I quit. The clankers won • Hacker News Board

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#431

Post by rafterydj » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #413

rafterydj wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this line of thought put out there many times, and I've been thinking: why do people do anything at all? What's the point? If no one at all is even reviewing the output of coding agents, genuinely, what are we doing as a society? I fail to see how we transition society into a positive future without supplying means of verifying systemic integrity. There is a reason that Upton Sinclair became famous: wayward inc…

I mean, the promise of perfect AI and perfect robotics is that humans would no longer have to do anything. They could live a life of leisure. Unfortunately, we're going to get these perfect AI and perfect robotics before we transition socially into a post-scarcity, post-ownership society. So what will happen is that ownership of the AI and robots will be consolidated into the hands of the few, the vast rest of us wil…

I've definitely felt this kind of way in the past. But these days I'm not so sure.

Setting aside the AI point about it, the idea of people becoming essentially irrelevant to the economy is an indictment on society. But I'd argue that the indictment really is towards what constitutes measurement in the economy. Not an indictment on society itself, or technology.

Sure, someone may not spend much money or produce much money, but if they produce scientific research or cultural work that is intangibly valuable it is still valuable regardless of whether economists can point to a metric or not. Same goes for the infinite amounts of contributions to our world from nature: what is the economic value of a garden snake or a beetle? A meaningless question when the economy can only see things in dollars.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#432

Post by ndriscoll » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 7:47 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #400

ndriscoll wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly do you have in mind? The large companies I've worked at had book subscriptions, internal training courses, and would pay for school. Personally I don't see the point of any of it. For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free. You can go download e.g. graduate level CS courses on youtube. MIT OCW has been around for almost a quarter century now. IME no one's going to stop you from sp…

Putting people on projects they’re only partly qualified for, ideally with mentoring, and letting them learn even though it takes longer than having the mentor do it by themselves. Allowing people to fail and try again without risking their ratings or their career. Book subscriptions and conference travel are quite cheap in comparison.

Is that not what every company does? At least any company big enough to have HR/some formalized ladder/promotion process? And any company large enough to have teams probably has a leads where a decent chunk of their work is doing that mentoring and figuring out who's ready for what work, or how to break it down into something their team is ready for if needed?

e.g. my current company's ladder explicitly mentions that the first two levels are receiving active mentoring and supervision. Third (~5 yrs xp) is still receiving mentoring but also providing it. Fourth and up you're generally expected to be the one doing the mentoring.

What that actually means on the ground is that I try to make sure my teammates are asking good questions/paying attention to the right things/thinking from the right perspectives. I can also let them know about some solution or basic approach for what they're doing, but then they need to go read more and think more deeply about what I'm talking about. So to me, "skills" are just something people need to pick up themselves.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#433

Post by ndriscoll » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 7:54 PM UTC

mixmastamyk wrote: post #360

ndriscoll wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For foundational knowledge, there's been high quality information for free from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc. out there for years. Just look there first. If you're beyond that, you're beyond the canon that you can "learn" and closer to needing to follow/participate in SOTA R&D. And if you need a more structured environment, that's why people go to school. Engineering jobs expect you're at the level of someone wh…

Often doesn’t matter. Fancy degree gets an interview in this job market. Not, “I read a bunch for free.” The explosion of stacks means it’s hard to keep everything in your head at once. Lookup is routine but will sink you as a candidate. Personally not great under the gun in adversarial interviews, so my extensive self learning is not well highlighted.

Inefficient credentialism is a different problem from lack of opportunity to grow your skills though, which was the original contention I replied to. IME companies are perfectly happy for their employees to spend deliberate time learning how to be better at their job, and this is actually usually even formalized as a written expectation.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#434

Post by bartread » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #207

pfisherman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

> what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? Well, it's not. There's a small moat around that right now because the UX is still being ironed out, but in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel . What will remain are the things that already differentiate a good developer from a bad one: - Able to review the ou…

> in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel.

Yeah, but there’s “able to use Excel”, and then there’s “able to use Excel.”

There is a vast skill gap between those with basic Excel, those who are proficient, and those who have mastered it.

As in intermittent user of Excel I fall somewhere in the middle, although I’m probably a master of knowing how to find out how to do what I need with Excel.

The same will be true for agentic development (which is more than just coding).

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#435

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 8:37 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #182

Thanemate wrote: post #84

Funnily enough I saw this post as I was placing my HN account on hiatus, because I'm tired pretending that the quality of discourse is on par with what I've been used to read and participate in. We're obviously in an era where "good enough" is taken so far that, what used to be the middle of the fictional line is not the middle point anymore but a new extreme. You're either someone who cares for the output or someone…

There is a lot more "yngmi" and "have fun being poor"-style attitude around here regarding LLM boosterism.

The thing I can't stand is the absolute certainty of the boosters. It's almost religious.

AI is the future. AI will do this. AI will cause that. It is inevitable. Everything is obviously changing.

They leave no room left for debate. No openness to pushback. And no evidence or proof. It just is because it is, and if you don't believe it, you're simply wrong. We saw the same sort of attitudes with blockchain and NFTs.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#436

Post by TomasBM » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #423

TomasBM wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be evidence that it's more difficult than evangelists first imagine, but it's not evidence of a technical obstacle. Generally, "automation failed" does not imply that "automation is impossible". To your individual points: - OOP and UML are domain-specific abstractions. Aside from still being very much used in expanding niches [1], they have failed to automate much work because their proponents failed to cove…

I'm not saying there is a technical obstacle, I'm saying there's a practical obstacle that LLMs and vibecoding don't overcome. The evidence isn't in that it failed but why it failed. It's not that the problem was more difficult than they anticipated, it's that they didn't comprehend the nature of the problem they were solving from the outset. Software development is an incremental creative activity that involves good…

Fair enough, I agree. The process of one or more people figuring out what is actually needed is a big part of the outcome, I'd consider an important social obstacle or limit to automation.

But here's what's important to my point:

  > abstracting the [worker] human out of a loop built for the benefit of [customer] humans

This is now technically easier and more feasible for current workers [1], which makes it economically more desirable to employers, and customers won't really know or care what happens to the workers. There's no indicator that companies can't go much leaner, even if it means that you can't automate every worker.

So, rather than wait for a technical wall to save us, or legally protect functionally replaceable jobs, or wait until people's lives implode, we should pressure our respective governments to decouple [2] the person's ability to survive from the ability to hold uninterrupted full-time employment. That's the only collective way forward that I see.

[1] We can even constrain it to existing roles: if a team of one requirements engineer, one full-stack dev/architect and LLMs can do the same job as a bigger team of specialized roles and coders, why would anyone pick the latter? I'd be happy to hear a technical or economic reason.

[2] My order of preference, preferably multiple: UBI, UBS, increased part-time work options, conditional non-basic income, union contracts, automation pauses, retraining, severance, temporarily subsidized bullshit jobs.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#437

Post by sharyphil » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #207

pfisherman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

> what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? Well, it's not. There's a small moat around that right now because the UX is still being ironed out, but in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel . What will remain are the things that already differentiate a good developer from a bad one: - Able to review the ou…

And the last two are much more important. Don't forget that most decision makers and people with capital are normies, they don't live in a tech bubble.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#438

Post by dogleash » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

pfisherman wrote: post #131

Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

>This is going to catch some heat [...]

It does seem like a roundabout way of saying "but what if full sending on AI didn't have downsides, tho?"

Just phrased in a way that can put the onus on the other party with a perfect weasel word qualifier like "most important".

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#439

Post by joquarky » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

chromacity wrote: post #263

TeMPOraL wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dog in the Manger. I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person, whether that's some intentional contribution or a random brain fart that happened in the vicinity of someone else doing something useful - and then become resentful they're not "getting their share". There's hardly any other…

Conversely, some people feel entitled to 100% of the value created by others. Oh, you wrote a book? Too bad, it's a part of my training data set now. Downloading public stuff off the internet with no regard for the creator's wishes or license is bad enough, but we have many people here who defended AI companies seeding models with pirated content. The internet is a social contract. AI is not the first thing to try an…

Let's not forget the basis here: To promote the progress of science and the useful arts.

Everything else is window dressing. The fact that licenses even exist to conditionalize use goes against this grain and creates far too much overreach that spoils the spirit of the basis of copyright law.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#440

Post by ModernMech » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

rekrsiv wrote: post #219

pfisherman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

The endgame in programming is reducing complexity before the codebase becomes impossible to reason about. This is not a solved problem, and most codebases the LLMs were trained on are either just before that phase transition or well past it. Complexity is not just a matter of reducing the complexity of the code, it's also a matter of reducing the complexity of the problem. A programmer can do the former alone with th…

Yes, a retreading of the accidental vs. implicit complexity discussion is in order here. I asked an AI agent to implement function calls in a programming language the other day. It decided the best way to do this was to spin up a new interpreter for every function call and evaluate the function within that context. This actually worked but it was very very very slow.

The only way I was able to direct the AI to a better design was by saying the words I know in my head that describe better designs. Anyone without that knowledge wouldn't be able to tell the heavy interpreter architecture wasn't good, because it was fast enough for simple test cases which all passed.

And you can say "just prompt better" but we're very quickly coming to a place where people won't even have the words to say without AI first telling them what they are. At that point it might as well just say "The design is fine don't worry about it" and how would the user know any better.