Live data from Hacker News

Fuck it, make it anyway

Post reply on HN

Print view View original

471–480 of 613 posts

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#471

Post by MPSimmons » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 6:09 PM UTC

1dom wrote: post #367

MachineMan wrote: post #10

In general creators must do some honest introspection. Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t? Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life? Who remains when the thing you do no longe…

> PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply. I appreciated this, but I feel the crux of the issue is this is only true with painful caveats. If you're a "computer carpenter" (massive nerd), that massive nerdiness was almost like a scarce asset in the professional world that appeared only after a life involving…

> The asset of being able to quickly understand and produce a solution appropriate for a large technical system is now _significantly_ less scarce for businesses.

Certainly, it's easier to produce solutions now, but I wouldn't underestimate the knowledge you have, and say that others who are capable of using AI to produce the same output have the same understanding that you do.

Personally, I find that I am able to produce excellent outcomes with AI with respect to the topics that I have the most expertise in, and passingly acceptable outcomes in things that I know very little about.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#472

Post by abstractcontrol » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 6:09 PM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #370

regenschutz wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLMs aren't even AI, […] I am very curious to know what you classify as AI then. Do you mean that LLMs aren't artificial? Or aren't intelligent?

Just another person who thinks AI===AGI.

Consider that maybe AI should mean AGI. That was what its original meaning was supposed to be, and calling generative models AI is watering down the original term and accepting the frame of the LLM makers.

What's really disappointing about current LLM models isn't that they aren't useful, but that they really tell us much about intelligence at all. The techniques used to make LLMs aren't generalizable at all, and I cannot use them to solve problems of interest in the real world.

That wouldn't be the case with real AI. I want better methods and algorithms that could live up to the expectations, and I am sure we'll get them at some point even if we don't have them now.

The history of AI is people deciding that it really means AGI but then getting enamored with some method of the time and calling it AI, before going back to the original meaning. We're just living through the latest iteration of this where LLMs mean AI, and we're forced to invent the term AGI for what used to be AI.

I'll admit that to the people who don't know how LLMs work, which includes most investors, the lie seems very plausible so of course the CEOs running the companies are going to frame it as such.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#473

Post by enraged_camel » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 6:11 PM UTC

wiether wrote: post #461

jvanderbot wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone addresses this differently, but for me, I always grated at people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity. It feels to me like suffering through programming built that knowledge, and so that knowledge was an indicator of taste and experience and persistence, but then it became cosplayed as people sought the knowledge itself in "patterns", or "features" rather than…

> people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity I came across too many of those people in my career and I can't say I'm sad that LLM are taking this away from them. The worst were the ones acting as gatekeepers during hiring process. You could have built S3 and they'd still look down on you because you didn't knew about some weird feature in Java.

>> You could have built S3 and they'd still look down on you because you didn't knew about some weird feature in Java.

Max Howell, creator of Homebrew, was famously rejected from Google for not being able to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#474

Post by eudamoniac » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 6:15 PM UTC

jenniferhooley wrote: post #131

srcreigh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for now, not everybody can make a private SaaS. Doing that requires skills and focus. Even with SOTA models, as of ~today, there are inflection points where the AI would not be able to make the right choice without a knowledgable human, or would cycle and waste time with things that don't matter, etc.

Not really true tbh. Plenty of 50 year old business guys with less than zero technical ability making saas startups over months of focused chats with LLMs. Of course they're slower at making stuff and the projects are worse than a smart engineer, but they can definitely ship and run to thousands of real customers.

This is like the "Now everyone can just 3D print little widgets they need!" sentiment. Approximately no one is going to do this.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#475

Post by preg_match » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #272

ReadMuch wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not paying attention. There is no agentic. You use the LLM the way your tax man uses a calculator. It's back and forth all the time. Ignore agentic stuff, that is marketing. Think about it anyway - why tf would it take all day, responses take seconds. There is no "leave it running" it's a fake concept

That's fine, but then the value of the tool evaporates. I agree you have to hold the LLM's hand so that it doesn't do crazy things, but that takes so much time that you don't actually save time over just writing it yourself. That is why I continue to maintain that LLMs are not a useful tool: either you completely give up on quality to get speed gains, or you maintain quality but get no speed gains.

You definitely save a ton of time over writing it yourself, just not as much time saved as “agentic” coding. I don’t do agentic coding either, I think it’s basically a scam. But using an LLM does mean creating stuff faster, much faster. The LLM can write 500 lines of code in seconds. That takes me hours.

I still design the APIs, the system, the tests. But the specific implementation of functions, I am freed from. There is a large speed gain there.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#476

Post by Chris2048 » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 6:20 PM UTC

imdsm wrote: post #79

whstl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once told me "Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book." People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI. There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete". But that was the reality before, with the str…

This is interesting because it mixes the process with the reward in an inverse way to what I see from AI pro/con. Those who like writing code have seemed to me to lose out in status from the introduction of AI, while those such as myself who care little for status have used AI more and gained from it. Conversely, those who like writing aren't always about the reward (being an author, having a book published) but thos…

You contrast "like writing code" with "care little for status", but they are not the same things; as are having status, and caring about it.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#477

Post by abstractcontrol » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

regenschutz wrote: post #355

abstractcontrol wrote: post #349

If I were an artist, I wouldn't really care that a machine took over the role of drawing lines on paper, and as a programmer, I don't care that the machines are taking the role of writing code. The thing that actually matters is understanding the problem domain, and thinking about and visualizing the program I am trying to make, so I am happy to be doing less drudge work so I can focus on what really matters. I've be…

>LLMs aren't even AI, […] I am very curious to know what you classify as AI then. Do you mean that LLMs aren't artificial? Or aren't intelligent?

Are those important questions that need to be answered? Rather, you should be asking whether you could use backprop and NNs to create something other than text predictors. What have LLMs changed about your conception of intelligence?

As far as I can see, none of the hard problems of intelligence that we had a decade ago got touched. What LLMs ultimately changed is the way I see language. I've underestimated its power, and I will admit, the companies making these models went far further than I could have imagined with them.

But intelligence and AI have a high hurdle to clear, and it won't be done with LLMs.

Revealing the secrets of intelligence will involve new concepts and understanding that that we don't have now. LLMs will be helpful with the plumbing and as replacement for natural evolution, but not so much natural intelligence.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#478

Post by GMoromisato » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

spoiler wrote: post #413

GMoromisato wrote: post #392

Think of the classic Venn diagram, the intersection of: 1. Things I enjoy doing. 2. Things I am good at doing. 3. Things people value me doing. The problem with AI is that it potentially changes all three of those bubbles. 1. Sure, AI is powerful, but maybe I don't enjoy coding that way. 2. I'm really good at C++, but I'm not very good at prompting (at least no better than anyone else). 3. No one hires me anymore bec…

> No one hires me anymore because AI can do my job cheaper. As someone who thinks AI is an incredible tool, I think your job is safe. Are there incompetent companies that are replacing people with AI? Yup... But also, I'm pretty sure most people don't want to work at companies with such poor management anyway? So in a way, I think AI is prefiltering incompetent management for us. On you other two points: I kinda feel…

Yes--I very much agree with you, and that's what I mean about finding a new intersection.

The job-part of the Venn diagram is, I think, hardest for people because we can't control what companies pay for. I agree that software engineering, as a profession, will continue, but I don't think there will be many jobs that pay you to (e.g.) write C++ by hand.

The trick is finding that new intersection. I actually agree with you that the creative process is the important part--as long as I'm creating, I don't care whether I'm typing code or not.

But I also get that for some people, the typing (or the thinking about what to type) is the important part. They are having a hard time finding the new intersection.

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#479

Post by 1dom » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 6:27 PM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #462

1dom wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PS: You have intrinsic value, and your skills will also remain valuable, if even for how it teaches you to approach complex problems and think deeply. I appreciated this, but I feel the crux of the issue is this is only true with painful caveats. If you're a "computer carpenter" (massive nerd), that massive nerdiness was almost like a scarce asset in the professional world that appeared only after a life involving…

I think the nerdiness is still a huge asset, because what I've seen is that technical people are the ones whos ceiling is raised the most by AI. Sure, anyone can make a flashy demo now, and so the signaling value of being able to create something like that is gone, not to mention flashy demos themselves have lost 90% of the wow factor overnight and will continue to plummet. But in a way these superficial perception s…

> I would argue that was an especially privileged moat over the last 20 years powered by the rise of FAANG.

I agree. I was going to touch on this, but I was trying to practice smaller walls of text - I do think AI has merged/interacted/double-teamed with a correction in tech salaries. We all worked through a very lucky decade or 2! This just adds I think to the current "Fuck it" attitude around the tech world and AI right now.

> If you think AI is devaluing programmers, you should take a look at what it's doing to bad product managers and other "decision makers" who used to be able to hide behind the cost of building, and now are being exposed for not being able to rationalize different business needs and feature ideas into a cohesive product.

Have you got some specific examples of this you're thinking of? I might find that reassure. I stopped working in and around tech in 2023, and most discussion I read is more from tech rather than product. I guess without good examples/evidence, I worry this is just applying the "I see vibe coded software, so therefore AI doesn't actually help software engineering at all" fallacy to product managers and decision makers - I assumed roles whose success depends on programming who don't program themselves would see productivity gains by not having to deal with programmers.

I think we're generally in agreement: core/real/passionate software engineers and nerds will always have a job and role. It may pay less, but at least the drop in income will put off all the people who retrained via bootcamps chasing FAANG salaries. Not sure I agree entirely on product suffering less though: in some environments, software engineering teams are the tools product managers use to build the businesses requirements, agents are just a new tool for product which will replace the bootcamp engineers. I don't think the c-suite and customers are going to all of a sudden want to talk to the massive nerds locked away in cellar, and I'm not sure all of the massive nerds are ready to have to deal directly with customers or c-suite. (LLMs will be though.)

Re: Fuck it, make it anyway

#480

Post by GMoromisato » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

znnajdla wrote: post #440

GMoromisato wrote: post #392

Think of the classic Venn diagram, the intersection of: 1. Things I enjoy doing. 2. Things I am good at doing. 3. Things people value me doing. The problem with AI is that it potentially changes all three of those bubbles. 1. Sure, AI is powerful, but maybe I don't enjoy coding that way. 2. I'm really good at C++, but I'm not very good at prompting (at least no better than anyone else). 3. No one hires me anymore bec…

Couldn't disagree more. Here's how I look at it as a person who wrote my code by hand for 15 years. I'm the owner of my own small bootstrapped startup. 1. I've always been enjoyed delivering solutions more than the actual process of programming, and AI just helps me deliver more of that faster. And for the actual process of programming, I found a way of working with AI that makes it enjoyable. I've built my own AI ag…

I actually think we agree. My point isn't that "we're all screwed". I do use and like AI, and I don't want to go backwards. My point is that every bubble in the Venn diagram is changing.

You're absolutely right about how each bubble is still there. But they are a different shape now, and the intersection isn't where it used to be. Some of us are still in the intersection; others are not.

Post reply on HN