We might all be AI engineers now • Hacker News Board

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#341

Post by hansmayer » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 11:54 AM UTC

gbbloke wrote: post #334

hansmayer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the same amount of bread with only 5 people. That is actually the case with a lot of bakeries these days. But the one major difference being,the baker can rely with almost 100% reliability that the form, shape and ingredients used will be ex…

"vibe-bake" is maybe the best thing I've heard in a long time. Thank you for that, you made my day!

Gladly - well now don't just sit with this great neologism, push it out, lets make it at least as 20% as popular as the term "microslop" :)

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#342

Post by KronisLV » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 11:54 AM UTC

peteforde wrote: post #336

KronisLV wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, every time that this comes up. You're asking people who are experienced developers absolutely chewing through checklists and peeking at HN while compiling/procrastinating/eating a sandwich/waiting for a prompt to finish to not just explain but quantify what is plainly obvious to those people, every day. You want us to bring paper receipts, like w…

Totally! Though I maintain that the only good aspect to microservices is that krazam video. You know the one. I do get frustrated when I see people not using Plan steps, copy/pasting from web front-ends or expecting to one-shot their entire codebase from a single dense prompt. It's problematic because it's not immediately obvious whether someone is still arguing like it's late 2024, you know what I mean? Also, speaki…

Haven't looked into 4.5 vs 4.6 in depth (since the latter seems good for my needs), but

> but it's crazy expensive

was something I struggled with until just going for the Max subscription and cancelling my other ones.

I'm not sure what Anthropic is doing, but they're either making truckloads of money from those paying per-token (especially since you're not supposed to use subscriptions for server use cases --> devs can use Claude Code, but not code review bots etc.), or heavily subsidizing subscriptions.

100 USD is worth it for me, I've only hit the 5 hour limits a few times, and haven't hit 100% of the weekly limits once. I fear to think how much comparable usage with any of the Opus models would have been, if I were to pay per token - even Sonnet could get similarly expensive.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#343

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

peteforde wrote: post #335

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, quite frankly there seems to be something incredibly frustrating in your life going on, but I'm not sure that the underlying cause of whatever is weighing on your mind at the moment is that I asked "how do you know that what you are feeling is actually true, in comparison to what studies show should be true?" (rephrased, as not reasonable to quote…

This takes the cake for one of the strangest replies I've ever received on here. I'm not sure how or indeed why you draw lines from what I said to my life situation... which is relevant how? What I apparently did not do a good enough job of conveying is that those "data from multiple sources" get cited and then people immediately reply with "those are old studies". It's circular in the same way that arguing with anti…

OK, glad to hear I was mistaken, but it certainly seemed like about halfway through your first response you went off the rails and decided to take my question as some sort of personal affront. It was not the strangest response I've had on HN, but one of the strangest. I could go through with a full analysis of why I thought "this guy is having problems", but that would take a long time and as you say you aren't I guess it isn't particularly useful.

I guess we aren't going to get anything meaningful between us on this subject, because you seem to think it is like arguing with an anti-vaxxer, which funny enough I thought the same thing,

So fine, you experience a gain, you just do, and it is so clear and evident you don't need to guard yourself against being deluded despite studies suggesting that gain is not there. That seems crazy to me, I would doubt and want to verify my gain if I read a study suggesting the gain was illusory. No meaningful convergence seems possible between needing verification and not needing verification.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#344

Post by peteforde » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #343

peteforde wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This takes the cake for one of the strangest replies I've ever received on here. I'm not sure how or indeed why you draw lines from what I said to my life situation... which is relevant how? What I apparently did not do a good enough job of conveying is that those "data from multiple sources" get cited and then people immediately reply with "those are old studies". It's circular in the same way that arguing with anti…

OK, glad to hear I was mistaken, but it certainly seemed like about halfway through your first response you went off the rails and decided to take my question as some sort of personal affront. It was not the strangest response I've had on HN, but one of the strangest. I could go through with a full analysis of why I thought "this guy is having problems", but that would take a long time and as you say you aren't I gue…

I like remus' comment to your previous message; you're telling a guy with a chainsaw who is busy chopping down trees at lightning speed that he should stop and defend his daily experience against some studies that suggest tree chopping speeds are not what they seem.

At some point you just have to shrug and get back to work chopping down 3-5x more trees than you did last year.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#345

Post by peteforde » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #342

peteforde wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally! Though I maintain that the only good aspect to microservices is that krazam video. You know the one. I do get frustrated when I see people not using Plan steps, copy/pasting from web front-ends or expecting to one-shot their entire codebase from a single dense prompt. It's problematic because it's not immediately obvious whether someone is still arguing like it's late 2024, you know what I mean? Also, speaki…

Haven't looked into 4.5 vs 4.6 in depth (since the latter seems good for my needs), but > but it's crazy expensive was something I struggled with until just going for the Max subscription and cancelling my other ones. I'm not sure what Anthropic is doing, but they're either making truckloads of money from those paying per-token (especially since you're not supposed to use subscriptions for server use cases --> devs c…

I don't get/like/want Claude Code. I do everything in Cursor, and I am very happy. I recommend it! And there's no time-based limits. You get deeply discounted API calls included in your monthly subscription, and then overage is billed at the same discounted rate. It's essentially committing to an "at least" amount per month in exchange for a preferred rate.

I have a USD$200/month Cursor plan, and I do hundreds of hours worth of Opus 4.5 prompting with it every month. I tend to pay $250-300 a month after overages, and I consider myself a heavy user. During Opus 4.1 days, one month I paid $700. 4.5 got substantially cheaper and smarter, and I consider that the real moment agentic coding got real.

I don't know your financial situation and I recognize that $300/month is more than much of the world makes in a month. I am just saying that for me, what I'm working on is important enough that I am absolutely willing to pay a premium for access to the best tooling available, because every dollar I spend represents literally an hour of my time. Maybe more? It's so incredibly cheap compared to hiring an unreliable human who needs to sleep.

You can't pay someone $3600/year to lick stamps, much less pair program application development.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#346

Post by solaire_oa » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

prescriptivist wrote: post #261

_dwt wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no, not with that attitude there won’t! I am not trying to insinuate that there is a conspiracy, or that posts like yours are part of it, but there has been a huge wave of posts and comments since February which narrow the Overton window to the distance between “it’s here and it’s great” and “I’m sad but it’s inevitable”. Humanity has possessed nuclear weapons for 80 years and has used them exactly twice in ang…

> We can in fact just NOT do things! I agree with you on that. Not just on AI but a lot of things that suck about this world, and in particular the United States. But capital is too powerful. And these tools are legitimately transformative for business. And business pays our bills and, more importantly, provides the healthcare insurance for our families. The wheel is a real fucking drag isn't it? I don't see anything…

If it helps, I would consider learning about and deploying local LLMs (llama.cpp etc), if you have the hardware (and it doesn't take all that much hardware at all). They're nowhere near as fast as LLM providers, but they come fairly close in overall quality (including agentic workflows).

The reason that I suggest this is that not only does running locally democratize AI (while AI democratizes software), it solves a lot of the discomfort surrounding the new reliance, dependence, data, and trust given to LLM providers. Basically it removes a lot of the "ick" surrounding LLMs, while also hedging any bets that the investment schemes of LLM providers are unsustainable. You may also hedge bets surrounding "owning" the maintenance of the machines that replace you.

I don't know, it's a small thing that makes me feel a little better during this tumultuous time.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#347

Post by overgard » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #291

overgard wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Claude every day, and it definitely makes me faster but.. I'm also able to give it a lot of very specific instructions and correct a lot of mistakes quickly because I look at the code and understand what it's doing; and I'm also asking it to write code in domains I understand. So I don't think these skills are obsolete at all. If anything, keeping them sharp is the only differentiator we have. "Agentic Engi…

>I'm using Claude every day, and it definitely makes me faster but.. I see a lot of posts about this, and I see a lot studies, also on HN, that show that this isn't the case. Now of the course the "this isn't the case" stuff is statistically, thus there can be individual developers whom are faster, but there can also be that an individual developer sometimes is faster and sometimes not but the times that they are fas…

Fair question! I've wondered that myself, there is always the possibility that the productivity gain is in my head. I'm not AI pilled, if these things disappeared tommorow I would probably just shrug, I'm just trying to keep up to date.

Where I find it makes me faster is in dealing with writing low value code that's repetitive, which I might normally procrastinate. Like, the thing I'm working on is a data editor that generates a lot of fields, so having it churn out a lot of samey react code is useful to me in that context. There's already an obvious pattern for the tools to follow.

I also find it useful for "rubber ducking". Bouncing ideas I might previously have bugged a colleague about.

By faster I'm not suggesting a fanciful number for me. Maybe like 10 to 20 percent if I were to guess.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#348

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

prescriptivist wrote: post #323

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm using Claude every day, and it definitely makes me faster but.. I see a lot of posts about this, and I see a lot studies, also on HN, that show that this isn't the case. Now of the course the "this isn't the case" stuff is statistically, thus there can be individual developers whom are faster, but there can also be that an individual developer sometimes is faster and sometimes not but the times that they are fas…

I'm a principal engineer, been working on the same set of codebases for almost 10 years. I handle the 20% or so of my time that constitutes inbound faster than ever and I know because that inbound volume has clearly increased and yet I have, for the first time ever, begun chipping away at the "nice to have" backlog. My biggest time sink now is interviewing and code reviews -- the latter being directly proportional to…

thanks, this seems pretty useful information.

Assuming inbound volume clearly increased is something like we've been handling more tickets than ever before over the last few quarters or something like that.

I've read this code review thing before, and this tends to go into these studies suggesting that the whole process is taking the same amount of time, but for that to be the case the code reviews would have to take longer on the individual code review level and for you it is just volume increase because of increased tickets being pushed through.

Is there anything about your ticketing strategy? For example do you make your tickets much more atomic than lots of teams who say they do but then end up with things that could be split up into two or three tickets? How much time do spend on preparing tickets for ready for development / ready for AI?

Just trying to identify behavioral patterns in your successful usage that would explain the success. Given the example of throughput of tickets over long time I suppose we can assume that the gain is not illusory.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#349

Post by dasil003 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

lll-o-lll wrote: post #317

prescriptivist wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that people who don't want to use these tools or clean old ways are incurious. But I think these developers should face the fact that those skills and those ways they are reticent to give up are more or less obviated at this point. Not in the future, but now. It's just that the adoption of these tools isn't evenly distributed yet. I think there's a place for thoughtful dialogue around what this means fo…

> I think these developers should face the fact that those skills and those ways they are reticent to give up are more or less obviated at this point. Yes. We are this generations highly skilled artisans, facing our own industrial revolution. Just as the skilled textile workers and weavers of early 19’th century Britain were correct when they argued this new automated product was vastly inferior, it matters not at al…

I think the analogy is directionally good, but it short changes the abstract and recursive nature of software.

We were already writing code that was automating not only manual work but also simpler programs. LLMs essentially just move us one more (large) hop up the abstraction ladder. And yes I get that it’s a different type of hop (non-deterministic, extremely leaky, etc), but it’s still a hop.

So if the only thing you want to do is manually write code in the traditional way (perhaps with vim instead of IntelliJ) then yeah I think you’re cooked. On the other hand, if you are willing to work with LLM-assisted tooling and learn how to compensate for its shortcomings then I think you’ll have a bright future.

Re: We might all be AI engineers now

#350

Post by jbpd924 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 6:40 PM UTC

samiv wrote: post #321

johnfn wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just completely inaccurate. There is more to learn now than ever before, and I find myself spending more and more time teaching myself things that I never before would have been able to find time to understand.

This is just completely inaccurate. There's the same amout of information available as before. It's not like LLMs provide you with information that isn't available anywhere else. But I agree that it can serve as a tool for a person who it's interested in learning but I bet you that for every such person there's 10x as many who are happy to outsource all their thinking to the machine. We already have reports from basi…

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