Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

1 to 5% of software can be improved with AI at the current level. For most incumbents will be even more secure as every startup will be forced to put some BS AI into their thing by investooors

Its a nice productivity and capability boost that feels on the same magnitude as, for example, React. The "dream" of it being able to just take tickets and agentically get a PR up for review is possible for ~5% of tickets. That goes up to ~10% if your organization has no standards at all, including even a self-serving standard like "at least make sure the repository remains useful to future AI usage".

My organization would still hire as many software engineers as we could afford.

- Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore.

- Using it for exploratory high level research and summarization into unfamiliar repos is pretty nice.

- Very rarely does AI write code that I feel would last a year without needing to be rewritten. That makes it good for things like knocking out a quick script or updating a button color.

- None of them actually follow instructions e.g. in Cursor rules. Its a serious problem. It doesn't matter how many times or where I tell it "one component per file, one component per file", all caps, threaten its children, offer it a cookie, it just does whatever it wants.

Angry because this is yet another play by the ruling class to make more money, and you, I, and everyone you know is going to pay dearly for it.

Baffled because there are too many rank-and-file tech workers who seem to think AI exciting/useful/interesting. It’s none of those things.

Just ask yourself who wants AI to succeed and what their motivations are. It is certainly not for your benefit.

I'm just waiting for the hype-cycle to end. AI might revolutionize some industry (probably natural-language-adjacent), but not ours. COBOL has already been attempted, and far more competently (and with less energy cost).

If people can seriously have an AI do 50% of their work, that's usually a confession that they weren't actually doing real work in the first place. Or, at least, they lacked the basic competence with tools that that any university sophomore should have.

Sometimes, however, it is instead a confession "I previously wasn't allowed to copy the preexisting solutions, but thanks to the magic of copyright laundering, now I can!"