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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#441

Post by metobehonest » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

abletonlive wrote: post #312

metobehonest wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You actually think the economy has reached the point of maximum growth due to the laws of thermodynamics? Of course it hasn't. The real problem is that the atmosphere is being poisoned beyond repair, at an increasing pace, and that is tied to economic growth. That will eventually un-terraform the planet into a place hostile to agriculture, be it in 50 or 100 years. We're nowhere near being able to reverse this in an…

> That will eventually un-terraform the planet into a place hostile to agriculture, be it in 50 or 100 years. We're nowhere near being able to reverse this in any way, and there are no signs of it slowing down. yet another classic bullshit doomer prediction that never plays out where you'll conveniently not be around to admit you're wrong about. > Oh, am I to believe space mining fantasies maybe? You don't need to, w…

>yet another classic bullshit doomer prediction that never plays out where you'll conveniently not be around to admit you're wrong about.

Of course it hasn't played out yet, it's in the future. No one said the world was ending in 2010 and if they did it doesn't make others wrong. Your definition of doomerism is a very convenient strawman, it means "whenever someone in the past was pessimistic".

>Or did you think every time nvidia announces their quarterly results and the market puts a valuation on nvidia that we are allocating materials to nvidia?

Do I look like I care about the US pretend economy and stupid shit like the Nvidia stock bubble? Of course that's not closely pegged to material or energy use. I'm talking about larger trends, where you can see a clear correlation of GDP with energy use, material use, etc: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-person-vs-...

>The worst part? You keep telling everybody around you to place a bet on your model with their life savings despite never being able to produce an example where your model was right

Researchers built a world simulation model in the 70s. It was revisited recently and the resource use curves track closely to reality:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...

I guess I'll just stop responding because you're clearly not interested in the scientific consensus or having an imagination beyond human exceptionalism.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#442

Post by nathan_douglas » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:03 PM UTC

sublinear wrote: post #352

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…

Perhaps this is the wrong place to plant this thought. Maybe nobody will read it. These comments are now many hours old and HN has a way of walking away once they have had their turn shouting into the void. I once received a "bonsai" seed kit from a former boss during a holiday dinner. I think it was meant as a joke, but even now I'm not so sure. I planted those seeds anyway. I told some people about it and they imme…

I was thinking the other day about how frustrated my desire is to perform some kind of Great Work. A few years back I was intensely interested in making something like Nethack - a roguelike game with a deceptively simple surface and incredible complexity in the engine. I worked on several for a few years, different angles on the whole "managing complexity" thing. I suppose I learned a lot, and I made some interesting things, but I never really produced anything I felt I could work on for 20-30 years, that would be sort of my artistic statement as an engineer (if such a thing makes any sense).

I wouldn't've laughed at you. I view bonsai as a representation of steadfastness, endurance, determination, effort, (and self-mastery?) in the face of tremendous hardship, challenge, and deprivation. That said, I've never been particularly good at any of those things.

IDK if I would've taken you all that seriously either, though. Six months until you move and it's left behind on the curb. Or a year and a half until your cat knocks it off the windowsill. Or three years until some blight infects it and it dies off despite your best efforts. Eight years until, for whatever reason, it just succumbs to some kind of vegetative ennui. Nine years until your significant other overwaters it one too many times and the roots rot.

That's not meant disrespectfully. I just tend to view uncertainty and complexity as opportunities for shit to go sideways. Especially in this case, where it's unlikely you'll wake up to find your tree has spontaneously cloned itself, or has eaten a 1-UP mushroom. Disasters happen all the time, and miracles don't.

I suppose I'm just having a bit of a spiritual crisis right now. But thank you for your comment. It gives me a lot to think about, in a positive sense.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#443

Post by drzaiusx11 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #439

codyb wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At which point you've gained very little efficiency in most large organizations given that by the time you're actually doing development work at the ticket level 90% of the project timeline (identifying issues, prioritizing, creating requirements, architecture, ticket breakdowns, coordination, etc) has already passed. If AI can enable engineers to move through the organization more effectively, say by allowing them t…

The productivity gains are somewhat real in a sense, but are not really about "moving faster", as the hype would have us believe. GenAI agentic systems instead boost individual developer "efficiency" by allowing a single, reasonably qualified developer, to approximate an entire software team. As those developers, however, we're still required to manage the workload of those teams and ourselves to ensure quality outpu…

And just to underscore my point about the disconnect between the advertising/hype vs the reality: the real point of this tech and the reason leadership seems so motivated to push it is that they ultimately see this tooling as our replacement, not our enhancement, at least in the long term (although those "many hats" roles will have to persist).

It's just harder to sell trades folk the tools of their demise, so it's couched in terms of a miracle product that'll make us all 10x devs; when the reality is, it'll just be 1/10 of us still around doing the risk mitigation work left within the system that relaced us.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#444

Post by nubg » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

_the_inflator wrote: post #246

Towaway69 wrote: post #124

What the article doesn't touch on is the vendor lock-in that is currently underway. Many corps are now moving to an AI-based development process that is reliant on the big AI providers. Once the codebase has become fully agentic, i.e., only agents fundamentally understand it and can modify it, the prices will start rising. After all, these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup on their investments.…

I have similar concerns. We will miss SaaS dearly. I think history is repeating just with DVD and streaming - we simply bought the same movie twice. AI more and more feels the same. Half a year ago Claude Opus was Anthropics most expensive model - boy, using Claude Opus 4.6 in the 500k version is like paying 1 dollar per minute now. My once decent budgets get hit not after weeks but days (!) now. And I am not using a…

> 1 dollar per minute

so 60 usd / hour? a plumber earns more

if this allows you to produce features that bring you money, it's a no-brainer

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#445

Post by Forgeties79 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:13 PM UTC

aryehof wrote: post #401

andyferris wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe coding is actually "good" for small, bespoke things. The same way that Excel is "good" for small tasks, bad bad for larger things. Too easy to make mistakes, too hard to maintain. I could equally ask - where are all the Excel workbooks that are actually _good_? No-one needs to share their Excel workbooks. They don't need 10k github stars. They just achieve some small goal of the Excel user. These LLM agents just…

> maintaining enterprise software which is what most programmers are employed to do … I hear little from those involved with enterprise or line-of-business applications discussing their findings. Forums like this are dominated by SAAS, tool makers, computer and data scientists, and infrastructure concerns. Anyone using AI with large, complex business systems?

Totally agree. I see a lot of experimentation, initial exploration for an idea, etc. but the middle and end portions are never noteworthy except when it goes haywire and someone makes a blogpost about it.

Ideating is important but it is also very far from what is being promised. It’s also not that useful to the average person most of the time. If this is truly a revolutionary, must-have, daily-use technology, then by now we should have some idea of where it lives. But we don’t! The best and most consistent application so far is coding agents for coders. That’s great, but again, not the promise and very limited in scope.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#446

Post by alt227 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

_the_inflator wrote: post #246

Towaway69 wrote: post #124

What the article doesn't touch on is the vendor lock-in that is currently underway. Many corps are now moving to an AI-based development process that is reliant on the big AI providers. Once the codebase has become fully agentic, i.e., only agents fundamentally understand it and can modify it, the prices will start rising. After all, these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup on their investments.…

I have similar concerns. We will miss SaaS dearly. I think history is repeating just with DVD and streaming - we simply bought the same movie twice. AI more and more feels the same. Half a year ago Claude Opus was Anthropics most expensive model - boy, using Claude Opus 4.6 in the 500k version is like paying 1 dollar per minute now. My once decent budgets get hit not after weeks but days (!) now. And I am not using a…

> we simply bought the same movie twice

Maybe you did, but I certainly didnt.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#447

Post by alt227 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

emmitska wrote: post #374

blargey wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering. Feels like there’s a counter to the frequent citation of Jevon’s Paradox in there somewhere, in the context of LLM impact on the software dev market. Overestimation of external demand for software, or at least…

Amen. Now with all the agents and bots, I often pause and wonder — how much code is there left to write that we need AI as our saving grace? How many unsolved problems, underserved customers, unanswered questions actually justify the volume? Where did we all go wrong?

I think we have reached peak functionality in software, therefore the only place left to go was make the underlying code more complex, messy, and impossible for humans to read. /s

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#448

Post by adammarples » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:26 PM UTC

econ wrote: post #364

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…

> the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, Except from. You know, books. And all the websites die pretty fast. At an insane rate. > the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jimbokun No contact info, intentionally. >* the ability to order any product made anywhere a…

Yes, you can get books. I have hundreds of ebooks on my Kindle with pretty much any other book a moment's download away. Even LLMs can regurgitate 95% of Harry Potter with a single prompt.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#449

Post by alt227 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

alvivar wrote: post #337

I was reading the article, but I don't think it's possible to slow the fuck down, honestly. There are too many people who need to discover for themselves what the limits of these AI models are when they push them far. Maybe some people have already reached that point after so much AI coding and are now warning us; they pushed so hard that they understand the limits. But this is the kind of thing you need to experienc…

> There are too many people who need to discover for themselves what the limits of these AI models are when they push them far

Why? Next week a new version of Claude and GPT will come out and the limits will change again. Are you really fully testing every new version of every LLM agant to see where its limits are?

Those of us old enough to have seen this cycle before know its a fools game trying to keep up with development pace in the initial bubble. Its much better to wait for development and progress to start plateuing and then its easier to see the wood for the trees.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#450

Post by xivzgrev » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

There's currently a billboard up in San Francisco that basically says "use AI to reduce your saas costs".

And I'm thinking - has anyone actually done that for something meaningful?

Replacing salesforce as your crm or replacing Shopify as your e-commerce platform?

I get the hype but AI doesn't remove accountability, it just moves it up. Oh you can do with 1 person what 3 people used to do? Great, that 1 person is now accountable for 3 person's jobs. And people are naturally uncomfortable with that - you need to understand what's going on and be able to investigate / fix. It's different than say, weaving machines replacing jobs because weaving machines were consistent. 1 person could confidently produce what x weavers could before. But AI is not, and that variability in output & quality introduces massive friction.

So as of now, in both software and people, there's a real limit to how much AI can replace because the remaining people still are equally accountable.

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