The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription • Hacker News Board

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#91

Post by mschuster91 » Sun, May 31, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

nba456_ wrote: post #82

iainctduncan wrote: post #63

I wonder how many of the responses here bifurcate by age. The post resonates with me, but I am now in my early fifties. When I was in my 20's and 30's, I would have happily chased rabbits down all those holes, but now that time seems so brutally finite, I feel that anything encouring me to spend time on stuff other than what really matters is a strong negative. (Where "what matters" includes work, family, friends, an…

Of course it is. Young people are always more eager to adapt new tech while older people yell at clouds. AI usage is MUCH higher among young people.

> Young people are always more eager to adapt new tech while older people yell at clouds.

That's not just because young people have time like GP explained, but it is also because young people haven't been through the endless rounds of getting beaten up at work over daring to suggest that the "old ways" of one's superiors might be outdated, inefficient or just plain wrong.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#92

Post by naasking » Sun, May 31, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #69

elliotbnvl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is patently false. I work with and on AI every day at multiple levels of the stack, and every day I'm learning massive new swathes of information. I'm honestly shocked how deep the field goes and how much more effective you can be with time. The floor is falling and the ceiling is rising and the gap between them is widening every day.

That would be more convincing if you put up two or more examples of what is there to learn.

Using AI effectively for long horizon tasks, like maintaining a large codebase, is a wide open field. No single AI is good at it autonomously. That means achieving the right balance of testing, formal specification of pre/post-conditions and invariants and manual review.

It's like having a naive but super knowledgeable junior developer starting under you. It's obvious you'd learn a lot in how to communicate, framing, specifications, and what kind of follow-up you'd need to do to ensure good results.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#93

Post by elliotbnvl » Sun, May 31, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #69

elliotbnvl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is patently false. I work with and on AI every day at multiple levels of the stack, and every day I'm learning massive new swathes of information. I'm honestly shocked how deep the field goes and how much more effective you can be with time. The floor is falling and the ceiling is rising and the gap between them is widening every day.

That would be more convincing if you put up two or more examples of what is there to learn.

Go off and run a comparison of Qwen 3.6 27B and GLM 5.1 GGUF (https://huggingface.co/ubergarm/GLM-5.1-GGUF) at IQ2_KL 261.988 GiB (2.985 BPW) and let me know if you learn anything.

Or maybe just compare Hermes vs OpenClaw for long-horizon personal agentic tasks. Which one performs better in offline inference personal finance analysis tasks?

Or read up on how the `/code-review` workflow works in Opus 4.8 and give me a guess as to how long it'll take Codex to implement it and which tool would be more appropriate for your engineering team (don't forget to include enterprise API token costs in workflows – it can spin up 100 agents in thirty seconds).

If you can figure out how to secure agents with simultaneous access to personal data and the internet to run unsupervised while avoiding the lethal trifecta (Willison, 2025) let me know.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#94

Post by GuB-42 » Sun, May 31, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

elliotbnvl wrote: post #2

It seems like the author is overindexing on useful and underindexing on wonderful. He clearly had fun building these products — and in hindsight is disavowing them because they didn’t generate income? An oddly capitalist view of play. Some really good points on how these bots are incentivized to reward mindless engagement though and the bit about voice transcription not producing useful writing landed. When the barri…

It is not just about not generating income, it is also about learning very little.

I like to compare AI to GPS navigation. At least my experience of it. With GPS, I enter my destination, follow the direction and get to it. Problem is, I have no idea how I got there, I didn't pay attention to the landmarks, time and orientation, only to the arrow on the screen telling me where I should go, I learned nothing and should I go back, I will need the GPS again. And if the GPS is wrong, maybe because some road closed and it didn't get the update, too bad.

One may argue that using AI is a skill, yeah, sure, as much as following an arrow on a navigation screen is. It is nothing like actual development/navigation.

Personally, I have a terrible sense of direction, so I fully embrace GPS, and importantly, it isn't my job, no one pays me to navigate (they would want their money back anyways :)). But programming is my job, and I believe that if I want to keep it, I have to offer more than mindless vibe coding, that is a part that anyone can do, and practicing is the way to go. And even without the capitalist view, passion is about doing things the hard way because it is more rewarding, the easy way is wonderful at first, but it gets boring quickly.

Now, more specifically for AI, I think it has its uses. It can be a good rapid prototyping tool. I used to write some quick and dirty scripts, but rewrote them completely in a different language, with proper design, once I realized it would grow in complexity and have to be maintained. The first part can be vibe coded, before scrapping everything and doing it over by hand before it starts to grow. It is not an AI problem, it is more like a language problem, plain english simply isn't great for telling computers what to do exactly, in fact it is not good enough for telling other people what to do precisely, that's why many professions evolved their own language, math, chemical diagrams, blueprints, music scores, etc... In fact, that why porting is what AI does best: it already has a precise description of what to do in a programming language, human programmers already did the hard work, the AI just has to translate into another programming language. In the best case scenario, someone even wrote unit test so the AI can go over if it screwed up.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#95

Post by randomdev123 » Sun, May 31, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

I have a friend who considers himself very humanist. He is really into UBI and more into socialist than me. He is environmentally conscious, all the bells and whistles. He is also Catholic.

He always asked me to help him build this app and that app and thinks his ideas are million dollar ideas. He has ADHD.

Surprisingly, he really loves LLM. He doesn't care that LLM destroys knowledge worker bargains by stealing work without compensating the original authors. He doesn't care that LLM uses a lot of energy. He doesn't care that LLM will concentrate money in the hands of the few. He doesn't care that the Pope has a crusade against LLM. For someone with humanist tendencies this seems to contradict his beliefs.

All he cares is, "I can make apps now and my 5 year old kids are making games by prompting, and we can make money using this, those who don't will be left behind, including you".

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#96

Post by ZyanWu » Sun, May 31, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

hparadiz wrote: post #58

JoshTriplett wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow? Many of the people who are complaining about AI vibecoding today also didn't blindly copy/paste from StackOverflow in the past.

I'm sure they were blindly accepting the Assembly coming out of the compiler.

> out of the compiler

You mean a source that's been tested on billions of PCs over 45+ years?

As opposed to a LLM which outputs code that barely works on my machine™?

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#97

Post by ses1984 » Sun, May 31, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

michaelchisari wrote: post #76

hparadiz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow? Ya'll need to stop with this cope. It's not a good look.

Anyone worth their salt looked down on copy/paste from Stackoverflow, let alone blindly doing so. Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?

Some things are easier to verify than they are to solve, right?

So if you see an answer on stack overflow, read it, comprehend it, and you can pretty easily mentally verify the correctness to a sufficient degree of confidence…

I guess I’m not worth my salt.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#98

Post by naasking » Sun, May 31, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

xendo wrote: post #33

naasking wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning how to use AI effectively was the learning opportunity here, what was created is completely incidental. You're effectively obsessing over programming languages obscuring the machine code that actually runs. "Imagine all the missed learning opportunity of digging into all that machine code!" Sure, but also, who cares? The machine code is completely incidental for most purposes.

I work with AI everyday, despite what many people suggest there is so little to learn. After a couple of hours you are good to go. You don't even need gstack.

Unless you just happen to work in a domain where the code you generate every day is very common in the AI training data, this isn't true.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#99

Post by a3764 » Sun, May 31, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

nba456_ wrote: post #82

iainctduncan wrote: post #63

I wonder how many of the responses here bifurcate by age. The post resonates with me, but I am now in my early fifties. When I was in my 20's and 30's, I would have happily chased rabbits down all those holes, but now that time seems so brutally finite, I feel that anything encouring me to spend time on stuff other than what really matters is a strong negative. (Where "what matters" includes work, family, friends, an…

Of course it is. Young people are always more eager to adapt new tech while older people yell at clouds. AI usage is MUCH higher among young people.

No, GenZ is AI critical, no matter what a one-liner optimized model trained to discredit comments says.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#100

Post by johndhi » Sun, May 31, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

iainctduncan wrote: post #63

I wonder how many of the responses here bifurcate by age. The post resonates with me, but I am now in my early fifties. When I was in my 20's and 30's, I would have happily chased rabbits down all those holes, but now that time seems so brutally finite, I feel that anything encouring me to spend time on stuff other than what really matters is a strong negative. (Where "what matters" includes work, family, friends, an…

Agreed with this until the last sentence, haha! I recently have been building throwaway apps and it has helped me scratch a bucket list itch I've had since childhood. Father is a programmer but I could never figure it out until vibe coding.