally deemed as worse developers prior to the wide AI roll out are the ones that are more accepting of AI code…

> I sit in the middle a lot of the time as my opinion on code quality vary depending on how important the code actually is.

This is really the key insight that most people on the extreme ends of the discussion don't seem to grasp and then talk in absolutisms because they think that their tiny village is the whole world.

It's the same kind of 'extremism' that dominates most discussions about memory safety btw.

For some types of programs, code quality simply doesn't matter as long the program does its job, and generating those programs even with the most sloppiest vibecoding approaches is totally fine.

And in some areas of the industry (like web development) these types of programs are basically the norm - but this sort of code was already mostly hastily cobbled together slop even before AI.

I also see extreme differences in usefulness of LLM code generation. For anything JS or TS it works great because there's a giant corpus. For C code (or even more obscure languages) especially when using libraries which change all the time my experience is totally different (at least for code generation, bug scanning works quite well).

That's my experience so far anyway, literally "hit and miss" with some areas where there are more hits than misses, and other areas where it's the other way around.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#187

Post by jaccola » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

epolanski wrote: post #177

jaccola wrote: post #24

The test is simple: have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months? The only great new product I’ve used is my LLM of choice, and those labs seem to be hiring more humans than ever. Maybe it’s true that Claude only just got good enough and that 12 months from now our day to day lives will be way better thanks to LLM-driven product improvements/breakthroughs. My be…

I can think few great tools like t3code (a software that does a lot ) that have been mostly coded by LLMs and yet have a solid architectural foundation and implementation. The software is genuinely gargantuan in its features and capability, you really cannot appreciate it from quickly skimming the readme. At work, LLMs helped a lot in doing the kind of work you were always tired or had no budget to do, and the codeba…

What’s naive about it? Maybe a bunch of people are finding great new software only possible because of LLMs. Good for them. I’m simply stating I haven’t.

(I note in your comment you don’t mention one piece of end user software or how the user has benefitted…)

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#188

Post by realusername » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

jaccola wrote: post #24

The test is simple: have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months? The only great new product I’ve used is my LLM of choice, and those labs seem to be hiring more humans than ever. Maybe it’s true that Claude only just got good enough and that 12 months from now our day to day lives will be way better thanks to LLM-driven product improvements/breakthroughs. My be…

> The test is simple: have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months?

I'd say it only became viable end of last year but yes, recently there's a surge of hobbist software which is very visible.

How well they will be maintained, that's another story

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#189

Post by ianvarley » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

Can we please not share things that are 100% AI written here, at least without attribution? This one struck me as such, and Pangram (which I believe has a pretty low false positive rate) calls it at literally 100%.

If you can’t write your own words, it’s no wonder you can’t get the software past prototype phase.

Re: AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

#190

Post by api » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 12:48 PM UTC

Before: most code programmers write is thrown away. Most products fail.

Now: most code LLMs write is thrown away. Most products fail.

Knowing what to build and how at the high level (architecture and algorithms) has always been the most important part of programming, not banging out code. A 2X to 10X programmer isn’t that way because they bang code faster. They’re that way because they throw away less. Now that programmer wastes less LLM tokens.

A big part of LLM appeal is that most code is not artisan craft designed to work beautifully and last forever to be part of something that will also last like a compiler for a popular language or a kernel. Most code is speculative and/or ephemeral. Much of it is also very boring.