221–230 of 330 posts
This article is obviously written by ai and it’s just painful for me to read ChatGPT’s writing style day in and day out
Software engineering is a means to an end. The computers need to do something and software engineering is how we’ve traditionally done that.
But it should be abundantly clear that this is no longer required. Before AI, engineers needed to care about every line of code. With current AI, engineers need only worry about larger architectural issues. But at this rate, even those concerns will be driven by AI. One can easily imagine a world where relevant architectural trade-offs are surfaced to prompters. We’ll live in a world very soon where no human will have to concern themselves with code.
So while the premise of this blog post may be true, it’s a bit like complaining that hopeless carriages don’t take to stirrups very well.
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It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use? The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software.
> It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use? Yes. > The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software. No. The _actual_ open source system consisted of hackers scratching their own itch and sharing the artifacts, because (it was assumed that) sharing is free. So if the work is already done and solved their problem, why n…
If you have the time tona scratch your own itch and gift the results, it implies you have a source of income that gives you the time/lifestyle to do such a thing. You might be a tenured academic, or live in a society with a strong safety net. Or you might be able to do your day job in 1/2 the allotted time.
The problem is that a those scenarios are eroding precipitously, leaving more to seek compensation for their work output, whether it is closed or open source.
Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.
The comments as well. I won't give away the tells but HN is less and less pleasant to read. Now is the time to cherish your pockets of small scale high quality forums that's not flooded by this stuff yet.
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I think it is very fair to say that in the same way that LLM's have given english majors access to programming, LLMs have also given engineers access to clear communication. I'm not shy to admit that LLMs even from 2 years ago could communicate ideas much better than me, especially for a general audience.
> LLMs have also given engineers access to clear communication. A lot of the time, the inability to express an idea clearly hints at some problem with the underlying idea, or in one's conceptualisation of that idea. Writing is a fantastic way to grapple with those issues, and iron out better and clearer iterations of ideas (or one's understanding thereof). An LLM, on the other hand, will happily spit out a coherent p…
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N=2 form the same author: https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/24/first-1000-lines-det... > AI is an in-context learner, not a standards enforcer. > The AI is not judging your code. It is learning from it. > Speed without structure is not speed. It is borrowed time. > This is not about premature optimization or over-engineering. It is about giving the AI the patterns it needs to work effectively on your behalf. > Thi…
AI learned this figure of speech from humans. Even the frequency in which it is used is copied from humans. So you can't really use it to determine if something is written by an AI or not.
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The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.
> The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking. Dunno man. Ideas alone aren't worth anything [0] and execution is everything [1], but good ideas and great execution will never go out of style regardless of how much competition is out there. I'm of the opinion that even if 10% of the population is now capable of creating a side project, there's still the same re…
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> It's no longer just about writing code It never was
But that was a large part of it. When it was difficult to write correct, well-structured code, that was a major determinant in who would get a job as a developer - ability to design and test came second. Now that generating code is automatic, it's the rest that becomes important. That works well for those of us who could do all of those things, but hurts those whose only ability was to generate code.
That's different than saying a lot of people *believed* writing code was the hardest/most important part.