Live data from Hacker News

Is it all just vapourware?

kirahowe.com

51–60 of 208 posts

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone is a web developer bub

Might I recommend HVAC or plumbing, it's honorable work and pays well. Trim trees if you've got the body for it. I don't recommend web work, the last ten years or the next ten. Wouldn't touch the stuff. I skipped the phone app era, too.

Why is there honor in HVAC? Family honor?

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#52
Writing meaningful and correct code was always difficult. That we know how to generate pointless CRUD or half-baked apps using agents doesn't mean we can do them well. It's probably sufficient for selling them as a business but far from being great.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very, very senior dev here who has never taken a shortcut in his life. Don't mean to sound like a prick but you're doing it wrong. You have to find your own path through this stuff. It works, promise. I was in your shoes six weeks ago.

To be fair, a "very very senior dev" wouldn't tell me that I'm doing it wrong without telling me what I'm doing wrong.

I've tried. It's like trying to teach squirrels how to Google. Really, you just have to figure out what works for you. You will be rewarded.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#54

It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.

I find this to be an incredibly myopic viewpoint. Software engineering is not defined by a single tool or technology, but rather how we design, implement, and maintain processes of value we want to automate or scale.

LLMs will certainly be an aide, but assuming adoption of them is required across a whole _field_ ignores whole classes of problems, domains, and constraints the production of software covers.

Rather, we should be wary of allowing our skills and hard-earned knowledge to atrophy by over reliance on new technology that is far from perfect, reliable, or even universally available. These tools more than any before suffer from the junk-in-junk-out problem and I’d much rather work with someone who knows their fundamentals than someone who knows their way around a the LLM of the month.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#55
It's strange to me that the voices naysaying agentic coding capabilities seem to be getting louder in recent weeks.

I almost wonder if there's a campaign to start suppressing public awareness of where SOTA capabilities really are.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did but it was followed by "holy shit now I gotta review this +3000 -500 LOC PR full of subtly wrong abstractions, needless diversions and incorrect assumptions". People keep repeating your sentiment here but I simply can't follow, are we even on the same planet? Or did everyone switch to just not caring about maintainability and code quality anymore? Or are your work tasks simply so mindnumbingly, stupidly simple…

Mr lucky over here with an agent that removes code!

Fair, that was unrealistic. One day, maybe!

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#58

The churn in this space puts javascript to shame. As an example, its only been a few months and AFAICT no one is even talking about openclaw anymore.

I agree but how many developers did you know making heavy use of it? It always seemed like it was a poorly thought out experiment that gained a lot of traction and hype from the non-technical crowd. I don't say that to be elitist, I just think that non-technical users need a much more consistent and constrained product because they can't really fix and upstream things themselves (even with the use of agents). For all the hype it got, not a single person from my circle installed it to even check it out.

I do agree that the current pace of abandonware creation is wild. I think a lot of projects are generated top down from an idea, and not bottom up through usage. If you have a new experimental project, and you don't have recent commits, I assume you are not using it and thus it has no value.

I think agentic use is mostly only valuable as author extension (help you search, rubber duck, generate code but needs very heavy review). Over time with enough usage of a process I do think some of them can turn into author automation but not from simply writing down an idea. It takes lots and lots of executions, iterations, generalizations, specifications, basically lots of work to get any decently hands-off intelligent automation through agents.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#60
post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

@antirez is a very prominent open source contributor that gets lot of shit done with LLMs. Mitchel Hashimoto is also open about using LLMs to speed up his work. There are some caveats attached: neither of them is doing crazy loops or graphs producing thousands of lines of code, they are both amazing software engineers and they know what they are doing.
Post reply on HN