The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work • Hacker News Board

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#151

Post by chaps » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

tossandthrow wrote: post #131

chaps wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because you're deflecting. :)

Deflecting from what? Telling the company name so you can avoid it due to your incredibly curious nature?

Sigh.

Look friend, I really hope you can realize how you sound in your post. You're extraordinarily confidently saying that you refactored some ambiguous endpoints in 30 minutes. Whenever I see someone act that confidently towards refactoring, thousands alarms go off in my head. I hope you see how it sounds to others. Like, at least spend longer than a lunch break on it with just a tad more diligence. Or hell, maybe even consider LIEing about how much time you spent on it. But my point is that your shortcuts will burn you. If you want to go down that path, I'm happy to be a witness to eventual schadenfreude.

My issue isn't with the fact that you used AI. My issue is with how confident you are that it worked well and exactly to spec. I'm very well aware of what these systems can do. Hell, I've been able to get postgres to boot inside linux inside postgres inside linux inside postgres recently with these tools. But I'm also acutely aware of the aggressive modes that these systems can break in.

So again, which company should we all avoid so that we can avoid your, specifically your, refactoring?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#152

Post by apsurd » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

peterbell_nyc wrote: post #132

tossandthrow wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are very strong on the "slop" bias. Why? In managing a large to enterprise sized code base, I experience the opposite. I can guarantee a much more homogenous quality of the code base. It is the opposite of slop I am seeing. And that at a lower cost. Today,I literally made a large and complex migration of all of our endpoints. Took ai 30 minutes, including all frontends using these endpoints. Works flawlessly, deb…

Seeing plenty of this. The quality of agentic code is a function of the quantity and quality of adversarial quality gates. I have seen no proof that an agentic system is incapable of delivering code that is as functional, performant and maintainable as code from a great team of developers, and enough anecdotes in the other direction to suggest that AI "slop" is going to be a problem that teams with great harnesses wi…

I take your point but then it makes me think is there no more value in diversity?

[Philosophy disclaimer] So in a code-base diversity is probably a bad idea, ok that makes sense. But in an agentic world, if everything is run through the Perfect Harness then humans are intentionally just triggers? Not even that, like what are humans even needed for? Everything can be orchestrated. I'm not against this world, this is an ideal outcome for many and it's not my place to say whether it's inevitable.

What I'm conflicted on is does it even "work" in terms of outcomes. Like have we lost the plot? Why have any humans at all. 1 person billion dollar company incoming. Software aside, is the premise even valid? 1 person's inputs multiplied by N thousand agents -> ??? -> profit

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#153

Post by miyoji » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #14

greatpost wrote: post #5

Thank you for this aphyr. My one ask is people seem to put “CEOs” on a pedestal any time things come up, like they’re an alien life form and oh no they’re going to do something terrible. There are good company executives and shitty ones. You should try to start a company and see if you can be one of the better ones.

Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable. An unintended side effect that I’ve noticed is that it normalizes bad behavior of CEOs for those who invest a lot of “CEOs bad” grist (Reddit, Threads, even Hacker News). When someone, usually early career, takes a job with a bad CEO afte…

I think it's true that there are more bad CEOs than good CEOs. I've seen good CEOs turn into bad CEOs, but I've never seen a bad CEO turn into a good CEO. I assume it does happen, but there's a strong cultural pressure (and many hundreds of millions of dollars) pushing bad CEO behavior and very little other than personal ethics pushing good CEO behavior, and when the incentives look like that, swimming upstream is hard.

> We have to shake them free from those ideas and get them to realize that there are good and bad companies out there and they have options.

Not everyone does have options, though. This is why instead of telling people to just avoid the bad CEOs, workers should unionize and collectively bargain against the bad CEOs. I'm sure I'll be seeing a lot of class warfare generalizations about "unions bad" in response to this suggestion.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#154

Post by neutronicus » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

dlev_pika wrote: post #75

Aurornis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable. An unintended side effect that I’ve noticed is that it normalizes bad behavior of CEOs for those who invest a lot of “CEOs bad” grist (Reddit, Threads, even Hacker News). When someone, usually early career, takes a job with a bad CEO afte…

“No war but class war” rings as true in 2026 as it did 40 years ago

Sure, although the obsession with "CEOs and billionaires" does have the ring of the 300k HHI software-engineer class hoping to play class enemies above and below them against each other.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#155

Post by Quarrelsome » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

fny wrote: post #129

jerf wrote: post #37

The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on…

Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? You don't need superintelligence to disrupt humanity. We easily have enough advancement to change the economy dramatically as is. The adoption isn't there yet.

Moreover the singularity makes this crass assumption that a single player takes all. It seems to ignore a future of many, many AI players, or many, many human + AI players instead.

Furthermore, regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans, who as a race are cognitively extremely diverse and adaptive.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#156

Post by enraged_camel » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

simoncion wrote: post #87

enraged_camel wrote: post #59

>> Imagine a co-worker who generated reams of code with security hazards, forcing you to review every line with a fine-toothed comb. One who enthusiastically agreed with your suggestions, then did the exact opposite. A colleague who sabotaged your work, deleted your home directory, and then issued a detailed, polite apology for it. One who promised over and over again that they had delivered key objectives when they…

> But you don't fire a table saw because it doesn't know when to stop cutting, right? If I purchased a table saw and that table saw irregularly and unpredictably jumped past its safeties -as we've plenty of evidence that LLMs [0] do-, then I would [1] immediately stop using that saw, return it for a refund, alert the store that they're selling wildly unsafe equipment, and the relevant regulators that a manufacturer i…

But that's the thing: the table saw has safeties. Someone put them there. Without those safeties, it, too, would jump unpredictably.

Scary scenarios like AIs deleting home directories are the result of the developers explicitly bypassing those safeties.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#157

Post by tra3 » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

macrocosmos wrote: post #136

itissid wrote: post #93

For any one who has not read the cockpit recording of air-france-447 I would encourage them to[1]. It is simply jaw dropping study in how things go wrong so fast — a risk with AI we have barely begun to acknowledge let alone regulate as a community. [1]( https://tailstrike.com/database/01-june-2009-air-france-447/ )

That catastrophe is entirely on Bonin the bonehead.

I read through the link. The other pilot and the captain are complicit by the virtue of being there. Autopilot disengages at 2:10 and they crash at 2:14. Terrible.

My other immediate thought -- Tesla's autopilot. I've never used it so I'm not sure I'm fully correct here, but apparently it requires you to be vigilant and take over in certain situations? Wonder how well that works out in practice.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#158

Post by jcalvinowens » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

itissid wrote: post #93

For any one who has not read the cockpit recording of air-france-447 I would encourage them to[1]. It is simply jaw dropping study in how things go wrong so fast — a risk with AI we have barely begun to acknowledge let alone regulate as a community. [1]( https://tailstrike.com/database/01-june-2009-air-france-447/ )

Anybody who is interested should read the full report: https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/AirFrance447_BEA.pdf

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#159

Post by Quarrelsome » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

aphyr wrote: post #20

greatpost wrote: post #5

Thank you for this aphyr. My one ask is people seem to put “CEOs” on a pedestal any time things come up, like they’re an alien life form and oh no they’re going to do something terrible. There are good company executives and shitty ones. You should try to start a company and see if you can be one of the better ones.

I am, oddly enough, the chief executive officer of two (trivially small) tech companies.

Btw why am i as a brit, blocked via my traditional routing because of the OSA? What possible features do you have on that site to make that relevant?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#160

Post by ikrenji » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

Quarrelsome wrote: post #155

fny wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? You don't need superintelligence to disrupt humanity. We easily have enough advancement to change the economy dramatically as is. The adoption isn't there yet.

Moreover the singularity makes this crass assumption that a single player takes all. It seems to ignore a future of many, many AI players, or many, many human + AI players instead. Furthermore, regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans, who as a race are cognitively extremely diverse and adaptive.

that's kind of optimistic. for example a misaligned super AI might engineer a virus that wipes out most of the 7 billion humans. that would put a damper on the adaptability of the human race...