The first 40 months of the AI era

It's funny you mention that. The only difference is sometimes you need a functionality without doing the plumbing. At the end of the day if you're getting the output you need, the process doesn't matter. It's an interesting analogy but only works if the inspector is another expert dev.

An important aspect of comparison is that nobody is going to tell you that your surgery is noticeable or looks bad.

Your friends, family, partners, coworkers, aren't going to say anything, neither are people you meet casually, certainly not service workers, strangers aren't going to pull you aside to tell you the truth about your nose job, etc.

I hope the same social taboo doesn't transfer over to AI content. We should honestly critique AI generated content, used either in-whole or in-part with human creations. If the inclusion of AI content botched your article, saying so should be socially acceptable.

We saw some of this here on HN. It used to be that when AI content would be submitted here, it was a social faux pas to even mention it was LLM generated, same thing with LLM generated comments, no matter how obvious it was. Mentioning a comment was AI was socially verboten and you'd be finger-wagged at.

Eventually, AI fatigue caused the community to discount Show HN entries, submissions and comments, and the signal to noise ratio could no longer be ignored.

Now, turn on showdead. Those same comments, that users were expected to interact with as if they were made in good faith by real people, litter every submission's comment section. These comments objectively hurt discussion and it's a good thing they're shadowbanned.

Culturally, I hope we can reach a point where critique of AI content, including code, doesn't brand critics as haters, Luddites, or worse, and stifle conversation about what our communities really value and want.

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating.

I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I can't get information on how the current API of some-thing works into my brain fast enough, because the docs are non existent, outdated, or scattered and hard to collate.

Yeah I get this impression too. AI feels like it's papering over overwrought and badly designed frameworks, tech stacks with far too many things in them, and also the decline of people creating or advocating for really expressive languages.

Pragmatic sure, but we're building a tower of chairs here rather than building ladders like a real engineering field.

I would agree with the utility of Claude and Claude Code. Claude feels like your own executive assistant, sales team and IT department. Combine that with Claude Code and you can build some incredible things. Myself as an example, I used Claude to advise me on starting a business and building a MVP. After a few weeks of refinement I was able to create something I never could have done without Claude. It is a game changer for sure.