91–100 of 329 posts
People are a gas, and they expand to fill the space they're in. Tools that produce more work do make people's lives easier, they mean an individual just needs to do more work using their tools to do so. This is a disposition that most people have, and therefore it's unavoidable. AI is not exciting to me. I only need to use it so I don't fall behind my peers. Why would I ever be interested in that?
I am becoming more and more convinced that AI cant be used to make something better than what could have built before AI. You never needed 1000s of engineers to build software anyway, Winamp & VLC were build by less than four people. You only needed 1000s of people because the executive vision is always to add more useless junk into each product. And now with AI that might be even harder to avoid. This would mean the…
So I wouldn’t use LLMs to produce significant chunks of code for something I care about. And publishing vibe coded projects under my own GitHub user feels like it devalues my own work, so for now I’m just not publishing vibe coded projects. Maybe I will eventually, under a ‘pen name.’
This is not a technology problem. AI intensifies work because management turns every efficiency gain into higher output quotas. The solution is labor organization, not better software.
I feel agentic development is a time sink. Previously, I'd have an idea, sit on it for a while. In most cases, conclude it's not a good idea worth investing in. If I decided to invest, I'd think of a proper strategy to approach it. With agentic development, I have an idea, waste a few hours chasing it, then switch to other work, often abandoning the thing entirely. I still need to figure out how to deal with that, fo…
> Previously, I'd have an idea, sit on it for a while. > With agentic development, I have an idea, waste a few hours chasing it, What's the difference between these 2 periods? Weren't you wasting time when sitting on it and thinking about your idea?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> percentage of good, well planned, consistent and coherent software is going to approach zero So everything stays exactly the same?
> So everything stays exactly the same? No, we get applications so hideously inefficient that your $3000 developer machine feels like it it's running a Pentium II with 256 MB of RAM. We get software that's as slow as it was 30 years ago, for no reason other than our own arrogance and apathy.
I do feels things in general are more "snappy" at the OS level, but once you get into apps (local or web), things don't feel much better than 30 years ago.
The two big exceptions for me are video and gaming.
I wonder how people who work in CAD, media editing, or other "heavy" workloads etc, feel.
What I personally find exhausting is Simon¹ constantly discovering the obvious. Time after time after time it’s just “insights” every person who smoked one blunt in college has arrived at.
Stop for a minute! You don’t have to keep churning out multiple blog posts a day, every day. Just stop and reflect. Sit back in your chair and let your mind rest. When a thought comes to you, let it go. Keep doing that until you regain your focus and learn to distinguish what matters from what is shiny.
Yes, of course, you’re doing too much and draining yourself. Of course your “productivity” doesn’t result in extra time but is just filled with more of the same, that’s been true for longer than you’ve been alive. It’s a variation of Parkinson’s law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
¹ And others, but Simon is particularly prevalent on HN, so I bump into these more often.
This is not a technology problem. AI intensifies work because management turns every efficiency gain into higher output quotas. The solution is labor organization, not better software.
Labor organization yes! I don't quite know how to achieve it. I also worry that my desire to become a manager is in direct conflict with my desire to contribute to labor organization. On a separate note, I have the intensification problem in my personal work as well. I sit down to study, but, first, let me just ask Claude to do some research in the background... Oh, and how is my Cursor doing on the dashboard? Ah, ri…
Definitely not by posting on right-wing social media websites.
> I also worry that my desire to become a manager is in direct conflict with my desire to contribute to labor organization.
It is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah if you want to keep your edge you have to find other ways to work your programming brain. But as far as output - we all have different reasons for enjoying software development but for me it's more making something useful and less in the coding itself. AI makes the fun parts more fun and the less fun parts almost invisible (at small scale). We'll all have to wrestle with this going forward.
If you use an LLM you've given up your edge.
This is not a technology problem. AI intensifies work because management turns every efficiency gain into higher output quotas. The solution is labor organization, not better software.
I am all for labor organization. I just don’t see how it would be of benefit in this particular case.