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This time is different

shkspr.mobi

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Re: This time is different

#341

Post by qsera »

generallyjosh wrote: post #331
qsera wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight. It is generating large amount of power on demand. From that one can imagine what it could do. But more importantly in this context, one could also imagine what it could NEVER do. If someone say "Oh, the mighty steam engine! It lets us print 100x more books than we were doing before. Who knows, may be s…

There are lots of intelligent people looking at AI and imagining its potential Are you just saying that you're more intelligent than them? You can see clearly, where all the steam engine technicians can't?

What are they saying that contradicts with something I said?

Re: This time is different

#342

Post by ehutch79 »

CompoundEyes wrote: post #53

I’m doing enterprise coding tasks that used to take a month of whole team coordination from mockups to through development and testing in 3 days now. It’s all test driven development, codex 5.3 and a small team of two people who know how to hold it right orchestrating the agents. There’s no reason not to work this way. The sociotechnical engineering aspects of this change are fascinating and rewarding to solve.

Surely the point of doing mockups is to get feedback.

Are you just not doing that anymore?

Re: This time is different

#343

Post by prescriptivist »

plomme wrote: post #310
prescriptivist wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a funny point that you're making (for me, anyway), because prior to early December, probably 5% of the lines of code I wrote in a week were AI-generated by cursor. Then I started using Claude Code. Fast forward to today, I would say 98% of the code that I've shipped in the last three weeks has been written completely by Claude Code. Prior to three weeks ago, I had used speech-to-text to do accomplish approxim…

How are you doing speech-to-text with Claude Code?

Just Wispr Flow and a PTT key binding. It's very good for doing plans with Claude Code because I can just ramble and ramble. As long as I just convey the details of what I want over a sufficiently long string of text, it will work even if it has errors in speech-to-text or I have slight contradictions in my framing of the prompt.

If I need to explicitly reference files in the plan prompt, I just manually annotate them into the prompt at the end.

Re: This time is different

#344

Post by ludicrousdispla »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #228
massysett wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and despite every single one of these world-changing inventions, people in rich countries still go to work every day, even though UBI is generally not a thing. People claim AI will eliminate large numbers of jobs. Maybe it will, just like the tractor did. But new jobs are created. I would never have guessed that “influencer” would be a thing! This current “AI will destroy all the jobs and make most people useles…

This argument is the one that shook me, I’m curious if you think there’s any merit to it: Humans have essentially three traits we can use to create value: we can do stuff in the physical world through strength and dexterity, and we can use our brains to do creative, knowledge, or otherwise “intelligent” work. (Note by “dexterity” I mean “things that humans are better at than physical robots because of our shape and n…

This overlooks that there aren't enough 'intelligence jobs' in an economy for it to be impacted by this.

Re: This time is different

#345

Post by selridge »

bandrami wrote: post #283
thevinter wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursor came out 3 years ago. "Agentic" refactors have been a thing for 1.5 years. Vibecoding as a term has been created 1 year ago. There are multiple companies that deploy to production daily. What are we even talking about?

Right but this agentic stuff was supposed to be the wave where we would finally actually see increased output, so we should probably be seeing it soon if it's real. Like, my dev team should definitely have the actual code they keep talking about their agents making, ready for me to put into production. As should my vendors. Any day now.

What is this nonsense?

You said that none of this was in production and then when people pointed out that it was obviously in production, you shifted the goal post to some other measure that you just imagined in your head.

Re: This time is different

#346

Post by ludicrousdispla »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #282
inigyou wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we just run out of new jobs?

Areas of the economy suffered this time and time again. Even if there are new jobs, even if those new jobs are better paid and better conditions than the ones they replace, how does that help the 55 year old coal miner who has seen his industry vanish. Can he realistically retrain? It’s not unprecedented however the scale and speed that it will come at is. Things like the spinning jenny came along and replaced spinne…

Realistically, he can retrain, although he is unlikely to be a good culture fit. /s

Re: This time is different

#347

Post by FromTheFirstIn »

throw10920 wrote: post #187
fzeroracer wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you and many of your industry friends conveniently never actually post their 'perfect code' when asked for proof? I've asked like five different people now that make these claims and they just vanish into the ether.

Note that when code is shown, like the "browser" that was recently put on blast, it's often terrible. Are we experiencing a huge influence campaign on HN?

Yes

Re: This time is different

#348

Post by [deleted] »

jdietrich wrote: post #252
Retric wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It absolutely is. It was published as Fiction. The vast majority of people didn’t think it was anymore realistic than Interstellar etc. There’s plenty of stories where we cure cancer, but the 50% improvement in cancer treatments over the last 40 years just doesn’t get much hype because it’s so slow. It’s hard to get excited about the idea cancer may be gone in 200 years because while that will be awesome for people…

The electrical telegraph was integral to the growth and consolidation of the British Empire. Britain acquired more colonies and held on to them for longer than the other European powers partly due to its naval might, but also due to far superior bureaucratic and communications technology.

[deleted]

Re: This time is different

#349

Post by Gud »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #112
MaybiusStrip wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only people underwhelmed by AI in February 2026 are people who have formed an identity around being AI skeptics over the last couple years and are struggling to shed it. I haven't met anyone who has seriously used the new models who isn't a at least a bit awed and disturbed.

That's very true in terms of how capable these chatbots clearly are, but I believe the author was using 'underwhelming' to refer to the societal impact. So far, life goes on roughly the same as it did five years ago. This can feel 'underwhelming' in contrast to the onslaught of public discussion about, and huge investments in, AI. Most of us here on HN are programmers, and we all know how radically LLMs have changed…

lol “chatbots”.

I’m using these chatbots to produce advanced software. Chatbots, get real

Re: This time is different

#350

Post by ai-x »

getnormality wrote: post #276
esperent wrote: post #167

> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype. But these didn't: Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the pri…

So if you were overwhelmingly wrong about technology fads in your lifetime by saying yes to everything, you can comfort yourself by saying that if you had gone back a century and said yes to everything, you would have been right about some things!

Also, the ones you were right will provide 10,000x returns for all the 1x losses you have suffered.
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