[HN Gopher] Let's properly analyze an AI article for once
___________________________________________________________________
Let's properly analyze an AI article for once
Author : pabs3
Score : 190 points
Date : 2025-08-09 02:30 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nibblestew.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nibblestew.blogspot.com)
| righthand wrote:
| This was excellent!
| croes wrote:
| The statistics part will also be relevant for the rest of Trump's
| presidency
| ma73me wrote:
| I'll never judge an article by its HN header again
| vunderba wrote:
| Spot on critical analysis of the blog post "Developers
| reinvented" by Github Thomas Dohmke which includes such quotes
| as:
|
| _> Many Computer Science (CS) programs still center around
| problems that AI can now solve competently._
|
| Yeah. No they do not. Competent CS programs focus on fundamentals
| not your ability to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard. [1]
|
| Replacing linear algebra and discrete mathematics with courses
| called "Baby's First LLM" and "Prompt Engineering for Hipster
| Doofuses" is as vapid as proposing that CS should include an
| entire course on how to use git.
|
| [1] https://x.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
| charcircuit wrote:
| >not your ability to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.
|
| Knowing how to swap 2 variables and traverse data structures
| are fundamentals.
| kubb wrote:
| I'm surprised that the creator of Homebrew didn't know how to
| do that.
| meindnoch wrote:
| If you spend enough time with Homebrew, it's actually not
| that surprising.
| josephg wrote:
| Of course, lots of people are employed despite giant holes
| in their knowledge of CS fundamentals. There's more to
| being an effective developer than having good fundamentals.
| A lot more.
|
| But there's still a lot of very important concepts in CS
| that people should learn. Concepts like performance
| engineering, security analysis, reliability, data
| structures and algorithms. And enough knowledge of how the
| layers below your program works that you can understand how
| your program runs and write code which lives in harmony
| with the system.
|
| This knowledge is way more useful than a lot of people
| claim. Especially in an era of chatgpt.
|
| If you're weak on this stuff, you can easily be a liability
| to your team. If your whole team is weak on this stuff,
| you'll collectively write terrible software.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Also, what people fail to realize is that the whiteboard
| coding interview was never about testing skills that are
| necessary for your day to day work.
|
| Most fighter pilots don't fly missions that require
| superhuman reaction time or enduring 9.5g acceleration
| either.
|
| Whiteboard coding exercises are just a proxy for certain
| thinking skills, a kind of je ne sais quoi that
| successful engineers tend to have.
| nradov wrote:
| Alternatively, whiteboard coding exercises are a hazing
| mechanism to weed out candidates who have certain forms
| of anxiety or can't perform well under extreme scrutiny
| and time pressure. Which could be valid selection
| criteria for certain jobs. But let's be honest and admit
| that whiteboard coding exercises aren't actually a proxy
| for anything else, or at least we have no scientific
| evidence on that point.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| First, whiteboard interviews were a great selection
| criteria for about 30 seconds before it became public
| knowledge that being able to pass them was a ticket to a
| google salary. Subsequently, they functioned literally at
| all while under the pressure of literal billions of
| people knowing that they were the ticket to a google
| salary. A criteria surviving this second challenge is
| extremely impressive.
|
| To put it another way: I can hire based on open source
| contributions instead of credentials and interview
| performance. If google decided tomorrow to start hiring
| based on open source contributions, then their new
| criteria would leak on monday, and on tuesday the pull
| requests queues of every major project would
| simultaneously splatter like bugs on windshields.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| He wasn't actually asked that question, but just used it as
| a stand-in for the entire category of interview questions.
| funcDropShadow wrote:
| The goal of teaching binary trees is not that you can write
| binary trees in your sleep, the goal is that you train your
| ability to derive algorithms and data structures. If you look
| at what a world class soccer player does during training,
| most of it will never be applied identically during games.
| The same is true for university studies, if they focus on
| fundamentals.
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| Computer Science in academia is pretty out of line with a lot
| of skills that are actually used on a daily basis by
| professional software developers.
|
| You can teach fundamentals all day long, but on their first day
| of work they are going to be asked adhere to some internal
| corporate process that is so far removed from their academic
| experience that they will feel like they should have just
| taught themselves online.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >Computer Science in academia is pretty out of line with a
| lot of skills that are actually used on a daily basis by
| professional software developers.
|
| 80% of software development boils down to:
|
| 1. Get JSON(s) from API(s)
|
| 2. Read some fields from each JSON
|
| 3. Create a new JSON
|
| 4. Send it to other API(s)
|
| Eventually people stopped pretending that you need a CS
| degree for this, and it spawned the coding bootcamp
| phenomenon. Alas it was short-lived, because ZIRP was killed,
| and as of late, we realized we don't even need _humans_ for
| this kind of work!
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| And they were right.
|
| We no longer hires junior engineers because it just wasn't
| worth the time to train them anymore.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| I'll challenge that assumption.
|
| All of my rock star engineers have CS degrees OR are
| absolute savants of computer science who taught themselves.
| They solve problems, not just write CRUD apps.
|
| I don't want people who only have surface level knowledge
| of calling JSON APIs. They tend to be a serious drag on
| team productivity, and high performers don't want to work
| with them.
| SilasX wrote:
| I would also include:
|
| 5. Debug why the API's don't behave as documented and
| figure out a workaround.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Academia has a lot to offer with regard to:
| - fundamental principles and concepts, like paradigms,
| SOLID, coupling, cohesion, etc. - Maybe design patterns too
| - and when and how to apply them - To paraphrase a
| famous author, how to avoid making "programming the act of
| putting bugs in software" - And since you can't
| really avoid it, debugging techniques.
|
| All of these require good logic and judgement - skills that
| you are better off having when talking with an AI.
| nradov wrote:
| If you really believe that then you must have minimal real
| world experience outside of toy web applications. How much
| JSON do you think there is in the flight control software
| for an F-35?
| crinkly wrote:
| Depends what you do. The sudden large accumulation of layers
| and corporate SaaS crap in the industry since about 2001
| you're right on. But those of us a bit further down the stack
| or before that, it's pretty useful still.
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| Absolutely, but we are a dying breed in the same way that
| nobody really knows how to build nuclear power plants
| anymore.
|
| Most CS grads will end up in a position that has more in
| common with being an electrician or plumber than an
| electrical engineer, difference is that we can't really
| automate installing wires and pipes to same degree we have
| automated service integration and making api calls.
| crinkly wrote:
| Not a dying breed. There is just a relatively static
| demand. Proportionally it looks worse because the rest of
| the industry has grown massively.
|
| Really the problem is there are too many CS grads. There
| should be a software engineering degree.
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| Personally I am a fan of bootcamp grads for simple stuff
| like FE.
|
| They lack academic knowledge but understand the problem
| domain and tools, and are generally more teachable with
| lower salary expectations.
|
| I would like to see more "trade schools" and its one of
| my pet peeves when devs call themselves engineers despite
| not being a licensed or regulated in any meaningful way.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Those bootcamps create assembly line capable people, and
| nothing else. If your work is so static and unchanging
| that you can use such people, great, for those people
| doing that kind of limited scope work they are being used
| and discarded with little to no economic ladder to better
| their situation. It's exploitation of others, which is
| commonplace today, but I'd try to do better. It's still a
| poor way to treat others.
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| You just described people who go to bootcamps or trade
| schools as "assembly line capable, and nothing else".
|
| By your definition running a welding company is also
| exploitive?
| bsenftner wrote:
| I don't see welding companies with a series of 8 hour
| interviews where the welder is grilled on all manner of
| welding edge cases they'll never see in the job, then
| further evaluated for 'cultural fit', and then expected
| to work 12-14 hour days - including weekends - when the
| job listed no such hourly requirements.
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| Welding, machining, carpentry, plumbing, hvac etc are all
| highly technical trades with a lot more certification and
| regulatory oversight than the overwhelming majority of
| software development careers.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, do you actually know anything about welding,
| especially in safety critical applications? Thats not
| even counting crazy stuff like welding in the nuclear
| industry.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I don't get this viewpoint. Yes, of course when you start at
| your job you will have to learn how JIRA works or how to
| write a design doc. Obviously nobody is going to teach you
| that in college. But nobody is going to teach you that online
| either!
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| How about performing git bisect to identify when a
| regression was introduced, or debugging a docker container
| that is failing to start in your local environment, writing
| some unit tests for a CI suite, merging a pull request that
| has some conflicts, etc etc etc.
|
| These a just a couple of examples of things that I see
| juniors really struggle with that are day 1 basics of the
| profession that are consistently missed by interview
| processes that focus on academic knowledge.
|
| People won't teach you how to solve these problems online,
| but you will learn how to solve them while teaching
| yourself.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Yes, and I did plenty of that during my university
| education. Except Docker because at the time I refused to
| use Docker.
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| Great, and if you got a job with us I would be having to
| explain how docker works because you refused to learn it
| for some reason.
|
| Point is that what is deemed important in academic circle
| is rarely important in practice, and when it is I find it
| easier to explain a theory or algorithm than teach a
| developer how to use an industry standard tool set.
|
| We should be training devs like welders and plumbers
| instead of like mathematicians because practically
| speaking the vast majority of them will never use that
| knowledge and develop an entirely new skill set the day
| they graduate.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I use standard algorithms all the time. Sometimes I have
| to come up with new ones. And that's not just when I'm
| working on performance-sensitive roles.
|
| Also, btw, I did eventually learn how to use Docker. I
| did actually vaguely know how it worked for a while but I
| didn't want Linux VM anywhere near my computer, but
| eventually I capitulated provided I didn't have Linux VM
| running all the time.
| jrh3 wrote:
| Ditto. I avoided Docker as long as possible and look
| forward to the day it is replaced.
| thunky wrote:
| > I didn't want Linux VM anywhere near my computer
|
| This is like taking auto mechanic classes and refusing to
| touch a car because of the grease.
| nilamo wrote:
| Why are you against running a vm? And a superior OS in
| the vm, to boot?
|
| Your comment gives spooky vibes. Like, I'd expect you to
| avoid pattern matching, because "nested ifs work fine".
| lelanthran wrote:
| IME it is far far easier to teach a CS graduate how to
| use some software than to teach a user basic CS
| principles.
|
| Besides, at the rate of change we see in this industry,
| focusing on producing users instead of developers will
| make half the stuff outdated by the time the student
| graduates.
|
| I mean, okay, lets teach Jira. Then the industry switches
| to assure develops.
|
| That's the general problem with vocational training: it
| ages much faster than academic stuff.
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| We have obviously had different experiences, but I would
| much rather have a high level conversation on an abstract
| academic topic like reinforcement learning, set theory
| and how it applies to sql, merkle trees, cpu
| architectures etc that a junior dev will be adjacent to
| but not necessarily need to interact with vs something
| like AWS IAM roles or the various gotcha's and foot guns
| in CSS.
|
| I agree that vocational knowledge decays faster, which is
| why I would prefer stricter training and certification in
| those areas vs something like building a compiler from
| scratch in the your final year of undergrad based on a
| textbook written by the professor 10 years ago.
| mafuy wrote:
| You're simply wrong about CS. CS is a science. You are
| not looking for scientists, you are looking for
| apprentices. Don't hire an architect to paint your wall.
| Don't hire scientists to be code monkies. Universities
| are not the right place to look at.
|
| Except if you instead just want smart people, yea, they
| tend to aggregate at unis. There, you can hire an athlete
| to paint your wall, if that's what you need.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > How about performing git bisect to identify when a
| regression was introduced, or debugging a docker
| container that is failing to start in your local
| environment, writing some unit tests for a CI suite,
| merging a pull request that has some conflicts, etc etc
| etc
|
| That's called vocational training and isn't usually
| taught as part of academic curricula.
|
| If you want non-academic graduates you've got your pick.
|
| Maybe having a technical addendum to academic curricula
| that makes student work at the end of the studies a
| criteria for graduation might help. That's how it is done
| for doctors, lawyers and accountants after all. The
| difference is that they graduate but can't practice until
| they have completed training.
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's not vocational training, it's the equivalent to the
| lab portions of physical science classes. We don't call
| pipetting vocational training for biologists or titration
| vocational for chemists, even though both will be doing a
| lot of that in professional and research careers.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > It's not vocational training, it's the equivalent to
| the lab portions of physical science classes. We don't
| call pipetting vocational training for biologists or
| titration vocational for chemists, even though both will
| be doing a lot of that in professional and research
| careers.
|
| You're on the right path: learning how to use a specific
| tool produced by a specific $Corp is _not_ vocational
| training, it 's _end-user_ training.
|
| Learning pipetting and titration is _very different_ from
| learning $MegaCorps software tool that will be replaced
| with something else in a few years.
|
| Source: Me! I did undergrad in multiple different
| subjects, _including_ chemistry, physics and biology.
|
| Like I said, if you are looking for _end-users_ , you
| don't have to search very hard. Universities should not
| be focused on training more end-users. It's fine if
| there's a half-credit or no-credit course somewhere on
| "How to use $PRODUCT".
|
| A better option would be, like I said, industrial
| practice after graduation, before getting a license to
| practice, but that's _way_ too professional for a field
| that seriously and unironically came up with
| SpaghettiCodeAsAFramework.
| throwup238 wrote:
| I'm not talking about SAP or Oracle databases or Matlab,
| but tools that are as fundamental to the application of
| computer science in industry as titration is to
| professional chemists.
|
| There aren't even that many of them: git, terminals and
| bash scripting, IDEs, and maybe a database. Vocational
| training would be stuff like managing VMs/cloud
| infrastructure, devops, testing, and so on that would be
| taught as dedicated classes.
|
| The important thing is that these aren't skills with a
| dedicated class but skills a student should pick up and
| masters across half a dozen classes with CS departments
| that coordinate their choice of tooling.
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| I agree with you.
|
| SSH and even just managing your dev env in a sane manner
| are skills that I have to literally hand hold people
| through on a regular basis and would fully expect people
| to have coming out of a 4 year degree.
|
| Git and basic SQL are next on the list.
| nradov wrote:
| Your expectations are completely irrational.
| mafuy wrote:
| SSH is absolutely not a core CS skill. I use it daily,
| and I think students should pick it up somewhere along
| the line. But it still is a mere tool, not a concept that
| should be taught in mandatory classes. Same goes for
| latex and git and C.
|
| All of that is, or should be, vocational, because anyone
| can learn it given some time. Universities are about the
| _hard_ stuff that is difficult to get right at even a
| mediocre level.
|
| If your company requires it, include it in your regular
| training program. Don't dilute the material because you
| don't want to be bothered. If you think people spend too
| much time on hard stuff, hire BSc instead of MSc.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| When learning how to git bisect, you're learning two
| things:
|
| 1. the specifics of how to use git (*) to carry out a
| task
|
| 2. the conceptual underpinnings of the task, which would
| exist whether you use git or perforce or bitwarden or any
| future RCS.
|
| Being overly focused on either #1 or #2 is a mistake.
| It's not good understanding the task if you don't know
| how to use the tools you have right now to carry it out
| (or what available tools are appropriate). It's not good
| knowing how to run the tools if you don't understand what
| you're actually doing. The two go hand-in-hand.
|
| (*) not exactly the product of a mega-corp
| layer8 wrote:
| If they learned how binary search works in university,
| they shouldn't have difficulty to grasp what _git bisect_
| does. So that seems like a bad example.
| nradov wrote:
| Writing a design document isn't really part of computer
| science (a branch of applied math). But most colleges also
| have some sort of project based software _engineering_
| courses that do teach more practical skills to students who
| want to work in industry.
| janalsncm wrote:
| A weaker version of your argument that might be more popular
| here involves math requirements.
|
| I had to take calculus and while I think it's good at
| teaching problem solving, that's probably the best thing I
| can say about it. Statistics, which was not required, would
| also check that box and is far more applicable on a regular
| basis.
|
| Yes calculus is involved in machine learning research that
| some PhDs will do, but heck, so is statistics.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Except statistics _requires_ calculus - otherwise it makes
| no sense, and you can 't determine when the tools in the
| toolbox are applicable.
| crinkly wrote:
| Strangely I see a lot of people hitting things with the
| brute force hammer quite regularly rather than using
| calculus.
|
| Some of our financial modelling stuff was CPU bound and
| took seconds because someone couldn't be bothered or didn't
| know how to work out an integral.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| Calculus is used in basically everything hard or
| worthwhile. Its like the most useful part of maths to
| learn, along with linear algebra, for doing real world
| stuff.
|
| I've personally used it in my career for machine learning,
| non ml image processing, robot control, other kinds of
| control, animations, movement in games, statistics,
| physics, financial modelling, and more.
| bregma wrote:
| Computer programming is to computer science as working a cash
| register is to economics.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| If this is true than I hope that AI kills both computer
| programming and computer science as fast as possible.
|
| It's not. If you're a computer scientist who's not coding,
| you are a bad computer scientist. "Those who cannot do,
| teach"
| deepburner wrote:
| I dont know where that "Those who cannot do, teach"
| bullshit came from but it's absolute nonsense someone
| made up to dunk on teachers.
|
| It doesnt even make sense in your post because
| "programming" isn't "doing computer science". You're not
| better than a teacher in any notion because you asked
| chatgpt to generate some slop.
| rindalir wrote:
| Professor Felleisen, is that you?
| mafuy wrote:
| Sorry but that's just nonsense. "Programming" has for a
| long time been a low level job. In Germany, it is taught
| as an apprentice level program. CS in practical
| universities will instead, or rather on top, teach
| program architecture and planning. At theory focussed
| universities, you'll learn how an LLM actually works, how
| to design high or low level protocols, how to design a
| new algorithm suited to your environment, etc. The
| programming required for these can be done for personal
| recreation, be outsourced, or replaced with an existing
| library as desired.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| People love to make these weirdly diminutive comments about
| programmers, precisely because programmers are crushing it.
| Meanwhile most of the economy has been diverted to
| attempting to replicate the abilities of even just an
| entry-level drone who copy/pastes off Medium articles,
| which itself is heralded as a miracle.
| recipe19 wrote:
| I've heard that a number of times, but the vast majority of
| people who get into CS do it because they want a high-
| paying tech job, for which most of what they'll learn at
| the university is borderline useless (and to the extent
| that cutting-edge CS research happens, the academia is
| nowadays usually trailing the industry).
|
| The problem, arguably, is that we don't have reputable
| trade schools that would actually teach what the students
| need. But if that changes, I think some CS departments will
| be in for a rude awakening.
| wavemode wrote:
| There is such a thing as a Software Engineering degree.
|
| The fact that people keep buying the wrong product
| (Computer Science degrees) and universities keep selling
| it, doesn't mean that there's something wrong with
| Computer Science.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Computer science is not the same thing as software
| development.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Schools still make you manually understand math even though
| calculators have been perfect for decades. Because it turns out
| having some magic machine spit out an answer you can't
| understand isn't good and you'll have no ability to understand
| when and why the answer is incorrect.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think until the third year of high school you should do
| without a calculator. There really is no substitute for being
| able to do basic math in your head. It also helps you to
| later on spot order of magnitude errors and such, as well as
| to do good first order of approximation estimates.
| dleeftink wrote:
| I'm a bit different then, maths only started to make sense
| well after picking up a calculator; Wolfram notebooks,
| Excel and SQL were much easier for me to grok than
| attempting the equivalent by heart/head/hand.
|
| Nowadays, math concepts or papers only makes sense when I
| can properly implement them as query, it's somehow a basic
| translation step I need.
| wrs wrote:
| In my ninth grade physics class we had to use a slide rule
| to do calculations for the first three months to help
| develop that intuition for orders of magnitude. Also
| because our teacher was just tired of people reporting
| results to nine significant figures for measurements they
| made with a meter stick.
| xg15 wrote:
| I found Factorio being a good paradigm for that. The core
| game loop is essentially: "Do a task manually, then automate
| it; then do a higher-level task manually that only became
| feasible through the automation; then automate _that_ as
| well, etc etc ".
|
| But throughout the game, you often drop back down into the
| lower level tasks, e.g. to understand problems or change the
| workflow. So in the end an understanding of the entire
| "stack" of tasks on different abstraction levels is necessary
| to make progress.
|
| This always felt like a good analogy to programming, or
| really scientific knowledge in general.
| internet_points wrote:
| Are there any games that teach automation like Factorio but
| that don't have that depressive dystopian magnasanti feel?
| jon_richards wrote:
| Bombe is great. You might like the zactronics games. And
| there are tons of factory games now if you want factorio
| with different window dressing.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Satisfactory?
|
| Or for a different take, magnum opus?
| drdrey wrote:
| Dyson Sphere Program and a lot of zachtronics games do
| that very well
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Perhaps one of the successors to the original Tekkit mod
| for Minecraft, like Tekkit SMP? It's one of the Minecraft
| mods that inspired Factorio.
| felixhummel wrote:
| Shapez
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Shapez 2 (and I guess Shapez 1) both feel cartoony and
| abstract enough that it doesn't make you feel like you're
| polluting a whole planet and killing the wildlife.
|
| But that very same cartooniness also made it less
| interesting to me; the things you're producing are just
| too arbitrary.
| navane wrote:
| Solving a situation, moving up an abstraction layer,
| solving that, etc is inherently distopian. That's how we
| got here.
| xg15 wrote:
| Huh? That seems just like the basic pattern of any kind
| of civilization or even just personal learning. How would
| you do it otherwise?
|
| Unless you mean to imply that civilization itself is
| already dystopian and we should go back to hunting and
| gathering?
| mafuy wrote:
| I'll just leave this here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUpZg-Ua5ao
| fspeech wrote:
| Unfortunately the writer's own understanding of statistics is
| flawed. For example sample size has not much to do with
| population size but a lot to do with effect size. For example
| to demonstrate that a chemical is fatal often a sample size of
| 1 is sufficient. Population comes into play if there is a large
| variance of the effect relative to the average size of the
| effect. You need a good statistical sampling of the population
| to study the variance but even here sample size if not
| determined by population size.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| > The sample size is 22. According to this sample size calculator
| I found, a required sample size for just one thousand people
| would be 278
|
| I'm all for criticizing a lack of scientific rigor, but this bit
| pretty clearly shows that the author knows even less about sample
| sizes than the GitHub guy, so it seems a bit pot calling the
| kettle black. You certainly don't need to sample more than 25% of
| any population in order to draw statistical information from it.
|
| The bit about running the study multiple times also seems kinda
| random.
|
| I'm sure this study of 22 people has a lot of room for criticism
| but this criticism seems more ranty than 'proper analysis' to me.
| foma-roje wrote:
| > You certainly don't need to sample more than 25% of any
| population in order to draw statistical information from it.
|
| Certainly? Now, who is ranting?
| brabel wrote:
| It's a basic property of statistics. You need an extremely
| varied population to need a sample of 25%, and almost no
| human population is that varied in practice. Humans are
| actually very uniform in fact.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| > The bit about running the study multiple times also seems
| kinda random.
|
| Reproducibility? But knowing it comes from the CEO of Github,
| who has vested interests in that matter because AI is one of
| the things that will allow to maintain Github's position on the
| market (or increase revenue of their paid plans, once everyone
| is hooked on vibe coding etc.), anyone would anyway take it
| with a grain of salt. It's like studies funded by big pharma.
| pcwelder wrote:
| >I found, a required sample size for just one thousand people
| would be 278
|
| It's interesting to note that for a billion people this number
| changes to a whopping ... 385. Doesn't change much.
|
| I was curious, with 22 sample size (assuming unbiased sample,
| yada yada), while estimating the proportion of people satisfying
| a criteria, the margin of error is 22%.
|
| While bad, if done properly, it may still be insightful.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > This helps explain the - perhaps unintuitive at first -
| observation that many of the developers we interviewed were
| paying for top-tier subscriptions.
|
| It doesn't sound like an unbiased sample.
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Sample size requirements are primarily determined by desired
| confidence level and margin of error rather than population
| size, which explains why the required sample barely changes
| between 1,000 and 1 billion people.
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| It's a bit annoying that this article on AI is hallucinating
| itself:
|
| > To add insult to injury, the image seems to have been created
| with the Studio Ghibli image generator, which Hayao Miyazaki
| described as an abomination on art itself.
|
| He never said this. This is just false, and it seems like the
| author didn't even fact check if Hayao Miyazaki ever said this.
| tough wrote:
| Right it was an out of context presentation of their own
| company and some very rough AI generated content and years ago
| before the existence of LLMs
|
| but yeah sensationalism and all and people don't do research so
| unless you remember well
|
| and also lost in translation from Japanese to English, the work
| sampled by their engineers, it depicted some kinda of zombie
| like pictures in a very rough form, thus the -insult to life-
| as in literally
| meindnoch wrote:
| Context: https://youtu.be/ngZ0K3lWKRc
|
| Miyazaki is repulsed by an AI-trained zombie animation which
| reminded him of a friend with disabilities. So the oft quoted
| part is about that zombie animation.
|
| When he the team tells him that they want to build a machine
| that can draw pictures like humans do, he doesn't say anything
| just stares.
| vemv wrote:
| > Said person does not give a shit about whether things are
| correct or could even work, as long as they look "somewhat
| plausible".
|
| Spot on, I think this every time I see AI art on my Linkedin
| feed.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I've become super sensitive to spotting it now. When I see a
| restaurant using AI food pictures I don't want to eat there.
| Why would I want to do business with people who are so
| dishonest to lie about the basics?
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| using food pics as an example is hilarious, food photos in
| advertising have been "faked" for about as long as
| photography has existed
| Gigachad wrote:
| Sure, they went through a long process of dressing them up
| as nice as possible. But they were still just ideal
| versions of the thing you actually receive. While the AI
| food looks pretty much nothing like what the restaurant is
| actually making.
|
| And outside of mega chains like McDonalds, most restaurants
| used fully real images.
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| This is provably false.
|
| There is a large industry based around faking food, you
| can watch some pretty interesting videos on the process
| and you will quickly find that they rarely use anything
| resembling the actual food you will be eating.
|
| Japan is an extreme example, but there they literally use
| wax models to advertise their food.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Those fake food models are still made to look just like
| the actual meal. I don't know if you've looked at any of
| these AI food pictures but they look nothing like the end
| result. And they are also signalling low effort and low
| initial investment unlike commissioning custom models of
| ramen bowls.
| bmicraft wrote:
| I've been to plenty of local joints where photos clearly
| a) weren't taken by them, and b) didn't at all match the
| food. Still delicious food for a good price, but the
| picture is more a vague idea of what it could look like
| if you payed 3x as much somewhere else. It's been that
| way for as long as I can remember.
| bevr1337 wrote:
| Yes and no. Magazines, newspapers, highly profitable
| restaurants, and professional publications employ food
| photography. The local greasy spoon did not. Now instead of
| sloppy burgers and pizza pics, I get weird AI blobs of
| pepperoni. (Real example.)
|
| Dressing up a pizza so it photographs well is different
| than an AI generated pizza. Maybe I cannot perfectly
| articulate that, but I'm confident
| pacifika wrote:
| Isn't this just the digital version of hand waving / guesswork?
| People not checking assumptions have long since been a leading
| cause of weak software delivery.
| bgwalter wrote:
| "AI" could certainly replace Dohmke. It excels at writing such
| meaningless articles.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Said person does not give a shit about whether things are
| correct or could even work, as long as they look "somewhat
| plausible".
|
| This seems to be the fundamental guiding ideology of LLM
| boosterism; the output doesn't actually _really_ matter, as long
| as there's lots of it. It's a truly baffling attitude.
| Gigachad wrote:
| They always market the % of lines generated by AI. But if you
| are forced to use a tool that constantly inserts generations,
| that number is always going to be high even if the actual
| benefit is nil or negative.
|
| If the AI tool generates a 30 line function which doesn't work.
| And you spend time testing and modifying the 3 lines of broken
| logic. The vast majority of the code was AI generated even if
| it didn't save you any time.
| diggan wrote:
| > They always market the % of lines generated by AI
|
| That's crazy, should really be the opposite. If someone
| releases weights that promises "X% less lines generated
| compared to Y", I'd jump on that in an instant, more LLMs are
| way too verbose by default. Some are really hard to even use
| prompts to get them to be more concise (looking at you,
| various Google models)
| 986aignan wrote:
| It is possible to take this too far, though - consider the
| OpenAI IMO proofs[1], for instance, and compare them to
| Gemini's.[2]
|
| [1] https://github.com/aw31/openai-imo-2025-proofs
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15855 Appendix A
| thrown-0825 wrote:
| All of the crypto grifters have shifted to AI.
|
| Fundamentals don't matter anymore, just say whatever you need
| to say to secure the next round of funding.
| bsenftner wrote:
| They never mattered, at least a long as you've been alive.
| The "Soviet statistics" discussion at the start of the
| article was an amazing example of Western capitalistic
| propaganda, because the same nonsense with statistics is also
| out of control in the West, just not so mind numbingly
| obvious. The USA is the king of propaganda, far in advance of
| all rivals.
| exq wrote:
| All of the finance grifters have shifted to tech.
| tempodox wrote:
| And yet this fine example of a used car salesman is being
| rewarded by everyone and their dog hosting their stuff on
| GitHub, feeding the Copilot machinery with their work for free,
| so it can be sold back to them.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> It 's a truly baffling attitude._
|
| I wish, but no, it's not baffling. We live in a post-truth
| society, and this is the sort of fundamental nihilism that
| naturally results.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I agree that it fits in with a certain trope. But do people
| really believe that?
|
| What I mean is:
|
| Some people recognize that there are circumstances where the
| _social aspects of agreement_ seem to be the dominant
| concern, e.g. when the goal is to rally votes. The cynical
| view of "good beliefs" in that scenario is group cohesion,
| rather than correspondence with objective reality.
|
| But most everyone would agree that there are situations where
| correlation with objective reality is the main concern. E.g.,
| when someone is designing and building the bridge they cross
| every day.
| xpe wrote:
| > We live in a post-truth society
|
| Oversimplified to an awful degree. There is a _lot_ of
| variation between people, cultures, even countries.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > the fundamental guiding ideology of LLM boosterism
|
| It's the same as the ideology of FOMO Capitalism:
|
| = The billionaire arseholes are saying it, it must be true
|
| = Stock valuations are in the trillions, there must be enormous
| value
|
| = The stock market is doing so well, your concerns about
| fundamental social-democratic principles are unpatriotic
|
| = You need to climb aboard or you will lose even worse than you
| lost in the _crypto-currency hornswoggle_
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| It's a perfectly understandable attitude: " _Get me a fat
| paycheck with the least effort possible._ " The longer term
| problem is that those who see the most benefit in productivity
| from LLMs are also the ones weak enough to be most easily
| replaced by LLMs entirely.
| crinkly wrote:
| Professional statistician here. Not that I get to do any of that
| these days, bar read Significance magazine and get angry
| occasionally.
|
| Looking at the original blog post, it's marketing copy so there's
| no point in even reading it. The conclusion is in the headline
| and the methodology is starting with what you want to say and
| working back to supporting information. If it was in a more
| academic setting it would be the equivalent of doing a meta-
| analysis and p-hacking your way to the pre-defined conclusion you
| wanted.
|
| Applying any kind of rigour to it is pointless but thanks for the
| effort.
| nhinck3 wrote:
| This isn't the first time Github (or it's CEO) has produced a
| completely garbage article about the wonders of AI and it won't
| be the last.
| skywhopper wrote:
| " It was reposted with various clickbait headings like GitHub CEO
| Thomas Dohmke Warns Developers: 'Either Embrace AI or Get Out of
| This Career' "
|
| Is it clickbait if it's literally quoting the author? I mean,
| yes, it was clickbait by Thomas Dohmke, but not by the source
| that used that headline.
| saulpw wrote:
| Apparently it's not a quote by the author, but a participant.
| quantum_state wrote:
| if history is of reference, vibe coding would turn out to be the
| most effective tool to produce technical debt ...
| tempodox wrote:
| If history is any indication, too few will care to make a
| difference.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| A near insurmountable amount of problems and technical debt
| are due to be created in problems teams. Sounds like a great
| time to get into consulting. It's like knowing that y2k is
| coming up ahead of time. Learn your debuggers and your slide
| decks folks
| jmull wrote:
| Technical debt will have a strong negative impact on a
| project/product over time if left unresolved (if it doesn't,
| it probably isn't really something we should call technical
| debt).
|
| That is, technical debt matters whether anyone cares about it
| or not.
| righthand wrote:
| As a junior engineer I don't care about technical debt and
| instead will push that we should rewrite the app so the new
| wave of employees can understand it.
|
| Convincing my manager and leadership of this is 100x easier
| with generated code. I get approval and generate a new
| stack of tech debt that I try to pass to the next wave of
| employees.
| bsenftner wrote:
| This analysis is not complete, it needs to continue with an
| analysis of how many people, and critically how many business
| owners, believe the lies and non-truths propagandized by that
| article and the entire marketing push of LLMs.
|
| That article is not for developers, it's for the business owner,
| their management, and the investor class. If they believe it,
| they will try to enforce it.
|
| This is serious, destroy our industry type of idiot logic.
| overgard wrote:
| One thing that seems to always get lost in the AI hype cycle is
| actually screening articles by the source. Maybe it's just
| because in this age of social media we don't have much in the way
| of journalism. I have zero interest in what Sam Altman, Dario
| Amodei, Thomas Dohmke, etc. have to say because they obviously
| want to sell something.
| card_zero wrote:
| The Miyazaki quote get taken out of context and altered. It was
| "an insult to life itself", not "an abomination on art itself",
| and the context was creepy AI animations of zombies. He said that
| he won't use the technology, but the implied reason was because
| he saw a crass demo. "Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what
| pain is." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki
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