Grief and the AI split • Hacker News Board

Re: Grief and the AI split

#381

Post by bluefirebrand » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #359

bluefirebrand wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using forklifts has made us overall less healthy and less physically fit than moving things by hand Will LLMs, "the forklifts of the mind" make us less mentally fit? Seems like a pretty likely outcome to me

Strawman. Forklifts usually do work we physically can't do (or sometimes could do if ignoring personnel risks and costs).

> Forklifts usually do work we physically can't do

Is that any different from doing work we can do, but way faster than we could realistically do it?

Change the analogy to an excavator then. I could move a pile of dirt with a shovel, or I could write code with my brain

Or I could move a pile of dirt with an excavator or write code with an LLM

Re: Grief and the AI split

#382

Post by rng-concern » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 9:29 PM UTC

pona-a wrote: post #374

calebkaiser wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how "the real split" is always between the intellectually and morally superior (me) and the inferiors (them).

When one side of the discussion makes their ignorance a point of pride, defining themselves entirely based on what they now need not know, I believe you've inadvertently insulted yourself.

I don't see many on one "side" with prideful ignorance. There are a few loud ones, sure. But I love to see the many ideas I've not had the time to implement come to fruition. I don't get the same satisfaction. It doesn't seem as much "mine" as if I did it all by hand. However once the tool is built, I use it to build more things. More tools.

Not having to know the lower levels means you can free your mind for things at higher levels of abstraction. It's not a void in our brain you don't fill with other things.

But I don't know. I'm new to this.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#383

Post by maplethorpe » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 10:32 PM UTC

orsorna wrote: post #334

orsorna wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow your analogy at all. Suppose I want to build an application with xyz features. My research yields that there are no such applications that include xyz features. However, there are plenty of applications that might have x feature, y feature or z feature, or a combination of two, but not all three. If there are no such applications, I don't have a choice but to write it myself. This could take some time…

Further, I don't argue that 100% prompting an application together isn't building something themselves. Built on the shoulders of leviathans, as libraries were built on the shoulders of giants of yore. But an application that combines xyz features is novel in this scenario. There is inherent value in that.

I'm not arguing whether AI has value as a code-generating application. I'm more interested in whether you, as a developer, still get satisfaction from building with AI, the same way you would get satisfaction if you built it yourself.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#384

Post by Timwi » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 12:05 AM UTC

gilbetron wrote: post #350

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, theres the pace of advancement of the models. Many people formed their opinions last year, and the landscape has changed a lot. People have been saying this every year for the last 3 years. It hasn't been true before, and it isn't true now. The models haven't actually gotten smarter, they still don't actually understand a thing, and they still routinely make basic syntax and logic errors. Yes, even (insert yo…

I swear some people are using some other tech than I'm using the past few months. Where I work, Claude Code is developing major changes to our very large code base (many repos, millions upon millions of lines of really important code) and pushing to prod regularly. Even the most bearish of engineers are now using it to ship important code daily. It still has issues and you have to know how to use it, but it is a shoc…

> I swear some people are using some other tech than I'm using the past few months.

I'm curious about this discrepancy too. I assume that you're being facetious and the discrepancy is with people's perceptions of AI’s capabilities or usefulness or whatever subjective metric. Some, myself included, seem to perceive it as basically useless, while others, yourself included, seem to imply that it's at a level where it genuinely replaces competent coders.

If the discrepancy were small, it could just be chalked up to the metric being subjective. But it seems to be like night and day. A difference of orders of magnitude. I wanna know what's going on there.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#385

Post by roncesvalles » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 12:52 AM UTC

In my experience, the grief goes away when you realize that making the LLM do useful stuff is very much not a solved problem and that there is ample room for creativity here.

And that once you fully lean into this part of software engineering, all the other stuff becomes interesting again. I highly recommend if anyone is demotivated from software engineering to write their own orchestrator or Ralph loop or sub agent system whatever it is that makes LLM actually work for you, exactly in the way you want it to work. And then to go back to your projects again. Because now the LLM is a part of you. It's no longer a vending machine, it's a gundam suit.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#386

Post by nerdright » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 5:50 AM UTC

There's still going to be some craftsmanship tho, right? I think software is evolving to be like a factory. Sure, you may not care much about each part of the factory, but the way these parts fit together to produce the desired value/output is still craft IMO. I have personally started enjoying this part and it's actually becoming pretty fun.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#387

Post by FabianCarbonara » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 8:35 AM UTC

tovej wrote: post #344

FabianCarbonara wrote: post #218

For me AI unlocked building things I just couldn't before. My creativity and ingenuity now have an outlet that wasn't possible without agentic coding tools. That's genuinely exciting. But I also keep wondering: how long until the level of abstraction I'm working at now gets automated too?

Is it really valid to call it "ingenuity" if you weren't able to execute projects before? Gen-AI has not enabled me to develop anything I wasn't able to do before, and I consider myself to be an average developer.

I would say so ;-) Right now AI is a powerful tool for me. It helps me express ingenuity on a more abstract level, e.g. conceptual or product thinking rather than implementation details. Some of my current projects I could have built without AI, but not in the time I had. AI moved them from unrealistic to actually doable.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#388

Post by hyperflowerer » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 9:57 AM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #193

reverius42 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current AI is much, much better than current search engines (which themselves seem worse than they were decades ago, for some reason).

It really isn't. AI has nothing on a good search engine like Kagi.

You and this board are totally delusional. This entire board is just a complete waste of time to read. Just total fucking nonsense.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#389

Post by tovej » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 11:38 AM UTC

FabianCarbonara wrote: post #387

tovej wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really valid to call it "ingenuity" if you weren't able to execute projects before? Gen-AI has not enabled me to develop anything I wasn't able to do before, and I consider myself to be an average developer.

I would say so ;-) Right now AI is a powerful tool for me. It helps me express ingenuity on a more abstract level, e.g. conceptual or product thinking rather than implementation details. Some of my current projects I could have built without AI, but not in the time I had. AI moved them from unrealistic to actually doable.

What are these ingenious projects then, pray tell?

Re: Grief and the AI split

#390

Post by gzread » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

gilbetron wrote: post #350

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, theres the pace of advancement of the models. Many people formed their opinions last year, and the landscape has changed a lot. People have been saying this every year for the last 3 years. It hasn't been true before, and it isn't true now. The models haven't actually gotten smarter, they still don't actually understand a thing, and they still routinely make basic syntax and logic errors. Yes, even (insert yo…

I swear some people are using some other tech than I'm using the past few months. Where I work, Claude Code is developing major changes to our very large code base (many repos, millions upon millions of lines of really important code) and pushing to prod regularly. Even the most bearish of engineers are now using it to ship important code daily. It still has issues and you have to know how to use it, but it is a shoc…

Did you lay off some engineers or keep them but make the software better?