Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#191

Post by airstrike » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #182

airstrike wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#2 does not negate my steering suggestion, so I'm not sure how you can conclude nobody thinks it's a real thing that works also Claude Code is notoriously poorly built, so I wouldn't tout it as SOTA

I have worked at companies from startups to fortune 500. They all have garbage code. Who cares? It works anyway. The world is held together with duct tape, and it's unreasonably effective. I don't believe "code quality" can be measured by how it looks. The only meaningful measure of its quality is whether it runs and solves a user's problem. Get the best programmer in the world. Have them write the most perfect sourc…

I hear you about "it just works" mattering infinitely more than some arbitrary code quality metric

but I'm not judging Claude Code by how it looks. I kinda like the aesthetics. I'm talking about how slow, resource hungry and finnicky/flickery it is. it's objectively sloppy

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#192

Post by neonstatic » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 10:55 PM UTC

physicles wrote: post #52

rokob wrote: post #13

> architecture is what happens when all those local pieces interact, and you can’t get good global behaviour by stitching together locally correct components This is a great article. I’ve been trying to see how layered AI use can bridge this gap but the current models do seem to be lacking in the ambiguous design phase. They are amazing at the local execution phase. Part of me thinks this is a reflection of software…

I’ve had a couple wins with AI in the design phase, where it helped me reach a conclusion that would’ve taken days of exploration, if I ever got there. Both were very long conversations explicitly about design with lots of back and forth, like whiteboarding. Both involved SQL in ClickHouse, which I’m ok but not amazing at — for example I often write queries with window functions, but my mental model of GROUP BY is st…

This rings a bell. The model is a search engine, that understands concepts - to some degree. It can find a concept, that you currently need.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#193

Post by pessimizer » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 10:57 PM UTC

csallen wrote: post #176

lowsong wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what everyone says when technology democratizes something that was previously reserved for a small number of experts. What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run. Over the past 20 years software engineering has become something that just about anyone can do with li…

> What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run. "Renting your ability to do your job"? I think you're misunderstanding the definition of democratization. This has nothing to do with programmers. It has nothing to do with people's jobs. Democratizing is defined as "the process…

I have no idea what this flood of personal-use software is that you think normal people want to produce. Normal people don't even think about software doing a thing until they see an advertisement about software that does a thing. And then they'd rather pay 10 bucks for it than to invent a shittier version of it themselves for $500.

And I'm not being condescending about normal people. Developers often don't think about the possibility of making software that does a particular thing until they actually see software that does that thing. And they're going to also going to prefer to buy than vibe code unless the program is small and insignificant.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#194

Post by csallen » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 11:12 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #180

csallen wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not factoring in the list of constraints I provided. There's no broad social acceptance of supersonic flight because it creates incredibly loud sonic booms that the public doesn't want to deal with. And despite that, it's still a bad counterexample, as companies continue to innovate in this area e.g. Boom Supersonic. At best you can say, "It's taking longer than expected," but my point was never that it will h…

If code quality only stops mattering in 400 years (whatever that definition happens to be) then the prediction that it makes is worthless in terms of what you should do today. You use it to argue it’s unimportant deal with it, but if it’s a 400 year payoff you’ve made the wrong bet.

Surely you don't think AI coding technology will be as slow to develop as guns were.

We're obviously talking about 1-10 years here, not 100-1000 years.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#195

Post by csallen » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 11:13 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #189

csallen wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every metric I've seen points to there being an explosion in (a) the number of apps that exist and (b) the number of people making applications.

What relevance do either of those claims have to the claim of the comment you are responding to? Are you trying to imply that having more things means that each of them will be smaller? There are more people than there were 500 years ago - are they smaller, or larger? Also, the printing press did lead to much longer works. There are many continuous book series that have run for decades, with dozens of volumes and mil…

The average piece written and published today today is much shorter than the average piece from the past. Look at Twitter. Social media in general. Internet forums. Blog posts. Emails. Chats. Etc. The amount of this content DWARFS other content.

The same is true of most things that get democratized. Look at video. TikTok, YouTube, YouTube shorts.

Look at all the apps people are building are building for themselves with AI. They are typically not building Microsoft Word.

Of course there will be some apps that are bigger and more ambitious than ever. I myself am currently building an app that's bigger an more ambitious than I would have tried to build without AI. I'm well aware of this use case.

But as many have pointed out, AI is worse at these than at smaller apps. And pretending that these are the only apps that matter is what's leading developers imo to over-value the importance of code quality. What's happening right now that's invisible to most professional engineers is an explosion in the number of time, bespoke personal applications being quickly built by non-developers are that are going to chip away at people's reasons to buy and use large, bloated, professional software with hundreds of thousands of users.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#196

Post by csallen » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 11:24 PM UTC

lowsong wrote: post #175

csallen wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has literally never happened in the history of humanity. Name one technology where development permanently stopped due to lack of funding, despite there being... 1. lots of room for progress, i.e. the theoretical ceiling dwarfed the current capabilities 2. strong incentives to continue development, i.e. monetary or military success 3. no obviously better competitors/alternatives 4. social/cultural tolerance from…

AI has none of these things. 1. As I said before, we've long since reached diminishing returns on models. We simply don't have enough compute or training data left to make them dramatically better. 2. This is only true if it actually pans out, which is still an unknown question. 3. Just... not using it? It has to justify its existence. If it's not of benefit vs. the cost then why bother. 4. The public hates AI. The p…

1. Saying that AI will never approach its theoretical limits because XYZ tech is approaching diminishing returns, is like saying guns would never get better than the fire sticks of China in 1000 AD because the then-current methods hit their theoretical limits. You're betting against tens of thousands of the smartest minds of a generation across the entire planet. I will happily take the other side of this bet.

2. Sure, depends on #1. But the incentive is undeniable.

3. It has. Do you think people are using Claude Code in incredible numbers for no reason?

4. The public and businesses are adopting AI en masse. It's incredibly useful. Demand is skyrocketing. I don't think you could show that negative public sentiment has been sufficient to stop this, any more than negative sentiment about TVs, headphones, bicycles, etc (which was significant).

With the exception of #1, I feel like you're arguing that things won't happen, where the numbers show they've already have happened and are accelerating.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#197

Post by ryguz » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 11:25 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#198

Post by csallen » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 11:27 PM UTC

lowsong wrote: post #187

csallen wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run. "Renting your ability to do your job"? I think you're misunderstanding the definition of democratization. This has nothing to do with programmers. It has nothing to do with people's jobs. Democratizing is defined as "the process…

> Democratizing is defined as "the process of making technology, information, or power accessible, available, or appealing to everyone, rather than just experts or elites." Your definition only supports my point. The transfer of skill from something you learn to something you pay to do is the exact and complete opposite of your stated definition. It turns the activity from something that requires you to learn it to o…

> It is quite literally making this technology, information, and power available to only the elite.

I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening.

> What payout? Zero AI companies are profitable.

Because they're reinvesting profits into continued R&D, not because their current products are unprofitable. You're failing to understand basic high-growth business models.

> If you're invested in one of these companies you could be a billionaire on paper, but until it's liquid it's meaningless.

Plenty of AI companies have exited, and plenty of other AI companies offer tender offers where shareholders have been able to sell their shares to new investors. Again, it sounds like you just aren't really educated on what's happening. Plenty of people are millionaires in real life, not just on paper. You're massively incorrect about the payout landscape that investors are considering.

> The only people making money at the moment are either taking cash salaries from AI labs or speculating on Nvidia stock.

No, founders, early-stage investors, and employees with stock have cashed out in many cases. Again, it just feels like you're not aware of what's happening on the ground.

> Neither of which have much do with the tech itself and everything to do with the hype.

That's a very different argument. If you want to say that the investment is unsound, then fine, that's your opinion, but trying to say that investors have no appetite because they have to wait 10 to 15 years for a payout is incredibly incorrect.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#199

Post by devmor » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 11:28 PM UTC

cossray wrote: post #141

devmor wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also just the negative association factor. I use LLMs in my every day work. I’m also a strong critic of LLMs and absolutely loathe the hype cycle around them. I have done some really cool things with copilot and Claude and I keep sharing them to within my working circle because I simply don’t want to interact that much with people who aren’t grounded on the subject.

I would be interested to hear your take on Copilot vs Claude. I have used Copilot (trial) in VS Code and I found it to mostly meet my needs. It could generate some plans and code, which I could review on the go. I found this very natural to me as I never felt 'left behind' in whatever code the AI was generating. However, most of the posts I see here are on Claude (I haven't tried it) and very few mentions of Copilot.…

Copilot isn’t really a competing product to Claude - in fact I use Claude through copilot.

I have found in general that for the type of work I do (senior to staff level engineering, 90-10 research to programming) that Claude Opus is the only model really worth my time - but I just really like the Copilot CLI tooling.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#200

Post by csallen » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 11:31 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #193

csallen wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run. "Renting your ability to do your job"? I think you're misunderstanding the definition of democratization. This has nothing to do with programmers. It has nothing to do with people's jobs. Democratizing is defined as "the process…

I have no idea what this flood of personal-use software is that you think normal people want to produce. Normal people don't even think about software doing a thing until they see an advertisement about software that does a thing. And then they'd rather pay 10 bucks for it than to invent a shittier version of it themselves for $500. And I'm not being condescending about normal people. Developers often don't think abo…

Go look at the numbers from Lovable and Replit and Claude Code and similar companies. Quite staggering.

I myself have run an online community for early-stage startup founders for over a decade. The number of ambitious people who would love to build something but don't know how to code and in the last year or two have started cranking out applications is tremendous. That number is far higher than the number of software engineers who existed before.