Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 505 posts

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#321

Post by foobarchu »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #237
jimbokun wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and project…

I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get programs to work without knowing how to program. The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible , and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software -…

> the low cost of $20/month?

At what threshold does this stop being true? AI firms are famously hemorrhaging money and it will not last.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#322

Post by mingyeow »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #237
jimbokun wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and project…

I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get programs to work without knowing how to program. The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible , and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software -…

“ The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far.”

Curious on this - why?

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#323

Post by therealdrag0 »

jimbokun wrote: post #202
perrygeo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to sha…

In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and project…

Not all software is competing for attention. The big win of automation is it frees your attention to do other things!

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#324

Post by Zachzhao »

> Coding agents are sirens, luring you in with their speed of code generation and jagged intelligence, often completing a simple task with high quality at breakneck velocity. Things start falling apart when you think: "Oh golly, this thing is great. Computer, do my work!".

But the rough edges are temporary. Coding agents are becoming superhuman along certain dimensions; the progress is staggering. As Andrej Karpathy put it, anything measurable or legible can be optimized by AI. The gaps will close fast.

The harder question is HCI. How do you expose this kind of intelligence in interfaces that actually align with human values? That's the design problem worth obsessing over.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#325

Post by stavros »

wild_egg wrote: post #241
jaffee wrote: post #16

> You installed Beads, completely oblivious to the fact that it's basically uninstallable malware. Did I miss something? I haven't used it in a minute, but why is the author claiming that it's "uninstallable malware"?

Have a read through everything that's needed for a full uninstall: https://gist.github.com/banteg/1a539b88b3c8945cd71e4b958f319... Minimalist alternative with no hooks or dependencies for the curious: https://github.com/wedow/ticket

Ticket looks great, thanks!

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#326

Post by convexly »

I started writing down any of the technical decisions I needed to make before implementing them, usually just a sentence or two on what I'm choosing and why. I I looked back after 6 months and the pattern was embarrassing. I spent days agonizing over choices that turned out to be totally reversible and made quick decisions on things that actually mattered.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#327

Post by codybontecou »

convexly wrote: post #326

I started writing down any of the technical decisions I needed to make before implementing them, usually just a sentence or two on what I'm choosing and why. I I looked back after 6 months and the pattern was embarrassing. I spent days agonizing over choices that turned out to be totally reversible and made quick decisions on things that actually mattered.

How did you find patterns between these sentences?

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#328

Post by lmm »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #69
SoftTalker wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was. It isn't. Show me the licensing requirements to be a "software engineer." There are none. A 12 year old can call himself a software engineer and there are probably some who have managed to get remote work on major projects.

> It isn't. Show me the licensing requirements That's assuming the axiom that "engineer" must require licensing requirements. That may be true in some jurisdictions, but it's not axiomatically or definitionally true. Some kinds of building software may be "engineering", some kinds may not be, but anyone seeking to argue that "licensing requirements" should come into play will have to actually argue that rather than t…

> it's not axiomatically or definitionally true.

Depends which definition you're going by. Some people do define "engineer" that way.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#329

Post by lmm »

badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

> It's not about agile or waterfall or "functional" or abstracting your dependencies via Podman or Docker or VMware or whatever that nix crap is.

It is though. Picking the right approaches and tools makes more difference than anything else. Sure, you don't need the right tools if you can make the right choices - but it's much easier to pick a better methodology than to hire smarter people.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#330

Post by esseph »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #295
mikestorrent wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now this is the right take. It's one thing for us to do navel-gazing into the recursive autononomous future; it's another to step back and see what Normal People can do, now that the walls are coming down around our profession. Creating new walls is probably not the answer! From the Cathedral and Bazaar, we now have an entire metaphorical city of development happening, by people who would not have thought it possible…

The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes? When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely . But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediatel…

> Where are the vibe coded apps that are actually good? Where are the new, innovative creations built by “normal” people? Because by now you’d think we’d see them.

They're busy using them. They're probably not GitHub users or HN readers. I've seen some really nice internal (business) apps made.

Post reply on HN