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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

blog.jakesaunders.dev

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#451

Post by ludicrousdispla »

keybored wrote: post #278
_doctor_love wrote: post #153

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…

A post supposedly about being bored of talking about AI. But psyche, it’s the same AI talking points. And psyche, the top comment is the same sentiment about how the truly skilled will finally have their time to shine. I don’t know if it’s the Universe delivering this farce or it’s the emergent LLM Singularity.

it's essentially the same argument Agile consultants made when faced with criticism about Agile, ... "you're not using it right"

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#452

Post by sph »

s_u_d_o wrote: post #184

Gosh how i miss the old HN Days… where one would actually code, read docs, and develop stuff and feel happy about it. Not write a prompt and watch a chatbox do all the work in a matter of seconds. It’s like we’re losing the meaning of building something… dk how to explain it more. But yeah, it’s tech! Nothing stays the same

I miss the Javascript framework of the week.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#453

Post by dazzaji »

Nope, not bored at all. I'm clicking on most HN AI threads out of sheer curiosity, eager to learn new techniques and see what folks are thinking or building. Given its transformative ripple effects, AI feels like the single biggest shift reshaping the economy and society right now. Kind of the opposite of boring.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#454

Post by nicbou »

tartoran wrote: post #269
nicbou wrote: post #80

I'm not. At least I'm not tired of talking about how it's killing websites and filling everything with spam. I have spent most of a decade building a useful resource, and Google AI overviews has killed my traffic. It killed everyone's traffic. This thing gave me purpose, and I'm watching AI slowly strangle it. I mourn the death of the independent web, and it frightens me that this is still the happy stage. We haven't…

AI isn't doing any of that, it's the companies that train their AI's or push their slop that are doing all the harm. We should always keep in mind who the villain is.

This is the "guns don't kill people" argument, isn't it? Semantics are not that important when people say "we have a gun problem".

One way or the other, tech companies have created a weapon and they are using it against us. Instead of stopping them, we're all trying to point it at someone else.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#455

Post by nicbou »

lukev wrote: post #46

This is bad in tech. But at least we are (relatively) well equipped to deal with it. My partner teaches at a small college. These people are absolutely lost , with administration totally sold on the idea that "AI is the future" while lacking any kind of coherent theory about how to apply it to pedagogy. Administrators are typically uncritically buying into the hype, professors are a mix of compliant and (understandab…

My only gripe is how myopic the AI discussion on HN is. We barely talk about how it hits everyone else.

In the relocation industry, it's losing translators, relocation consultants and immigration lawyers a lot of work. Their cases are also getting tougher because people are getting false information from ChatGPT and arguing with them.

This problem is compounded by the lack of training data for that topic. I spent years surfacing that sort of information and putting it online, but with AI overviews killing the economics of running a website, it feels pointless.

I see such stories everywhere. People being replaced by something half as good but a tenth of the cost. It's putting everyone out of work and making everything worse.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#456

Post by nicbou »

chatmasta wrote: post #103

What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted libraries or frameworks. That’s become way less common now that everyone is building a layer up the stack. I fear we’ll be stuck in a permanent state of using Tailwind and React and all the LLM-favored libraries as they were frozen in time at the beginning of 2025. Then again, that’ll be the agent’s problem, not mine… All that said, it’s extremely exciting. I’ve be…

That's interesting because the atmosphere feels the opposite of that. I was so excited by tech back then, so optimistic. Now I see it as a threat. People around me are worried about their future more than they are excited about the technology.

I think we've seen what the enthusiasm leads to, once these companies establish dominance. We even coined a word for it: enshittification.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#458

Post by simianwords »

nicbou wrote: post #455
lukev wrote: post #46

This is bad in tech. But at least we are (relatively) well equipped to deal with it. My partner teaches at a small college. These people are absolutely lost , with administration totally sold on the idea that "AI is the future" while lacking any kind of coherent theory about how to apply it to pedagogy. Administrators are typically uncritically buying into the hype, professors are a mix of compliant and (understandab…

My only gripe is how myopic the AI discussion on HN is. We barely talk about how it hits everyone else. In the relocation industry, it's losing translators, relocation consultants and immigration lawyers a lot of work. Their cases are also getting tougher because people are getting false information from ChatGPT and arguing with them. This problem is compounded by the lack of training data for that topic. I spent yea…

Half as good and tenth of the cost is a good replacement. I constantly make those choices myself when purchasing things.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#459

Post by imiric »

ok_dad wrote: post #406
hparadiz wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"productivity" is a misnomer. Sort of. The things I'm building are all things I've had on the back burner for years. Most of which I never would have bothered to do. But AI lets me ignore that excuse and just do it.

The productivity comes from not having the startup costs. You don’t need to research the best way to do X, just verify that X works via tests and documentation. I find it still takes T hours to actually implement X with an agent, but if I didn’t know how to do X it eliminates that startup cost which might make it take 3T hours instead. The only downside is not learning about method Y or Z that work differently than X…

> You don’t need to research the best way to do X, just verify that X works via tests and documentation.

"Just verify" is glossing over a lot of difficult work, though. It doesn't just involve checking whether the program compiles and does what you wanted—that's the easy part. You should also verify that the program is secure, robust, reasonably performant, efficient, etc. Even if you think about these things, and ask the tool to do this for you, generate tests, etc., you will have the same verification problem in that case as well. The documentation could also be misleading, and so on. At each step of this process there will likely always be something you missed, which considering you're not experienced in X, Y, or Z, you have no ability to properly judge.

You can ignore all of this, of course, which majority of people do, but then don't be surprised when it fails in unexpected ways.

And verification is actually relatively simple for software. In many other fields and industries verification is very impractical and resource intensive. It doesn't take a genius to deduce the consequences of all of this. Hence, the net effect of these tools is arguably not positive.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#460

Post by squirrellous »

delbronski wrote: post #172

AI is starting to look like a net negative for humanity. I remember the early days of OpenAI. I was super excited about it. There was a new space to uncover and learn about. I was hopeful. Now I have this love/hate relationship with it. Claude Code is amazing. I use it everyday because it makes me so much more efficient at my job. But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day. A…

The problem is scale. Beyond a certain scale it’s all a net negative: social networks, bitcoin, ads, machine learning, automated trading, big this big that, etc.

Unfortunately for fellow developers, software enables massive scale.

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