[HN Gopher] Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
___________________________________________________________________
Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 444 points
Date : 2026-01-11 10:26 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (antirez.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (antirez.com)
| dom96 wrote:
| > As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever,
| now.
|
| I want to write less, just knowing that LLM models are going to
| be trained on my code is making me feel more strongly than ever
| that my open source contributions will simply be stolen.
|
| Am I wrong to feel this? Is anyone else concerned about this?
| We've already seen some pretty strong evidence of this with
| Tailwind.
| poszlem wrote:
| You are not wrong to feel this, because you cannot control what
| you feel. But it might be worth investigating why you feel
| this, and why were you writing open source in the first place.
| abc123abc123 wrote:
| It is actually very simple to control what you feel, and very
| much possible. This deterministic idea about our feelings
| must die quick. Pro-tip, call the psychology department at
| your local university and they will happily teach you how to
| control your feelings.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Job insecurity while a bunch of companies claim LLM coding
| agents are letting them decimate their workforces is a pretty
| solid reason to feel like your code is being stolen. Many, if
| not most tech workers have been very sheltered from the
| harsher economic realities most people face, and many are
| realizing that labor demand, rather than being special, is
| why. A core goal of AI products is increasing the supply of
| what developer labor produces, which reduces demand for that
| labor. So yeah-- feeling robbed when your donated code is
| used to train models is pretty rational.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Ultimately most things in life and society where one freely
| gives (and open source could be said to be one such activity)
| is also balanced by advising everyone participating in the
| "system" to also reciprocate the same, without which it
| becomes an exploitative relationship. Examples of such
| sayings can be found in most major world religions, but a
| non-religious explanation of the dynamics at hand follows
| below.
|
| If running an open source model means that I have only given
| out without receiving anything, there remains the possibility
| of being exploited. This dynamic has always existed, such as
| companies using a project and sending in vulnerability
| reports and the like but not offering to help, and instead
| demanding, often quite rudely.
|
| In the past working with such extractive contributors may
| have been balanced with other benefits such as growing
| exposure leading to professional opportunities, or being able
| to sell hosted versions, consulting services and paid
| features, which would have helped the maintainer of the open
| source project pay off their bills and get ahead in life.
|
| However with the rise of LLMs, it both facilitates usage of
| the open source tools without getting a chance to direct
| their attention towards these paid services, nor allows the
| maintainer to have direct exposure to their contributors. It
| also indirectly violates the spirit of said open source
| licenses, as LLMs can spit out the knowledge contained in
| these codebases at a scale that humans cannot, thus allowing
| people to bypass the license and create their own versions of
| the tools, which are themselves not open source despite
| deriving their knowledge from such data.
|
| Ultimately we don't need to debate about this; if open source
| remains a viable model in the age of LLMs, people will
| continue to do it regardless of whether we agree or disagree
| regarding topics such as this; on the other hand, if people
| are not rewarded in any way we will only be left with LLM
| generated codebases that anyone could have produced, leaving
| all the interesting software development to happen behind
| closed doors in companies.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| I don't worry about that too much. I still contribute to FOSS
| projects, and I use FOSS projects. Whenever I contribute, I
| usually fix something that affects me (or maybe just something
| I encountered), and fixing it has a positive effect on the
| users of that software, including me.
| rolisz wrote:
| With Tailwind, wasn't the problem that much fewer people
| visited the documentation, which showed ads? The LLMs still
| used Tailwind
| chrishare wrote:
| I think the Tailwind case is more complicated than this, but
| yes - I think it's reasonable to want to contribute something
| to the common good but fear that the value will
| disproportionally go to AI companies and shareholders.
| bromuro wrote:
| I do open source exactly because i'm fine my work can be
| "stolen".
| m4rtink wrote:
| Stolen means no attribution and not following the rules of
| the GPL, instead producing un-attributed AI-washed closed
| source code owned by companies.
| arter45 wrote:
| GPL requires attribution. Some people are fine with their
| code being used by others for free while still expecting
| their work to be acknowledged. Code posted on Stackoverflow
| is apparently CC-BY-SA licensed, which means attribution is
| still required.
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| I feel similarly for a different reason. I put my code out
| there, licensed under the GPL. It is now, through a layer of
| indirection, being used to construct products that are not
| under the GPL. That's not what I signed up for.
|
| I know the GPL didn't have a specific clause for AI, and the
| jury is still out on this specific case (how similar is it to a
| human doing the same thing?), but I like to imagine, had it
| been made today, there probably would be a clause covering this
| usage. Personally I think it's a violation of the spirit of the
| license.
| luke5441 wrote:
| GPL works via copyright. Since AI companies claim fair use no
| copyright applies. There is no fixing this. The only option
| is not to publish.
|
| There are non-US jurisdictions where you have some options,
| but since most of them are trained in the US that won't help
| much.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| > Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies.
| There is no fixing this.
|
| They can claim whatever they want. You can still try to
| stop it via lawsuits and make them claim it in court.
| Granted, I believe there's already been some jurisdictions
| that have sided with fair use in those particular cases.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Laws can be changed. This is right now a trillion dollar
| industry, perhaps later it could even become a billion
| dollar industry. Either way, it's very important.
|
| Strict copyright enforcement is a competitive
| disadvantage. Western countries lobbied for copyright
| enforcement in the 20th century because it was
| beneficial. Now the tables have turned, don't hold your
| breath for copyright enforcement against the wishes of
| the markets. We are all China now.
| luke5441 wrote:
| Yes, I think Japan added an AI friendly copyright law. If
| there were problems in the US, they'd just move training
| there.
| martin-t wrote:
| Moving training won't help them if their paying customers
| are in jurisdictions which do respect copyright as
| written and intended.
| luke5441 wrote:
| OPs idea is about having a new GPL like license with a
| "may not be used for LLM training" clause.
|
| That the LLM itself is not allowed to produce copyrighted
| work (e.g. just copies of works or too structurally
| similar) without using a license for that work is
| something that is probably currently law. They are
| working around this via content filters. They probably
| also have checks during/after training that it does not
| reproduce work that is too similar. There are law suits
| about this pending if I remember correctly e.g. with the
| New York Times.
| martin-t wrote:
| The issue is that everyone is focusing on verbatim (or
| "too similar") reproduction.
|
| LLMs themselves are compressed models of the training
| data. The trick is the compression is highly lossy by
| being able to detect higher-order patterns instead of
| fucusing on the first-order input tokens (or bytes). If
| you look at how, for example, any of the Lempel-Ziv
| algorithms work, they also contain patterns from the
| input and they also predict the next token (usually byte
| in their case), except they do it with 100% probability
| because they are lossless.
|
| So copyright should absolutely apply to the models
| themselves and if trained on AGPL code, the models have
| to follow the AGPL license and I have the right to see
| their "source" by just being their user.
|
| And if you decompress a file from a copyrighted archive,
| the file is obviously copyrighted. Even if you decompress
| only a part. What LLMs do is another trick - by being
| lossy, they decompress probabilistically based on all the
| training inputs - without seeing the internals, nobody
| can prove how much their particular work contributed to
| the particular output.
|
| But it is all mechanical transformation of input data,
| just like synonym replacement, just more sophisticated,
| and the same rules regarding plagiarism and copyright
| infringement should apply.
|
| ---
|
| Back to what you said - the LLM companies use fancy
| language like "artificial intelligence" to distract from
| this so they can they use more fancy language to claim
| copyright does not apply. And in that case, no license
| would help because any such license fundamentally depends
| on copyright law, which as they claim does not apply.
|
| That's the issue with LLMs - if they get their way,
| there's no way to opt out. If there was, AGPL would
| already be sufficient.
| luke5441 wrote:
| I agree with your view. One just has to go into courts
| and somehow get the judges to agree as well.
|
| An open question would be if there is some degree of
| "loss" where copyright no longer applies. There is
| probably case law about this in different jurisdictions
| w.r.t. image previews or something.
| martin-t wrote:
| I don't think copyright should be binary or should work
| the way it does not. It's just the only tool we have now.
|
| There should be a system which protects all work
| (intellectual and physical) and makes sure the people
| doing it get rewarded according to the amount of work and
| skill level. This is a radical idea and not fully
| compatible with capitalism as implemented today. I have a
| lot on my to-read list and I don't think I am the first
| to come up with this but I haven't found anyone else
| describing it, yet.
|
| And maybe it's broken by some degenerate case and goes
| tits up like communism always did. But AFAICT, it's a
| third option somewhere in between, taking the good parts
| of each.
|
| For now, I just wanna find ways to stop people already
| much richer than me from profiting from my work without
| any kind of compensation for me. I want inequality to
| stop worsening but OTOH, in the past, large social change
| usually happened when things got so bad people rejected
| the status quo and went to the streets, whether with
| empty hands or not. And that feels like where we're
| headed and I don't know whether I should be exited or
| worried.
| martin-t wrote:
| I recall a basics of law class saying that in some
| countries (e.g. Czech Republic), open source contributors
| have the right to small compensation if their work is used
| to a large financial benefit.
|
| At some point, I'll have to look it up because if that's
| right, the billionaires and wannabe-trillionaires owe me a
| shitton of money.
| wmwragg wrote:
| Yep, this is my take as well. It's not that open source is
| being stolen as such, as if you abide by an open source
| license you aren't stealing anything, it's that the licenses
| are being completely ignored for the profit of a few massive
| corporations.
| dom96 wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I meant by "stolen", I should have been
| clearer. But indeed, this is the crux of the problem, I
| have no faith that licenses are being abided by.
| leonidasv wrote:
| What profit? All labs are taking massive losses and there's
| no clear path to profit for most of them yet.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Expected profit.
| rurp wrote:
| The wealthiest people in tech aren't spending 10s of
| billions on this without the expectation of future
| profits. There's risk, but they absolutely expect the
| bets to be +EV overall.
| delusional wrote:
| The argument of the AI megacorps is that generated work is
| not "derivative" and therefore doesn't fall interact with the
| original authors copyright. They have invented a machine that
| takes in copyrighted works, and from a legal standpoint
| produces "entirely original" code. No license, be that GPL or
| otherwise, can do anything about that, because they
| ultimately rely on the authors copyright to required the
| licensee to observe the license.
|
| They cannot violate the license, because in their view they
| have not licensed anything from you.
|
| I think that's horse shit, and a clear violation of the
| intellectual property rights that are supposed to protect
| creatives from the business boys, but apparently the stock
| market must grow.
| Ekaros wrote:
| What makes this whole thing even weirder for me is the
| similar fact that any output from AI might not enjoy
| copyright protections. So basically if you can steal
| software made with AI you can freely resell it.
| martin-t wrote:
| During the gold rush, it is said, the only people who
| made money were the ones selling the pickaxes. A"I"
| companies are ~selling~ renting the pickaxes of today.
|
| (I didn't come up with this quote but I can't find the
| source now. If anything good comes out of LLMs, it's
| making me appreciate other people's more and trying to
| give credit where it's due.)
| kapsi wrote:
| What about the people who sold gold? Didn't they make
| money?
| martin-t wrote:
| To be honest, I haven't looked at any statistics but I
| imagine a tiny few of those looking for gold found any
| and got rich, the most either didn't find anything, died
| of illness or exposure or got robbed. I just like the
| quote as a comparison. Updated the original comment to
| reflect I haven't checked if it's correct.
| netsharc wrote:
| Wasn't it shovels?
|
| NVidia is a shovel-maker worth a few trillion dollars...
| martin-t wrote:
| If you want, I made a coherent argument about how the
| mechanics of LLMs mean both their training and inference is
| plagiarism and should be copyright infringement.[0] TL;DR
| it's about reproducing higher order patterns instead of word
| for word.
|
| I haven't seen this argument made elsewhere, it would be
| interesting to get it into the courtrooms - I am told cases
| are being fought right now but I don't have the energy to
| follow them.
|
| Plus as somebody else put it eloquently, it's labor theft -
| we, working programmers, exchanged out limited lifetime for
| money (already exploitative) in a world with certain rules.
| Now the rules changed, our _past_ work has much more value,
| and we don 't get compensated.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330
| martin-t wrote:
| And HN does its thing again - at least 3 downvotes, 0
| replies. If you disagree, say why, otherwise I have to
| assume my argument is correct and nobody has any
| counterarguments but people who profit from this hate it
| being seen.
| dahart wrote:
| I agree that training on copyrighted material is
| violating the law, but not for the reasons you stated.
|
| That said, this comment is funny to me because I've done
| the same thing too, take some signal of disagreement, and
| assume the signal means I'm right and there's a low-key
| conspiracy to hold me down, when it was far more likely
| that either I was at least a bit wrong, or said something
| in an off-putting way. In this case, I tend to agree with
| the general spirit of the sibling comment by
| @williamcotton in that it seems like you're inventing
| some criteria that are not covered by copyright law.
| Copyrights cover the "fixation" of a work, meaning they
| protect only its exact presentation. Copyrights do not
| cover the Madlibs or Cliff Notes scenarios you proposed.
| (Do think about Cliff Notes in particular and what it
| implies about AI - Cliff Notes are explicitly legal.)
|
| Personally, I've had a lot of personal forward progress
| on HN when I assume that downvotes mean I said something
| wrong, and work through where my own assumptions are bad,
| and try to update them. This is an important step
| especially when I think I'm right.
|
| I'm often tempted to ask for downvote explanations too,
| but FWIW, it never helps, and aside from HN guidelines
| asking people to avoid complaining about downvotes, I
| find it also helps to think of downvotes as symmetric to
| upvotes. We don't comment on or demand an explanation for
| an upvote, and an upvote can be given for many reasons -
| it's not only used for agreement, it can be given for
| style, humor, weight, engagement, pity, and many other
| reasons. Realizing downvotes are similar and don't only
| mean disagreement helps me not feel personally attacked,
| and that can help me stay more open to reflecting on what
| I did that is earning the downvotes. They don't always
| make sense, but over time I can see more places I went
| wrong.
| martin-t wrote:
| > or said something in an off-putting way
|
| It shouldn't matter.
|
| Currently, downvote means "I want this to be ranked
| lower". There really should be 2 options "factually
| incorrect" and "disagree". For people who think it should
| matter, there should be a third option, "rude", which
| others can ignore.
|
| I've actually emailed about this with a mod and it seems
| he conflated talking about downvotes with having to
| explain a reason. He also told me (essentially) people
| should not have the right to defend themselves against
| incorrect moderator decisions and I honestly didn't know
| what to say to that, I'll probably message him again to
| confirm this is what he meant but I don't have high hopes
| after having similar interactions with mods on several
| different sites.
|
| > FWIW, it never helps
|
| The way I see it, it helped since I got 2 replies with
| more stuff to read about. Did you mean it doesn't work
| for you?
|
| > downvotes as symmetric to upvotes
|
| Yes, and we should have more upvote options too. I am not
| sure the explanation should be symmetric though.
|
| Imagine a group conversation in which somebody lies (the
| "factually incorrect" case here). Depending on your
| social status within the group and group politics, you
| might call out the lie in public, in private with a
| subset or not at all. But if you do, you will almost
| certainly be expected to provide a reasoning or evidence.
|
| Now imagine he says something which is factually correct.
| If you say you agree, are you expected to provide
| references why? I don't think so.
|
| ---
|
| BTW, on a site which is a more technical alternative to
| HN, there was recently a post about strange behavior of
| HN votes. Other people posted their experience with
| downvotes here and they mirrored mine - organic looking
| (i.e. gradual) upvotes, then within minutes of each other
| several downvotes. It could be coincidence but me and
| others suspect voting rings evading detection.
|
| I also posted a link to my previous comment as an
| experiment - if people disagree, they are more likely to
| also downvote that one. But I did not see any change
| there so I suspect it might be bots (which are unlikely
| to be instructed to also click through and downvote
| there). Note sample size is 1 here, for now.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Maybe if you constructed your argument in terms of the
| relevant statutes for your jurisdiction, like an actual
| copyright attorney does, HN might be more receptive to
| it?
| martin-t wrote:
| I argue primarily about morality (right and wrong), not
| legality. The argument is valid morally, if LLM companies
| found a loophole ion the law, it should be closed.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| You literally wrote "it would be interesting to get it
| into the courtrooms". A court won't give a hoot about
| your opinions on morality.
| martin-t wrote:
| 1) I appreciate that you differentiate between legality
| and morality, many people sadly don't.
|
| 2) re "hoot": You can say "fuck" here. You've been rudely
| dismissive twice now, yet you use a veil of politeness. I
| prefer when people don't hide their displeasure at me.
|
| 3) If you think I am wrong, you can say so instead of
| downvoting, it'll be more productive.
|
| 4) If you want me to expend effort on looking up
| statutes, you can say so instead of downvoting, it'll be
| more productive.
|
| 5) The law can be changed. If a well-reasoned argument is
| presented publicly, such as in a court room, and the
| general agreement is that the argument should apply but
| the court has to reject is because of poorly designed
| laws, that's a good impetus for changing it.
| williamcotton wrote:
| The first thing you need to do is brush up on some IP law
| around software in the United States. Start here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea-expression_distinction
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organ
| i...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-
| Compari...
|
| In a court of law you're going to have to argue that
| something is an expression instead of an idea. Most of what
| LLMs pump out are almost definitionally on the idea side of
| the spectrum. You'd basically have to show verbatim code or
| class structure at the _expressive_ level to the courts.
| martin-t wrote:
| Thanks for the links, I'll read them in more detail
| later.
|
| There's a couple issues I see:
|
| 1) All of the concepts were developed with the idea that
| only humans are capable of certain kinds of work needed
| for producing IP. A human would not engage in highly
| repetitive and menial transformation of other people's
| material to avoid infringement if he could get the same
| or better result by working from scratch. This placed,
| throughout history, an upper limit on how protective
| copyright had to be.
|
| Say, 100 years ago, synonym replacement and paraphrasing
| of sentences were SOTA methods to make copies of a book
| which don't look like copies without putting in more work
| than the original. Say, 50 years ago, computers could do
| synonym replacement automatically so it freed up some
| time for more elaborate restructuring of the original
| work and the level of protection should have shifted.
| Say, 10 years ago, one could use automatic replacement of
| phrases or translation to another language and back,
| freeing up yet more time.
|
| The law should have adapted with each technological step
| up and according to your links it has - given the cases
| cited. It's been 30 years and we have a massive step up
| in automatic copying capabilities - the law should change
| again to protect the people who make this advancement
| possible.
|
| Now with a sufficiently advanced LLM trained on all
| public and private code, you can prompt them to create a
| 3D viewer for Quake map files and I am sure it'll most of
| the time produce a working program which doesn't look
| like any of the training inputs but does feel vaguely
| familiar in structure. Then you can prompt it to add a
| keyboard-controlled character with Quake-like physics and
| it'll produce something which has the same quirks as
| Quake movement. Where did bunny hopping, wallrunning,
| strafing, circlejumps, etc. come from if it did not copy
| the original and the various forks?
|
| Somebody had to put in creative work to try out various
| physics systems and figure out what feels good and what
| leads to interesting gameplay.
|
| Now we have algorithms which can imitate the results but
| which can only be created by using the product of human
| work without consent. I think that's an exploitative
| practice.
|
| 2) It's illegal to own humans but legal to own other
| animals. The USA law uses terms such as "a member of the
| species Homo sapiens" (e.g. [0]) in these cases.
|
| If the legality of tech in question was not LLMs but
| remixing of genes (only using a tiny fraction of human
| DNA) to produce a animals which are as smart as humans
| with chimpanzee bodies which can be incubated in
| chimpanzee females but are otherwise as sentient as
| humans, would (and should) it be legal to own them as
| slaves and use them for work? It would probably be legal
| by the current letter of the law but I assure you the law
| would quickly change because people would not be OK with
| such overt exploitation.
|
| The difference is the exploitation by LLM companies is
| not as overt - in fact, mane people refer to LLMs as AIs
| and use pronouns such as "he" or "she", indicating them
| believe them to be standalone thinking entities instead
| of highly compressed lossy archives of other people's
| work.
|
| 3) The goal of copyright is progress, not protection of
| people who put in work to make that progress possible. I
| think that's wrong.
|
| I am aware of the "is" vs "should" distinction but since
| laws are compromises between the monopoly in violence and
| the people's willingness to revolt instead of being an
| (attempted) codification of a consistent moral system,
| the best we can do is try to use the current laws (what
| is) to achieve what is right (what should be).
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unborn_Victims_of_Viol
| ence_Act
| williamcotton wrote:
| But "vaguely familiar in structure" could be argued to be
| the only reasonable way to do something, depending on the
| context. This is part of the filtration step in AFC.
|
| The _idea_ of wallrunning should not be protected by
| copyright.
| martin-t wrote:
| The thing is a model trained on the same input as current
| models _except Quake and Quake derivatives_ would not
| generate such code. (You 'd have to prompt it with
| descriptions of quake physics since it wouldn't know what
| you mean, depending on whether only code or all mentions
| were excluded.)
|
| The quake special behaviors are results of essentially
| bugs which were kept because it led to fun gameplay. The
| model would almost certainly generate explicit handling
| for these behaviors because the original quake code is
| very obviously not the only reasonable way to do it. And
| in that case the model and its output is derivative work
| of the training input.
|
| The issue is such an experiment (training a model with
| specific content excluded) would cost (tens/hundreds of?)
| millions of dollars and the only companies able to do it
| are not exactly incentivized to try.
|
| ---
|
| And then there's the thing that current LLMs are
| fundamentally impossible to create without such large
| amounts of code as training data. I honestly don't care
| what the letter of the law is, to any reasonable person,
| that makes them derivative work of the training input and
| claiming otherwise is a scam and theft.
|
| I always wonder if people arguing otherwise think they're
| gonna get something out of it when the dust settles or if
| they genuinely think society should take stuff from a
| subgroup of people against their will when it can to
| enrich itself.
| williamcotton wrote:
| "Exploitative" is not a legal category in copyright. If
| the concern is labor compensation or market power, that's
| a question for labor law, contract law, or antitrust, not
| idea-expression analysis and questions of derivative
| works.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| There was a legal analysis of the copyright implications of
| Copilot among a set of white papers commissioned by the
| Free Software Foundation:
| https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-
| implications...
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Now imagine how much more that sucks for artists and
| designers that were putting artwork out there to advertise
| themselves only to have some douchebag ingest it in order to
| sell cheap simulacra.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| One work-around would be to legislate that code produce by an
| LLM trained on GPL code would also be GPL.
| layer8 wrote:
| There are licenses that are incompatible with each other,
| which implies that one wouldn't be allowed to train LLMs on
| code based on multiple such licenses.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Sounds reasonable to me - much the same way that building
| a project from multiple incompatible licenses wouldn't be
| allowed. The alternative is that using an LLM could just
| be an end-run around the choice of license that a
| developer used.
| layer8 wrote:
| Copyright normally only applies when you're plagiarizing.
| LLM output typically isn't that. It's more like someone
| having studied multiple open source projects with
| incompatible licenses and coding up their own version of
| them, which is perfectly fine. So your "workaround" is
| overshooting things by far, IMO.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| My understanding is that LLMs are plagiarising openly
| available code - it's not like the code is used to
| inspire a person as that involves creative thinking. I'm
| thinking that taking a piece of code and applying a
| transformation to it to make it look different (e.g.
| changing variable/function names) would be still
| considered plagiarism. In the case of the GPL, I think it
| would be entirely appropriate for a GPL trained LLM to be
| required to license its code output as GPL.
|
| I suppose the question is when does a machine applied
| transformation become a new work?
| prodigycorp wrote:
| I dont understand the invocation of tailwind here. It doesn't
| make sense. Tailwind's LLM struggles had nothing to do with
| open source, it had to do with the fact that they had the same
| business model as publisher, with ads pointing to their only
| product.
| aspaviento wrote:
| Exactly, their issue was about a drop in visits to their
| documentation site where they promote their paid products. If
| they were making money from usage, their business could
| really thrive with LLMs recommending Tailwind by default
| dom96 wrote:
| AFAIK their issue is that LLMs have been trained on their
| paid product (Tailwind UI, etc.) and so can reproduce them
| very easily for free. Which means devs no longer pay for
| the product.
|
| In other words, the open source model of "open core with
| paid additional features" may be dead thanks to LLMs.
| Perhaps less so for some types of applications, but for
| frameworks like Tailwind very much so.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| That's not what Adam said. He said it was a traffic
| issue.
| burnermore wrote:
| This is an absolute valid concern. We either need strong
| governmental interventions to these models who don't comply
| with OSS.
|
| Or accept that there definitely wont be open model businesses.
| Make them proprietary and accept the fact that even permissive
| licenses such as MIT, BSD Clause 2/3 wont't be followed by
| anyone while writing OSS.
|
| And as for Tailwind, I donno if it is cos of AI.
| tmplostpwd wrote:
| If you don't want people "stealing" your code, you don't want
| open source. You want source available.
| pferde wrote:
| You're confusing open source with public domain.
| noosphr wrote:
| Use a license that doesn't allow it then.
|
| Not everything needs to be mit or gnu.
| bakugo wrote:
| LLMs don't care about licenses. And even if they did, the
| people who use them to generate code don't care about
| licenses.
| noosphr wrote:
| Thieves don't care about locks, so doors are pointless.
| bakugo wrote:
| Thieves very much do care about doors and locks, because
| they are a physical barrier that must be bypassed, and
| doing so is illegal.
|
| Software licenses aren't, AI companies can just take your
| GPL code and spit it back out into non-GPL codebases and
| there's no way for you to even find out it happened, much
| less do anything about it, and the law won't help you
| either.
| serf wrote:
| I don't understand the mindset because I began my foray into
| open source exactly because I wanted to distribute and share my
| code.
|
| in other words, i've never been in the position that I felt my
| charitable givings _anywhere_ were ever _stolen_.
|
| Some people write code and put it out there without caveats.
| Some people jump into open source to be license warriors. Not
| me. I just write code and share it. If youre a person, great.
| if you're a machine then I suppose that's okay too -- I don't
| want to play musical chairs with licenses all day just to throw
| some code out there, and I don't particularly care if someone
| more clever than myself uses it to generate a profit.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Me too.
|
| I've never been a fan of coercive licensing. I don't consider
| that "open." It's "strings-attached."
|
| I make mine MIT-licensed. If someone takes my stuff, and gets
| rich (highly unlikely), then that's fine. I just don't want
| some asshole suing me, because they used it inappropriately,
| or a bug caused them problems. I don't even care about
| attribution.
|
| I mainly do it, because it forces me to take better care,
| when I code.
| immibis wrote:
| You wouldn't even be the 100th developer to eventually
| regret that.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| Do you really struggle to understand the mindset?
|
| Some people are happy to release code openly and have it used
| for anything, commercial or otherwise. Totally understandable
| and a valid choice to make.
|
| Other people are happy to release code openly so long as
| people who incorporate it into their projects also release it
| in the same way. Again, totally understandable and valid.
|
| None of this is hard to understand or confusing or even
| slightly weird.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| I want to write less, because quite frankly I get zero
| satisfaction from having an LLM churn out code for me, in the
| same way that Vincent van Gogh would likely derive no joy from
| using Nano Banana to create a painting.
|
| And sure, I could stubbornly refuse to use an LLM and write the
| code myself. But after getting used to LLM-assisted coding,
| particularly recent models, writing code by hand feels
| extremely tedious now.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > I want to write less, just knowing that LLM models are going
| to be trained on my code is making me feel more strongly than
| ever that my open source contributions will simply be stolen.
| Am I wrong to feel this? Is anyone else concerned about this?
|
| I don't think it's wrong, but misdirected maybe. What do you
| that someone can "steal" your open source contributions? I've
| always released most of my code as "open source", and not once
| has someone "stolen" it, it still sits on the same webpage
| where I initially published it, decades ago. Sure, it's
| guaranteed ingested into LLMs since long time ago, but that's
| hardly "stealing" when the thing is still there + given away
| for free.
|
| I'm not sure how anyone can feel like their open source code
| was "stolen", wasn't the intention in the first place that
| anyone can use it for any purpose? That's at least why I
| release code as open source.
| krior wrote:
| "Open Source" does not equal "No terms on how to share and
| use the code". Granted, there are such licenses but afaik the
| majority requires attribution at the minimum.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Then I'd say they're "breaking the license", not "stolen
| your project", but maybe I'm too anal about the meaning of
| words.
| dom96 wrote:
| Yeah, fair, I could have been clearer. But yes, that is
| what I meant: breaking the license.
| otterley wrote:
| I'm unaware of any mainstream Open Source licenses that
| forbid training an AI model on the work. Are you using
| one?
| gus_massa wrote:
| [A]GPL is viral, so the derived code must use the same
| license. People that like that license care a lot about that.
|
| On the other side BSD0 is just a polite version of WTFPL, and
| people that like it doesn't care about what you do with the
| code.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| And I mostly use MIT, which requires attribution. Does that
| mean when people use my code, without attribution me, that
| they're "stealing my code"? I would never call it that, I'd
| say they're "breaking the license", or similar.
| otterley wrote:
| The MIT license doesn't require attribution for
| "using...code." It reads as follows:
|
| > Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any
| person obtaining a copy of this software and associated
| documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the
| Software without restriction, including without
| limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge,
| publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of
| the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software
| is furnished to do so, subject to the following
| conditions:
|
| > The above copyright notice and this permission notice
| shall be included in all copies or substantial portions
| of the Software.
|
| > THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF
| ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED
| TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A
| PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL
| THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM,
| DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF
| CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
| CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS
| IN THE SOFTWARE.
|
| The operative language here is "all copies or substantial
| portions of the Software." LLMs, with rare exceptions,
| don't retain copies or substantial portions of the
| software it was trained on. They're not libraries or
| archives. So it's unclear to me how training an AI model
| with an MIT-licensed project could violate the license.
|
| (IAAL and this is my personal analysis, not legal
| advice.)
| gus_massa wrote:
| I think the GP said "use" in the programer sense, i.e.
| ctr-C&ctr-V into your program. Not in the normal sense,
| i.e. double click on the icon. So I guess we all agree.
| babarock wrote:
| I don't know if you're "wrong", but I do feel differently about
| this.
|
| I've written a ton of open source code and I never cared what
| people do with it, both "good" or "bad". I only want my code to
| be "useful". Not just to the people I agree with, but to anyone
| who needs to use a computer.
|
| Of course, I'd rather people use my code to feed the poor than
| build weapons, but it's just a preference. My conviction is
| that my code is _freed_ from me and my individual preferences
| and shared for everyone to use.
|
| I don't think my code is "stolen", if someone uses it to make
| themselves rich.
| martin-t wrote:
| > Not just to the people I agree with, but to anyone who
| needs to use a computer.
|
| Why not say "... but to the people I disagree with"?
|
| Would you be OK knowing your code is used to cause more harm
| than good? Would you still continue working on a hypothetical
| OSS which had no users, other than, say, a totalitarian
| government in the middle east which executes homosexuals?
| Would you be OK with your software being a critical directly
| involved piece of code for example tracking, de-anonymizing
| and profiling them?
|
| Where is the line for you?
| layer8 wrote:
| I agree with the GP. While I wouldn't be happy about such
| uses, I see the use as detached from the software as-is,
| given (assuming) that it isn't purpose-built for the bad
| uses. If the software is only being used for nefarious
| purposes, then clearly you have built the wrong thing, not
| applied the wrong license. The totalitarian government
| wouldn't care about your license anyway.
|
| The one thing I do care about is attribution -- though
| maybe actually not in the nefarious cases.
| martin-t wrote:
| > The totalitarian government wouldn't care about your
| license anyway.
|
| I see this a lot and while being technically correct, I
| think it ignores the costs for them.
|
| In practice such a government doesn't need to have laws
| and courts either but usually does because the appearance
| of justice.
|
| Breaking international laws such as copyright also has
| costs for them. Nobody will probably care about one small
| project but large scale violations could (or at least
| should) lead to sanctions.
|
| Similarly, if they want to offer their product in other
| countries, now they run the risk of having to pay fines.
|
| Finally, see my sibling comment but a lot of people act
| like Open Source is an absolute good just because it's
| Open Source. By being explicit about our views about
| right and wrong, we draw attention to this delusion.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's fine to use whatever license you think is right.
| That includes the choice of using a permissive license.
| Restrictions are generally an impediment for adoption,
| due to their legal risk, even for morally immaculate
| users. I think that not placing usage restrictions on
| open source is just as natural as not placing usage
| restrictions on published research papers.
| martin-t wrote:
| Tragedy of the commons. If all software had (compatible)
| clauses about permitted usage, then the choice would be
| to rewrite it inhouse or accept the restrictions. When
| there are alternatives (copyleft or permissive) which are
| not significantly worse, those will get used instead,
| even if taken in isolation, the restricted software was a
| bigger social good.
| stravant wrote:
| As for me that's a risk I'm willing to accept in return for
| the freedom of the code.
|
| I'm not going to deliberately write code that's LIKELY to
| do more harm than good, but crippling the potential
| positive impact just because of some largely hypothetical
| risk? That feels almost selfish, what would I really be
| trying to avoid, personally running into a feel-bad
| outcome?
| martin-t wrote:
| I think it would be most interesting to find ways to
| restrict bad usage without crippling the positive impact.
|
| Douglas Crockford[0] tried this with JSON. Now, strictly
| speaking, this does not satisfy the definition of Open
| Source (it merely is open source, lowercase). But after
| 10 years of working on Open Source, I came to the
| conclusion that Open Source is not the absolute social
| good we delude ourselves into thinking.
|
| Sure, it's usually better than closed source because the
| freedoms mean people tend to have more control and it's
| harder for anyone (including large corporations) to
| restrict those freedoms. But I think it's a local optimum
| and we should start looking into better alternatives.
|
| Android, for example, is nominally Open Source but in
| reality the source is only published by google
| periodically[1], making any true cooperation between the
| paid devs and the community difficult. And good luck
| getting this to actually run on a physical device without
| giving up things like Google Play or banking apps or your
| warranty.
|
| There's always ways to fuck people over and there always
| will be but we should look into further ways to limit and
| reduce them.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford
|
| [1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/aosp-source-code-
| schedule-3...
| auggierose wrote:
| And in that case, use MIT license or something like that for
| your code, and all is good. If I use AGPL, on the other hand,
| AI companies should not be allowed to train on that and then
| use the result of that training while ignoring the license.
| risyachka wrote:
| Also open source without support has zero value. And you can
| support only 1-2 projects.
|
| Meaning 99% of everything oss released now is de-facto
| abandonware.
| samwillis wrote:
| I'm convinced that LLMs results in all software needing to be
| open source (or at the very least source available).
|
| In future _everyone_ will expect to be able to customise an
| application, if the source is not available they will not chose
| your application as a base. It 's that simple.
|
| The future is highly customisable software, and that is best
| built on open source. How this looks from a business
| perspective I think we will have to find out, but it's going to
| be fun!
| charcircuit wrote:
| Why do you think customization can only viably done via
| changing the code of the application itself.
|
| I think there is room for closed source platforms that are
| built on top of using LLMs via some sort of API that it
| exposes. For example, iOS can be closed source and LLMs can
| develop apps for it to expand the capabilities of one's
| phone.
|
| Allowing total customization by a business can allow them to
| mess up the app itself or make other mistakes. I don't think
| it's the best interface for allowing others to extend the
| app.
| dom96 wrote:
| I'm convinced of the opposite. I think a lot more software
| will be closed source so that an LLM cannot reproduce it from
| its training data for free.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > In future everyone will expect to be able to customise an
| application, if the source is not available they will not
| chose your application as a base. It's that simple.
|
| This seems unlikely. It's not the norm today for closed-
| source software. Why would it be different tomorrow?
| simonw wrote:
| Because we now have LLMs that can read the code for us.
|
| I'm feeling this already.
|
| Just the other day I was messing around with Fly's new
| Sprites.dev system and I found myself confused as to how
| one of the "sprite" CLI features worked.
|
| So I went to clone the git repo and have Claude Code figure
| out the answer... and was surprised to find that the
| "sprite" CLI tool itself (unlike Fly's flycli tool, which I
| answer questions about like this pretty often) wasn't open
| source!
|
| That was a genuine blocker for me because it prevented me
| from answering my question.
|
| It reminded me that the most frustrating thing about using
| macOS these days is that so much of it is closed source.
|
| I'd love to have Claude write me proper documentation for
| the sandbox-exec command for example, but that thing is
| pretty much a black hole.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I'm not convinced that lowering the barrier to entry to
| software changes will result in this kind of change of
| norms. The reasons for closed-source commercial software
| not supporting customisation largely remain the same.
| Here are the ones that spring to mind:
|
| * Increased upfront software complexity
|
| * Increased maintenance burden (to not break officially
| supported plugins/customizations)
|
| * Increased support burden
|
| * Possible security/regulatory/liability issues
|
| * The company may want to deliberately block
| functionality that users want (e.g. data migration,
| integration with competing services, or removing ads and
| content recommendations)
|
| > That was a genuine blocker for me because it prevented
| me from answering my question.
|
| It's always been this way. From the user's point of view
| there has always been value in having access to the
| source, especially under the terms of a proper Free and
| Open Source licence.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I've written plenty of open source and I'm glad it's going into
| the great training models that help everyone out.
|
| I love AI and pay for four services and will never program
| without AI again.
|
| It pleases me that my projects might be helping out.
| zsoltkacsandi wrote:
| > As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever,
| now.
|
| I believe open source will become a bit less relevant in it's
| current form, as solution/project tailored libraries/frameworks
| can be generated in a few hours with LLMs.
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| Then why open source something in the first place? The entire
| point is to make it public, for anyone to use however is useful
| to him or her, and often to publicly collaborate on a project
| together.
|
| If I made something open source, you can train your LLM on it
| as much as you want. I'm glad my open source work is useful to
| you.
| tw04 wrote:
| > The entire point is to make it public, for anyone to use
| however is useful to him or her
|
| The entire point isn't to allow a large corporation to make
| private projects out of your open source project for many
| open source licenses. It's to ensure the works that leverage
| your code are open source as well. Something AI is completely
| ignoring using various excuses as to why their specific type
| of theft is ok.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| There is an open source world that believes in the MIT
| license which has no obligation to keep the derivative FOSS
| dom96 wrote:
| Even the MIT license requires attribution, all of that
| gets lost when training an LLM.
| otterley wrote:
| Read _all_ the text of the license carefully:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577208
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Plenty of people will gladly give you their hard work for
| free if you promise you'll return the favor. Or if you
| promise not to take your work and make others pay for it when
| they could just get it for free. Basically, help the people
| that want to embrace the freedoms of open source, but not the
| ones that are just in it for the free labour. Or at the very,
| very least, include a little "thank you" note.
|
| AI doesn't hold up its end of the bargain, so if you're in
| that mindset you now have to decide between going full hands-
| off like you or not doing any open source work at all.
| simonw wrote:
| Given the amount of value I get from having AI models help
| me write code I would say that AI is paying me back for my
| (not insignificant) open source contributions a thousand
| times over.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| You're quite vigorously replying to anyone disagreeing
| with the post (and haven't contributed to the top level
| as far as I can tell).
|
| It comes across as really trying too hard and a bit
| aggressive.
|
| You could just write one top level comment and chill a
| bit. Same advice for any future threads too...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Good for you, I guess? That doesn't really change the
| situation much for the people who do care and/or don't
| use AI.
|
| I consider the payment I and my employer make to these AI
| companies to be what the LLM is paying me back for. Even
| the free ones get paid for my usage somehow. This stuff
| isn't charity.
| martin-t wrote:
| No, you're absolutely right.
|
| LLMs are labor theft on an industrial scale.
|
| I spent 10 years writing open source, I haven't touched it in
| the last 2. I wrote for multiple reasons none of which any
| longer apply:
|
| - I believe every software project should have an open source
| alternative. But writing open source now means useful patterns
| can be extracted and incorporated into closed source versions
| _mechanically_ and with plausible deniability. It's ironically
| worse if you write useful comments.
|
| - I enjoyed the community aspect of building something bigger
| than one person can accomplish. But LLMs are trained on the
| whole history and potentially forum posts / chat logs / emails
| which went into designing the SW too. With sufficiently
| advanced models, they effectively use my work to create a
| simulation of myself and other devs.
|
| - I believe people (not just devs) should own the product they
| build (an even stronger protection of workers against
| exploitation than copyright). Now our past work is being used
| to replace us in the future without any compensation.
|
| - I did it to get credit. Even though it was a small motivation
| compared to the rest, I enjoyed everyone knowing what I
| accomplished and I used it during job interviews. If somebody
| used my work, my name was attached to it. With LLMs, anyone can
| launder it and nobody knows how useful my work was.
|
| - (not solely LLM related) I believed better technology
| improves the world and quality of life around me. Now I see it
| as a tool - neutral - to be used by anyone for both good and
| bad purposes.
|
| Here's[0] a comment where I described why it's theft _based on
| how LLMs work_. I call it higher order plagiarism. I haven 't
| seen this argument made by other people, it might be useful for
| arguing about those who want to legalize this.
|
| In fact, I wonder if this argument has been made in court and
| whether the lawyers understand LLMs enough to make it.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330
| zahlman wrote:
| > But, in general, it is now clear that for most projects,
| writing the code yourself is no longer sensible, if not to have
| fun.
|
| I want to write code to defy this logic and express my
| humanity. "To have fun", yes. But also to showcase what it
| means when a human engages in the act of programming. Writing
| code may increasingly not be "needed", but it increasingly is
| art.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| If you give, and expect something in return, then you are not
| giving, that is a transaction.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Am I wrong to feel this?
|
| There's no such thing as a wrong feeling.
|
| And I say this as one of those with the view that AI training
| is "learning" rather than "stealing", or at least that this is
| the goal because AI is the dumbest, the most error prone, and
| also the most expensive way, to try to make a copy of
| something.
|
| My fears about setting things loose for public consumption are
| more about how I will be judged for them than about being
| ripped off, which is kinda why that book I started writing a
| decade ago and have not meaningfully touched in the last 12
| months is neither published properly nor sent to some online
| archive.
|
| When it comes to licensing source code, I mostly choose MIT,
| because I don't care what anyone does with the code once it's
| out there.
|
| But there's no such thing as a wrong feeling, anyone who
| dismisses your response is blinding themselves to a common
| human response that also led to various previous violent
| uprisings against the owners of expensive tools of automation
| that destroyed the careers of respectable workers.
| 63stack wrote:
| Also why would I use your open source project, when I can just
| prompt the AI to generate one for me, gracefully stripping the
| license as a bonus?
| qsera wrote:
| Unless I am missing something, it seems that you only need to
| use something like the following that was (obtained using quick
| search, haven't tried)
|
| https://archclx.medium.com/enforcing-gpg-encryption-in-githu...
|
| My opinion on the matter is that AI models stealing the open
| source code would be ok IF the models are also open and remain
| so, and the services like chatgpt will remain free of cost (at
| least a free tier), and remain free of ads.
|
| But we all know how it is going to go.
| CraftingLinks wrote:
| Not wrong. But i don't share your concerns at all. I like
| sharing code and if people, and who knows, machines, can make
| use of it and provide some value however minute, that makes me
| content.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| A common intention with opensource is to allow people, and AI
| tools they use, to reuse, recombine, etc. OSS code in any way
| they see fit. If that's not what you want, don't open source
| your work. It's not stealing if you gave it away and
| effectively told people "do whatever you want". Which is one
| way licenses such as the MIT license are often characterized.
|
| It's very hard to prevent specific types of usage (like feeding
| code to an LLM) without throwing out the baby with the
| bathwater and also preventing all sorts of other valid usages.
| AGPLv3, which is what antirez and Redis use goes to far IMHO
| and still doesn't quite get the job done. It doesn't forbid
| people (or tools) to "look" at the code which is what AI
| training might be characterized as. That license creates lots
| of headaches for corporate legal departments. I switched to
| Valkey for that reason.
|
| I actually prefer using MIT style licenses for my own
| contributions precisely because I don't want to constrain
| people or AI usage. Go for it. More power to you if you find my
| work useful. That's why I provide it for free. I think this is
| consistent with the original goals of open source developers.
| They wanted others to be able to use their stuff without having
| to worry about lawyers.
|
| Anyway, AI progress won't stop because of any of this. As
| antirez says, that stuff is now part of our lives and it is a
| huge enabler if you are still interested in solving interesting
| problems. Which apparently he is. I can echo much of what he
| says. I've been able to solve larger and larger problems with
| AI tools. The last year has seen quite a bit of evolution in
| what is possible.
|
| > Am I wrong to feel this?
|
| I think your feelings are yours. But you might at least examine
| your own reasoning a bit more critically. Words like theft and
| stealing are big words. And I think your case for that is just
| very weak. And when you are coding yourself are you not
| standing on the shoulders of giants? Is that not theft?
| williamcotton wrote:
| I've been writing a bunch of DSLs lately and I would love to
| have LLMs train on this data.
| fabianholzer wrote:
| > Am I wrong to feel this?
|
| Why would a feeling be invalid? You have one life, you are
| under no obligation to produce clean training material, much
| less feel bad about this.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Yes. If you didn't care before when contributing to open source
| who uses your code then it shouldn't matter now that a company
| picks up your code. You are also contributing this way too.
|
| Tailwind is a business and they picked a business model that
| wasn't resilient enough.
| oxag3n wrote:
| This is a dilemma for me that gets more and more critical as I
| finalize my thesis. My default mental model was to open source
| for the sake of contributing back to the community, enhance my
| ideas and discuss them with whoever finds it interesting.
|
| To my surprise, my doctoral advisor told me to keep the code
| closed. She told me not only LLMs will steal it and benefit
| from it, but there's a risk of my code becoming a target after
| it's stolen by companies with fat attorney budgets and there's
| no way I could defend and prove anything.
| JacobAsmuth wrote:
| This is why I never got into open source in the first place. I
| was worried that new programmers might read my code, learn how
| to program, and then start independently contributing the the
| projects I know and love - significantly devaluing my
| contributions.
| JackSlateur wrote:
| "Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the
| villain"
|
| AI is both a near-perfect propaganda machine and, in the
| programming front, a self-fulfilling prophecy: yes, AI will be
| better at coding than human. Mostly because humans are made worse
| by using AI.
| zinodaur wrote:
| [not an ai booster] I think you are the target of this article.
| I believe you are misunderstanding the current capacity AI
| JackSlateur wrote:
| I think I spend too much time at work fixing the greatness of
| AI.
| edg5000 wrote:
| Are you hand-fixing the issues or having AI do it? I've
| found that second pass quality is miles away from an
| initial implementation. If you're experienced, you'll know
| exactly where the code smells are. Point this out, and the
| agents will produce a much better implementation in this
| second pass. And have those people store the promps in the
| repo! I put my specifications in ./doc/spec/*.md
|
| Every time I got bad results, looking back I noticed my
| spec was just vague or relied on assumptions. Of course you
| can't fix your collegues, if they suck they suck and
| sombody gotta do the mopping :)
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| I think it would make sense to have these issues bubble up
| into the public consciousness of hackernews.
|
| I've never used AI to code, I'm a software architect and
| currently assume I get little value out of an LLM. It would
| be useful for me if this debate had a vaguely engineering-
| smelling quality to it, because its currently just two
| groups shouting at eachother and handwaving criticism away.
|
| If you actually deal with AI generated problems, I love it,
| please make a post about it so we have something concrete
| to point to.
| JackSlateur wrote:
| Here is a sample
|
| We are talking about a "stupid" tool that parses a google
| sheet and makes calls to a third-party API
|
| So there is one google sheet per team, with one column
| per person
|
| One line per day
|
| And each day, someone is in charge of the duty
|
| The tool grabs the data from the sheet and configures
| pagerduty so that alerts go to the right person
|
| Very basic, no cleverness needed, really straightforward
| actually
|
| So we have 1 person that wrote the code, with AI. Then we
| have a second person that checked the code (with AI).
| Then the shit comes to my desk. To see this kind of
| cruft: def create_headers(api_token: str)
| -> dict: """Create headers for PagerDuty API
| requests. Args: api_token:
| PagerDuty API token. Returns:
| Headers dictionary. """ return {
| "Accept": "application/vnd.pagerduty+json;version=2",
| "Authorization": f"Token token={api_token}",
| "Content-Type": "application/json", }
|
| And then, we have 5 usage like this: def
| delete_override( base_url: str,
| schedule_id: str, override_id: str,
| api_token: str, ) -> None: """Delete an
| override from a schedule. Args:
| base_url: PagerDuty API base URL.
| schedule_id: ID of the schedule. override_id:
| ID of the override to delete. api_token:
| PagerDuty API token. """ headers =
| create_headers(api_token) override_url = f"{
| base_url}/schedules/{schedule_id}/overrides/{override_id}
| " response = requests.delete(override_url,
| headers=headers, timeout=60)
| response.raise_for_status()
|
| No HTTP keep-alive, no TCP reuse, the API key is passed
| down to every method, so is the API's endpoint. Timeout
| is defined in each method. The file is ~800 lines of
| python code, contains 19 methods and only deals with
| pagerduty (not google sheet). It tooks 2 fulltime days.
|
| These people fail to produce anything meaningful, this is
| not really a surprise given their failure to do sane
| things with such a basic topic
|
| Does AI brings good idea: obviously no, but we knew this.
| Does AI improves the quality of the result (regardless of
| the quality of the idea): apparently no Does AI improves
| productivity: again, given this example: no Are these
| people better, more skilled or else: no
|
| Am I too demanding ? Am I asking too much ?
| ej88 wrote:
| I'm sorry your teammates have skill issues when it comes
| to using these tools.
| simonw wrote:
| Try pasting that full code into Claude and prompting:
|
| > No HTTP keep-alive, no TCP reuse, the API key is passed
| down to every method, so is the API's endpoint. Timeout
| is defined in each method. Fix all of those issues.
| JackSlateur wrote:
| AI is a wonderful tool that will answer all of your
| questions, as long as you give it the right answer ?
| That's probably right.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Even in normal human-written code, it's not guaranteed to
| get the code completely correct in one-shot. That's why
| code review and QA still exists.
|
| The issue here is more organizational with the engineers
| not getting the code up to standards before handing off,
| not the capabilities of the AI itself.
| insin wrote:
| PRs where somebody who clearly doesn't know the tech
| being used well enough, or enough about how the complex
| app they're working on really works, thus isn't able to
| determine a good design from a bad one for the feature
| they're working on, but has AI*-assisted themselves to
| something which "works", can become an absolute death
| spiral.
|
| I wasted so much work time trying to steer one of these
| towards the light, which is very demotivating when design
| and "why did you do this?" questions are responded to
| with nothing but another flurry of commits. Even taking
| the time to fully understand the problem and suggest an
| alternative design which would fix most of the major
| issues did nothing (nothing useful must have emerged when
| that was fed into the coin slot...)
|
| Since I started the review, I ended up becoming the
| "blocker" for this feature when people started asking why
| it wasn't landed yet (because I also have my own work to
| do), to the point where I just hit Approve because I knew
| it wouldn't work at all for the even more complex use
| cases I needed to implement in that area soon, so I could
| just fix/rewrite it then.
|
| From my own experience, the sooner you accept code from
| an LLM the worse a time you're going to have. If wasn't a
| good solution or even was the wrong solution from the
| get-go, no amount of churning away at the code with an
| LLM will fix it. If you _don't know_ how to fix it
| yourself, you can't suddenly go from reporting your great
| progress in stand-ups to "I have nothing" - maybe
| backwards progress is one of those new paradigms we'll
| have to accept?
| gentooflux wrote:
| It's a zero sum game. AI cannot innovate, it can only
| predictively generate code based on what it's already seen. If
| we get to a point where new code is mostly or only written by
| AI, nothing new emerges. No new libraries, no new techniques,
| no new approaches. Fewer and fewer real developers means less
| and less new code.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Nonsense. LLMs can easily build novel solutions based on my
| descriptions. Even in languages and with (proprietary)
| frameworks they have not been trained on, given a tiny bit of
| example code and the reference docs.
| gentooflux wrote:
| That's not novel, it's still applying techniques it's
| already seen, just in a different platform. Moreover it has
| no way of knowing if it's approach is anywhere near
| idiomatic in that new platform.
| vanviegen wrote:
| I didn't say the platform was the novel aspect. And I'm
| getting pretty idiomatic code actually, just based on a
| bit of example code that shows it how. It's rather good
| at extrapolating.
| edg5000 wrote:
| Nonsense indeed. The model knowledge is the current state of
| the art. Any computation it does, advances it. It re-ingests
| work of prior agents every time you run it on your codebase,
| so even though the model initializes the same way (until they
| update the model), upon repeated calls it ingests more and
| more novel information, inching the state of the art ever
| forwards.
| JackSlateur wrote:
| Current state of the art ? You must be joking .. I see code
| it has generated, some interns does better.
|
| Obviously, you are also joking about the thing that AI is
| immune to consanguinity, right ?
| simonw wrote:
| If you have had interns who can write better code than
| Opus 4.5 I would very much like to hire them.
| vanviegen wrote:
| > Mostly because humans are made worse by using AI.
|
| For the type of work I do, I found it best to tightly supervise
| my LLMs. Giving lots of design guidance upfront, and being very
| critical towards the output. This is not easy work. In fact,
| this was always the hard part, and now I'm spending a larger
| percentage of my time doing it. As the impact of design
| mistakes is a lot smaller, I can just revert after 20 minutes
| instead of 3 days, I also get to learn from mistakes quicker.
| So I'd say, I'm improving my skills faster than before.
|
| For juniors though, I think you are right. By relying on this
| tech from early on in their careers, I think it will be very
| hard to grow their skills, taste and intuition. But maybe I'm
| just an old guy yelling at the clouds, and the next generation
| of developers will do just fine building careers as AI
| whisperers.
| simonw wrote:
| > Mostly because humans are made worse by using AI.
|
| I'm confident you are wrong about that.
|
| AI makes people who are intellectually lazy and like to
| cheating worse, in the same way that a rich kid who hires
| someone to do their university homework for them is hurting
| their ability to learn.
|
| A rich kid who hires a personal tutor and invests time with
| them is spending the same money but using it to get better, not
| worse.
|
| Getting worse using AI is a choice. Plenty of people are
| choosing to use it to accelerate and improve their learning and
| skills instead.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| The "anti-AU hype" phrase oversimplifies what's playing out at
| the moment. On the tech side, while things are a bit rough around
| the edges still the tech is very useful and isn't going away. I
| honestly don't see much disagreement there.
|
| The concern mostly comes from the business side... that for all
| the usefulness on the tech there is no clearly viable path that
| financially supports everything that's going on. It's a nice set
| of useful features but without products with sufficient revenue
| flowing in to pay for it all.
|
| That paints a picture of the tech sticking around but a general
| implosion of the startups and business models betting on making
| all this work.
|
| The later isn't really "anti-AI hype" but more folks just calling
| out the reality that there's not a lot of evidence and data to
| support the amount of money invested and committed. And if you've
| been around the tech and business scene a while you've seen that
| movie before and know what comes next.
|
| In 5 years time I expect to be using AI more than I do now. I
| also expect most of the AI companies and startups won't exist
| anymore.
| antirez wrote:
| The blog post title is a joke about the AI hype.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Well it completely misses the mark, because your whole
| article IS hyping up AI, and probably more than anything I've
| seen before honestly.
|
| If it's all meant to be ironical, it's a huge failure and
| people will use it to support their AI hype.
| antirez wrote:
| I was not clear enough. I wanted to write a PRO-AI blog
| post. The people against AI always say negative things with
| using as central argument that "AI is hyped and overhyped".
| So I, for fun, consider the anti-AI movement a form of
| hype. It's a joke but not in the sense it does not mean
| what it means.
| danielbln wrote:
| There are too many people who see the absurd AI hype
| (especially absurd in terms of investment) and construct a
| counter-argument with it that AI is useless, overblown and
| just generally not good. And that's a fallacy. Two things
| can be true at the same time. Coding agents are a step
| change and immensely useful, and the valuations and
| breathless AGI evangelizing is a smoke screen and pure
| hype.
|
| Don't let hype deter you to get your own hands dirty and
| try shit.
| nielsole wrote:
| In the late 2000s i remember that "nobody is willing to pay for
| things on the Internet" was a common trope. I think it'll
| culturally take a while before businesses and people understand
| what they are willing to pay for. For example if you are a
| large business and you pay xxxxx-xxxxxx per year per developer,
| but are only willing to pay xxx per year in AI tooling,
| something's out of proportion.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > For example if you are a large business and you pay xxxxx-
| xxxxxx per year per developer, but are only willing to pay
| xxx per year in AI tooling, something's out of proportion.
|
| One is the time of a human (irreplaceable) and the other is a
| tool for some human to use, seems proportional to me.
| thunky wrote:
| > human (irreplaceable)
|
| Everyone is replaceable. Software devs aren't special.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yes, with another human. I meant more that you cannot
| replace a human with a non-human, at least not yet and if
| you care about quality.
| qcnguy wrote:
| Late 1990s maybe. Not late 2000s.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| People said the exact same thing about (numbers from memory,
| might be off):
|
| - when Google paid $1 bil for YouTube
|
| - when Facebook paid $1 bil for Instagram
|
| - when Facebook paid $1 bil for WhatsApp
|
| The same thing - these 3 companies make no money, and have no
| path to making money, and that the price paid was crazy and
| decoupled from any economics.
|
| Yet now, in hindsight, they look like brilliant business
| decisions.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| There's no comparison to what's going on now vs those
| examples. Not even remotely similar.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| > that for all the usefulness on the tech there is no
| clearly viable path that financially supports everything
| that's going on
|
| you lack imagination, human workers are paid globally over
| $10 trillion dollars.
| qcnguy wrote:
| We don't really know how much money Google sunk into YouTube
| before it became (presumably) profitable. It might have
| actually not been strongly coupled to economics.
| Izkata wrote:
| Also they attempted their own competitor before buying
| YouTube, called Google Video. It never got very popular.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| You listed only acquisitions that paid off and not the many,
| many more that didn't though.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| _On the tech side, while things are a bit rough around the
| edges still the tech is very useful and isn't going away. I
| honestly don't see much disagreement there._
|
| What? HN is absolutely packed with people complaining about
| LLMs are nothing more than net useless creators of slop.
|
| Granted, fewer than six months ago, which should tell people
| something...
| systemf_omega wrote:
| What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI
| train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early
| adopter have for AI tools?
|
| The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good
| enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn
| instead of letting my brain atrophy.
| Ekaros wrote:
| By their promises it should get so good that basically you do
| not need to learn it. So it is reasonable to wait until that
| point.
| dkdcio wrote:
| this is a straw man, nobody serious is promising that. it is
| a skill like any other that requires learning
| Ekaros wrote:
| OpenAI is going to get to AGI. And AGI should in minutes
| build a system that takes vague input and produces fully
| functioning product out of it. Isn't singularity being
| promised by them?
| dkdcio wrote:
| you're just repeating the straw man. if you can't think
| critically and just regurgitate every dumb thing you hear
| idk what to tell you. nobody serious thinks a
| "singularity" is coming. there's not even a proper
| definition of "AGI"
|
| your argument amounts to "some people said stupid shit
| one time and I took it seriously"
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| I agree about skills actually, but it's also obvious that
| parent is making a very real point that you cannot just
| dismiss. For several years now and far short of wild AGI
| promises, the answer to literally _every_ issue with casual
| or production AI has been something like "but the rate of
| model improvement.." or "but the tools and ecosystem will
| evolve.."
|
| If you believe that uncritically about everything else,
| then you have to answer why agentic workflows or MCP or
| whatever is the one thing that it can't evolve to do for
| us. There's a logical contradiction here where you really
| can't have it both ways.
| dkdcio wrote:
| I'm not understanding your point... (and would be
| genuinely curious to)? the models and systems around them
| have evolved and gotten better (over the past few years
| for LLMs and decades for "AI" more broadly)
|
| oh I think I do get your point now after a few rereads
| (correct if wrong but you're saying it should keep
| getting better until there's nothing for us to do). "AI",
| and computer systems more broadly, are not and cannot be
| viable systems. they don't have agency (ironically) to
| affect change in their environment (without humans in the
| loop). computer systems don't exist/survive without
| people. all the human concerns around what/why remain, AI
| is just another tool in a long line of computer systems
| that make our lives easier/more efficient
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| AI Engineer to Software Engineer: Humans writing code is
| a waste of time, you can only hope to add value by
| designing agentic workflows
|
| Prompt Engineer to AI Engineer: Designing agentic
| workflows is a waste of time, just pre/postfix whatever
| input you'd normally give to the agentic system with the
| request to "build or simulate an appropriate agentic
| workflow for this problem"
| fabianholzer wrote:
| > nobody serious is promising that
|
| There is a staggering number of unserious folks in the ears
| of people with corporate purchasing power.
| simonw wrote:
| If you listen to promises like that you're going get burned.
|
| One of the key skills needed in working with LLMs is learning
| to ignore the hype and marketing and figure out what these
| things are actually capable of, as opposed to LinkedIn
| bluster and claims from CEOs who's net worth are tied to
| investor sentiment in their companies.
|
| If someone spends more time talking about "AGI" then what
| they're actually building, filter that person out.
| pydry wrote:
| >One of the key skills needed in working with LLMs is
| learning to ignore the hype and marketing and figure out
| what these things are actually capable of
|
| This is precisely what led me to realize that while they
| have some use for code review and analyzing docs, for
| coding purposes they are fairly useless.
|
| The hypesters responses' to this assertion exclusively into
| 5 categories. Ive never heard a 6th.
| edg5000 wrote:
| It took me a few months of working with the agents to get
| really productive with it. The gains are significant. I write
| highly detailed specs (equiv multiple A4 pages) in markdown and
| dicate the agent hierarchy (which agent does what, who reports
| to who).
|
| I've learned a lot of new things this year thanks to AI. It's
| true that the low levels skills with atrophy. The high level
| skills will grow though; my learning rate is the same, just at
| a much higher abstraction level; thus covering more subjects.
|
| The main concern is the centralisation. The value I can get out
| of this thing currently well exceeds my income. AI companies
| are buying up all the chips. I worry we'll get something like
| the housing market where AI will be about 50% of our income.
|
| We have to fight this centralisation at all costs!
| wmwragg wrote:
| This is something I think a lot of people don't seem to
| notice, or worry about, the moving of programming as a local
| task, to one that is controlled by big corporations,
| essentially turning programming into a subscription model,
| just like everything else, if you don't pay the subscription
| you will no longer be able to code i.e. PaaS (Programming as
| a Service). Obviously at the moment most programmers can
| still code without LLMs, but when autocomplete IDEs became
| main stream, it didn't take long before a large proportion of
| programmers couldn't program without an autocomplete IDE, I
| expect most new programmers coming in won't be able to
| "program" without a remote LLM.
| Lio wrote:
| That ignores the possibility that local inference gets good
| enough to run without a subscription on reasonably priced
| hardware.
|
| I don't think that's too far away. Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.
| are pushing the idea that you need a subscription but if
| opensource tools get good enough they could easily become
| an expensive irrelivance.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| My concern is that inference hardware is becoming more
| and more specialized and datacenter-only. It won't be
| possible any longer to just throw in a beefy GPU (in fact
| we're already past that point).
| wmwragg wrote:
| Yep, good point. If they don't make the hardware
| available for personal use, then we wouldn't be able to
| buy it even it could be used in a personal system.
| wmwragg wrote:
| There is that, but the way this usually works is that
| there is always a better closed service you have to pay
| for, and we see that with LLMs as well. Plus there is the
| fact that you currently need a very powerful machine to
| run these models at anywhere near the speed of the PaaS
| systems, and I'm not convinced we'll be able to do the
| Moore's law style jumps required to get that level of
| performance locally, not to mention the massive energy
| requirements, you can only go so small, and we are
| getting pretty close to the limit. Perhaps I'm wrong, but
| we don't see the jumps in processing power we used to see
| in the 80s and 90s, due to clock speed jumps, the clock
| speed of most CPUs has stayed pretty much the same for a
| long time. As LLMs are essentially probabilistic in
| nature, this does open up options not available to
| current deterministic CPU designs, so that might be an
| avenue which gets exploited to bring this to local
| development.
| smallerfish wrote:
| This is the most valid criticism. Theoretically in several
| years we may be able to run Opus quality coding models
| locally. If that doesn't happen then yes, it becomes a pay
| to play profession - which is not great.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > I write highly detailed specs (equiv multiple A4 pages) in
| markdown and dicate the agent hierarchy (which agent does
| what, who reports to who).
|
| That sounds incredibly inneficient.
|
| Are you all AI bros calcualting productivity gains on how
| fast the code was outputed and nothing else?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Well, if you're programming without AI you need to
| understand what you're building too, lest you program
| yourself into a corner. Taking 3-5 minutes to speech-to-
| text an overview of why you want to build what exactly,
| using which general philosophies/tool seems like it should
| cost you almost zero extra time and brainpower
| nebula8804 wrote:
| The hardware needs to catch up I think. I asked ChatGPT (lol)
| how much it would cost to build a Deepseek server that runs
| at a reasonable speed and it quoted ~400k-800k(8-16 H100 +
| the rest of the server).
|
| Guess we are still in the 1970s era of AI computing. We need
| to hope for a few more step changes or some breakthrough on
| model size.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| You can run most open models (excluding kimi-k2) on
| hardware that costs anywhere from 45 - 85k (tbf, specced
| before the vram wars of late 2025 so +10k maybe?). 4-8
| PRO6000s + all the other bits and pieces gives you a
| machine that you can host locally and run very capable
| models, at several quants (glm4.7, minimax2.1, devstral,
| dsv3, gpt-oss-120b, qwens, etc.), with enough speed and
| parallel sessions for a small team (of agents or humans).
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| The problem is that Moore's law is dead, silicon isn't
| advancing as fast as what we've envisioned in the past,
| we're experiencing all sorts of quantum tunneling effects
| in order to cram as much microstructure as possible into
| silicon, and R&D for manufacturing these chips are climbing
| at a rapid rate. There's a limit to how we can fight
| against Physics, and unless we discover a totally new
| paradigm to alleviate this issues (ex. optical computing?)
| we're going to experience diminishing returns at the end of
| the sigmoid-like tech advancement cycle.
| nikcub wrote:
| I've used cursor and claude code both daily[0] within a month
| of their releases - i'm learning something new on how to work
| with and apply the tools almost every day.
|
| I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the best
| developers[1] are using these tools and some openly advocating
| for them because it still requires core skills to get the most
| out of them
|
| I can honestly say that building end-to-end products with
| claude code has made me a better developer, product designer,
| tester, code reviewer, systems architect, project manager,
| sysadmin etc. I've learned more in the past ~year than I ever
| have in my career.
|
| [0] abandoned cursor late last year
|
| [1] see Linus using antigravity, antirez in OP, Jared at bun,
| Charlie at uv/ruff, mitushiko, simonw et al
| dkdcio wrote:
| I started heavy usage in April 2025 (Codex CLI -> some Claude
| Code and trying other CLIs + a bit of Cursor -> Warp.dev ->
| Claude Code) and I'm still learning as well (and constantly
| trying to get more efficient)
|
| (I had been using GitHub Copilot for 5+ years already,
| started as an early beta tested, but I don't really consider
| that the same)
|
| I like to say it's like learning a programming language. it
| takes time, but you start pattern matching and knowing what
| works. it took me multiple attempts and a good amount of time
| to learn Rust, learning effective use of these tools is
| similar
|
| I've also learned a ton across domains I otherwise wouldn't
| have touched
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| AI development is about planning, orchestration and high
| throughput validation. Those skills won't go away, the quality
| floor of model output will just rise over time.
| bsaul wrote:
| An ecosystem is being built around AI : Best prompting
| practices, mcps, skills, IDE integration, how to build a
| feedback loop so that LLM can test its output alone, plug to
| the outside world with browser extensions, etc...
|
| For now i think people can still catch up quickly, but at the
| end of 2026 it's probably going to be a different story.
| edg5000 wrote:
| > probably going to be a different story
|
| Can you elaborate? Skill in AI use will be a differentiator?
| rvz wrote:
| > Best prompting practices, mcps, skills, IDE integration,
| how to build a feedback loop so that LLM can test its output
| alone, plug to the outside world with browser extensions,
| etc...
|
| Ah yes, an ecosystem that is fundamentally inherently built
| on probabilisitic quick sand and even with the "best
| prompting practices", you still get agents violating the
| basics of security and committing API keys when they were
| told not to. [0]
|
| [0] https://xcancel.com/valigo/status/2009764793251664279
| dkdcio wrote:
| I have tons of examples of AI not committing secrets. this
| is one screenshot from twitter? I don't think it makes your
| point
|
| CPUs are billions of transistors. sometimes one fails and
| things still work. "probabilistic quicksand" isn't the dig
| you think it is to people who know how this stuff works
| rvz wrote:
| > I have tons of examples of AI not committing secrets.
|
| "Trust only me bro".
|
| It takes 10 seconds to see the _many_ examples of API
| keys + prompts on GitHub to verify that tweet. The issue
| with AI isn 't limited to that tweet which demonstrates
| its probabilistic nature; Otherwise why do need a sandbox
| to run the agent in the first place?
|
| Nevermind, we know why: _Many_ [0] _such_ [1] _cases_ [2]
|
| > CPUs are billions of transistors. sometimes one fails
| and things still work. "probabilistic quicksand" isn't
| the dig you think it is to people who know how this stuff
| works
|
| Except you just made a false equivalence. CPUs can be
| tested / verified transparently and even if it does go
| wrong, we know exactly why. Where as you can't explain
| why the LLM hallucinated or _decided_ to delete your home
| folder because the way it predicts what it outputs is
| fundamentally stochastic.
|
| [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1pgxckk/cl
| aude_cl...
|
| [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1jfidvb/cl
| aude_tr...
|
| [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+deleted+files+site
| %3Anews...
| dkdcio wrote:
| you could find tons of API keys on GitHub before these
| "agentic" tools too. that was my point, one screenshot
| from twitter vs one anecdote from me. I don't think
| either proves the point, but posting a screenshot from
| twitter like it's proof of some widespread problem is
| what I was responding to (N=2, 1 vs 1)
|
| my point is more "skill issue" than "trust me this never
| happens"
|
| my point on CPUs is people who don't understand LLMs talk
| like "hallucinations" are a real thing -- LLMs are
| "deciding" to make stuff up rather than just predicting
| the next token. yes it's probabilistic, so is practically
| everything else at scale. yet it works and here we are.
| can you really explain in detail how everything you use
| works? I'm guessing I can explain failure modes of
| agentic systems (and how to avoid them so you don't look
| silly on twitter/github) and how neural networks work
| better than most people can explain the technology they
| use every day
| rvz wrote:
| > you could find tons of API keys on GitHub before these
| "agentic" tools too. that was my point, one screenshot
| from twitter vs one anecdote from me. I don't think
| either proves the point, but posting a screenshot from
| twitter like it's proof of some widespread problem is
| what I was responding to (N=2, 1 vs 1)
|
| That doesn't refute the probabilistic nature of LLMs
| despite best prompting practices. In fact it emphasises
| it. More like your 1 anecdotal example vs my 20+ examples
| on GitHub.
|
| My point tells you that not only it indeed does happen,
| but a previous old issue is now made even worse and more
| widespread, since we now have vibe-coders without
| security best practices assuming the agent should know
| better (when it doesn't).
|
| > my point is more "skill issue" than "trust me this
| never happens"
|
| So those that have this "skill issue" are also those who
| are prompting the AI differently then? Either way, this
| just inadvertently proves my whole point.
|
| > yes it's probabilistic, so is practically everything
| else at scale. yet it works and here we are.
|
| The additional problem is can you explain _why_ it went
| wrong as you scale the technology? CPUs circuit design go
| through formal verification and if a fault happens, we
| know exactly why; hence it is deterministic in design
| which makes them reliable.
|
| LLMs are not and don't have this. Which is why OpenAI had
| to describe ChatGPT's misaligned behaviour as
| "sycophancy", but could not explain _why_ it happened
| other than tweaking the hyper-parameters which got them
| that result.
|
| So LLMs being fundamentally probabilistic and are hence,
| more unexplainable being the reason why you have the
| screenshot of vibe-coders who somehow prompted it wrong
| and the agent committed the keys.
|
| Maybe that would never have happened to you, but it won't
| be the last time we see more of this happening on GitHub.
| dkdcio wrote:
| I was pointing out one screenshot from twitter isn't
| proof of anything just to be clear; it's a silly way to
| make a point.
|
| yes AI makes leaking keys on GH more prevalent, but so
| what? it's the same problem as before with roughly the
| same solution
|
| I'm saying neural networks being probabilistic doesn't
| matter -- everything is probabilistic. you can still
| practically use the tools to great effect, just like we
| use everything else that has underlying probabilities
|
| OpenAI did not have to describe it as sycophancy, they
| chose to, and I'd contend it was a stupid choice
|
| and yes, you can explain what went wrong just like you
| can with CPUs. we don't (usually) talk about quantum-
| level physics when discussing CPUs; talking about neurons
| in LLMs is the wrong level of abstraction
| rvz wrote:
| > I was pointing out one screenshot from twitter isn't
| proof of anything just to be clear; it's a silly way to
| make a point.
|
| Verses your anecdote being a proof of what? Skill issue
| for vibe coders? Someone else prompting it wrong?
|
| You do realize you are proving my entire point?
|
| > yes AI makes leaking keys on GH more prevalent, but so
| what? it's the same problem as before with roughly the
| same solution
|
| Again, it exacerbates my point such that it makes the
| existing issue _even worse_. Additionally, that wasn 't
| even the only point I made on the subject.
|
| > I'm saying neural networks being probabilistic doesn't
| matter -- everything is probabilistic.
|
| When you scale neural networks to become say, production-
| grade LLMs, then it does matter. Just like it does matter
| for CPUs to be reliable when you scale them in
| production-grade data centers.
|
| But your earlier (fallacious) comparison ignores the
| reliability differences between them (CPUs vs LLMs.) and
| determinism is a hard requirement for that; which the
| latter, LLMs are not.
|
| > OpenAI did not have to describe it as sycophancy, they
| chose to, and I'd contend it was a stupid choice
|
| For the press, they _had_ to, but no-one knows the real
| reason, because it is unexplainable; going back to my
| other point on reliability.
|
| > and yes, you can explain what went wrong just like you
| can with CPUs. we don't (usually) talk about quantum-
| level physics when discussing CPUs; talking about neurons
| in LLMs is the wrong level of abstraction
|
| It is indeed wrong for LLMs because not even the
| researchers can practically give an explanation why a
| single neuron (for every neuron in the network) gives
| different values on every fine-tune or training run. Even
| if it is "good enough", it can still go wrong at the
| inference-level for other unexplainable reasons other
| than it "overfitted".
|
| CPUs on the other hand, have formal verification methods
| which verify that the CPU conforms to its specification
| and we can trust that it works as intended and can
| diagnose the problem accurately without going into
| atomic-level details.
| dkdcio wrote:
| ...what is your point exactly (and concisely)? I'm saying
| it doesn't matter it's probabilistic, everything is, the
| tech is still useful
| rvz wrote:
| No one is arguing that it isn't useful. The problem is
| this:
|
| > _I'm saying it doesn't matter it's probabilistic,
| everything is,_
|
| Maybe it doesn't matter for you, but it generally does
| matter.
|
| The risk level of a technology failing is far higher if
| it is more random and unexplainable than if it is
| expected, verified and explainable. The former eliminates
| many serious use-cases.
|
| This is _why_ your CPU, or GPU works.
|
| LLMs are neither deterministic, no formal verification
| exists and are fundamentally black-boxes.
|
| That is _why_ many vibe-coders reported many "AI deleted
| their entire home folder" issues even when they told it
| to move a file / folder to another location.
|
| If it did not matter, why do you need sandboxes for the
| agents in the first place?
| dkdcio wrote:
| I think we agree then? the tech is useful; you need
| systems around them (like sandboxes and commit hooks that
| prevent leaking secrets) to use them effectively (along
| with learned skills)
|
| very little software (or hardware) used in production is
| formally verified. tons of non-deterministic software
| (including neural networks) are operating in production
| just fine, including in heavily regulated sectors
| (banking, health care)
| Mawr wrote:
| I have tons of examples of drivers not running into
| objects.
| dkdcio wrote:
| like my other comment, my point is one screenshot from
| twitter vs one anecdote. neither proves anything. cool
| snarky response though!
| simonw wrote:
| One of the skills needed to effectively use AI for code is
| to know that telling AI "don't commit secrets" is not a
| reliable strategy.
|
| Design your secrets to include a common prefix, then use
| deterministic scanning tools like git hooks to prevent then
| from being checked in.
|
| Or have a git hook that knows which environment variables
| have secrets in and checks for those.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| That's such an incredibly basic concept, surely AIs have
| evolved to the point where you don't need to explicitly
| state those requirements anywhere?
| thunky wrote:
| Doesn't seem to work for humans all the time either.
|
| Some of this negativity I think is due to unrealistic
| expectations of perfection.
|
| Use the same guardrails you should be using already for
| human generated code and you should be fine.
| simonw wrote:
| They can still make mistakes.
|
| For example, what if your code (that the LLM hasn't
| reviewed yet) has a dumb feature in where it dumps
| environment variables to log output, and the LLM runs
| "./server --log debug-issue-144.log" and commits that log
| file as part of a larger piece of work you ask it to
| perform.
|
| If you don't want a bad thing to happen, adding a
| deterministic check that prevents the bad thing to happen
| is a better strategy than prompting models or hoping that
| they'll get "smarter" in the future.
| Avshalom wrote:
| Okay, end of 2026 then what? No one ever learns how to use
| the tools after that? No one gets a job until the pre-2026
| generation dies?
| hackable_sand wrote:
| For now i think people can still catch up quickly, but at
| the end of 2027 it's probably going to be a different
| story.
| rvz wrote:
| > What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI
| train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an
| early adopter have for AI tools?
|
| The ones pushing this narrative have either the following:
|
| * Invested in AI companies (which they will never disclose
| until they IPO / acquired)
|
| * Employees at AI companies that have stock options which they
| are effectively paid boosters around AGI nonsense.
|
| * Mid-life crisis / paranoia that their identity as a
| programmer is being eroded and have to pivot to AI.
|
| It is no different to the crypto web3 bubble of 2021. This
| time, it is even more obvious and now the grifters from crypto
| / tech are already "pivoting to ai". [0]
|
| [0] https://pivot-to-ai.com/
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I'm not an AI booster, but I can't argue with Opus doing lots
| of legwork
|
| > It is no different to the crypto web3 bubble of 2021
|
| web3 didn't produce anything useful, just noise. I couldn't
| take a web3 stack to make an arbitrary app. with the PISS
| machine I can.
|
| Do I worry about the future, fuck yeah I do. I think I'm up
| shit creek. I am lucky that I am good at describing in plain
| English what I want.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Web3 generated plenty of use if you're in on it. Pension
| funds, private investors, public companies, governments,
| gambling addicts, teenagers with more pocket money than
| sense, they've all moved billions into the pockets of Web3
| grifters. You follow a tutorial on YouTube, spam the right
| places, maybe buy a few illegal ads, do a quick rugpull,
| and if you did your opsec right, you're now a millionaire.
| The major money sources have started to dry up (although
| the current American regime has been paid off by crypto
| companies so a Web3 revival might just happen).
|
| With AI companies still selling services far below cost,
| it's only a matter of time before the money runs out and
| the true value of these tools will be tested.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > Pension funds, private investors, public companies
|
| As someone who was at a large company that was dabbling
| in NFTs, there was no value apart from pure gambling. At
| the time that we were doing it, it was also too late, so
| it was just a jinormous
|
| My issue with GenAI is the rampant copyright violation,
| and the effect it will have on the economy. Its also
| replacing all of the fun bits of the world that I
| inhabit.
|
| At least with web3 it was mostly contained with in the BO
| infested basement that crypto bros inhabit. AI bollocks
| has infected half the world.
| menaerus wrote:
| Comparing crypto and web3 scam with AI advancements is
| disingenuous at its best. I am a long time C and C++ systems
| programming engineer oriented at (sometimes novel)
| algorithmic design and high-performance large-scale systems
| operating at the scale of internet. I am specializing in low-
| level details that generally very small amount of engineers
| around the globe are familiar with. We can talk at the level
| of CPU microarchitectural details or memory bank conflicts or
| OS internals, and all the way up to the line of code we are
| writing. AI is the most transformative technology ever
| designed. I'd go that far and say that not even industrial
| revolution is going to be comparable to it. I have no stakes
| in AI.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| My take: learning how to do LLM-assisted coding at a basic
| level gets you 80% of the returns, and takes about 30 minutes.
| It's a complete no-brainer.
|
| Learning all of the advanced multi-agent worklows etc. etc...
| Maybe that gets you an extra 20%, but it costs a lot more time,
| and is more likely to change over time anyway. So maybe not
| very good ROI.
| antirez wrote:
| I think that who says that you need to be accustomed to the
| current "tools" related to AI agents, is suffering from a
| horizon effect issue: these stuff will change continuously for
| some time, and the more they evolve, the less you need to
| fiddle with the details. However, the skill you _need_ to have,
| is communication skills. You need to be able to express
| yourself and what matters for your project fast and well. Many
| programmers are not great at communication. In part this is a
| gift, something you develop at small age, and this will, I
| believe, kinda change who is good at programming: good
| communicators / explorers may not have a edge VS very strong
| coders that are bad at explaining themselves. But a lot of it
| is attitude, IMHO. And practice.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Many programmers are not great at communication.
|
| This is true, but still shocking. Professional (working with
| others at least) developers basically live or die by their
| ability to communicate. If you're bad at communication, your
| entire team (and yourself) suffer, yet it seems like the
| "lone ranger" type of programmer is still somewhat praised
| and idealized. When trying to help some programmer friends
| with how they use LLMs, it becomes really clear how little
| they actually can communicate, and for some of them I'm
| slightly surprised they've been able to work with others at
| all.
|
| An example the other day, some friend complained that the LLM
| they worked with was using the wrong library, and using the
| wrong color for some element, and surprised that the LLM
| wouldn't know it from the get go. Reading through the prompt,
| they never mentioned it once, and when asked about it, they
| thought "it should have been obvious" which yeah, to someone
| like you who worked for 2 years on this project that might be
| obvious, but for some with zero history and zero context
| about what you do? How you expect it to know this? Baffling
| sometimes.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| Yup. I'd take a gander than most complaints by people who
| have even used LLMs for long time can be resolved by
| "describe your thing in detail". LLM's are such a relief on
| my wrists that I often get tempted to write short prompts
| and pray that the LLM divines my thoughts. I always get
| much better results in a lot faster time when i just turn
| on the mic and have whisper transcribe a couple minutes of
| my speaking though.
| menaerus wrote:
| I am using Google Antigravity for the same type of work you
| mention, such as many things and ideas I had over the years
| but I couldn't justify the time I needed to invest into them.
| Pretty non-trivial ideas and yet with a good problem
| definition communication skills I am getting unbelievable
| results. I am even intentionally sometimes being too vague in
| my problem definition to avoid introducing the bias to the
| model and the ride has been quite crazy so far. In 2 days
| I've implemented several substantial improvements that i had
| in my head for years.
|
| The world changed for good and we will need to adapt. The
| bigger and more important question at this point isn't
| anymore if LLMs are good enough, for the ones who want to
| see, but, as you mention in your article, is what will happen
| to people who will get unemployed. There's a reality check
| for all of us.
| zahlman wrote:
| The idea, I think, is to gain experience with the loop of
| communicating ideas in natural language rather than code, and
| then reading the generated code and taking it as feedback.
|
| It's not that different overall, I suppose, from the loop of
| _thinking of_ an idea and then implementing it and running
| tests; but potentially very disorienting for some.
| simonw wrote:
| This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting
| left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again".
|
| I don't think that's true.
|
| I'm _really good_ at getting great results out of coding agents
| and LLMs. I 've also been using LLMs for code on an almost
| daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022.
| That's more than three years ago now.
|
| Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints from other
| developers who can't get anything useful out of these machines,
| or find that the gains they get are minimal at best.
|
| Using this stuff well is a _deep_ topic. These things can be
| applied in so many different ways, and to so many different
| projects. The best asset you can develop is an intuition for
| what works and what doesn 't, and getting that intuition
| requires months if not years of personal experimentation.
|
| I don't think you can just catch up in a few weeks, and I do
| think that the risk of falling behind isn't being taken
| seriously enough by much of the developer population.
|
| I'm glad to see people like antirez ringing the alarm bell
| about this - it's not going to be a popular position but it
| needs to be said!
| systemf_omega wrote:
| > Using this stuff well is a deep topic.
|
| Just like the stuff LLMs are being used for today. Why
| wouldn't "using LLMs well" be not just one of the many things
| LLMs will simplify too?
|
| Or do you believe your type of knowledge is somehow special
| and is resistant to being vastly simplified or even made
| obsolete by AI?
| simonw wrote:
| An interesting trend over the past year is that LLMs have
| learned how to prompt each other.
|
| Back in ~2024 a lot of people were excited about having
| "LLMs write the prompt!" but I found the results to be
| really disappointing - they were full of things like "You
| are the world's best expert in marketing" which was
| superstitious junk.
|
| As of 2025 I'm finding they actually do know how to prompt,
| which makes sense because there's a ton more information
| about good prompting approaches in the training data as
| opposed to a couple of years ago. This has unlocked some
| very interesting patterns, such as Claude Code prompting
| sub-agents to help it explore codebases without polluting
| the top level token window.
|
| But learning to prompt is not the key skill in getting good
| results out of LLMs. The thing that matters most is having
| a robust model of what they can and cannot do. Asking an
| LLM "can you do X" is still the kind of thing I wouldn't
| trust them to answer in a useful way, because they're
| always constrained by training data that was only aware of
| their predecessors.
| leonidasv wrote:
| Unless we figure out how to make 1 billion+ tokens
| multimodal context windows (in a commercially viable way)
| and connect them to Google Docs/Slack/Notion/Zoom
| meetings/etc, I don't think it will simplify that much.
| Most of the work is adjusting your mental model to the fact
| that the agent is a stateless machine that starts from
| scratch every single time and has little-to-no knowledge
| besides what's in the code, so you have to be very specific
| about the context of the task in some ways.
|
| It's different from assigning a task to a co-worker who
| already knows the business rules and cross-implications of
| the code in the real world. The agent can't see the broader
| picture of the stuff it's making, it can go from ignoring
| obvious (to a human that was present in the last planning
| meeting) edge cases to coding defensively against hundreds
| of edge cases that will never occur, if you don't add that
| to your prompt/context material.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| So far every new AI product and even model update has
| required me to relearn how to get decent results out of them.
| I'm honestly kind of sick of having to adjust my work flow
| every time.
|
| The intuition just doesn't hold. The LLM gets trained and
| retrained by other LLM users so what works for me suddenly
| changes when the LLM models refresh.
|
| LLMs have only gotten easier to learn and catch up on over
| the years. In fact, most LLM companies seem to optimise for
| getting started quickly over getting good results
| consistently. There may come a moment when the foundations
| solidify and not bothering with LLMs may put you behind the
| curve, but we're not there yet, and with the literally
| impossible funding and resources OpenAI is claiming they
| need, it may never come.
| Mawr wrote:
| I don't see how your position is compatible with the constant
| hype about the ever-growing capabilities of LLMs. Either they
| _are_ improving rapidly, and your intuition keeps getting
| less and less valuable, or they aren 't improving.
| simonw wrote:
| They're improving rapidly, which means your intuition needs
| to be constantly updated.
|
| Things that they couldn't do six months go might now be
| things that they can do - and knowing they couldn't do X
| six months ago is useful because it helps systematize your
| explorations.
|
| A key skill here is to know what they can do, what they
| can't do and what the current incantations are that unlock
| interesting capabilities.
|
| A couple I've learned in the past week:
|
| 1. Don't give Claude Code a URL to some code and tell it to
| use that, because by default it will use its WebFetch tool
| but that runs an extra summarization layer (as a prompt
| injection defense) which loses details. Telling it to use
| curl sometimes works but a guaranteed trick is to have it
| git clone the relevant repo to /tmp and look at the code
| there instead.
|
| 2. Telling Claude Code "use red/green TDD" is a quick to
| type shortcut that will cause it to write tests first, run
| them and watch them fail, then implement the feature and
| run the test again. This is a wildly effective technique
| for getting code that works properly while avoiding
| untested junk code that isn't needed.
|
| Now multiply those learnings by three years. Sure, the
| stuff I figure out in 2023 mostly doesn't apply today - but
| the skills I developed in learning _how_ to test and
| iterate on my intuitions from then still count and still
| keep compounding.
|
| The idea that you don't need to learn these things because
| they'll get better to the point that they can just
| perfectly figure out what you need is AGI science fiction.
| I think it's safe to ignore.
| crakhamster01 wrote:
| I feel like both of these examples are insights that
| won't be relevant in a year.
|
| I agree that CC becoming omniscient is science fiction,
| but the goal of these interfaces is to make LLM-based
| coding more accessible. Any strategies we adopt to
| mitigate bad outcomes are destined to become part of the
| platform, no?
|
| I've been coding with LLMs for maybe 3 years now.
| Obviously a dev who's experienced with the tools will be
| more adept than one who's not, but if someone started
| using CC today, I don't think it would take them anywhere
| near that time to get to a similar level of competency.
| simonw wrote:
| I base part of my skepticism about that on the huge
| number of people who seem to be unable to get good
| results out of LLMs for code, and who appear to think
| that's a commentary on the quality of the LLMs themselves
| as opposed to their own abilities to use them.
| svara wrote:
| I suspect that's neither a skill issue nor a technical
| issue.
|
| Being "a person who can code" carries some prestige and
| signals intelligence. For some, it has become an
| important part of their identity.
|
| The fact that this can now be said of a machine is a
| grave insult if you feel that way.
|
| It's quite sad in a way, since the tech really makes your
| skills _even more_ valuable.
| mmcnl wrote:
| Personally I think this is an extreme waste of time.
| Every week you're learning something new that is already
| outdated the next week. You're telling me AI can write
| complex code but isn't able to figure out how to properly
| guide the user into writing usable prompts?
|
| A somewhat intelligent junior will dive deep for one week
| and be on the same knowledge level as you in roughly 3
| years.
| simonw wrote:
| No matter how good AI gets we will never be in a
| situation where a person with poor communication skills
| will be able to use it as effectively as someone who's
| communication skills are razor sharp.
| q3k wrote:
| But the examples you've posted have nothing to do with
| communication skills, they're just hacks to get
| particular tools to work better for you, and those will
| change whenever the next model/service decides to do
| things differently.
| simonw wrote:
| I'm going to resist the temptation to spend more time
| coming up with more examples. I'm sorry those weren't to
| your liking!
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Why do you bother with all this discussion? Like, I get
| it the first x times for some low x, it's fun to have the
| discussion. But after a while, aren't you just tired of
| the people who keep pushing back? You are right, they are
| wrong. It's obvious to anyone who has put the effort in.
| zahlman wrote:
| I'm generally skeptical of Simon's specific line of
| argument here, but I'm inclined to agree with the point
| about communication skill.
|
| In particular, the idea of saying something like "use
| red/green TDD" _is an expression of_ communication skill
| (and also, of course, awareness of software methodology
| jargon).
| habinero wrote:
| Ehhh, I don't know. "Communication" is for sapients. I'd
| call that "knowing the right keywords".
|
| And if the hype is right, why would you need to know any
| of them? I've seen people unironically suggest telling
| the LLM to "write good code", which seems even easier.
| zahlman wrote:
| I sympathize with your view on a philosophical level, but
| the consequence is really a meaningless semantic
| argument. The point is that prompting the AI with words
| that you'd actually use when asking a human to perform
| the task, generally works better than trying to "guess
| the password" that will magically get optimum performance
| out of the AI.
|
| Telling an intern to care about code quality might
| actually cause an intern who hasn't been caring about
| code quality to care a little bit more. But it isn't
| going to help the intern understand the intended purpose
| of the software.
| habinero wrote:
| Right? I kinda roll my eyes at the endless urgent FOMO
| that somehow always links back to their podcast or blog.
|
| Fuck you, I learned k8s and general relativity, I can
| learn how to yell at a computer lol
|
| Y'all go on and waste your time learning and relearning
| and chanting at websites. I'll just copy and paste your
| shit if and when I need to.
| mmcnl wrote:
| Why can't both be true at the same time? Maybe their problems
| are more complex than yours. Why do you assume it's a skill
| issue and ignore the contextual variables?
| simonw wrote:
| On the rare occasions that I can convince them to share the
| details of the problems they are tackling and the exact
| prompts they are using it becomes very clear that they
| haven't learned how to use the tools yet.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| I'm kind of curious about the things you're seeing since
| I find the best way is to have them come up with a plan
| for the work they're about to do and then make sure they
| actually finish it because they like to skip stuff if it
| requires too much effort.
|
| I mean, I just think of them like a dog that'll get
| distracted and go off doing some other random thing if
| you don't supervise them enough and you certainly don't
| want to trust them to guard your sandwich.
| rubslopes wrote:
| I don't disagree, knowing how to use the tools is important.
| But I wanted to add that great prompting skill nowadays are
| far far less necessary for top-tier models that it was years
| ago. If I'm clear about what I want and how I want it to
| behave, Claude Opus 4.5 almost always nails it first time.
| The "extra" that I do often, that maybe newcomers don't, is
| to setup a system where the LLM can easily check the results
| of its changes (verbose logs in terminal and, in web, verbose
| logs in console and playwright).
| coffeemug wrote:
| Strongly disagree. Claude Code is the most intuitive
| technology I've ever used-- way easier than learning to use
| even VS Code for example. It doesn't even take weeks. Maybe a
| day or two to get the hang of it and you're off to the races.
| simonw wrote:
| Don't underestimate the number of developers who aren't
| comfortable with tools that live in the terminal.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Well these people are left behind either way. Competent
| devs can easily learn to use coding assistants in a day
| or two
| johnsmith1840 wrote:
| The difference is AI tooling lies to you. Day 0 you think
| it's perfect but the more you use ai tools you realize
| using them wrong can give you gnarly bugs.
|
| It's intuitive to use but hard to master
| furyofantares wrote:
| I think I'm also very good at getting great results out of
| coding agents and LLMs, and I disagree pretty heavily with
| you.
|
| It is just way easier for someone to get up to speed today
| than it was a year ago. Partly because capabilities have
| gotten better and much of what was learned 6+ months ago no
| longer needs to be learned. But also partly because there is
| just much more information out there about how to get good
| results, you might have coworkers or friends you can talk to
| who have gotten good results, you can read comments on HN or
| blog posts from people who have gotten good results, etc.
|
| I mean, ok, I don't think someone can fully catch up in a few
| weeks. I'll grant that for sure. But I think they can get up
| to speed much faster than they could have a year ago.
|
| Of course, they will have to put in the effort at that time.
| And people who have been putting it off may be less likely to
| ever do that. So I think people will get left behind. But I
| think the alarm to raise is more, "hey, it's a deep topic and
| you're going to have to put in the effort" rather than "you
| better start now or else it's gonna be too late".
| biophysboy wrote:
| What are your tips? Any resources you would recommend? I use
| Claude code and all the chat bots, but my background isn't
| programming, so I sometimes feel like I'm just swimming
| around.
| Humorist2290 wrote:
| It needs to be said that your opinion on this is well
| understood by the community, respected, but also far from
| impartial. You have a clear vested interest in the success of
| _these_ tools.
|
| There's a learning curve to any toolset, and it may be that
| using coding agents effectively is more than a few weeks of
| upskilling. It may be, and likely will be, that people make
| their whole careers about being experts on this topic.
|
| But it's still a statistical text prediction model, wrapped
| in fancy gimmicks, sold at a loss by mostly bad faith actors,
| and very far from its final form. People waiting to get on
| the bandwagon could well be waiting to pick up the pieces
| once it collapses.
| csmpltn wrote:
| So where's all of this cutting edge amazing and flawless
| stuff you've built in a weekend that everybody else couldn't
| because they were too dumb or slow or clueless?
| wild_egg wrote:
| This is such a tired response at this point.
|
| People are under zero obligation to release their work to
| the public. Simon actually publishes and writes about a
| remarkable amount of the side projects he builds with AI.
|
| The rest of us just build tons of cool stuff for personal
| use or for $JOB. Releasing stuff to the public is, in
| general, a massive amount of extra work for very little
| benefit. There are loads of FOSS maintainers trapped
| spending as much time managing their communities as they do
| their actual projects and many of us just don't have time
| for that.
| hollowturtle wrote:
| I can't buy it because for many people like you it's always
| the other that uses the tools wrong, proving the contrary for
| skeptics that keep getting bad results from llms it simply is
| impossible with this narrative as the base of the discourse,
| eg "you're not using it well". I don't even get why you need
| to praise yourself so much being really good at using these
| tools, if not for building some tech influencer status around
| here... same thing I believe antirez is trying to do(who
| knows why)
| camel-cdr wrote:
| How many thing you learned working with LLMs in 2022 are
| relevant today? How many things you learned now are relevant
| in the future?
| quitit wrote:
| You're right, it's difficult to get "left behind" when the
| tools and workflows are being constantly reinvented.
|
| You'd be sage with your time just to keep a high-level view
| until workflows become stable and aren't advancing every few
| months.
|
| The time to consider mastering a workflow is when a casual user
| of the "next release" wouldn't trivially supersede your
| capabilities.
|
| Similarly we're still in the race to produce a "good enough"
| GenAI, so there isn't value in mastering anything right now
| unless you've already got a commercial need for it.
|
| This all reminds me of a time when people were putting in
| serious effort to learn Palm Pilot's Graffiti handwriting
| recognition, only for the skill to be made redundant even
| before they were proficient at it.
| nicce wrote:
| > What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI
| train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an
| early adopter have for AI tools?
|
| Replace that with anything and you will notice that people who
| are building startups in this area will want to bring the
| narrative like that as it usually highly increases the value of
| their companies. When narrative gets big enough, then big
| companies must follow - or they look like "lagging behind".
| Whether the current thing brings value or not. It is a fire
| that keeps feeding itself. In the end, when it gets big enough
| - we call it as bubble. Bubble that may explode. Or not.
|
| Whether the end user gets actual value or not, is just side
| effect. But everyone wants to believe that that it brings value
| - otherwise they were foolish to jump in the train.
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm trying not to fall for it, but when I try ai to write code it
| fails more often than not - at least for me. some people claim it
| does everything but I keep finding major problems. Even when it
| writes something that works often I can't explain that in 2026 we
| should be using smart pointers (C++) or what ever the modern
| thing
| criddell wrote:
| Same here. I've had limited success getting AIs to do very
| simple stuff. Every one I've tried invents APIs that don't
| exist and eventually get stuck in a circle where it tells me to
| try A. When that doesn't work, try B. No luck? Try C. Hmmm my
| apologies, try A. Lather, rinse, repeat.
| simonw wrote:
| Are you using a coding agent running in auto-approve mode?
|
| If so then _none of this matters_ , because it will run
| through that lather-rinse-repeat loop itself in less than a
| minute.
| criddell wrote:
| No, I haven't tried that yet. I don't really want to turn
| on auto mode when it's iterating on my credit card and it
| looks like it's in an infinite loop... Is that a silly
| thing to be worried about?
|
| I work mostly in C++ (MFC applications on Windows) and
| assembly language (analyzing crash reports).
|
| For the C++ work, the AIs do all kinds of unsafe things
| like casting away constness or doing hacks to expose
| private class internals. What they give me is sometimes
| enough to get unstuck though which is nice.
|
| For crash reports (a disassembly around the crash site and
| a stack trace) they are pretty useless and that's coming
| from someone who considers himself to be a total novice at
| assembly. (Looking to up my x64 / WinDbg game and any
| pointers to resources would be appreciated!)
|
| I do prototyping in Python and Claude is excellent at that.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> No, I haven't tried that yet. I don't really want to
| turn on auto mode when it's iterating on my credit card
| and it looks like it's in an infinite loop... Is that a
| silly thing to be worried about?
|
| Yeah. Most AIs today are pretty good at detecting that
| they're in a loop and aren't making progress. When that
| happens, they either take a different approach, or stop
| and say they are stuck. But, if you're _really_ worried
| about it, you can cap monthly spend on the billing page
| of virtually every AI provider.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| We are 5 years in... it's fine to be sceptical. The model
| advancements are in the single digits now. It's not on us that
| they promised the world 3 years ago. It's fine and will be just
| fine for the next few years. A real breakthrough is at least
| another 5 years away and if it comes everything you do now will
| be obsolete. Nobody will need or care about the dude that
| Sloperatored Claude Code on release and that's the reality
| everyone who goes full AI evangelist needs to understand. You are
| just a stopgap. The knowledge you are accumulating now is just
| worthless transitional knowledge. There is no need for FOMO and
| there is nothing hard operating LLMs for coding and it will get
| easier by the day.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| Where we're at is a lot better than we expected to be three
| years ago TBH.
| baq wrote:
| I haven't been listening to any promises, I'm simply trying out
| the models as they get released. I agree with the article
| wholeheartedly - you can't pretend these tools are not worth
| learning anymore. It's irresponsible if you're a professional.
|
| Next breakthrough will happen in 2030 or it might happen next
| Tuesday; it might have already happened, it's just that the lab
| which did it is too scared to release it. It doesn't matter:
| until it happens, you should work with what you've got.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| I would have wholeheartedly agreed with this comment one year
| ago. Now, not so much.
| danielbln wrote:
| 5 years ago we had GPT-3, not even instruction-following GPT
| yet, a mere completion model. ChatGPT release was late 2022 (3
| years ago). True agentic systems with reliable tool calling in
| a loop, that came maybe a year ago, agentic coding harnesses
| less than a year ago.
|
| Model improvements may have flattened, the quality improvements
| due to engineering work around those models certainly have not.
|
| If we always wait for technology to calcify and settle before
| we interact with it, then that would be rather boring for some
| of us. Acquiring knowledge is not really that much of a heavy
| burden that it's an issue if it's outdated a year in . But
| that's maybe just a mindset thing.
| phtrivier wrote:
| How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking over
| manual coding ? Would we see an increase in the number of GitHub
| projects ? In the number of stars (given the ai is so good) ? In
| the number of start up ipos (surely if all your engineers are
| 1000x engineers thanks to Claude code, we'll have plenty of
| googles and Amazons to invest in) ? In the price of software (if
| I can just vibe code everything, than a 10$ fully compatible
| replacement for MS Windows is just a few months away, right ?) In
| the the numbers of app published in the stores ?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Plot twist: the bottleneck when you have a development force
| multiplier is __MARKETING__. If you develop at 10X the rate,
| you still have to grind/growth marketing. Unmarketed products
| might as well not exist, even if they're fantastic.
|
| Github stars? That's 100% marketing. Shit that clears a low
| quality bar can rack up stars like crazy just by being well
| marketed.
|
| Number of startups? That's 100% marketing. Investors put money
| into products that have traction, or founders that look
| impressive, and both of those are mostly marketing.
|
| People actually are vibe coding stuff rather than using SaaS
| though, that one's for real. Your example is hyperbolic, but
| the Tailwind scenario is just one example of AI putting
| pressure on products.
| falloutx wrote:
| You cant vibe code users or traction. If you make they will
| come is not a strategy for 2026. In fact, the amount of money
| needed for marketing will wipe out any savings from not
| having a Software dev.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If you make they will come has never been a valid strategy.
| And marketing is fucking miserable now because of the
| proliferation low quality software people are trying to
| turn into SaaS.
|
| If you don't have a halo already, you need to be blessed or
| you're just going to suffer. Getting a good mention by
| someone like Theo or SimonW >> 1000 well written articles.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Someone should really take AI to these task. Let the agents
| run wild. Let them astroturf every possible platform in
| existence. Especially like this one here HN. Insert marketing
| messages to every post and every thread.
|
| There is not bad publicity. More you spam more you will be
| noticed. Human attention is limited. So grab as much as you
| can. And also this helps your product name to get into
| training data and thus later in LLM outputs.
|
| Even more ideas. When you find an email address. Spam that
| too. Get your message out multiple times to each address.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| HN has been astroturfed for a while. Ever notice low
| quality linkedin blogspam that hits the front page before
| people would even have had time to finish reading it?
|
| It's hard to disambiguate this from people who have a
| "fanbase." People will upvote stuff from people like simonw
| sight unseen without reading. I'd like to do a study on HN
| where you hide the author, to see how upvote patterns
| change, in order to demonstrate the "halo" benefit.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| I get annoyed that no one mentions software for just the
| user. Part of the joy of programming is making stuff you want
| not just to sell or to get famous. I vibe coded so many
| chrome extensions I lost count. Most apply just to one site,
| they save me one click or something. It's fun!
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| Wouldn't it be easier and/or faster to create a userscript?
| I've "vibe coded" tens myself, but never really saw the use
| case for making a full extension out of any of them.
| Genuinly curious what you made.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| I allegedly know someone who allegedly uses a pirating
| site for watching the NFL. The site has every kind of
| clickjacking and malwarey trick. The extension makes only
| the correct buttons work, the volume controls the volume,
| the full screen button controls the screen size etc.
|
| Another one (I've open sourced, you can check it out here
| https://github.com/luvchurchill/mani-gpg) A site I use
| (manifold.markets) announced they are getting rid of DMs
| due to spam (they've since brought it back) so I made an
| extension which makes it easy to use pgp & age encryption
| on the site so we can do pseudo DMs. It injects "Decrypt"
| buttons next to exncrypted text etc etc. You can see
| screenshots at https://manifold.markets/post/an-
| extension-to-assist-with-so...
|
| (Look at the comments for the latest look)
|
| Besides for that, there are a few I'm sure can be scripts
| falloutx wrote:
| I was looking my homebrewed product hunt data and this week we
| had 5000 projects submitted, in 5 days. Thats more than a
| entire month in 2018.
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| > How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking
| over manual coding ?
|
| Instead of asking "where are the AI-generated projects" we
| could ask about the easier problem of "where are the AI-
| generated ports". Why is it still hard to take an existing
| fully concrete specification, and an existing test suite, and
| dump out a working feature-complete port of huge, old, and
| popular projects? Lots of stuff like this will even be in the
| training set, so the fact that this isn't easy yet must mean
| something.
|
| According to claude, wordpress is still 43% of all the websites
| on the internet and PHP has been despised by many people for
| many years and many reasons. Why no python or ruby portage?
| Harder but similar, throw in drupal, mediawiki, and wonder when
| can we automatically port the linux kernel to rust, etc.
| simonw wrote:
| > Why is it still hard to take an existing fully concrete
| specification, and an existing test suite, and dump out a
| working feature-complete port of huge, old, and popular
| projects? Lots of stuff like this will even be in the
| training
|
| We have a smaller version of that ability already:
|
| - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/
|
| See also https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/01/08/a-software-
| library-with-...
|
| I need to write these up properly, but I pulled a similar
| trick with an existing JavaScript test suite for
| https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript and the official
| WebAssembly test suite for https://github.com/simonw/pwasm
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| So extrapolating from here and assuming applications are as
| easy as libraries, operating systems are as easy as
| applications.. at this rate with a few people in a weekend
| you can convert anything to anything else, and the
| differences between different programming languages are
| very nearly effectively erased. Nice!
|
| And yet it doesn't _feel_ true yet, otherwise we 'd see it.
| Why do you think that is?
| simonw wrote:
| Because it's not true yet. You can't convert anything to
| anything else, but you CAN get good results for problems
| that can be reduced to a robust conformance suite.
|
| (This capability is also brand new: prior to Claude Opus
| 4.5 in November I wasn't getting results from coding
| agents that convinced me they could do this.)
|
| It turns out there are some pretty big problems that
| works for, like HTML5 parsers and WebAssembly runtimes
| and reduced-scoped JavaScript language interpreters. You
| have to be selective though. This won't work for Linux.
|
| I thought it wouldn't work for web browsers either - one
| of my 2026 predictions was "by 2029 someone will build a
| new web browser using mostly LLM-code"[1] - but then I
| saw this thread on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthro
| pic/comments/1q4xfm0/over_chr... "Over christmas break I
| wrote a fully functional browser with Claude Code in
| Rust" and took a look at the code and it's surprisingly
| deep: https://github.com/hiwavebrowser/hiwave
|
| [1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/llm-predictions-
| for-202...
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| > you CAN get good results for problems that can be
| reduced to a robust conformance suite.
|
| If that's what is shown then why doesn't it work on
| anything that has a sufficiently large test-suite,
| presumably scaling linearly in time with size? Why should
| we be selective, and based on what?
| simonw wrote:
| It probably does. This only become possible over the last
| six weeks, and most people haven't yet figured out the
| pattern.
| yobbo wrote:
| > How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking
| over manual coding ?
|
| Falling salaries?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| All the other tools before that made programming more
| efficient results in rising salaries. I imagine salaries
| would only fall if AI can 100% replace a human, which
| currently it cannot. It remains to be seen what happens in
| the future of course.
|
| Remember that an average software engineer only spends around
| 25% of their time coding.
| galdauts wrote:
| I feel like the use of the term "anti-AI hype" is not really
| fully explored here. Even limiting myself to tech-related
| applications - I'm frankly sick of companies trying to shove
| half-baked "AI features" down my throat, and the enshittification
| of services that ensues. That has little to do with using LLMs as
| coding assistants, and yet I think it is still an essential part
| of the "anti-AI hype".
| falloutx wrote:
| The dreaded summarize feature, its in places you wouldn't
| expect, and not to mention the whole lets record every meeting
| and then summarize it for leaders. Big Brother in work is back
| and its even more powerful.
| chrz wrote:
| > How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by
| LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, because I see this as a
| continuation of what I tried to do all my life: democratizing
| code, systems, knowledge. LLMs are going to help us to write
| better software, faster, and will allow small teams to have a
| chance to compete with bigger companies.
|
| You might feel great, thats fine, but I dont. And software
| quality is going down, I wouldn't agree that LLMs will help write
| better software
| adityaathalye wrote:
| Don't fall into the "Look ma, no hands" hype.
|
| Antirez + LLM + CFO = Billion Dollar Redis company, quite
| plausibly.
|
| /However/ ...
|
| As for the delta provided by an LLM to Antirez, outside of Redis
| (and outside of any problem space he is already intimately
| familiar with), an Apples to Apples comparison would be he trying
| this on an equally complex codebase he has no idea about. I'll
| bet... what Antirez can do with Redis and LLMs (certainly useful,
| huge Quality of Life improvement to Antirez), he cannot even
| begin to do with (say) Postgres.
|
| The only way to get there with (say) Postgres, would be to /know/
| Postgres. And pretty much everyone, no matter how good, cannot
| get there with code-reading alone. With software at least, we
| need to develop a mental model of the thing by futzing about with
| the thing in deeply meaningful ways.
|
| And most of us day-job grunts are in the latter spot... working
| in some grimy legacy multi-hundred-thousand line code-mine, full
| of NPM vulns, schelpping code over the wall to QA (assuming there
| is even a QA), and basically developing against live customers
| --- "learn by shipping", as they say.
|
| I _do_ think LLMs are wildly interesting technology, however they
| are poor utility for non-domain-experts. If organisations want to
| _profit_ from the fully-loaded cost of LLM technology, they
| better also invest heavily in staff training and development.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Exactly. AI is minimally useful for coding something that you
| couldn't have been able to code yourself, given enough time,
| without explicitly investing time in generic learning not
| specific to that codebase or particular task.
|
| Although calling AI "just autocomplete" is almost a slur now,
| it really is just that in the sense that you need to A) have a
| decent mental picture of what you want, and, B) recognize a
| correct output when you see it.
|
| On a tangent, the inability to identify correct output is also
| why I don't recommend using LLMs to teach you anything serious.
| When we use a search engine to learn something, we know when
| we've stumbled upon a really good piece of pedagogy through
| various signals like information density, logical consistency,
| structuredness/clarity of thought, consensus, reviews, author's
| credentials etc. But with LLMs we lose these critical analysis
| signals.
| teeeew wrote:
| Absolutely spot on.
|
| You are calling out the and subtle nuance that many don't
| get...
| deadbabe wrote:
| You could have another LLM tell you which is the correct
| output.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| ... and then a third one to check wether the second one was
| right. then a forth one to... o wait
| avbanks wrote:
| I've been trying to articulate this exact point. The problem
| w/ LLM's is that at times they are very capable but always
| unreliable.
| falloutx wrote:
| if you are very high up the chain like Linus, i think doing
| vibe coding gives you more feedback than any average dev. So
| they are having a positive feedback loop.
|
| For most of us vibe coding gives 0 advantage. Our software will
| just sit there and get no views and producing it faster means
| nothing. In fact, it just scares us that some exec is gonna
| look at this and write us for low performance because they saw
| someone do the same thing we are doing in 2 days instead of 4.
| crote wrote:
| Except that Linus does basically zero programming these days.
| He's a manager, combining code from the subsystem managers
| below him into a final release.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| Right, but Linus also has an extremely refined mental model
| of the project he maintains, and has built up a lot of
| skills reading code.
|
| Most engineers in my experience are much less skillful at
| reading code than writing code. What I've seen so far with
| use of LLM tools is a bunch of minimally edited LLM
| produced content that was not properly critiqued.
| simonw wrote:
| Here's some of the code antirez described in the OP, if
| you want to see what expert usage of Claude Code looks
| like: https://github.com/antirez/linenoise/commit/c12b66d
| 25508bd70... and https://github.com/antirez/linenoise/com
| mit/a7b86c17444227aa...
| yobbo wrote:
| This looks more worrying than impressive. It's long files
| of code with if-statements and flag-checking unicode bit
| patterns, with an enormous number of potential test-
| cases.
|
| It's not conceptually challenging to understand, but time
| consuming to write, test, and trust. Having an LLM write
| these types of things can save time, but please don't
| trust it blindly.
| falloutx wrote:
| I see dividing the tests and code into two different
| changes is pretty nice, In fact I have been using double
| agent thing where one is writing tests and other is
| writing the code, solves the attention issue also.
| Although the code itself looks harder to read, but that
| is probably more on me than Claude.
| conorcleary wrote:
| Less a 'chain' or hierarchy than a lecture hall with cliques.
| Many of the 'influencers', media personalities, infamous,
| famous, anyone with a recognizable name - for the most part -
| was introduced to the tsunami wave of [new tech] at the same
| time. They may come with advantages, but it's how they get
| back to the 'top' (for your chain) vs. staying up there.
| conorcleary wrote:
| For a while now I've felt that there's an apathy in:
| there's more content being created than consumed.
| falloutx wrote:
| this is true, like 90% of projects submitted on product
| hunt have 1 vote or less.
| conorcleary wrote:
| I've set the bar so low that getting a reply to that was
| already unexpected.
| falloutx wrote:
| Lmao, me too, the internet has become a single player
| game at this point. I usually just type and forget.
| rightbyte wrote:
| There is a lot of "attention" to go around for small
| group interactions like this subthread. Like a bar chat I
| guess.
| CraftingLinks wrote:
| Keep believing. To the bitter end. For such human slop
| codebases AI slop additions will do equally fine. Add good
| testing and the code might even improve over the garbage that
| came before.
| ruszki wrote:
| Generating also the tests happens a little bit too often for
| any kind of improvement. simonw posted here a generated
| "something" the other day, which he didn't know whether it's
| really working or not, but he was happy that his generated,
| completely unchecked tests are green, and yet some other root
| commenter here praises him.
|
| It needs a lot of work to not be skeptical, when when I try
| it, it generates shit, especially when I want something
| completely new, not existing anywhere, and also when these
| people when they show how they work with it, it always turns
| out that it's on the scale of terrible to bad.
|
| I also use AI, but I don't allow it to touch my code, because
| I'm disgusted by its code quality. I ask it, and sometimes it
| delivers, but mostly not.
| simonw wrote:
| Which thing was that?
|
| (If you need help finding it try visiting
| https://tools.simonwillison.net/hn-comments-for-user and
| searching for simonw - you can then search my 1,000 most
| recent comments in one place.)
|
| If my tests are green then it tells me a LOT about what the
| software is capable of, even if I haven't reviewed every
| line of the implementation.
|
| The next step is to actually start using it for real
| problems. That should very quickly shake out any
| significant or minor issues that sneaked past the automated
| tests.
|
| I've started thinking about this by comparing it to work
| I've done within larger companies. My team would make use
| of code written by other teams without reviewing everything
| those other teams had written. If their tests passed we
| would build against their stuff, and if their stuff turned
| out not to work we would let them know or help debug and
| fix it ourselves.
| thunky wrote:
| > And pretty much everyone, no matter how good, cannot get
| there with code-reading alone. With software at least, we need
| to develop a mental model of the thing by futzing about with
| the thing in deeply meaningful ways
|
| LLMs help with that part too. As Antirez says:
|
| _Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now
| a lot more interesting to understand what to do, and how to do
| it (and, about this second part, LLMs are great partners,
| too)._
| adityaathalye wrote:
| How to "understand" what to do?
|
| How to know the "how to do it" is sensible? (sensible = the
| product will produce the expected outcome within the expected
| (or tolerable) error bars?)
| thunky wrote:
| > How to "understand" what to do?
|
| How did you ever know? It's not like everyone always wrote
| perfect code up until now.
|
| Nothing has changed, except now you have a "partner" to
| help you along with your understanding.
| adityaathalye wrote:
| Well, I have a whole blog post of an answer for you:
| https://www.evalapply.org/posts/tools-for-thought/
|
| Who "knows"?
|
| It's who has a world-model. It's who can evaluate input
| signal against said world-model. Which requires an
| ability to generate questions, probe the nature of
| reality, and do experiments to figure out what's what.
| And it's who can alter their world-model using
| experiences collected from the back-and-forth.
| bodegajed wrote:
| Yes most c-level executives (who often have to report to a
| board) have tendencies to predict the future after using claude
| code. It didn't happen in 2025 yet they still insist. While
| their senior engineers are still working at the production
| code.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| >> ...however they are poor utility for non-domain-experts.
|
| IDK, just two days ago I had a bug report/fix accepted by a
| project which I would have never dreamt of digging into as what
| it does is way outside my knowledge base. But Claude got right
| on in there and found the problem after a few rounds of printf
| debugging which lead to an assertion we would have hit with a
| debug build which led to the solution. Easy peasy and I still
| have no idea how the other library does its thing at all as
| Claude was using it to do this other thing.
| keeda wrote:
| What "domain expert" means is also changing however.
|
| As I've mentioned often, I'm solving problems in a domain I had
| minimal background in before. However, that domain is computer
| vision. So I can literally "see" if the code works or not!
|
| To expand, I've set up tests, benchmarks and tools that
| generate results as images. I chat with the LLM about a
| specific problem at hand, it presents various solutions, I pick
| a promising approach, it writes the code, I run the tests which
| almost always pass, but if they don't, I can hone in on the
| problem quickly with a visual check of the relevant images.
|
| This has allowed me to make progress despite my lack of
| background. Interestingly, I've now built up some domain
| knowledge through learning by doing and experimenting (and
| soon, shipping)!
|
| These days I think an agent could execute this whole loop by
| itself by "looking" at the test and result images itself. I've
| uploaded test images to the LLM and we had technical
| conversations about them as if it "saw" them like a human.
| However, there are ton of images and I don't want to burn the
| tokens at this point.
|
| The upshot is, if you can set up a way of reliably testing and
| validating the LLM's output, you could still achieve things in
| an unfamiliar domain without prior expertise.
|
| Taking your Postgres example, it's a heavily tested and
| benchmarked project. I would bet someone like Antirez would be
| able to jump in and do original, valid work using AI very
| quickly, because even if hasn't futzed with Postgres code, he
| HAS futzed with a LOT of other code and hence has a deep
| intuition about software architecture in general.
|
| So this is what I meant by the meaning of "domain expert"
| changing. The required skills have become a lot more
| fundamental. Maybe the only required skills are intuition about
| software engineering, critical thinking, and basic knowledge of
| statistics and the scientific method.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > Whatever you believe about what the Right Thing should be, you
| can't control it by refusing what is happening right now.
| Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career. Think about
| it. Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a
| five minutes test where you can just reinforce your own beliefs.
|
| This is the advice I've been giving my friends and coworkers as
| well for a while now. Forget the hype, just take time to test
| them from time to time. See where it's at. And "prepare" for
| what's to come, as best you can.
|
| Another thing to consider. If you casually look into it by just
| reading about it, be aware that almost everything you read in
| "mainstream" places has been wrong in 2025. The people covering
| this, writing about this, producing content on this have
| different goals in this era. They need hits, likes, shares and
| reach. They don't get that with accurate reporting. And, sadly,
| negativity sells. It is what it is.
|
| THe only way to get an accurate picture is to try them yourself.
| The earlier you do that, the better you'll be. And a note on
| signals: right now, a "positive" signal is more valuable for you
| than many "negative" ones. Read those and try to understand the
| what, if not the how. "I did this with cc" is much more valuable
| today than "x still doesn't do y reliably".
| esperent wrote:
| > But I'm worried for the folks that will get fired. It is not
| clear what the dynamic at play will be: will companies try to
| have more people, and to build more?
|
| This is the crux. AI suddenly became good and society hasn't
| caught on yet. Programmers are a bit ahead of the curve here,
| being closer to the action of AI. But in a couple of years, if
| not already, all the other technical and office jobs will be
| equally affected. Translators, admin, marketing, scientists,
| writers of all sorts and on and on. Will we just produce more and
| retain a similar level of employment, or will AI be such a force
| multiplier that a significant number or even most of these jobs
| will be gone? Nobody knows yet.
|
| And yet, what I'm even more worried about for their society
| upending abilities, is robots. These are coming soon and they'll
| arrive with just as much suddeness and inertia as AI did.
|
| The robots will be as smart as the AI running them, so what
| happens when they're cheap and smart enough to replace humans in
| nearly all physical jobs?
|
| Nobody knows the answer to this. But in 5 years, or 10, we will
| find out.
| falloutx wrote:
| In one of the scenarios programmers get replaced then the
| progress slows, thus saving jobs of writers, lawyers,
| marketing, scientists, artists. At this point I am okay with
| that scenario seeing how programmers have showed no solidarity
| while every other field has been rejecting AI. Lawyers have
| even started hiring junior lawyers back and Art industry has
| basically shoved AI into a bin of irrelevance.
| esperent wrote:
| > Art industry
|
| I don't agree, unless by "art industry" what you actually
| mean is "art establishment".
|
| If we broaden it to mean "anywhere that money is paid, or
| used to be paid, to people for any kind of artistic endeavor"
| - even if we limit that to things related to drawing,
| painting, illustrating, graphic design, 3d design etc. - then
| AI is definitely replacing or augmenting a ton of human work.
| Just go on any Photoshop forum. It's all about AI now, just
| like everywhere else.
| yard2010 wrote:
| This is making me sad. The people that are going to lose their
| jobs will be literally weaponized against minorities by the
| crooked politicians that are doing their thing right now, it's
| going to be a disaster I can tell. I just wish I could go back in
| time. I don't want to live in this timeline anymore. I lost my
| passion job before anything of it even happened. On the paper.
| falloutx wrote:
| We already may have hit the point where easier it is to make
| software, harder it is to sell (or make money from it).
|
| There is no way I can convince a user that my vibe coded
| version of Todolist is better than 100 other made this week
| tim333 wrote:
| Industries have come and gone for centuries and it doesn't
| always go horribly wrong.
| artemonster wrote:
| I see AI effect as exact opposite, a turbo version of "lisp
| curse".
| senko wrote:
| The anti-AI hype, in the context of software development, seems
| to focus on a few things:
|
| > _AI code is slop, therefore you shouldn 't use it_
|
| You should learn how to responsibly use it as a tool, not a
| replacement for you. This can be done, people are doing it,
| people like Salvatore (antirez), Mitchell (of Terraform/Ghostty
| fame), Simon (swillison) and many others are publicly talking
| about it.
|
| > _AI can 't code XYZ_
|
| It's not all-or-nothing. Use it where it works for you, don't use
| it where it doesn't. And btw, do check that you actually
| described the problem well. Slop-in, slop-out. Not sayin' this is
| always the case, but turns out it's the case surprisingly often.
| Just sayin'
|
| > _AI will atrophy your skills, or prevent you from learning new
| ones, therefore you shouldn 't use it_
|
| Again, you should know where and how to use it. Don't tune out
| while doing coding. Don't just skim the generated code. Be
| curious, take your time. This is entirely up to you.
|
| > _AI takes away the fun part (coding) and intensifies the boring
| (management)_
|
| I love programming but TBH, for non-toy projects that need to go
| into production, at least three quarters are boring boilerplate.
| And making _that_ part interesting is one of the _worst_ things
| you can do in software development! That path lies resume-driven
| development, architecture astronautics, abusing design patterns
| du jour, and other sins that will make code maintenance on that
| thing a nightmare! You want boring, stable, simple. AI excels at
| that. Then you can focus on the small tiny bit that 's fun and
| hand-craft that!
|
| Also, you can always code for fun. Many people with boring coding
| jobs code for fun in the evenings. AI changes nothing here
| (except possibly improving the day job drudgery).
|
| > _AI is financially unsustainable, companies are losing money_
|
| Perhaps, and we're probably in the bubble. Doesn't detract from
| the fact that these things exist, are here now, work. OpenAI and
| Anthropic can go out of business tomorrow, the few TB of weights
| will be easily reused by someone else. The tech will stay.
|
| > _AI steals your open source code, therefore you shouldn 't
| write open-source_
|
| Well, use AI to write your closed-source code. You don't _need_
| to open source anything if you 're worried someone (AI or human)
| will steal it. If you don't want to use something on moral
| grounds, that's a perfectly fine thing to do. Others may have
| different opinion on this.
|
| > _AI will kill your open source business, therefore you shouldn
| 't write open-source_
|
| Open source is not a business model (I've been saying this for
| longer than median user of this site has been alive). AI doesn't
| change that.
|
| As @antirez points out, you can use AI or not, but don't go
| hiding under a rock and then being surprised in a few years when
| you come out and find the software development profession
| completely unrecognizable.
| zahlman wrote:
| > at least three quarters are boring boilerplate. And making
| that part interesting is one of the worst things you can do in
| software development! That path lies resume-driven development,
| architecture astronautics, abusing design patterns du jour, and
| other sins that will make code maintenance on that thing a
| nightmare!
|
| You apparently see "making the boilerplate interesting" as
| doing a bunch of overengineering. Strange. To my mind, the
| overengineering is _part of_ the boilerplate. "Making the
| boilerplate interesting" in my mind is not possible; but rather
| the goal is to fix the system such that it _doesn 't require_
| boilerplate any more. (Sometimes that just means a different
| implementation language.)
| senko wrote:
| I agree with what you said, but I think we might be talking
| about slightly different things. Let me give a few examples
| in an attempt to better explain myself:
|
| A company I worked with a while ago had a microservices
| architecture, and have decided to not use one of a few
| standard API serialization/deserialization options, but write
| their own, because was going to be more performant, easier to
| maintain, better fit for their use case. A few years on,
| after having grown organically to support all the edge cases,
| it's more convoluted, slower, and buggy than if they went
| with the boring option that ostensibly had "a bit more
| boilerplate" from the start.
|
| A second example is from a friend, whose coworker decided to
| write a backend-agnostic, purpose-agnostic, data-agnostic
| message broker/routing library. They spent a few months of
| this, delivered a beautifully architected solution in a few
| dozen k lines of code. The problem is the solution solves
| many problems the company didnt and wouldn't have, and will
| be a maintenance drag from then forevermore. Meanwhile, they
| could have done it in a few hundred lines of code that would
| be coupled to the problem domain, but still farily decend
| from most people's point of view.
|
| These two are from real projects. But you can also notice
| that in general people are often picking a fancy solution
| over a boring one, ostensibly because it has something "out
| of the box". The price of the "out of the box"-ness (aside
| from potential SaaS/infra costs and vendor lock in), is that
| you now need to adapt your own code to work with the mental
| model (domain) of the fancy solution.
|
| Or to harp on something trivial, you end up depending on
| left-pad because writing it yourself was boring.
|
| > fix the system such that it doesn't require boilerplate any
| more.
|
| I think perhaps I used a more broad meaning for "boilerplate"
| than you had in mind. If we're talking about boilerplate as
| enumerating all the exceptions a Java method may raise, or
| whatever unholy sad thing we have to do in C to use
| GTK/GObject, then I agree.
|
| But I also meant something more closer to "glue code that
| isn't the primary carrier of value of the project", or to
| misuse financial language in this context, the code that's a
| cost center, not a profit center.
| kace91 wrote:
| >Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn coding,
| and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire
| inside you, when you coded till night to see your project
| working? It was building. And now you can build more and better,
| if you find your way to use AI effectively. The fun is still
| there, untouched.
|
| I wonder if I'm the odd one out or if this is a common sentiment:
| I don't give a shit about building, frankly.
|
| I like programming as a puzzle and the ability to understand a
| complex system. "Look at all the things I created in a weekend"
| sounds to me like "look at all the weight I moved by bringing a
| forklift to the gym!". Even ignoring the part that there is
| barely a "you" in this success, there is not really any interest
| at all for me in the output itself.
|
| This point is completely orthogonal to the fact that we still
| need to get paid to live, and in that regard I'll do what pays
| the bills, but I'm surprised by the amount of programmers that
| are completely happy with doing away with the programming part.
| falloutx wrote:
| Learning, solving puzzles and understanding something was a
| bigger desire for me than building another to-do list. In fact,
| most of my building effort has been used by corporations to
| make software worse for users.
| simonw wrote:
| Interestingly, I read "I like programming as a puzzle and the
| ability to understand a complex system." and thought that you
| were about to argue in favor of AI-assisted programming!
|
| I enjoy those things about programming too, which is why I'm
| having so much fun using LLMs. They introduce new layers of
| complex system understanding and problem solving (at that AI
| meta-layer), and let me dig into and solve harder and more
| time-consuming problems than I was able to without them.
| kace91 wrote:
| >They introduce new layers of complex system understanding
| and problem solving (at that AI meta-layer), and let me dig
| into and solve harder and more time-consuming problems than I
| was able to without them.
|
| This is not my experience at all. My experience is that the
| moment I stop using them as google or search on steroids and
| let them generate code, I start losing the grip of what is
| being built.
|
| As in, when it's time for a PR, I never feel 100% confident
| that I'm requesting a review on something solid. I can listen
| to that voice and sort of review myself before going public,
| but that usually takes as much time as writing myself and is
| way less fun, or I can just submit and be dishonest since
| then I'm dropping that effort into a teammate.
|
| In other words, I feel that the productivity gain only comes
| if you're willing to remove yourself from the picture and let
| others deal with any consequence. I'm not.
| simonw wrote:
| Clearly you and I are having different experiences here.
|
| Maybe a factor here is that I've invested a _huge_ amount
| of effort over the last ~10 years in getting better at
| reading code?
|
| I used to hate reading code. Then I found myself spending
| more time in corporate life reviewing code then writing it
| myself... and then I realized the huge unlock I could get
| from using GitHub search to find examples of the things I
| wanted to do, I'd only I could overcome my aversion to
| reading the resulting search results!
|
| When LLMs came along they fit my style of working much
| better than they would have earlier in my career.
| kace91 wrote:
| I mean, I wouldn't say that's a personal limitation. I
| read and review code on the daily and have done so for
| years.
|
| The point is exactly that, that ai feels like reviewing
| other people's code, only worse because bad ai written
| code mimics good code in a way that bad human code
| doesn't, and because you don't get the human factor of
| mentoring someone when you see they lack a skill.
|
| If I wanted to do that for a living it's always been an
| option, being the "architect" overseeing a group of
| outsourced devs for example. But I stay as individual
| contributor for doing quite different work.
| simonw wrote:
| > The point is exactly that, that ai feels like reviewing
| other people's code, only worse because bad ai written
| code mimics good code in a way that bad human code
| doesn't, and because you don't get the human factor of
| mentoring someone when you see they lack a skill.
|
| Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
|
| I've certainly felt the "mimics good code" thing in the
| past. It's been less of a problem for me recently, maybe
| because I've started forcing Claude Code into a red/green
| TDD cycle for almost everything which makes it much less
| likely to write code that it hasn't at least executed via
| the tests.
|
| The mentoring thing is really interesting - it's clearly
| the biggest difference between working with a coding
| agent and coaching a human collaborator.
|
| I've managed to get a weird simulacrum of that by telling
| the coding agents to take notes as they work - I even
| tried "add to a til.md document of things you learned" on
| a recent project - and then condensing those lessons into
| an AGENTS.md later on.
| bakugo wrote:
| > LLMs are going to help us to write better software
|
| No, I really don't think they will. Software has only been
| getting worse, and LLMs are accelerating the rate at which
| incompetent developers can pump out low quality code they don't
| understand and can't possibly improve.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Exactly. Many of us have learned, after decades of experience,
| that more code and more features is not a net positive. Lots of
| additional code is a liability that your carefully accept given
| the value it provides.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a
| five minutes test where you can just reinforce your own beliefs.
| Find a way to multiply yourself, and if it does not work for you,
| try again every few months.
|
| I've been taking a proper whack at the tree every 6 months or so.
| This time it seems like it might actually fall over. Every prior
| attempt I could barely justify spending $10-20 in API credits
| before it was obvious I was wasting my time. I spent $80 on
| tokens last night and I'm still not convinced it won't work.
|
| Whether or not AI is morally acceptable is a debate I wish I had
| the luxury of engaging in. I don't think rejecting it would allow
| me to serve any good other than in my own mind. It's really easy
| to have certain views when you can afford to. Most of us don't
| have the privilege of rejecting the potential that this
| technology affords. We can complain about it but it won't change
| what our employers decide to do.
|
| Walk the game theory for 5 minutes. This is a game of musical
| chairs. We really wish it isn't. But it is. And we need to
| consider the implications of that. It might be better to join the
| "bad guys" if you actually want to help those around you. Perhaps
| even become the worst bad guy and beat the rest of them to a
| functional Death Star. Being unemployed is not a great position
| to be in if you wish to assist your allies. Big picture, you
| could fight AI downstream by capitalizing on it near term. No one
| is keeping score. You might be in your own head, but you are
| allowed to change that whenever you want.
| falloutx wrote:
| Wouldn't a lot of us become unemployed anyway if there are 75%
| less jobs? I don't see how I can use AI better than other
| people. People who keep their jobs are also not in for a fun
| time when they will be responsible for 4x the surface. And if
| you are not in top 7 companies, your company might not fire you
| but get bankrupt in a couple of years because all the
| investment is hogged by the top7. This is more of a lose-lose
| situation.
| akomtu wrote:
| > Big picture, you could fight AI downstream by capitalizing on
| it near term.
|
| Trying to beat a demon long term by making a contract with it
| short term?
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| Let's maybe avoid _all_ the hype, whether it is for or against,
| and just have thoughtful and measured stances on things? Fairly
| high points for that on this piece, despite the title. It has the
| obligatory remark that manually writing code is pointless now but
| also the obligatory caveat that it depends on the kind of code
| you 're writing.
| vmaurin wrote:
| > facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming forever
|
| Show me these "facts"
| antirez wrote:
| If you can't see this by working with Claude Code for a few
| weeks, I don't want to go into bigger efforts than writing a
| blog post to convince you. It's not a mission, mine. I just
| want to communicate with the part of people that are open
| enough to challenge their ideas and are willing to touch with
| their hands what is happening. Also, if you tried and failed,
| it means that either for your domain AI is not good enough, or
| you are not able to extract the value. The fact is, this does
| not matter: a bigger percentage of programmers is using AI with
| success every day, and as it progresses this will happen more
| and in more diverse programming fields and tasks. If you
| disagree and are happy to avoid LLMs, well, it's ok as well.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| okay, but again: if you say in your blog that those are
| "facts", then... show us the facts?
|
| You can't just hand-wavily say "a bigger percentage of
| programmers is using AI with success every day" and not give
| a link to a study that shows it's true
|
| as a matter of fact, we know that a lot of companies have
| fired people by pretending that they are no longer needed in
| the age of AI... only to re-hire offshored people for much
| cheaper
|
| for now, there hasn't been a documented sudden increase in
| velocity / robustness for code, a few anecdotical cases sure
|
| I use it myself, and I admit it saves some time to develop
| some basic stuff and get a few ideas, but so far nothing
| revolutionary. So let's take it at face value:
|
| - a tech which helps slightly with some tasks (basically "in-
| painting code" once you defined the "border constraints"
| sufficiently well)
|
| - a tech which might cause massive disruption of people's
| livelihoods (and safety) if used incorrectly, which might FAR
| OUTWEIGH the small benefits and be a good enough reason for
| people to fight against AI
|
| - a tech which emits CO2, increases inequalities, depends on
| quasi slave-work of annotators in third-world countries, etc
|
| so you can talk all day long about not dismissing AI, but you
| should take it also with everything that comes with it
| antirez wrote:
| 1. If you can't convince yourself, after downloading Claude
| Code or Codex and playing with them for 1 week, that
| programming is completely revolutionized, there is nothing
| I can do: you have it at your fingertips and you search for
| facts I should communicate for you.
|
| 2. The US alone air conditioning usage is around 4 times
| the energy / CO2 usage of all the world data centers (not
| just AI) combined together. AI is 10% of the data centers
| usage, so just AC is 40 times that.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| 1. "if you can't convince yourself by playing
| anecdotically" is NOT "facts"
|
| 2. it's not because the US is incredibly bad at energy
| spending in AC that it somehow justifies the fact that we
| would add another, mostly unnecessary, polluting source,
| even if it's slightly lower. ACs have existed for
| decades. AI has been exploding for a few years, so we can
| definitely see it go way, way past the AC usage
|
| also the idea is of "accelerationnism". Why do we need
| all this tech? What good does it make to have 10 more
| silly slop AI videos and disinformation campaigns during
| election? Just so that antirez can be a little bit faster
| at doing his code... that's not what the world is about.
|
| Our world should be about humans, connecting together
| (more slowly, not "faster"), about having meaningful
| work, and caring about planetary resources
|
| The exact opposite of what capitalistic accelerationism /
| AI is trying to sell us
| simonw wrote:
| If you can solve "measure programming productivity with
| data" you'll have cracked one of the hardest problems in
| our industry.
|
| > Why do we need all this tech?
|
| Slightly odd question to be asking here on Hacker News!
| oulipo2 wrote:
| Sure, but I wasn't the one pretending to have "facts" on
| AI...
|
| > Slightly odd question to be asking here on Hacker News!
|
| It's absolutely not? The first line of question when you
| work in a domain SHOULD BE "why am I doing this" and
| "what is the impact of my work on others"
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah, I think I quoted you out of context there. I'm very
| much in agreement about asking "what is the impact of my
| work on others".
| lunar_mycroft wrote:
| > If you can solve "measure programming productivity with
| data" you'll have cracked one of the hardest problems in
| our industry.
|
| That doesn't mean that we have to accept claims that LLMs
| drastically increase productivity without good evidence
| (or in the presence of evidence to the contrary). If
| anything, it means the opposite.
| simonw wrote:
| At the is point the best evidence we have is a large
| volume of extremely experienced programmers - like
| antirez - saying "this stuff is amazing for coding
| productivity".
|
| My own personal experience supports that too.
|
| If you're determined to say "I refuse to accept appeal to
| authority here, I demand a solution to the measuring
| productivity problem first" then you're probably in for a
| long wait.
| akomtu wrote:
| This is obviously a collision between our human culture
| and the machine culture, and on the surface its intent is
| evil, as many have guessed already. But what it also does
| is it separates the two sides cleanly, as they want to
| pursue different and wildly incompatible futures. Some
| want to herd sheep, others want to unite with tech, and
| the two can't live under one sky. The AI wedge is a
| necessity in this sense.
| keybits wrote:
| I enjoyed about your blog post, but I was curious about
| the claim in point 2 above. I asked Claude and it seems
| the claim is false:
|
| # Fact-Checking This Climate Impact Claim
|
| Let me break down this claim with actual data:
|
| ## The Numbers
|
| *US Air Conditioning:* - US A/C uses approximately
| *220-240 TWh/year* (2020 EIA data) - This represents
| about 6% of total US electricity consumption
|
| *Global Data Centers:* - Estimated *240-340 TWh/year
| globally* (IEA 2022 reports) - Some estimates go to 460
| TWh including cryptocurrency
|
| *AI's Share:* - AI represents roughly *10-15%* of data
| center energy (IEA estimates this is growing rapidly)
|
| ## Verdict: *The claim is FALSE*
|
| The math doesn't support a 4:1 ratio. US A/C and global
| data centers use *roughly comparable* amounts of energy--
| somewhere between 1:1 and 1:1.5, not 4:1.
|
| The "40 times AI" conclusion would only work if the 4x
| premise were true.
|
| ## Important Caveats
|
| 1. *Measurement uncertainty*: Data center energy use is
| notoriously difficult to measure accurately 2. *Rapid
| growth*: AI energy use is growing much faster than A/C 3.
| *Geographic variation*: This compares one country's A/C
| to global data centers (apples to oranges)
|
| ## Reliable Sources - US EIA (Energy Information
| Administration) for A/C data - IEA (International Energy
| Agency) for data center estimates - Lawrence Berkeley
| National Laboratory studies
|
| The quote significantly overstates the disparity, though
| both are indeed major energy consumers.
| simonw wrote:
| How does widespread access to AI tools increase
| inequalities?
| oulipo2 wrote:
| Because as long as it is done in a capitalistic economy,
| it will be excluding the many from work, while driving
| profits to a few
| AstroBen wrote:
| It's pretty clear that if AI delivers on its promise
| it'll decimate the income of all but the top 1%
| developers
|
| Labor is worth less, capital and equity ownership make
| more or the same
| simonw wrote:
| I don't think that's a forgone conclusion yet.
|
| I continue to hope that we see the opposite effect: the
| drop of cost in software development drives massively
| increased demand for both software and our services.
|
| I wrote about that here:
| https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/llm-predictions-
| for-202...
| AstroBen wrote:
| I keep flip-flopping between being optimistic and
| pessimistic on this, but yeah we just need to wait and
| see
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Just dismiss what he says and move on, he's already made it
| clear he's not trying to convince you.
| vmaurin wrote:
| I am waiting people to commits their prompt/agents setup
| instead of the code to call this a changing paradigm. So far
| it is "just" machine generating code and generating code
| doesn't solve all the software problem (but yeah they get
| pretty good at generating code)
| minimaxir wrote:
| If you want an example, I just open-sourced a project which
| includes the prompts and CLAUDE.md:
| https://github.com/minimaxir/miditui/tree/main/agent_notes
| timmytokyo wrote:
| Replace "Claude Code" or "AI" with "Jesus". It all sounds
| very familiar.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to
| see your project working? It was building.
|
| I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people,
| the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others
| "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made
| something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on.
|
| I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the
| actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a
| computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part.
| For me, I initially got into programming because I wanted to ruin
| other people's websites, then I figured out I needed to know how
| to build websites first, then I found it more fun to create and
| share what I've done with others, and they tell me what they
| think of it. That's my "fire". But I've met so many people who
| doesn't care an iota about sharing what they built with others,
| it matters nothing to them.
|
| I guess the conclusion is, not all programmers program for the
| same reason, for some of us, LLMs helps a lot, and makes things
| even more fun. For others, LLMs remove the core part of what
| makes programming fun for them. Hence we get this constant back
| and forth of "Can't believe others can work like this!" vs "I
| can't believe others aren't working like this!", but both sides
| seems to completely miss the other side.
| frizlab wrote:
| > I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like
| the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters
| into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun
| part.
|
| Exactly me.
| amelius wrote:
| Same. However, for me the fun in programming was always a
| kind of trap that kept me from doing more challenging things.
|
| Now the fun is gone, maybe I can do more important work.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| You might be surprised to find out how much of your
| motivation to do any of it at all was tied to your
| enjoyment, and that's much more difficult to overcome than
| people realize.
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| My problem was the exact opposite. I wanted to deliver but
| the dislike of the actual programming / typing code
| prevented me from doing so. AI has solved this for me.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| > Now the fun is gone, maybe I can do more important work.
|
| This is a very sad, bleak, and utilitarian view of "work."
| It is also simply not how humans operate. Even if you only
| care about the product, humans that enjoy and take pride in
| what they're doing almost invariably produce better
| products that their customers like more.
| judahmeek wrote:
| That's because physical programming ing is a ritual.
|
| I'm not entirely sure what that means myself, so please speak
| up if my statement resonates with you.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Corporations trying to "invent" agi is like that boss in
| bloodborne
| kaffekaka wrote:
| It resonates. But as I see it, that kind of ritual I rather
| devote myself to at home. At work, the more efficient and
| rapidly we can get stuff dobe, the better.
|
| Drawing and painting is a ritual to me as well. No one pays
| me for it and I am happy about that.
| tarsinge wrote:
| Conversely I have very little interest in the process of
| programming by itself, all the magic is about the end result
| and the business value for me (which fortunately has served
| me quite well professionally). As young as I remember I was
| fascinated with the GUI DBMS (4th Dimension/FileMaker/MS
| Access/...) my dad used to improve his small business. I only
| got into programming only to not be limited by graphical
| tools. So LLMs for me are just a nice addition in my toolbox,
| like a power tool is to a manual one. It doesn't
| philosophically changes anything.
| martin-t wrote:
| > programmer who actually do like the actual typing
|
| It's not about the typing, it's about the understanding.
|
| LLM coding is like reading a math textbook without trying to
| solve any of the problems. You get an overview, you get a sense
| of what it's about and most importantly you get a _false_ sense
| of understanding.
|
| But if you try to actually solve the problems, you engage
| completely different parts of your brain. _It 's about the
| self-improvement._
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > It's not about the typing, it's about the understanding.
|
| Well, it's both, for different people, seemingly :)
|
| I also like the understanding and solving something
| difficult, that rewards a really strong part of my brain. But
| I don't always like to spend 5 hours in doing so, especially
| when I'm doing that because of some other problem I want to
| solve. Then I just want it solved ideally.
|
| But then other days I engage in problems that are hard
| because they are hard, and because I want to spend 5 hours
| thinking about, designing the perfect solution for it and so
| on.
|
| Different moments call for different methods, and
| particularly people seem to widely favor different methods
| too, which makes sense.
| svara wrote:
| We've been hearing this a lot, but I don't really get it. A
| lot of code, most probably, isn't even close to being as
| challenging as a maths textbook.
|
| It obviously depends a lot on what exactly you're building,
| but in many projects programming entails a lot of low
| intellectual effort, repetitive work.
|
| It's the same things over and over with slight variations and
| little intellectual challenge once you've learnt the basic
| concepts.
|
| Many projects do have a kernel of non-obvious innovation,
| some have a lot of it, and by all means, do think deeply
| about these parts. That's your job.
|
| But if an LLM can do the clerical work for you? What's not to
| celebrate about that?
|
| To make it concrete with an example: the other day I had
| Claude make a TUI for a data processing library I made. It's
| a bunch of rather tedious boilerplate.
|
| I really have no intellectual interest in TUI coding and I
| would consider doing that myself a terrible use of my time
| considering all the other things I could be doing.
|
| The alternative wasn't to have a much better TUI, but to not
| have any.
| zahlman wrote:
| > It obviously depends a lot on what exactly you're
| building, but in many projects programming entails a lot of
| low intellectual effort, repetitive work.
|
| I think I can reasonably describe myself as one of the
| people telling you the thing you don't really get.
|
| And from my perspective: we hate those projects and only do
| them if/because they pay well.
|
| > the other day I had Claude make a TUI for a data
| processing library I made. It's a bunch of rather tedious
| boilerplate. I really have no intellectual interest in TUI
| coding...
|
| From my perspective, the core concepts in a TUI event loop
| are cool, and making one only involves boilerplate insofar
| as the support libraries you use expect it. And when I
| encounter that, I naturally add "design a better API for
| this" to my project list.
|
| Historically, a large part of avoiding the tedium has been
| making a clearer separation between the expressive code-
| like things and the repetitive data-like things, to the
| point where the data-like things can be purely automated or
| outsourced. AI feels weird because it blurs the line of
| what can or cannot be automated, at the expense of
| determinism.
| martin-t wrote:
| I've also been hearing variations of your comment a lot too
| and correct me if I am wrong but I think they always
| implicitly assume that LLMs are more useful for the low-
| intellectual stuff than solving the high-intellectual core
| of the problem.
|
| The thing is:
|
| 1) A lot of the low-intellectual stuff is not necessarily
| repetitive, it involved some business logic which is a
| culmination of knowing the process behind what the uses
| needs. When you write a prompt, the model makes assumptions
| which are not necessarily correct for the particular
| situation. Writing the code yourself forced you to notice
| the decision points and make more informed choices.
|
| I understand your TUI example and it's better than having
| none _now_ , but as a result anybody who wants to write "a
| much better TUI" now faces a higher barrier to entry since
| a) it's harder to justify an incremental improvement which
| takes a lot of work b) users will already have processes
| around the current system c) anybody who wrote a similar
| library with a better TUI is now competing with you and
| quality is a much smaller factor than
| hype/awareness/advertisement.
|
| We'll basically have more but lower quality SW and I am not
| sure that's an improvement long term.
|
| 2) A lot of the high-intellectual stuff ironically can be
| solved by LLMs because a similar problem is already in the
| training data, maybe in another language, maybe with slight
| differences which can be pattern matched by the LLM. It's
| laundering other people's work and you don't even get to
| focus on the interesting parts.
| svara wrote:
| > but I think they always implicitly assume that LLMs are
| more useful for the low-intellectual stuff than solving
| the high-intellectual core of the problem.
|
| Yes, this follows from the point the GP was making.
|
| The LLM can produce code for complex problems, but that
| doesn't save you as much time, because in those cases
| typing it out isn't the bottleneck, understanding it in
| detail is.
| nkrisc wrote:
| And so in the future if you want to add a feature, either
| the LLM can do it correctly or the feature doesn't get
| added? How long will that work as the TUI code base grows?
| simonw wrote:
| At that point you change your attitude to the project and
| start treating it like something you care about, take
| control of the architecture, rewrite bits that don't make
| sense, etc.
|
| Plus the size of project that an LLM can help maintain
| keeps growing. I actually think that size may no longer
| have any realistic limits at all now: the tricks Claude
| Code uses today with grep and sub-agents mean there's no
| longer a realistic upper limit to how much code it can
| help manage, even with Opus's relatively small (by
| today's standards) 200,000 token limit.
| zahlman wrote:
| The problem I'm anticipating isn't so much "the codebase
| grows beyond the agent-system's comprehension" so much as
| "the agent-system doesn't care about good architecture"
| (at least unless it's explicitly directed to). So the
| codebase grows beyond _the codebase_ 's natural size when
| things are redundantly rewritten and stuffed into
| inappropriate places, or ill-fitting architectural
| patterns are aped.
| svara wrote:
| Don't "vibe code". If you don't know what architecture
| the LLM is producing, you will produce slop.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Lately I've been writing DSLs with the help of these LLM
| assistants. It is definitely not vibe coding as I'm paying a
| lot of attention to the overall architecture. But most
| importantly my focus is on the expressiveness and usefulness
| of the DSLs themselves. I am indeed solving problems and I am
| very engaged but it is a very different focus. "How can the
| LSP help orient the developer?" "Do we want to encourage a
| functional-looking pipeline in this context"? "How should the
| step debugger operate under these conditions"? etc.
| GET /svg/weather |> jq: weatherData |> jq: `
| .hourly as $h | [$h.time, $h.temperature_2m] |
| transpose | map({time: .[0], temp: .[1]}) `
| |> gg({ "type": "svg", "width": 800, "height": 400 }): `
| aes(x: time, y: temp) | line() |
| point() `
|
| I've even started embedding my DSLs inside my other DSLs!
| ben_w wrote:
| > LLM coding is like reading a math textbook without trying
| to solve any of the problems. You get an overview, you get a
| sense of what it's about and most importantly you get a false
| sense of understanding.
|
| Can be, but... well, the analogy can go wrong both ways.
|
| This is what Brilliant.org and Duolingo sell themselves on:
| solve problems to learn.
|
| Before I moved to Berlin in 2018, I had turned the whole
| Duolingo German tree gold more than once, when I arrived I
| was essentially tourist-level.
|
| Brilliant.org, I did as much as I could before the questions
| got too hard (latter half of group theory, relativity, vector
| calculus, that kind of thing); I've looked at it again since
| then, and get the impressions the new questions they added
| were the same kind of thing that ultimately turned me off
| Duolingo, easier questions that teach little, padding out a
| progressions system that can only be worked through fast
| enough to learn anything if you pay a lot.
|
| Code... even before LLMs, I've seen and I've worked with
| confident people with a false sense of understanding about
| the code they wrote. (Unfortunately for me, one of my
| weaknesses is the politics of navigating such people).
| habinero wrote:
| Yeah, there's a big difference between edutainment like
| Brilliant and Duolingo and actually studying a topic.
|
| I'm not trying to be snobbish here, it's completely fine to
| enjoy those sorts of products (I consume a lot of pop
| science, which I put in the same category) but you gotta
| actually get your hands dirty and do the work.
|
| It's also fine to _not_ want to do that -- I love to doodle
| and have a reasonable eye for drawing, but to get really
| good at it, I 'd have to practice a lot and develop better
| technique and skills and make a lot of shitty art and
| ehhhh. I don't want it badly enough.
| jebarker wrote:
| > LLM coding is like reading a math textbook without trying
| to solve any of the problems.
|
| Most math textbooks provide the solutions too. So you could
| choose to just read those and move on and you'd have achieved
| much less. The same is true with coding. Just because LLMs
| are available doesn't mean you have to use them for all
| coding, especially when the goal is to learn foundational
| knowledge. I still believe there's a need for humans to learn
| much of the same foundational knowledge as before LLMs
| otherwise we'll end up with a world of technology that is
| totally inscrutable. Those who choose to just vibe code
| everything will make themselves irrelevant quickly.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I haven't used AI yet but I definitely would love a tool
| that could do the drudgery for me for designs that I
| already understand. For instance, if I want to store my own
| structures in an RDBMS, I want to lay the groundwork and
| say "Hey Jeeves, give me the C++ syntax to commit this
| structure to a MySQL table using commit/rollback". I
| believe once I know what I want, futzing over the exact
| syntax for how to do it is a waste of time. I heard c++
| isn't well supported but eventually I'll give it a try.
| dehsge wrote:
| Most math books do not provide solutions. Outside of
| calculus, advanced mathematics solutions are left as an
| exercise for the reader.
| jebarker wrote:
| The ones I used for the first couple of years of my math
| PhD had solutions. That's a sufficient level of
| "advanced" to be applicable in this analogy. It doesn't
| really matter though - the point still stands that _if_
| solutions are available you don't have to use them and
| doing so will hurt your learning of foundational
| knowledge.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| It's just a reiteration of the age-old conflict in arts:
|
| - making art as you thing it should be, but at the risk of it
| being non-commercial
|
| - getting paid for doing commercial/trendy art
|
| choose one
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yeah, but I guess wider. It's like the discussion would turn
| into "Don't use oil colors, then you don't get to do the fun
| process of mixing water and color together to get it just
| perfect" while maybe some artists don't think that's the fun
| process, and all the other categories, all mixed together,
| and everyone think their reason of doing it is the reason
| most people do it.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| It's not.
|
| It's:
|
| - Making art because you enjoy working with paint
|
| - Making art because you enjoy looking at the painting
| afterward
| smokel wrote:
| I've given this quite some thought and came to the conclusion
| that there is actually no choice, and all parties fall into
| the first category. It's just that some people intrinsically
| like working on commercial themes, or happen to be trendy.
|
| Of course there are some artists who sit comfortably in the
| grey area between the two oppositions, and for these a little
| nudging towards either might influence things. But for most
| artists, their ideas or techniques are simply not relevant to
| a larger audience.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > and all parties fall into the first category [...] Of
| course there are some artists who sit comfortably in the
| grey area between the two oppositions
|
| I'm not sure what your background is, but there are
| definitly artists out there drawing, painting and creating
| art they have absolutely zero care for, or even actively is
| against or don't like, but they do it anyways because it's
| easier to actually get paid doing those things, than
| others.
|
| Take a look in the current internet art community and ask
| how many artists are actively liking the situation of most
| of their art commissions being "furry lewd art", vs how
| many commissions they get for that specific niche, as just
| one example.
|
| History has lots of other examples, where artists typically
| have a day-job of "Art I do but do not care for" and then
| like the programmer, hack on what they actually care about
| outside of "work".
| smokel wrote:
| Agreed, but I'd say these would be artists in the "grey
| area". They are capable of drawing furry art, for
| example, and have the choice to monetize that, even
| though they might have become bored with it.
|
| I was mostly considering contemporary artists that you
| see in museums, and not illustrators. Most of these have
| moved on to different media, and typically don't draw or
| paint. They would therefore also not be able to draw
| commission pieces. And most of the time their work does
| not sell well.
|
| (Source: am professionally trained artist, tried to sell
| work, met quite a few artists, thought about this a lot.
| That's not to say that I may still be completely wrong
| though, so I liked reading your comment!)
|
| Edit: and of course things get way more complicated and
| nuanced when you consider gallerists pushing existing
| artists to become trendy, and artists who are only
| "discovered" after their deaths, etc. etc.)
| martin-t wrote:
| With LLMs, if you did the first in the past, then no matter
| what license you chose, your work is now in the second
| category, except you don't get a dime.
| smikhanov wrote:
| People who love thinking in false dichotomies like this one
| have absolutely no idea how much harder it is to "get paid
| for doing commercial/trendy art".
|
| It's so easy to be a starving artist; and in the world of
| commercial art it's bloody dog-eat-dog jungle, not made for
| faint-hearted sissies.
| loubbrad wrote:
| > I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like
| the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters
| into a computer...
|
| Reminds me of this excerpt from Richard Hamming's book:
|
| > Finally, a more complete, and more useful, Symbolic Assembly
| Program (SAP) was devised--after more years than you are apt to
| believe during which most programmers continued their heroic
| absolute binary programming. At the time SAP first appeared I
| would guess about 1% of the older programmers were interested
| in it--using SAP was "sissy stuff", and a real programmer would
| not stoop to wasting machine capacity to do the assembly. Yes!
| Programmers wanted no part of it, though when pressed they had
| to admit their old methods used more machine time in locating
| and fixing up errors than the SAP program ever used. One of the
| main complaints was when using a symbolic system you do not
| know where anything was in storage--though in the early days we
| supplied a mapping of symbolic to actual storage, and believe
| it or not they later lovingly pored over such sheets rather
| than realize they did not need to know that information if they
| stuck to operating within the system--no! When correcting
| errors they preferred to do it in absolute binary addresses.
| layer8 wrote:
| I think this is beside the point, because the crucial change
| with LLMs is that you don't use a formal language anymore to
| specify what you want, and get a deterministic output from
| that. You can't reason with precision anymore about how what
| you specify maps to the result. That is the modal shift that
| removes the "fun" for a substantial portion of the developer
| workforce.
| convolvatron wrote:
| its not not about fun. when I'm going through the actual
| process of writing a function, I think about design issues.
| about how things are named, about how the errors from this
| function flow up. about how scheduling is happening. about
| how memory is managed. I compare the code to my ideal, and
| this is the time where I realize that my ideal is flawed or
| incomplete.
|
| I think alot of us dont get everything specced out up
| front, we see how things fit, and adjust accordingly. most
| of the really good ideas I've had were not formulated in
| the abstract, but realizations had in the process of
| spelling things out.
|
| I have a process, and it works for me. Different people
| certainly have other ones, and other goals. But maybe stop
| telling me that instead of interacting with the compiler
| directly its absolutely necessary that instead I describe
| what I want to a well meaning idiot, and patiently correct
| them, even though they are going to forget everything I
| just said in a moment.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| That's not it for me, personally.
|
| I do all of my programming on paper, so keystrokes and
| formal languages are the fast part. LLMs are just too slow.
| zahlman wrote:
| I don't know what book you're talking about, but it seems
| that you intend to compare the switch to an AI-based workflow
| to using a higher-level language. I don't think that's valid
| at all. Nobody using Python for any ordinary purpose feels
| compelled to examine the resulting bytecode, for example, but
| a responsible programmer needs to keep tabs on what Claude
| comes up with, configure a dev environment that organizes the
| changes into a separate branch (as if Claude were a separate
| human member of a team) etc. Communication in natural
| language is fundamentally different from writing code; if it
| weren't, we'd be in a world with far more abundant
| documentation. (After all, that should be easier to write
| than a prompt, since you _already have seen_ the system that
| the text will describe.)
| immibis wrote:
| > Nobody using Python for any ordinary purpose feels
| compelled to examine the resulting bytecode, for example,
|
| The first people using higher level languages did feel
| compelled to. That's what the quote from the book is
| saying. The first HLL users felt compelled to check the
| output just like the first LLM users.
| le-mark wrote:
| Hamming was talking about assembler, not a high level
| language.
| sanderjd wrote:
| The same pattern held through the early days of "high
| level" languages that were compiled to assembly, and then
| the early days of higher level languages that were
| interpreted.
|
| I think it's a very apt comparison.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| If the same pattern held, then it ought to be easy to
| find quotes to prove it. Other than the one above from
| Hamming, we've been shown none.
| zahlman wrote:
| Yes, and now they don't.
|
| But there is no reason to suppose that responsible SWEs
| would ever be able to stop doing so for an LLM, given the
| reliance on nondeterminism and a fundamentally imprecise
| communication mechanism.
|
| That's the point. It's not the same kind of shift at all.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > you intend to compare the switch to an AI-based workflow
| to using a higher-level language.
|
| That was the comparison made. AI is an eerily similar
| shift.
|
| > I don't think that's valid at all.
|
| I dont think you made the case by cherry picking what it
| can't do. This is exactly the same situation, as the time
| SAP appeared. There weren't symbols for every situation
| binary programmers were using at the time. This doesn't
| change the obvious and practical improvement that
| abstractions provided. Granted, I'm not happy about it, but
| I can't deny it either.
| quesera wrote:
| Contra your other replies, I think this is _exactly_ the
| point.
|
| I had an inkling that the feeling existed back then, but I
| had no idea it was documented so explicitly. Is this quote
| from _The Art of Doing Science and Engineering_?
| zahlman wrote:
| Indeed. My response was: actually, no, if I think about it I
| really don't think it was "building" at all. I would have
| started fewer things, and seen them through more consistently,
| if it were about "building". I think it has far more to do with
| personal expression.
|
| ("Solving a problem for others" also resonates, but I think I
| implement that more by tutoring and mentoring.)
| phicoh wrote:
| The problem I see is not so much in how you generate the code.
| It is about how to maintain the code. If you check in the AI
| generated code unchanged then do you start changing that code
| by hand later? Do you trust that in the future AI can fix bugs
| in your code. Or do you clean up the AI generated code first?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Depends on what you do. When I'm using LLMs to generate code
| for projects I need to maintain (basically, everything non-
| throw-away-once-used), I treat it as any other code I'd
| write, tightly controlled with a focus on simplicity and
| well-thought out abstractions, and automated testing that
| verify what needs to be working. Nothing gets "merged" into
| the code without extensive review, and me understanding the
| full scope of the change.
|
| So with that, I can change the code by hand afterwards or
| continue with LLMs, it makes no difference, because it's
| essentially the same process as if I had someone follow the
| ideas I describe, and then later they come back with a PR. I
| think probably this comes naturally to senior programmers and
| those who had a taste of management and similar positions,
| but if you haven't reviewed other's code before, I'm not sure
| how well this process can actually work.
|
| At least for me, I manage to produce code I can maintain, and
| seemingly others to, and they don't devolve into
| hairballs/spaghetti. But again, requires reviewing absolutely
| every line and constantly edit/improve.
| phicoh wrote:
| We recently got a PR from somebody adding a new feature and
| the person said he doesn't know $LANG but used AI.
|
| The problem is, that code would require a massive amount of
| cleanup. I took a brief look and some code was in the wrong
| place. There were coding style issues, etc.
|
| In my experience, the easy part is getting something that
| works for 99%. The hard part is getting the architecture
| right, all of the interfaces and making sure there are no
| corner cases that get the wrong results.
|
| I'm sure AI can easily get to the 99%, but does it help
| with the rest?
| simonw wrote:
| Yes it does... but only in the hands of an expert who
| knows what they are doing.
|
| I'd treat PRs like that as proof of concepts that the
| thing that can be done, but I'd be surprised if they
| often produced code that should be directly landed.
| teeeew wrote:
| In the hands of an expert... right. So is it not
| incredibly irresponsible to release these tools into the
| wild, and expose it those who are not experts? They will
| actually become incredibly worse off. Ironically this
| does not 'democratise' intelligence at all - the gap
| widens between experts and the rest.
| simonw wrote:
| I sometimes wonder what would have happened if OpenAI had
| built GPT3 and then GPT-4 and NOT released them to the
| world, on the basis that they were too dangerous for
| regular people to use.
|
| That nearly happened - it's why OpenAI didn't release
| open weight models past GPT2, and it's why Google didn't
| release anything useful built on Transformers despite
| having invented the architecture.
|
| If we lived in the world today, LLMs would be available
| only to a small, elite and impossibly well funded class
| of people. Google and OpenAI would solely get to decide
| who could explore this new world with them.
|
| I think that would _suck_.
| teeeew wrote:
| So... what?
|
| With all due respect I don't care about an acceleration
| in writing code - I'm more interested in incremental
| positive economic impact. To date I haven't seen anything
| convince me that this technology will yield this.
|
| Producing more code doesn't overcome the lack of
| imagination, creativity and so on to figure out what
| projects resources should be invested in. This has always
| been an issue that will compound at firms like Google who
| have an expansive graveyard of projects laid to rest.
|
| In fact, in a perverse way, all this 'intelligence' can
| exist. At the same time humans can get worse in their
| ability to make judgments in investment decisions.
|
| So broadly where is the net benefit here?
| simonw wrote:
| You mean the net benefit in widespread access to LLMs?
|
| I get the impression there's no answer here that would
| satisfy you, but personally I'm excited about regular
| people being able to automate tedious things in their
| lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to
| program first.
|
| And being able to enrich their lives with access to as
| much world knowledge as possible via a system that can
| translate that knowledge into whatever language and
| terminology makes the most sense to them.
| teeeew wrote:
| "I'm excited about regular people being able to automate
| tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+
| months learning to program first."
|
| Bring the implicit and explicit costs to date into your
| analysis and you should quickly realise none of this
| makes sense from a societal standpoint.
|
| Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average
| person doesn't care about automating anything!
| bathtub365 wrote:
| The average person already automates a lot of things in
| their day to day lives. They spend far less time doing
| the dishes, laundry, and cleaning because parts of those
| tasks have been mechanized and automated. I think LLMs
| probably automate the wrong thing for the average person
| (i.e., I still have to load the laundry machine and fold
| the laundry after) but automation has saved the average
| person a lot of time
| zahlman wrote:
| What sorts of things will the average, non-technical
| person think of automating on a computer that are
| actually quality-of-life-improving?
| simonw wrote:
| My favorite anecdotal story here is that a couple of
| years ago I was attending a training session at a fire
| station and the fire chief happened to mention that he
| had spent the past two days manually migrating contact
| details from one CRM to another.
|
| I do not want the _chief of a fire station_ losing two
| days of work to something that could be scripted!
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| For example, my friend doesn't know programming but his
| job involves some tedious spreadsheet operations. He was
| able to use an LLM to generate a Python script to
| automate part of this work. Saving about 30 min/day. He
| didn't review the code at all, but he did review the
| output to the spreadsheet and that's all that matters.
|
| His workplace has no one with programming skills, this is
| automation that would never have happened. Of course it's
| not exactly replacing a human or anything. I suppose he
| could have hired someone to write the script but he never
| really thought to do that.
| simonw wrote:
| > Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average
| person doesn't care about automating anything!
|
| One of my life goals is to help bring as many people into
| my "technology can automate things for you" bubble as I
| possibly can.
| closewith wrote:
| You can apply the same logic to all technologies,
| including programming languages, HTTP, cryptography,
| cameras, etc. Who should decide what's a responsible use?
| phicoh wrote:
| I'm curious about the economic aspects of this. If only
| experts can use such tools effectively, how big will the
| total market be and does that warrant the investments?
|
| For companies, if these tools make experts even more
| special, then experts may get more power certainly when
| it comes to salary.
|
| So the productively benefits of AI have to be pretty high
| to overcome this. Does AI make an expert twice as
| productive?
| paodealho wrote:
| I have been thinking about this in the last few weeks.
| First time I see someone commenting about it here.
|
| - If the number of programmers will be drastically
| reduced, how big of a price increase companies like
| Anthropic would need to be profitable?
|
| - If you are a manager, you now have a much higher bus
| factor to deal with. One person leaving means a greater
| blow on the team's knowledge.
|
| - If the number of programmers will be drastically
| reduced, the need for managers and middle managers will
| also decline, no? Hmm...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yeah, so what I'm mostly doing, and advocate for others
| to do, is basically the pure opposite of that.
|
| Focus on architecture, interfaces, corner-cases, edge-
| cases and tradeoffs first, and then the details within
| that won't matter so much anymore. The
| design/architecture is the hard part, so focus on that
| first and foremost, and review + throw away bad ideas
| mercilessly.
| bitwize wrote:
| > We recently got a PR from somebody adding a new feature
| and the person said he doesn't know $LANG but used AI.
|
| "Oh, and check it out: I'm a bloody genius now! _Estas
| usando este software de traduccion in forma incorrecta.
| Por favor, consulta el manual._ I don 't even know what I
| just said, but I can find out!"
| dent9 wrote:
| > I'm sure AI can easily get to the 99%, but does it help
| with the rest?
|
| Yes the AI can help with 100% is it. But the operator of
| the AI needs to be able to articulate this to the AI .
|
| I've been in this position, where I had no choice but to
| use AI to write code to fix bugs in another party's
| codebase, then PR the changes back to the codebase
| owners. In this case it was vendor software that we rely
| on which the vendor hadn't fixed critical bugs in yet.
| And exactly as you described, my PR ultimately got
| rejected because even though it fixed the bugs in the
| immediate sense, it presented other issues due to not
| integrating with the external frameworks the vendor used
| for their dev processes. At which point it was just
| easier for the vendor to fix the software their way
| instead of accept my PR. But the point is that I could
| have made the PR correct in the first place, if I as the
| AI operator had the knowledge needed to articulate these
| more detailed and nuanced requirements to the AI. Since I
| didn't have this information then the AI generated code
| that worked but didn't meet the vendors spec. This type
| of situation is incredibly easy to fall into and is a
| good example of why you still need a human at the wheel
| on projects to set the guidance but you don't necessarily
| need the human to be writing every line of code.
|
| I don't like the situation much but this is the reality
| of it. We're basically just code reviewers for AI now
| pianopatrick wrote:
| I think we will find out that certain languages,
| frameworks and libraries are easier for AI to get all the
| way correct. We may even have to design new languages,
| frameworks and libraries to realize the full promise of
| AI. But as the ecosystem around AI evolves I think these
| issues will be solved.
| zahlman wrote:
| ... And with this level of quality control, is it still
| faster than writing it yourself?
| chii wrote:
| Would it not be a new paradigm, where the generated code from
| AI is segregated and treated like a binary blob? You don't
| change it (beyond perhaps some cosmetic, or superficial
| changes that the AI missed). You keep the prompt(s), and
| maintain that instead. And for new changes you want added,
| the prompts are either modified, or appended to.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Sounds like a nondeterministic nightmare
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Is it really much different from maintaining code that other
| people wrote and that you merged?
| zjzkshz wrote:
| Yes, this is (partly) why developer salaries are so high. I
| can trust my coworkers in ways not possible with AI.
|
| There is no process solution for low performers (as of
| today).
| dpark wrote:
| The solution for low performers is very close oversight.
| If you imagine an LLM as a very junior engineer who needs
| an inordinate amount of hand holding (but who can also
| read and write about 1000x faster than you and who gets
| paid approximately nothing), you can get a lot of useful
| work out of it.
|
| A lot of the criticisms of AI coding seem to come from
| people who think that the only way to use AI is to treat
| it as a peer. "Code this up and commit to main" is
| probably a workable model for throwaway projects. It's
| not workable for long term projects, at least not
| currently.
| nmehner wrote:
| A Junior programmer is a total waste of time if they
| don't learn. I don't help Juniors because it is an
| effective use of my time, but because there is hope that
| they'll learn and become Seniors. It is a long term
| investment. LLMs are not.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Just like LLMs are a total waste of time if you never
| update the system/developer prompts with additional
| information as you learn what's important to communicate
| vs not.
| nmehner wrote:
| That is a completely different level. I expect a Junior
| Developer to be able to completely replace me long term
| and to be able decide when existing rules are outdated
| and when they should be replaced. Challenge my decisions
| without me asking for it. Being able to adapt what they
| have learned to new types of projects or new programming
| languages. Being Senior is setting the rules.
|
| An LLM only follows rules/prompts. They can never become
| Senior.
| dpark wrote:
| It's a metaphor. With enough oversight, a qualified
| engineer _can_ get good results out of an underperforming
| (or extremely junior) engineer. With a junior engineer,
| you give the oversight to help them grow. With an
| underperforming engineer you hope they grow quickly or
| you eventually terminate their employment because it's a
| poor time trade off.
|
| The trade off with an LLM is different. It's not
| _actually_ a junior or underperforming engineer. It's far
| faster at churning out code than even the best engineers.
| It can read code far faster. It writes tests more
| consistently than most engineers (in my experience). It
| is surprisingly good at catching edge cases. With a
| junior engineer, you drag down your own performance to
| improve theirs and you're often trading off short term
| benefits vs long term. With an LLM, your net performance
| goes _up_ because it's augmenting you with its own
| strengths.
|
| As an engineer, it will never reach senior level (though
| future models might). But as a tool, it can enable you to
| do more.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| > It's far faster at churning out code than even the best
| engineers.
|
| I'm not sure I can think of a more damning indictment
| than this tbh
| dpark wrote:
| Can you explain why that's damning?
| nmehner wrote:
| I guess everyone dealing with legacy software sees code
| as a cost factor. Being able to delete code is harder,
| but often more important than writing code.
|
| Owning code requires you to maintain it. Finding out what
| parts of the code actual implement features and what
| parts are not needed anymore (or were never needed in the
| first place) is really hard. Since most of the time the
| requirements have never been documented and the authors
| have left or cannot remember. But not understanding what
| the code does removed all possibility to improve or
| modify it. This is how software dies.
|
| Churning out code fast is a huge future liability.
| Management wants solutions fast and doesn't understand
| these long term costs. It is the same with all code
| generators: Short term gains, but long term
| maintainability issues.
| dpark wrote:
| Do you not write code? Is your code base frozen, or do
| you write code for new features and bug fixes?
|
| The fact that AI can churn out code 1000x faster does not
| mean you should have it churn out 1000x _more_ code. You
| might have a list of 20 critical features and it have
| time to implement 10. AI could let you get all 20 but
| shouldn't mean you check in code for 1000 features you
| don't even need.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Sure if you just leave all the code there. But if it's
| churning out iterations, incrementally improving stuff,
| it seems ok? That's pretty much what we do as humans, at
| least IME.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| Sure:
|
| [1] https://saintgimp.org/2009/03/11/source-code-is-a-
| liability-...
|
| [2] https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/
| dpark wrote:
| I feel like this is a forest for the trees kind of thing.
|
| It is implied that the code being created is for
| "capabilities". If your AI is churning out needless code,
| then sure, that's a bad thing. Why would you be asking
| the AI for code you don't need, though? You should be
| asking it for critical features, bug fixes, the things
| you would be coding up regardless.
|
| You can use a hammer to break your own toes or you can
| use it to put a roof on your house. Using a tool poorly
| reflects on the craftsman, not the tool.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > It writes tests more consistently than most engineers
| (in my experience)
|
| I'm going to nit on this specifically. I firmly believe
| anyone that genuinely believes this either never writes
| tests that actually matter, or doesn't review the tests
| that an LLM throws out there. I've seen so many cases of
| people saying 'look at all these valid tests our LLM of
| choice wrote' only for half of them to do nothing and
| half of them misleading as to what it actually tests.
| dpark wrote:
| It's like anything else, you've got to check the results
| and potentially push it to fix stuff.
|
| I recently had AI code up a feature that was essentially
| text manipulation. There were existing tests to show it
| how to write effective tests and it did a great job of
| covering the new functionality. My feedback to the AI was
| mostly around some inaccurate comments it made in the
| code but the coverage was solid. Would have actually been
| faster for me to fix but I'm experimenting with how much
| I can make the AI do.
|
| On the other hand I had AI code up another feature in a
| different code base and it produced a bunch of tests with
| little actual validation. It basically invoked the new
| functionality with a good spectrum of arguments but then
| just validated that the code didn't throw. And in one
| case it tested something that diverged slightly from how
| the code would actually be invoked. In that case I told
| it how to validate what the functionality was actually
| doing and how to make the one test more representative.
| In the end it was good coverage with a small amount of
| work.
|
| For people who don't usually test or care bunch about
| testing, yeah, they probably let the AI create garbage
| tests.
| Oreb wrote:
| I also find it hard to agree with that part. Perhaps it
| depends on what type of software you write, but in my
| experience finding good test cases is one of those things
| that often requires a deep level of domain knowledge. I
| haven't had much luck making LLMs write interesting, non-
| trivial tests.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Yes. Firstly AI forgets why it wrote certain code and with
| humans at least you can ask them when reviewing. Secondly
| current gen AI(at least Claude) kind of wants to finish the
| thing instead of thinking of bigger picture. Human
| programmers code little differently that they hate a single
| line fix in random file to fix something else in different
| part of the code.
|
| I think the second is part of RL training to optimize for
| self contained task like swe bench.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| So you live in a world where code history must only be
| maintained orally? Have you ever thought to ask AI to
| write documentation on what and why and not just write
| the code. Asking it to document as well as code works
| well when the AI needs to go back and change either.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I don't see how asking AI to write some description of
| why it wrote this or that code would actually result in
| an explanation of why it wrote that code? It's not like
| it's thinking about it in that way, it's just generating
| both things. I guess they'd be in the same context so it
| might be somewhat correct.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| If you ask it to document why it did something, then when
| it goes back later to update the code it has the why in
| its context. Otherwise, the AI just sees some code later
| and has no idea why it was written or what it does
| without reverse engineering it at the moment.
| immibis wrote:
| I'm not sure you understood the GP comment. LLMs don't
| know and can't tell you why they write certain things.
| You can't fix that by editing your prompt so it writes it
| on a comment instead of telling you. It will not put the
| "why" in the comment, and therefore the "why" won't be in
| the future LLM's context, because there is no way to make
| it output the "why".
|
| It can output something that _looks like_ the "why" and
| that's probably good enough in a large percentage of
| cases.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| LLMs know why they are writing things in the moment, and
| they can justify decisions. Asking it to write those
| things down when it writes code works, or even asking
| them to design the code first and then generate/update
| code from the design also works. But yes, if things
| aren't written down, "the LLM don't know and can't tell."
| Don't do that.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I'm going to second seanmcdirmid here, a quick trick is
| to have Claude write a "remaining.md" if you know you
| have to do something that will end the session.
|
| Example from this morning, I have to recreate the EFI
| disk of one of my dev vm's, it means killing the session
| and rebooting the vm. I had Claude write itself a
| remaining.md to complement the overall build_guide.vm I'm
| using so I can pick up where I left off. It's
| surprisingly effective.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| No, humans probably have tens of millions of token in
| memory of memory per PR. It includes not only what's in
| the code, but what all they searched, what all they
| tested and in which way, which order they worked on, the
| edge cases they faced etc. Claude just can't document all
| these, else it will run out of its working context pretty
| soon.
| dpark wrote:
| > It can output something that looks like the "why"
|
| This feels like a distinction without difference. This is
| an extension of the common refrain that LLMs cannot
| "think".
|
| Rather than get overly philosophical, I would ask what
| the difference is in practical terms. If an LLM can write
| out a "why" and it is sufficient explanation for a human
| or a future LLM, how is that not a "why"?
| dpark wrote:
| Have you tried it? LLMs are quite good at summarizing.
| Not perfect, but then neither are humans.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Have you never had a situation where a question arose a
| year (or several) later that wasn't addressed in the
| original documentation?
|
| In particular IME the LLM generates a lot of
| documentation that explains what and not a lot of the why
| (or at least if it does it's not reflecting underlying
| business decisions that prompted the change).
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You can ask it to generate the why, even if it the agent
| isn't doing that by default. At least you can ask it to
| encode how it is mapping your request to code, and to
| make sure that the original request is documented, so you
| can record why it did something at least, even if it
| can't have insight into why you made the request in the
| first place. The same applies to successive changes.
| claytongulick wrote:
| > So you live in a world where code history must only be
| maintained orally?
|
| There are many companies and scenarios where this is
| completely legitimate.
|
| For example, a startup that's iterating quickly with a
| small, skilled dev team. A bunch of documentation is a
| liability, it'll be stale before anyone ever reads it.
|
| Just grabbing someone and collaborating with them on what
| they wrote is much more effective in that situation.
| jt2190 wrote:
| LLMs remove the familiarity of "I wrote this and deeply
| understand this". In other words, _everything_ is "legacy
| code" now ;-)
|
| For those who are less experienced with the constant
| surprises that legacy code bases can provide, LLMs are deeply
| unsettling.
| dpark wrote:
| I suspect that we are going to have a wave of gurus who
| show up soon to teach us how to code with LLMs. There's so
| much doom and gloom in these sorts of threads about the
| death of quality code that someone is going to make money
| telling people how to avoid that problem.
|
| The scenario you describe is a legitimate concern if you're
| checking in AI generated code with minimal oversight. In
| fact I'd say it's inevitable if you don't maintain strict
| quality control. But that's _always_ the case, which is why
| code review is a thing. Likewise you can use LLMs without
| just checking in garbage.
|
| The way I've used LLMs for coding so far is to give
| instructions and then iterate on the result (manually or
| with further instructions) until it meets my quality
| standards. It's definitely slower than just checking in the
| first working thing the LLM churns out, but it's sill been
| faster than doing it myself, I understand it exactly as
| well because I have to in order to give instructions
| (design) and iterate.
|
| My favorite definition of "legacy code" is "code that is
| not tested" because no matter who writes code, it turns
| into a minefield quickly if it doesn't have tests.
| d0liver wrote:
| How do you know that it's actually faster than if you'd
| just written it yourself? I think the review and
| iteration part _is_ the work, and the fact that you
| started from something generated by an LLM doesn't
| actually speed things up. The research that I've seen
| also generally backs this idea up -- LLMs _feel_ very
| fast because code is being generated quickly, but they
| haven't actually done any of the work.
| dpark wrote:
| Because I've been a software engineer for over 20 years.
| If I look at a feature and feel like it will take me a
| day and an LLM churns it out in a hour including the
| iterating, I'm confident that using the LLM was
| meaningfully faster. Especially since engineers
| (including me) are notoriously bad at accurate estimation
| and things usually take at least twice as long as they
| estimate.
|
| I have tested throwing several features at an LLM lately
| and I have no doubt that I'm significantly faster when
| using an LLM. My experience matches what Antirez
| describes. This doesn't make me 10x faster, mostly
| because so much of my job is not coding. But in term of
| raw coding, I can believe it's close to 10x.
| chrsw wrote:
| This is the key point for me in all this.
|
| I've never worked in web development, where it seems to me
| the majority of LLM coding assistants are deployed.
|
| I work on safety critical and life sustaining software and
| hardware. That's the perspective I have on the world. One
| question that comes up is "why does it take so long to
| design and build these systems?" For me, the answer is:
| that's how long it takes humans to reach a sufficient level
| of understanding of what they're doing. That's when we
| ship: when we can provide objective evidence that the
| systems we've built are safe and effective. These systems
| we build, which are complex, have to interact with the real
| world, which is messy and far more complicated.
|
| Writing more code means that's more complexity for humans
| (note the plurality) to understand. Hiring more people
| means that's more people who need to understand how the
| systems work. Want to pull in the schedule? That means
| humans have to understand in less time. Want to use Agile
| or this coding tool or that editor or this framework? Fine,
| these tools might make certain tasks a little easier, but
| none of that is going to remove the requirement that humans
| need to understand complex systems before they will work in
| the real world.
|
| So then we come to LLMs. It's another episode of "finally,
| we can get these pesky engineers and their time wasting out
| of the loop". Maybe one day. But we are far from that
| today. What matters today is still how well do human
| engineers understand what they're doing. Are you using LLMs
| to help engineers better understand what they are building?
| Good. If that's the case you'll probably build more robust
| systems, and you _might_ even ship faster.
|
| Are you trying to use LLMs to fool yourself into thinking
| this still isn't the game of humans needing to understand
| what's going on? "Let's offload some of the understanding
| of how these systems work onto the AI so we can save time
| and money". Then I think we're in trouble.
| dpark wrote:
| > Are you trying to use LLMs to fool yourself into
| thinking this still isn't the game of humans needing to
| understand what's going on?
|
| This is a key question. If you look at all the anti-AI
| stuff around software engineering, the pervading
| sentiment is "this will never be a senior engineer".
| Setting aside the possibility of future models actually
| bridging this gap (this would be AGI), let's accept this
| as true.
|
| You don't need an LLM to be a senior engineer to be an
| effective tool, though. If an LLM can turn your design
| into concrete code more quickly than you could, that
| gives you _more time_ to reason over the design, the
| potential side effects, etc. If you use the LLM well, it
| allows you to give more time to the things the LLM can't
| do well.
| discreteevent wrote:
| " They make it easier to explore ideas, to set things up,
| to translate intent into code across many specialized
| languages. But the real capability--our ability to
| respond to change--comes not from how fast we can produce
| code, but from how deeply we understand the system we are
| shaping. Tools keep getting smarter. The nature of
| learning loop stays the same."
|
| https://martinfowler.com/articles/llm-learning-loop.html
| esafak wrote:
| Why can't you use LLMs with formal methods?
| Mathematicians are using LLMs to develop complex proofs.
| How is that any different?
| buu700 wrote:
| I see where you're coming from, and I agree with the
| implication that this is more of an issue for inexperienced
| devs. Having said that, I'd push back a bit on the "legacy"
| characterization.
|
| For me, if I check in LLM-generated code, it means I've
| signed off on the final revision and feel comfortable
| maintaining it to a similar degree as though it were fully
| hand-written. I may not know every character as intimately
| as that of code I'd finished writing by hand a day ago, but
| it shouldn't be any more "legacy" to me than code I wrote
| by hand a year ago.
|
| It's a bit of a meme that AI code is somehow an
| incomprehensible black box, but if that is ever the case,
| it's a failure of the user, not the tool. At the end of the
| day, a human needs to take responsibility for any code that
| ends up in a product. You can't just ship something that
| people will depend on not to harm them without any human
| ever having had the slightest idea of what it does under
| the hood.
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| I have AI agents write, perform code review, improve and
| iterate upon the code. I trust that an agent with
| capabilities to write working code can also improve it. I use
| Claude skills for this and keep improving the skills based on
| both AI and human code reviews for the same type of code.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Are you just generating code with the LLM? Ya, you are
| screwed. Are you generating documentation and tests and
| everything else to help to code live? Your options for
| maintenance go up. Now just replace "generate" with
| "maintain" and you are basically asking AI to make changes to
| a description at the top that then percolate to multiple
| artifacts being updated, only one happening to be the code
| itself, and the code updates multiple time as the AI checks
| tests and stuff.
| dpark wrote:
| I wish there were good guides on how to get the best out of
| LLMs. All of these tips about adding documentation etc seem
| very useful but I've never seen good guides on how to do
| this effectively or sustainably.
| curt15 wrote:
| There is a related issue of ownership. When human programmers
| make errors that cost revenue or worse, there is (in theory)
| a clear chain of accountability. Who do you blame if errors
| generated by LLMs end up in mission critical software?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Who do you blame if errors generated by LLMs end up in
| mission critical software?
|
| I don't think many companies/codebases allow LLMs to
| autonomously edit code and deploy it, there is still a
| human in the loop that "prompt > generates > reviews >
| commits", so it really isn't hard to find someone to blame
| for those errors, if you happen to work in that kind of
| blame-filled environment.
|
| Same goes with contractors I suppose, if you end up
| outsourcing work to a contractor, they do a shitty job but
| that got shipped anyways, who do you blame? Replace
| "contractor" with "LLM" and I think the answer remains the
| same.
| globalnode wrote:
| yep theres all types of people. i get hung up on the structure
| and shape of a source file, like its a piece of art. if it
| looks ugly, even if it works, i dont like it. ive seen some llm
| code that i like the shape of but i wouldnt like to use it
| verbatim since i didnt create it.
| skybrian wrote:
| I think it's true that people get enjoyment from different
| things. Also, I wonder if people have fixed ideas about how
| coding agents can be used? For example, if you care about what
| the code looks like and want to work on readability, test
| coverage, and other "code health" tasks with a coding agent,
| you can do that. It's up to you whether you ask it to do
| cleanup tasks or implement new features.
|
| Maybe there are people who are about literally typing the code,
| but I get satisfaction from making the codebase nice and neat,
| and now I have power tools. I am just working on small personal
| projects, but so far, Claude Opus 4.5 can do any refactoring I
| can describe.
| omnicognate wrote:
| > do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special
| characters into a computer
|
| and from the first line of the article:
|
| > I love writing software, line by line.
|
| I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't write
| programs "line by line" and typing isn't programming. I work
| out code in the abstract away from the keyboard before typing
| it out, and it's not the typing part that is the bottleneck.
|
| Last time I commented this on HN, I said something like "if an
| AI could pluck these abstract ideas from my head and turn them
| into code, eliminating the typing part, I'd be an enthusiastic
| adopter", to which someone predictably said something like "but
| that's exactly what it does!". It absolutely is not, though.
|
| When I "program" away from the keyboard I form something like a
| mental image of the code, not of the text but of the abstract
| structure. I struggle to conjure actual visual imagery in my
| head (I "have aphantasia" as it's fashionable to say lately),
| which I suspect is because much of my visual cortex processes
| these abstract "images" of linguistic and logical structures
| instead.
|
| The mental "image" I form isn't some vague, underspecified
| thing. It corresponds directly to the exact code I will write,
| and the abstractions I use to compartmentalise and navigate it
| in my mind are the same ones that are used in the code. I
| typically evaluate and compare many alternative possible
| "images" of different approaches in my head, thinking through
| how they will behave at runtime, in what ways they might fail,
| how they will look to a person new to the codebase, how the
| code will evolve as people make likely future changes, how I
| could explain them to a colleague, etc. I "look" at this mental
| model of the code from many different angles and I've learned
| only to actually start writing it down when I get the
| particular feeling you get when it "looks" right from all of
| those angles, which is a deeply satisfying feeling that I
| actively seek out in my life independently of being paid for
| it.
|
| Then I type it out, which doesn't usually take very long.
|
| When I get to the point of "typing" my code "line by line", I
| don't want something that I can give a natural language
| description to. I have a mental image of the exact piece of
| logic I want, down to the details. Any departure from that is a
| departure from the thing that I've scrutinised from many angles
| and rejected many alternatives to. I want _the exact piece of
| code that is in my head_. The only way I can get that is to
| type it out, and that 's fine.
|
| What AI provides, and it is wildly impressive, is the ability
| to specify what's needed in natural language and have some code
| generated that corresponds to it. I've used it and it really is
| very, very good, but it isn't what I need because it can't take
| that fully-specified image from my head and translate it to the
| exact corresponding code. Instead I have to convert that image
| to vague natural language, have some code generated and then
| carefully review it to find and fix (or have the AI fix) the
| many ways it inevitably departs from what I wanted. That's
| strictly worse than just typing out the code, and the typing
| doesn't even take that long anyway.
|
| I hope this helps to understand why, for me and people like me,
| AI coding doesn't take away the "line-by-line part" or the
| "typing". We can't slot it into our development process at the
| typing stage. To use it the way you are using it we would
| instead have to allow it to replace the part that happens (or
| can happen) away from the keyboard: the _mental_ processing of
| the code. And many of us don 't want to do that, for a wide
| variety of reasons that would take a whole other lengthy
| comment to get into.
| teeeew wrote:
| That's because you're a subset of software engineers who know
| what they're doing and cares about rigour and so on.
|
| There's many who's thinking is not so deep nor sharp as yours
| - LLM's are welcomed by them but come at a tremendous cost to
| their cognition and the firms future well-being of its code
| base. Because this cost is implicit and not explicit it
| doesn't occur to them.
| closewith wrote:
| Companies don't care about you or any other developer. You
| shouldn't care about them or their future well-being.
|
| > Because this cost is implicit and not explicit it doesn't
| occur to them.
|
| Your arrogance and naivete blinds you to the fact it is
| does occur to them, but because they have a better
| understanding of the world and their position in it, they
| don't care. That's a rational and reasonable position.
| habinero wrote:
| No, they just have a different job than I do and they
| (and you, I suspect) don't understand the difference.
|
| Software engineers are not paid to write code, we're paid
| to solve problems. Writing code is a byproduct.
|
| Like, my job is "make sure our customers accounts are
| secure". Sometimes that involves writing code, sometimes
| it involves drafting policy, sometimes it involves
| presentations or hashing out ideas. It's on me to _figure
| it out_.
|
| Writing the code is the easy part.
| closewith wrote:
| > Like, my job is "make sure our customers accounts are
| secure".
|
| This is naivete. Secure customer accounts and the work to
| implement them is tolerated by the business only while it
| is necessary to increase profits. Your job is not to
| secure customer accounts, but to spend the least amount
| of money to produce a level of account security that will
| not affect the bottom line. If insecure accounts were
| tolerated or became profitable, that would be the
| immediate goal and your job description would pivot on a
| dime.
|
| Failure to understand this means you don't understand
| your role, employer, or industry.
| jofla_net wrote:
| >they have a better understanding of the world and their
| position in it.
|
| Try not to use better/worse when advocating so
| vociferously. As described by the parent they are short-
| term pragmatic, that is all. This discussion can open up
| into a huge worldview where different groups have
| strengths and weaknesses based on this axis of
| pragmatic/idealistic.
|
| "Companies" are not a monolith, both laterally between
| other companies, and what they are composed of as well.
| I'd wager the larger management groups can be pragmatic,
| where the (longer lasting) R&D manager will probably be
| the most idealistic of the firm, mainly because of seeing
| the trends of punching the gas without looking at long-
| term consequences.
| closewith wrote:
| Companies are monolithic in this respect and the idealism
| of any employee is tolerated only as long as it doesn't
| impact the bottom line.
|
| > Try not to use better/worse when advocating so
| vociferously.
|
| Hopefully you see the irony in your comment.
| barrkel wrote:
| I'm like you. I get on famously with Claude Code with Opus
| 4.5 2025.11 update.
|
| Give it a first pass from a spec. Since you know how it
| should be shaped you can give an initial steer, but focus on
| features first, and build with testability.
|
| Then refactor, with examples in prompts, until it lines up.
| You already have the tests, the AI can ensure it doesn't
| break anything.
|
| Beat it up more and you're done.
| omnicognate wrote:
| > focus on features first, and build with testability.
|
| This is just telling me to do this:
|
| > To use it the way you are using it we would instead have
| to allow it to replace the part that happens (or can
| happen) away from the keyboard: the mental processing of
| the code.
|
| I don't want to do that.
| saltcured wrote:
| I feel like some of these proponents act like a poet has
| the goal to produce an anthology of poems and should be
| happy to act as publisher and editor, sifting through the
| outputs of some LLM stanza generator.
|
| The entire idea using natural language for composite or
| atomic command units is deeply unsettling to me. I see
| language as an unreliable abstraction even with human
| partners that I know well. It takes a lot of work to
| communicate anything nuanced, even with vast amounts of
| shared context. That's the last thing I want to add
| between me and the machine.
|
| What you wrote futher up resonates a lot for me, right
| down to the aphantasia bit. I also lack an internal
| monologue. Perhaps because of these, I never want to
| "talk" to a device as a command input. Regardless of
| whether it is my compiler, smartphone, navigation system,
| alarm clock, toaster, or light switch, issuing such
| commands is never going to be what I want. It means
| engaging an extra cognitive task to convert my cognition
| back into words. I'd much rather have a more machine-
| oriented control interface where I can be aware of a
| design's abstraction and directly influence its
| parameters and operations. I crave the determinism that
| lets me anticipate the composition of things and nearly
| "feel" transitive properties of a system. Natural
| language doesn't work that way.
|
| Note, I'm not against textual interfaces. I actually
| prefer the shell prompt to the GUI for many recurring
| control tasks. But typing works for me and speaking would
| not. I need editing to construct and proof-read commands
| which may not come out of my mind and hands with the
| linearity it assumes in the command buffer. I prefer
| symbolic input languages where I can more directly map my
| intent into the unambiguous, structured semantics of the
| chosen tool. I also want conventional programming syntax,
| with unambiguous control flow and computed expressions
| for composing command flows. I do not want vagaries of
| natural language interfering here.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I've used it and it really is very, very good, but it isn't
| what I need because it can't take that fully-specified image
| from my head and translate it to the exact corresponding
| code. Instead I have to convert that image to vague natural
| language, have some code generated and then carefully review
| it to find and fix (or have the AI fix) the many ways it
| inevitably departs from what I wanted.
|
| I agree with this. The hard part of software development
| happens when you're formulating the idea in your head,
| planning the data structures and algorithms, deciding what
| abstractions to use, deciding what interfaces look like--the
| actual intellectual work. Once that is done, there is the
| unpleasant, slow, error-prone part: translating that big
| bundle of ideas into code while outputting it via your
| fingers. While LLMs might make this part a little faster,
| you're still doing a slow, potentially-lossy translation into
| English first. And if you care about things other than "does
| it work," you still have a lot of work to do post-LLM to
| clean things up and make it beautiful.
|
| I think it still remains to be seen whether idea -> natural
| language -> code is actually going to be faster or better
| than idea -> code. For unskilled programmers it probably
| already is. For experts? The jury may still be out.
| zahlman wrote:
| > I work out code in the abstract away from the keyboard
| before typing it out, and it's not the typing part that is
| the bottleneck.
|
| Funny thing. I tend to agree, but I think it wouldn't look
| that way to an outside observer. When I'm typing in code,
| it's typically at a pretty low fraction of my general typing
| speed -- because I'm constantly micro-interrupting myself to
| _doubt_ the away-from-keyboard work, and refine it in context
| (when I was "working in the abstract", I didn't exactly
| envision all the variable names, for example).
| jt2190 wrote:
| > ... not all programmers program for the same reason, for some
| of us, LLMs helps a lot, and makes things even more fun. For
| others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun
| for them. Hence we get this constant back and forth of "Can't
| believe others can work like this!" vs "I can't believe others
| aren't working like this!", but both sides seems to completely
| miss the other side.
|
| Unfortunately the job market does not demand both types of
| programmer equally: Those who drive LLMs to deliver
| more/better/faster/cheaper are in far greater demand right now.
| (My observation is that a decade of ZIRP-driven easy hiring
| paused the natural business cycle of trying to do more with
| fewer employees, and we've been seeing an outsized correction
| for the past few years, accelerated by LLM uptake.)
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Unfortunately the job market does not demand both types of
| programmer equally: Those who drive LLMs to deliver
| more/better/faster/cheaper are in far greater demand right
| now.
|
| I doubt that the LLM drivers deliver something better; quite
| the opposite. But I guess managers will only realize this
| when it's too late: and _of course_ they won 't take any
| responsibility for this.
| jt2190 wrote:
| > I doubt that the LLM drivers deliver something better...
|
| That is _your_ definition of "better". If we're going to
| trade our expertise for coin, we _must_ ask ourselves if
| the cost of "better" is worth it to the buyer. Can they see
| the difference? Do they care?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > if the cost of "better" is worth it to the buyer. Can
| they see the difference? Do they care?
|
| This is exactly the phenomenon of markets for "lemons":
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
|
| (for the HN readers: a related concept is "information
| asymmetry in markets").
|
| George Akerlof (the author of this paper), Michael Spence
| and Joseph Stiglitz got a Nobel Memorial Prize in
| Economic Sciences in 2001 for their analyses of markets
| with asymmetric information.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| HN: "Why should we craft our software well? Our employers
| don't care or reward us for it."
|
| Also HN: "Why does all commercial software seem to suck
| more and more as time goes on?"
| zjzkshz wrote:
| > I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like
| the actual typing of letters
|
| Do people actually spend a significant time typing? After I
| moved beyond the novice stage it's been an inconsequential
| amount of time. What it still serves is a thorough review of
| every single line in a way that is essentially equivalent to
| what a good PR review looks like.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Yes, for the type of work LLMs are good at (greenfield
| projects or lots of boilerplate).
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Novice work
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Dead on and well said
|
| Almost more importantly is: the people who pay you to build
| software, don't care if you type or enjoy it, they pay you for
| an output of working software
|
| Literally nothing is stopping people from writing assembly in
| their free time for fun
|
| But the number of people who are getting paid to write assembly
| is probably less than 1000
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| You're right of course. For me there's no flow state possible
| with LLM "coding". That makes it feel miserable instead of
| joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I
| then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard
| work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens
| myself, which feels effortless once I get going.
|
| Probably other people feel differently.
| wpm wrote:
| I'm the same way. LLMs are still somewhat useful as a way to
| start a greenfield project, or as a very hyper-custom google
| search to have it explain something to me exactly how I'd
| like it explained, or generate examples hyper-tuned for the
| problem at hand, but that's hardly as transformative or
| revolutionary as everyone is making Claude Code out to be. I
| loathe the tone these things take with me and hate how much
| extra bullshit I didn't ask for they always add to the
| output.
|
| When I do have it one-shot a complete problem, I never copy
| paste from it. I type it all out myself. I didn't pay
| hundreds of dollars for a mechanical keyboard, tuned to make
| every keypress a joy, to push code around with a fucking
| mouse.
| mirror_neuron wrote:
| I'm a "LLM believer" in a sense, and not someone who
| derives joy from actually typing out the tokens in my code,
| but I also agree with you about the hype surrounding Claude
| Code and "agentic" systems in general. I have found the
| three positive use cases you mentioned to be transformative
| to my workflow on its own. I'm grateful that they exist
| even if they never get better than they are today.
| sauercrowd wrote:
| > and hate how much extra bullshit I didn't ask for they
| always add to the output.
|
| I can recommend for that problem to make the "jumps"
| smaller, e.g. "Add a react component for the profile
| section, just put a placeholder for now" instead of "add a
| user profile".
|
| With coding LLMs there's a bit of a hidden "zoom"
| functionality by doing that, which can help calibrating the
| speed/involvment/thinking you and the LLM does.
| biophysboy wrote:
| I feel differently! My background isn't programming, so I
| frequently feel inhibited by coding. I've used it for over a
| decade but always as a secondary tool. Its fun for me to have
| a line of reasoning, and be able to toy with and analyze a
| series of questions faster than I used to be able to.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I like writing. I hate editing.
|
| Coding with an LLM seems like it's often more editing in
| service of less writing.
|
| I get this is a very simplistic way of looking at it and when
| done right it can produce solutions, even novel solutions,
| that maybe you wouldn't have on your own. Or maybe it speeds
| up a part of the writing that is otherwise slow and painful.
| But I don't know, as somebody who doesn't really code every
| time I hear people talk about it that's what it sounds like
| to me.
| holoduke wrote:
| Well are you the super developer than never run into issues,
| challenges? For me and I think most developers, coding is
| like a continuous stream of problems you need to solve. For
| me a LLM is very useful, because I can now develop much
| faster. Don't have to think which sorting algoritm should be
| used or which trigonometric function I need for a specific
| case. My LLM buddy solves most of those issues.
| gjadi wrote:
| When you don't know the answer to a question you ask an
| LLM, do you verify it out so you trust it?
|
| Like, if it tells you merge sort is better on that
| particular problem, do you trust it or do you go through an
| analysis to confirm it really is?
|
| I have a hard time trusting what I don't understand. And
| even more so if I realize later I've been fooled. Note that
| it's the same with human though. I think I only trust
| technical decision I don't understand when I deem the risk
| of being wrong low enough. Overwise I'll invest in learning
| and understanding enough to trust the answer.
| sauercrowd wrote:
| Three things I can suggest to try, having struggled with
| something similiar:
|
| 1. Look at it as a completely different discipline, dont
| consider it leverage for coding - it's it's own thing.
|
| 2. Try using it on something you just want to exist, not
| something you want to build or are interested in
| understanding.
|
| 3. Make the "jumps" smaller. Don't oneshot the project. Do
| the thinking yourself, and treat it as a junior programmer:
| "Let's now add react components for the profile section and
| mount them. Dont wire them up yet" instead of "Build the
| profile section". This also helps finding the right speed so
| that you can keep up with what's happening in the codebase
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| This.
|
| To me, using an LLMs is more like having a team of
| ghostwriters writing your novel. Sure, you "built" your novel
| but it feels entirely different to writing it yourself.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| This article is not about whether programming is fun, elegant,
| creative, or personally fulfilling.
|
| It is about business value.
|
| Programming exists, at scale, because it produces economic
| value. That value translates into revenue, leverage,
| competitive advantage, and ultimately money. For decades, a
| large portion of that value could only be produced by human
| labor. Now, increasingly, it cannot be assumed that this will
| remain true.
|
| Because programming is a direct generator of business value, it
| has also become the backbone of many people's livelihoods.
| Mortgages, families, social status, and long term security are
| tied to it. When a skill reliably converts into income, it
| stops being just a skill. It becomes a profession. And
| professions tend to become identities.
|
| People do not merely say "I write code." They say "I am a
| software engineer," in the same way someone says "I am a pilot"
| or "I am a police officer." The identity is not accidental.
| Programming is culturally associated with intelligence, problem
| solving, and exclusivity. It has historically rewarded those
| who mastered it with both money and prestige. That combination
| makes identity attachment not just likely but inevitable.
|
| Once identity is involved, objectivity collapses.
|
| The core of the anti AI movement is not technical skepticism.
| It is not concern about correctness, safety, or limitations.
| Those arguments are surface rationalizations. The real driver
| is identity threat.
|
| LLMs are not merely automating tasks. They are encroaching on
| the very thing many people have used to define their worth. A
| machine that can write code, reason about systems, and generate
| solutions challenges the implicit belief that "this thing makes
| me special, irreplaceable, and valuable." That is an
| existential threat, not a technical one.
|
| When identity is threatened, people do not reason. They defend.
| They minimize. They selectively focus on flaws. They move
| goalposts. They cling to outdated benchmarks and demand
| perfection where none was previously required. This is not
| unique to programmers. It is a universal human response to
| displacement.
|
| The loudest opponents of AI are not the weakest programmers.
| They are often the ones most deeply invested in the idea of
| being a programmer. The ones whose self concept, status, and
| narrative of personal merit are tightly coupled to the belief
| that what they do cannot be replicated by a machine.
|
| That is why the discourse feels so dishonest. It is not
| actually about whether LLMs are good at programming today. It
| is about resisting a trend line that points toward a future
| where the economic value of programming is increasingly
| detached from human identity.
|
| This is not a moral failing. It is a psychological one. But
| pretending it is something else only delays adaptation.
|
| AI is not attacking programming. It is attacking the assumption
| that a lucrative skill entitles its holder to permanence. The
| resistance is not to the technology itself, but to the loss of
| a story people tell themselves about who they are and why they
| matter.
|
| That is the real conflict. HN is littered with people facing
| this conflict.
| lins1909 wrote:
| Why do you say this subjective thing so confidently? Does
| believing what you just wrote make you feel better?
|
| Have you considered that there are people who actually just
| enjoy programming by themselves?
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Very good comment!
| simianwords wrote:
| I wrote something similar earlier:
|
| This is because they have entrenched themselves in a
| comfortable position that they don't want to give up.
|
| Most won't admit this to be the actual reason. Think about
| it: you are a normal hands on self thought software
| developer. You grew up tinkering with Linux and a bit of
| hardware. You realise there's good money to be made in a
| software career. You do it for 20-30 years; mostly the same
| stuff over and over again. Some Linux, c#, networking. Your
| life and hobby revolves around these technologies. And most
| importantly you have a comfortable and stable income that
| entrenches your class and status. Anything that can disrupt
| this state is obviously not desireable. Never mind that
| disrupting others careers is why you have a career in the
| first place.
| throw1235435 wrote:
| Sure; I absolutely agree and more to the point SWE's and
| their ideologies compared to other professions have meant
| they are the first on the chopping block. But what do you
| tell those people; that they no longer matter? Do they still
| matter? How will they matter?
|
| If the local unskilled job matters more than a SWE now these
| people have gone from being worth something to society to
| being more worthless than someone unskilled with a job. At
| that point following from your logic I can assume their long
| term value is one of an unemployed person. That isn't just an
| identity crash; its a crash potentially on their whole lives
| and livelihood. Even smart people can be in situations where
| it is hard to pivot (as you say mortgages, families, lives,
| etc).
|
| I'm sure many of the SWE's here (myself included) are asking
| the same questions; and the answers are too pessimistic to
| admit public ally and even privately. Myself the joy of
| coding is taken away with AI in general, in that there is no
| joy doing something that a machine will be able to do better
| soon for me at least.
| BananaaRepublik wrote:
| > I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like
| the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters
| into a computer...
|
| This sounds like an alien trying and failing to describe why
| people like creating things. No, the typing of characters in a
| keyboard has no special meaning, neither does dragging a brush
| across a canvas or pulling thread through fabric. It's the
| primitive desire to create something by your own hands. Have
| people using AI magically lost all understanding of creativity
| or creation, everything has to be utilitarian and business?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| My entire point is that people are different. For some people
| (read through the other comments), it's quite literally about
| typing of characters, or dragging a brush across the canvas.
| Sure, that might not be the point for you, but my entire
| point of my comment is that just because it's "obviously
| because of X" for you, that doesn't mean it's like that for
| others.
|
| Sometimes I like to make music because I have an idea of the
| final results, and I wanna hear it like that. Other times, I
| make music because I like the feeling of turning a knob, and
| striking keys at just the right moment, and it gives me a
| feeling of satisfaction. For others, they want to share an
| emotion via music. Does this mean someone of us are "making
| music for the wrong reasons"? I'd claim no.
| card_zero wrote:
| I bet you also sometimes like to make music because the
| final result emerges from your intimate involvement with
| striking keys, no? That's the suggestion.
| Izkata wrote:
| No, they're right. Your description is what you get from
| outsiders who don't understand what they're seeing.
|
| In a creative process, when you _really_ know your tools,
| you start being able to go from thought to result without
| really having to think about the tools. The most common
| example when it comes to computers would be touch-typing -
| when your muscle memory gets so good you don 't think about
| the keyboard at all anymore, your hands "know" what to do
| to get your thoughts down. But for those of us with enough
| experience in the programming languages and editor/IDE we
| use, the same thing can happen - going from thought to code
| is nearly effortless, as is reading code, because we don't
| need to think about the layers in between anymore.
|
| But this only works when those tools are reliable, when we
| know they'll do exactly what we expect. AI tooling isn't
| reliable: It introduces two lossy translation layers
| (thought -> English and English -> code) and a bunch of
| waiting in the middle that breaks any flow. With faster
| computers maybe we can eliminate the waiting, but the
| reliability just isn't there.
|
| This applies to music, painting, all sorts of creative
| things. Sure there's prep time beforehand with physical
| creation like painting, but when someone really gets into
| the flow it's the same: they're not having to think about
| the tools so much as getting their thoughts into the end
| result. The tools "disappear".
|
| > Other times, I make music because I like the feeling of
| turning a knob, and striking keys at just the right moment,
| and it gives me a feeling of satisfaction.
|
| But I'll bet you're not thinking about "I like turning this
| knob" at the moment you're doing it, I'll bet you're
| thinking "Increase the _foo_ " (and if you're like me it's
| probably more liking knowing that fact without forming the
| words) and the knob's immediate visceral feedback is where
| the satisfaction comes from because you're _increasing the
| foo_ without having to think about how to do it - in part
| because of how reliable it is.
| BananaaRepublik wrote:
| Let me get this right. You're telling me that in your
| personal experience, you don't abstract away low level
| actions like pressing keys of your instrument or typing on
| the keyboard? You're genuinely telling me you derive equal
| pleasure from music as the feel of the keys?
|
| Nah bro, most of us learn touch typing and musical
| instrument finger exercises etc when starting out, it's
| usually abstracted away once we get competent.
|
| AI takes away the joy of creation, not the low level
| actions. That's like abstracted twice over..
| aspenmartin wrote:
| I don't think these characterizations in either direction are
| very helpful; I understand they're coming from a place with
| someone trying to make sense of why their ingrained notion of
| what creativity means and what the "right" way to generate
| software projects is is not shared by other people.
|
| I use CC for both business and personal projects. In both
| cases: I want to achieve something cool. If I do it by hand,
| it is slow, I will need to learn something new which takes
| too much time and often time the thing(s) I need to learn is
| not interesting to me (at the time). Additionally, I am slow
| and perpetually unhappy with the abstractions and design
| choices I make despite trying very hard to think through
| them. With CC: it can handle parts of the project I don't
| want to deal with, it can help me learn the things I want to
| learn, it can execute quickly so I can try more things and
| fail fast.
|
| What's lamentable is the conclusion of "if you use AI it is
| not truly creative" ("have people using AI lost all
| understanding of creativity or creation?" is a bit
| condescending).
|
| In other threads the sensitive dynamic from the AI-skeptic
| crowds is more or less that AI enthusiasts "threaten or
| bully" people who are not enthusiastic that they will get
| "punished" or fall behind. Yet at the same time, AI-skeptics
| seem to routinely make passive aggressive implications that
| they are the ones truly Creating Art and are the true
| Craftsman; as if this venture is some elitist art form that
| should be gate kept by all of you True Programmers (TM).
|
| I find these takes (1) condescending, (2) wrong and also
| belying a lack of imagination about what others may find
| genuinely enjoyable and inspiring, (3) just as much of a
| straw man as their gripes against others "bullying" them into
| using AI.
| a022311 wrote:
| I think both of you are correct.
|
| LLMs do empower you (and by "you" I mean the reader or any
| other person from now on) to actually complete projects you
| need in the very limited free time and have available. Manually
| coding the same could take months (I'm speaking from experience
| developing a personal project for about 3 hours every Friday
| and there's still much to be done). In a professional context,
| you're being paid to ship and AI can help you grow an idea to
| an MVP and then to a full implementation in record-breaking
| time. At the end of the day, you're satisfied because you built
| something useful and helped your company. You probably also
| used your problem solving skills.
|
| Programming is also a hobby though. The whole process matters
| too. I'm one of the people who feels incredible joy when
| achieving a goal, knowing that I completed every step in the
| process with my own knowledge and skills. I know that I went
| from an idea to a complete design based on everything I know
| and probably learned a few new things too. I typed the variable
| names, I worked hard on the project for a long time and I'm
| finally seeing the fruits of my effort. I proudly share it with
| other people who may need the same and can attest its high
| quality (or low quality if it was a stupid script I hastily
| threw together, but anyway sharing is caring --the point is
| that I actually know what I've written).
|
| The experience of writing that same code with an LLM will leave
| you feeling a bit empty. You're happy with the result: it does
| everything you wanted and you can easily extend it when you
| feel like it. But you didn't write the code, someone else did.
| You just reviewed an intern's work and gave feedback. Sometimes
| that's indeed what you want. You may need a tool for your job
| or your daily life, but you aren't too interested in the
| internals. AI is truly great for that.
|
| I can't reach a better conclusion than the parent comment,
| everyone is unique and enjoys coding in a different way. You
| should always find a chance to code the way you want, it'll
| help maintain your self-esteem and make your life interesting.
| Don't be afraid of new technologies where they can help you
| though.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like
| the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters
| into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun
| part.
|
| I've "vibe coded" a ton of stuff and so I'm pretty bullish on
| LLMs, but I don't see a world where "coding by hand" isn't
| still required for at least some subset of software. I don't
| know what that subset will be, but I'm convinced it will exist,
| and so there will be ample opportunities for programmers who
| like that sort of thing.
|
| ---
|
| _Why_ am I convinced hand-coding won 't go away? Well,
| technically I lied, I have no idea what the future holds.
| However, it seems to me that an AI which could code _literally
| anything under the sun_ would almost by definition be that
| mythical AGI. It would need to have an almost perfect
| understanding of human language and the larger world.
|
| An AI like that wouldn't just be great at coding, it would be
| great at _everything!_ It would be the end of the economy, and
| scarcity. In which case, you could _still_ program by hand all
| you wanted because you wouldn 't need to work for a living, so
| do whatever brings you joy.
|
| So even without making predictions about what the limitations
| of AI will ultimately be, it seems to me you'll be able to keep
| programming by hand regardless.
| jcheng wrote:
| > For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes
| programming fun for them.
|
| Anecdotally, I've had a few coworkers go from putting
| themselves firmly in this category to saying "this is the most
| fun I've ever had in my career" in the last two months. The
| recent improvement in models and coding agents (Claude Code
| with Opus 4.5 in our case) is changing a lot of minds.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Yeah, I'd put myself in this camp. My trust is slowly going
| up, and coupled with improved guardrails (more tests, static
| analysis, refactoring to make reviewing easier), that
| increasing trust is giving me more and more speed at going
| from thought ("hmm, I should change how this feature works to
| be like X") to deployment into the hands of my customers.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| In my feed 'AI hype' outnumbers 'anti-AI hype' 5-1. And anti-
| hype moderates like antirez and simonw are rare. To be a
| radical in ai is to believe that ai tools offer a modest but
| growing net positive utility to a modest but growing subset of
| hackers and professionals
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Well put.
|
| AI obviously brings big benefits into the profession. We just
| have not seen exactly what they are just yet. How it will
| unfold.
|
| But personally I feel that a future of not having to churn
| out yet another crud app is attractive.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| For me its the feeling of true understanding and discovery. Not
| just of how the computer works, but how whatever problem domain
| I'm making software for works. It's model building and
| simulation of the world. To the degree I can use the LLM to
| teach me to solve the problem better than I could before I like
| it, to the degree it takes over and obscures the understanding
| from me, I despise it. I don't love computers because of how
| fast I can create shareholder value, that's for sure.
| colordrops wrote:
| The split I'm seeing with those around me is:
|
| 1. Those who see their codebase as a sculpture, a work of art,
| a source of pride 2. Those who focus on outcomes.
|
| They are not contradictory goals, but I'm finding that if your
| emphasis is 1, you general dislike LLMs, and if your emphasis
| is 2, you love them, or at least tolerate them.
| edg5000 wrote:
| > state of the art LLMs are able to complete large subtasks or
| medium size projects alone, almost unassisted, given a good set
| of hints about what the end result should be
|
| No. I agree with the author, but it's hyperbolic of him to phrase
| it like this. If you have solid domain knowledge, you'll steer
| the model with detailed specs. It will carry those out
| competently and multiply your productivity. However, the quality
| of the output still reflects your state of knowledge. It just
| provides leverage. Given the best tractors, a good farmer will
| have much better yields than a shit one. Without good direction,
| even Opus 4.5 tends to create massive code repetion. Easy to
| avoid if you know what you are doing, albeit in a refactor pass.
| artdigital wrote:
| Yes that's how I see it too. It's a productivity multiplier,
| but depends on what you put in.
|
| Sure Opus can work fully on its own by just telling it "add a
| button that does X", but do that 20 times and the good turns
| into mush. Steer the model with detailed tech specs on the
| other hand, and the output becomes magical
| falloutx wrote:
| If this only works for people with like 10+ years of domain
| experience, doesnt that make this an Anti-AI article? Whole
| vibe coding sells on the promise that it works and it works for
| every tom and their mom.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| This conflates two things.
|
| One is LLMs writing code. Not everything and not for
| everyone. But they are useful for most of the code being
| written. It is useful.
|
| What it does not do (yet, if ever) is bridging the gap from
| "idea" to a working solution. This is precisely where all the
| low-code ideas of the past decades fell apart. Translating an
| idea in to formal rules is very, very hard.
|
| Think of all of the "just add a button there"-type comments
| we've all suffered.
| biophysboy wrote:
| I feel like a lot of the disagreement over this "large project"
| capability is that "large project" can mean anything. It can
| mean something that has a trillion github repos to work with,
| or it can mean something that is basically uncharted territory.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think best hope against AI is copy right. That is AI generated
| software has none. Everyone is free to steal and resell it. And
| those who generated have zero rights to complain or take legal
| action.
| Juliate wrote:
| > What is the social solution, then? Innovation can't be taken
| back after all.
|
| It definitely can.
|
| The innovation that was the open, social web of 20 years ago?
| still an option, but drowned between closed ad-fueled toxic
| gardens and drained by AI illegal copy bots.
|
| The innovation that was democracy? Purposely under attack in
| every single place it still exists today.
|
| Insulin at almost no cost (because it costs next to nothing to
| produce)? Out of the question for people that live under the
| regime of pharmaceutical corporations that are not reigned by
| government, by collective rules.
|
| So, a technology that has a dubious ROI over the energy and water
| and land consumed, incites illegal activities and suicides, and
| that is in the process of killing the consumer public IT market
| for the next 5 years if not more, because one unprofitable
| company without solid verifiable prospects managed to pass
| dubious orders with unproven money that lock memory components
| for unproven data centers... yes, it definitely can be taken
| back.
| Philpax wrote:
| You cannot stop someone from running llama-server -m
| glm-4.7.gguf on their own hardware. That is the argument: even
| if all the AI companies go bust and the datacenters explode,
| the technology has been fundamentally proliferated and it is
| impossible to return to a world in which it does not exist.
| Juliate wrote:
| Of course not. But that's only the raw tech.
|
| The tech will still be there. As much as blockchains, crypto,
| NFTs and such, whose bubbles have not yet burst (well, the
| NFT one did, it was fast).
|
| But (Gen)AI today is much less about the tech, and much more
| about the illegal actions (harvesting copyrighted works) that
| permit it to run and the disastrous impact it has on ...
| everything (resources, jobs, mistaken prospectives, distorted
| IT markets, culture, politics) because it is not (yet)
| regulated to the extent it should.
| imiric wrote:
| This is the first time I hear sentiments against "AI" hype be
| referred to as hype itself. Yes, there are people ignoring this
| technology altogether, possibly to their own detriment, but at
| the stage where we are now it is perfectly reasonable to want to
| avoid the actual hype.
|
| What I would really urge people to avoid doing is listening to
| what any tech influencer has to say, including antirez. I really
| don't care what famous developers think about this technology,
| and it doesn't influence my own experience of it. People should
| try out whatever they're comfortable with, and make up their own
| opinions, instead of listening what anyone else has to say about
| it. This applies to anything, of course, but it's particularly
| important for the technology bubble we're currently in.
|
| It's unfortunate that some voices are louder than others in this
| parasocial web we've built. Those with larger loudspeakers should
| be conscious of this fact, and moderate their output responsibly.
| It starts by not telling people what to do.
| mehdi1964 wrote:
| The shift isn't about replacing programmers, it's about changing
| what programming means--from writing every line to designing,
| guiding, and validating. Excited to see how open source and small
| teams can leverage this without being drowned by centralization.
| richardjennings wrote:
| SOTA LLMs are now quite good at typing out code that passes
| tests. If you are able to instruct the creation of sufficient
| tests and understand the code generated structurally, there is a
| significant multiplier in productivity. I have found LLMs to be
| hugely useful in understanding codebases more quickly. Granted it
| may be necessary to get 2nd opinions and fact check what is
| stated, but there is a big door now open to anyone to educate
| themselves.
|
| I think there are some negative consequences to this; perhaps a
| new form of burn out. With the force multiplier and assisted
| learning utility comes a substantial increase in opportunity
| cost.
| eeixlk wrote:
| If you dont call it AI and see it as a natural language search
| engine result merger it's a bit easier to understand. Like a
| search engine, it's clunky so you have to know how to use it to
| get any useful results. Sometimes it appears magical or clever
| but it's just analyzing billions of text patterns. You can use
| this search merger to generate text in various forms quickly, and
| request new generated text. But it doesn't have taste,
| comprehension, problem solving, vision, or wisdom. However it can
| steal your data and your work and include it in it's search
| engine.
| falloutx wrote:
| Where is this Anti-AI hype? We are seeing 100x videos of Claude
| Code & Vibe Coding and then may be we get 1 or 2 people saying
| "Maybe we should be cautious"
| simonw wrote:
| I would count about two-thirds of the comments in this thread
| as anti-AI hype, and this thread is pretty mild in that regard
| compared to most other threads here about AI for code.
|
| And this is Hacker News, which you might expect to attract
| people who thrive on exploring the edges of weird new
| technology!
| falloutx wrote:
| I mean most of us dont work in our own thing or open source,
| so making badly thought & designed features faster isn't
| really a dream. Software already has so much bloat and slop
| that this way of doing just scares us.
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| I don't have decades of experience under my belt, but I feel
| like the reaction is happening mostly because it is the first
| time that developers are at the risk of being automated out
| of work. "Learn a new field" is easy to say when you are not
| the one that will need to do it. Now a lot of developers are
| afraid of having to follow the advice that they gave to a lot
| of workers.
|
| I don't believe that AI will put most of the working force
| out of jobs. That would be so different from what we had in
| history that I think the chances are minimal. However, they
| are not zero, and that is scary as fuck for a lot of people.
| falloutx wrote:
| This is literally true, we have been automating other
| people out of their jobs without empathy for ages, so it
| makes sense at some point the knife would fall on us.
| Because of low solidarity we have shown with others and
| even our fellow programmers, I guess we deserve it. My real
| worry at this point is that the most destructive ones will
| continue and only the destructive programmers will be safe.
| tucnak wrote:
| Honestly, "Maybe we should be cautious" seems akin to concern
| trolling.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| LLMs are breaking open-source monetization.
|
| Group 1 is untouched since they were writing code for the sake of
| writing and they have the reward of that altruism.
|
| Group 2 are those that needed their projects to bring in some
| revenue so they can continue writing open-source.
|
| Group 3 are companies that used open-source as a way to get
| market share from proprietary companies, using it more in a
| capitalistic way.
|
| Overtime, I think groups 2 and 3 will leave open-source and group
| 1 will make up most of the open-source contributors. It is up to
| you to decide if projects like Redis would be built today with
| the monetary incentives gone.
| antirez wrote:
| Please note that the majority of OSS efforts where already non
| monetized and deeply exploited. At least, what it is happening
| has the potential to change the model towards a more correct
| one. What you see with Tailwind and similar cases, it is not
| really an open source business model issue, it is a "low
| barrier to entry" business model issue, since with AI a lot of
| things can be done without efforts and without purchasing PRO
| products. And also documentation is less useful, but this is a
| general thing, not just related to OSS software. In general
| people that write OSS are, for the most part, not helped enough
| by the companies using their code to make money, by users, buy
| everybody else, basically.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I generally have a lot of respect for this guy. He's an excellent
| coder, and really cares about his craft. I can relate to him
| (except he's been more successful than me, which is fine -he
| deserves it).
|
| Really, one of the first things he said, sums it up:
|
| _> facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming
| forever._
|
| I have been using it in a very similar manner to how he describes
| his workflow, and it's already greatly improved my velocity and
| quality.
|
| I also can relate to this comment:
|
| _> I feel great to be part of that, because I see this as a
| continuation of what I tried to do all my life: democratizing
| code, systems, knowledge._
| metalman wrote:
| the end run around copyright, is TOS that are forced on users,
| through distribution chanels(platforms),service providors, and
| actual "patented" hardware, so money will continue to flow up,
| not sideways. Given that there are a very limited number of
| things that can actualy be done with computer/phones, and it
| becomes clear that "AI" can arrange those in any possible
| configuration, the rest is deciding if it will jive with the
| users, and noticing when it doesn't, which I believe that AI will
| be unable to disern from other AI slop, imitating actual useres
| sreekanth850 wrote:
| People here generalise vibcoders into single category. I don't
| write code line-by-line the traditional way, but I do understand
| architecture deeply. Recently I started using AI to write code.
| not by dumping random prompts and copy-pasting blindly, but
| inside VS Code, reviewing what it generates, understanding why it
| works, and knowing exactly where each feature lives and how it
| fits. I also work with a frontend developer (As i do backend only
| and not interested in building UI and css) to integrate things
| properly, and together we fix bugs and security issues. Every
| feature built with AI works flawlessly because it's still being
| reviewed, tested, and owned by humans. If I have a good Idea, and
| use AI to code, without depending on a developer friction due to
| limited budget, why people think its Sin? Is the implication that
| if you don't have VC money to hire a team of developers, you're
| supposed to just lose? I saw the exact same sentiment when tools
| like Elementor started getting popular among business owners.
| Same arguments, same gatekeeping. The market didn't care. It
| feels more like insecurity about losing an edge. And if the edge
| was I type code myself, that edge was always fragile. Edit: The
| biggest advantage is that you don't lose anything in translation.
| There's no gap between the idea in your head and what gets built.
|
| You don't spend weeks explaining intent, edge cases, or what I
| really meant to a developer. You iterate 1:1 with the system and
| adjust immediately when something feels off.
| kiriakosv wrote:
| AI tools in their current form or another will definitely change
| software engineering, I personally think for the best
|
| However I can't help but notice some things that look
| weird/amusing:
|
| - The exact time that many programmers were enlightened about the
| AI capabilities and the frequency of their posts.
|
| - The uniform language they use in these posts. Grandiose
| adjectives, standard phrases like 'it seems to me'
|
| - And more importantly the sense of urgency and FOMO they emit.
| This is particularly weird for two reasons. First is that if the
| past has shown something regarding technology is that open source
| always catches up. But this is not the case yet. Second, if the
| premise is that we re just the in beginning all these ceremonial
| flows will be obsolete.
|
| Do not get me wrong, as of today these are all valid ways to work
| with AI and in many domains they increase the productivity. But I
| really don't get the sense of urgency.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| These personal blogs are starting to feel like Linkdin Lunatic
| posts, kinda similar. to the optimised floor sweeping blog, "I am
| excited to provide shareholder value, at minimum wage"
| simonw wrote:
| What does it tell you that programmers with the credibility of
| antirez - and who do not have an AI product to sell you - are
| writing things like this even when they _know_ a lot of people
| aren 't going to like reading them?
| falloutx wrote:
| People higher up the ladder aren't selling anything but they
| also have to not worry about losing jobs. We are worried that
| execs are going to see the advances and quickly clear the
| benches, might not be true but every programmer believing
| they have become a 10x programmer pushes us more into that
| reality.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Nothing at all, it just sounds like a desperate post on
| LinkedIn riding the slight glimmer of hope it will help them
| land their next position.
| fabianholzer wrote:
| That is an argument to authority. There is a large enough
| segment of folks who like to be confirmed in either
| direction. Doesn't make the argument itself correct or
| incorrect. Time will tell though.
| atmavatar wrote:
| Just because he doesn't have an AI product to sell doesn't
| mean he doesn't have a bias. For all we know, he's heavily
| invested in AI companies.
|
| We have to abandon the appeal to authority and take the
| argument on its merits, which honestly, we should be doing
| regardless.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| > We have to abandon the appeal to authority and take the
| argument on its merits, which honestly, we should be doing
| regardless.
|
| I don't really agree. In virtually any field, when those
| who have achieved mastery speak, others, even other
| masters, tend to listen. That does not mean blindly trust
| them. It means adjust your priors and reevaluate your
| beliefs.
|
| Software development is not special. When people like
| antirez (redis) and simonw (django) and DHH (rails) are
| speaking highly of AI, and when _Linus Torvalds_ is saying
| he 's using AI now, suggesting they may be on to something
| is not an appeal to authority. And frankly, claiming that
| they might be saying nice things about AI because of some
| financial motive is crazy.
| kibwen wrote:
| What it tells me is that humans are fallible, and that being
| a competent programmer has no correlation with having strong
| mental defenses against the brainrot that typifies the modern
| terminally-online internet user.
|
| I leverage LLMs where it makes sense for me to do so, but
| let's dispense with this FOMO silliness. People who choose
| not to aren't missing out on anything, any more than people
| who choose to use stock Vim rather than VSCode aren't missing
| out on anything.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It's not Vim vs VSCode though - the analogy might be
| writing in assembler vs writing in your high level language
| of choice.
|
| Using AI you're increasing the level of abstraction you can
| work at, and reducing the amount of detail you need to
| worry about. You tell the AI what you want to do, not how
| to do it, other than providing context that does tell it
| about the things that you do actually care about.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Being famous doesn't mean that they're right about
| everything, e.g. Einstein and "God does not play dice with
| the universe".
|
| That LLMs advocates are resorting to the appeal to authority
| fallacy isn't a good look for them either.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| > Writing code is no longer needed for the most part.
|
| Said by someone who spent his career writing code, it lacks a bit
| of details... a more correct way to phrase it is: "if you're
| already an expert in good coding, now you can use these tools to
| skip most of code writing"
|
| LLMs today are mostly some kind of "fill-in-the-blanks
| automation". As a coder, you try to create constraints (define
| types for typechecking constraints, define tests for testing
| constraints, define the general ideas you want the LLM to code
| because you already know about the domain and how coding works),
| then you let the model "fill-in the blanks" and you regularly
| check that all tests pass, etc
| zkmon wrote:
| So, by "AI", you mean programming AI. Generalizing it as "AI" and
| "anti-AI" is adding great confusion to the already dizzying level
| of hype.
|
| At it's core, AI has capability to extract structure/meaning from
| unstructured content and vice-versa. Computing systems and other
| machines required inputs with limited context. So far, it was a
| human's job to prepare that structure and context and provide it
| to the machines. That structure can be called as "program" or
| "form data" or "a sequence of steps or lever operations or button
| presses".
|
| Now the machines got this AI wrapper or adapter that enables them
| to extract the context and structure from the natural human-
| formatted or messy content.
|
| But all that works only if the input has the required amount of
| information and inherent structure to it. Try giving a prompt
| with jumbled up sequence of words. So it's still the human jobs
| to provide that input to the machine.
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| I've found awesome use cases for quick prototyping. It saves me
| days when I can just describe the final step and iterate on it
| backwards to perfection and showcase an idea.
| keyle wrote:
| > The fun is still there, untouched.
|
| Well that's a way to put it. But not everyone enjoy the art only
| for the results.
|
| I personally love learning, and by letting AI drive forward and
| me following, I don't learn. To learn is to be human.
|
| So saying the fun is untouched is one-sided. Not everyone is in
| it for the same reasons.
| torlok wrote:
| I have no idea where the author is coming from with this. If I
| wanted to mainly tell others what to code, do code reviews, or
| "build", I'd be in a different role.
| elktown wrote:
| I wonder if being a literal AI sci-fi author, antirez
| acknowledges that there's possible bias and willingness to
| extrapolate here? That said, I respect his work immensely and I
| do put a lot of weight to his recommendations. But I'd really
| prefer the hype fog that's clouding signal [for me] to dissipate
| a bit - maybe economic realities will sort this out soon.
|
| There's also a short-termism aspect of AI generated code that's
| seemingly not addressed as much. Don't pee your pants in the
| winter to keep warm.
| on_the_train wrote:
| Another one of these sickening pieces. Framing opposition to an
| expensive tech that doesn't work as "anti". I tried letting the
| absolutely newest models write c++ today again. Gpt 5.1 and opus
| 4.5. single function with two or less input parameters, a nice
| return value, doing simple geometry with the glm library. Yes the
| code worked. But I took as long fixing the weird parts as it
| would have taken me myself. And I still don't trust the result,
| because reviewing is so much harder than writing.
|
| There's still no point. Resharper and clang-tidy still have more
| value than all LLMs. It's not just a hype, it's a bloody cult,
| right besides those nft and church of COVID people.
| simonw wrote:
| Did you try telling the model to write the unit tests first,
| watch them fail, then write a function that passes them?
| expedition32 wrote:
| There is too much money invested in AI. You can't trust anyone
| talking about it.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| People are afraid, because while AI seemingly gobbles up
| programmer jobs, on the economic side there are no guardrails
| visible or planned whatsoever.
| kruuuder wrote:
| What happens if the bubble bursts - can we still use all the
| powerful models to create all this code? Aren't all the agents
| effectively using venture capital today? Is this sustainable?
|
| If I can run an agent on my machine, with no remote backend
| required, the problem is solved. But right now, aren't all
| developers throwing themselves into agentic software development
| betting that these services will always be available to them at a
| relatively low cost?
| simonw wrote:
| If the bubble bursts we club together to buy one of those big
| GPU servers (now available at rock bottom prices thanks to the
| bubble bursting) and run a shared instance of GLM-4.7 (the
| current best-at-coding Chinese open weight model) on it.
| dzonga wrote:
| antirez gave us reddit - but somehow I think the part him and
| other smart folks who talk about A.I so much is they forget about
| agency | self-sufficiency.
|
| If A.I writes everything for you - cool, you can produce faster ?
| but is it really true ? if you're renting capacity ? what if
| costs go up, now you can't rent anymore - but you can't code
| anymore, the documentation is no longer there - coz mcp etc
| assumption that everything will be done by agents then what ?
|
| what about the people that work on messy 'Information Systems' -
| things like redis - impressive but it's closed loop software just
| like compilers -
|
| some smart guy back in the 80s - wrote it's always a people
| problem -
| otterley wrote:
| Redis, not Reddit. :)
| anovikov wrote:
| I'm sure it will go in the worst way possible: demand for code
| will not expand at nearly the same rate in which coding
| productivity will increase, and vast majority of coders will
| become permanently jobless, the rest will become disposable cheap
| labor just due to overabundance of them.
|
| This is already happening.
|
| AI had an impact on simplest coding first, this is self-evident.
| So any impact it had, had to be on the quantity of software
| created, and only then on its quality and/or complexity. And
| mobile apps are/were a tedious job with a lot of scaffolding and
| a lot of "blanks to fill" to make them work and get accepted by
| stores. So first thing that had to skyrocket in numbers with the
| arrival of AI, had to be mobile apps.
|
| But the number of apps on Apple Store is essentially flat and
| rate of increase is barely distinguishable from the past years,
| +7% instead of +5%. Not even visible.
|
| Apparently the world doesn't need/can't make monetisable use of
| much more software than it already does. Demand wasn't quite
| satisfied say 5 years ago, but the gap wasn't huge. It is now
| covered many times over.
|
| Which means, most of us will probably never get another job/gig
| after the current one - and if it's over, it's over and not worth
| trying anymore - the scraps that are left of the market are not
| worth the effort.
| agoodusername63 wrote:
| I never stop being amused that LLMs have made HN realize that
| many programmers are programmers for paychecks. Not for passion
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| > the more isolated, and the more textually representable, the
| better: system programming is particularly apt
|
| I've written complete GUIs in 3D on the front end. This GUI was
| non traditional. It allows you to playback, pause speed up, slow
| down and rewind a gps track like a movie. There is real time
| color changing and drawing of the track as the playback occurs.
|
| Using mapbox to do this straight would be to slow. I told the AI
| to optimize it by going straight into shader extensions for
| mapbox to optimize GPU code.
|
| Make no mistake. LLMs are incredible for things that are non
| systems based that require interaction with 3D and GUIs.
| antirez wrote:
| Yep, they work especially if you instruct them to add into your
| program ways for them to "see" what it is happening. And the
| more embedding models are getting better, the better results we
| will get too, from their ability to "see". For now Gemini 3 is
| the best at this, but is not the best at coding as an agent, so
| we will have to wait a bit.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| I am not sure why the OP is painting it as a "us-vs-them" - pro
| or anti-AI ? AI is a tool. Use it if it helps.
|
| I would draw an analogy here between building software and
| building a home.
|
| When building a home we have a user providing the requirements,
| the architect/structural engineer providing the blueprint to
| satisfy the reqs, the civil engineer overseeing the construction,
| and the mason laying the bricks. Some projects may have a
| project-manager coordinating these activities.
|
| Building software is similar in many aspects to building a
| structure. If developers think of themselves as a mason they are
| limiting their perspective. If AI can help lay the bricks use it
| ! If it can help with the blueprint or the design use it. It is a
| fantastic tool in the tool belt of the profession. I think of it
| as a power-tool and want to keep its batteries charged to use it
| at any time.
| yndoendo wrote:
| I want to know if any content has been made using AI or not.
|
| There really should be a label on the product to let the consumer
| know. This should be similar to Norway that requires disclosure
| of retouched images. No other way can I think of to help body
| image issues arising from pictorial people and how they never can
| being in real life.
| echelon wrote:
| I love Antirez.
|
| > However, this technology is far too important to be in the
| hands of a few companies.
|
| This is the most important assessment and we should all heed this
| warning with great care. If we think hyperscalers are bad,
| imagine what happens if they control and dictate the entire
| future.
|
| Our cellphones are prisons. We have no fundamental control, and
| we can't freely distribute software amongst ourselves. Everything
| flows through funnels of control and monitoring. The entire
| internet and all of technology could soon become the same.
|
| We need to bust this open now or face a future where we are truly
| serfs.
|
| I'm excited by AI and I love what it can do, but we are in a
| mortally precarious position.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| I'm not sure what to make of these technologies. I read about
| people doing all these things with them and it sounds impressive.
| Then when I use it, it feels like the tool produces junior level
| code unless I babysit it, then it really can produce what I want.
|
| If I have to do all this babysitting, is it really saving me
| anything other than typing the code? It hasn't felt like it yet
| and if anything it's scary because I need to always read the code
| to make sure it's valid, and reading code is harder than writing
| it.
| casid wrote:
| I'm always puzzled by these claims. I usually know exactly what
| I want my code to look like. Writing a prompt instead and
| waiting for the result to return takes me right out of the
| flow. Sure, I can try to prompt and ask for larger junks, but
| then I have to review and understand the generated output
| first. If this makes people 10x faster, they must have worked
| really slow before.
| golly_ned wrote:
| As long as I'm not reviewing PRs with thousands of lines net new
| that weren't even read by their PR submitter, I'm fine with
| anything. The software design I've seen from AI code agent using
| peers has been dreadful.
|
| I think for some who are excited about AI programming, they're
| happy they can build a lot more things. I think for others,
| they're excited they can build the same amount of things, but
| with a lot less thinking. The agent and their code reviewers can
| do the thinking for them.
| didip wrote:
| The paragraph that was started with this sentence:
|
| > However, this technology is far too important to be in the
| hands of a few companies.
|
| I wholeheartedly agree 1000%. Something needs to change this
| landscape in the US.
|
| Furthermore, the entire open source models being dominated by
| China is also problematic.
| 28ahsgT7 wrote:
| It is somewhat amusing that the pro-LLM faction increasingly co-
| opts their opponents' arguments--now they are turning AI-hype
| into anti-AI hype.
|
| They did the same with Upton Sinclair's quote, which is now used
| against any worker who dares to hope for salary.
|
| There is not much creativity in the pro-LLM faction, which is
| guided by monetary interests and does not mind to burn its social
| capital in exchange for loss of credibility and money.
| dbacar wrote:
| There are different opinions on this:
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding-degrades
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The reason I am "anti-AI" is not because I think LLMs being bad
| at what they do, nor because I'm afraid they'll take my job. I
| use CC to accelerate my own work (it's improved by leaps and
| bounds though I still find I have to keep it on a short leash
| because it doesn't always think things through enough). It's also
| a great research tool (search on steroids). It's excellent at
| summarizing long documents, editing and proofreading, etc. I use
| it for all those things. It's useful.
|
| The reason I am anti-AI is because I believe it poses a net-
| negative to society overall. Not because it is inherently bad,
| but because of the way it is being infused into society by large
| corps (and eventually governments). Yes, it makes me, and other
| developers, more productive. And it can more quickly solve
| certain problems that were time consuming or laborious to solve.
| And it might lead to new and greater scientific and technological
| advances.
|
| But those gains do not outweigh all of the negatives:
| concentration of power and capital into an increasingly small
| group, the eventual loss of untold millions of jobs (with, as of
| yet, not even a shred of indication of what might be replace
| them), the loss of skills in the next generations who are
| delegating much of their critical thinking (or thinking period),
| to ChatGPT; the loss of trust in society now that any believable
| video can be easily generated; the concentration of power in the
| the control of information if everyone is getting their info from
| LLMs instead of the open internet (and ultimately, potentially
| the death of the open internet); the explosion in energy
| consumption by data centers which exacerbates rather than
| mitigates global warming; and plenty more.
|
| AI might allow us to find better technological solutions to world
| hunger, poverty, mental health, water shortages, climate change,
| and war. But none of those problems are technological problems;
| technology only plays a small part. And the really important part
| is being negatively exacerbated by the "AI arms race". That's why
| I, who was my whole life a technological optimist, am no longer
| hopeful for the future. I wish I was.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _However, this technology is far too important to be in the
| hands of a few companies._
|
| I worry less about the model access and more about the hardwire
| required to _run_ those models (i.e. do inference).
|
| If a) the only way to compete in software development in the
| future is to outsource the entire implementation process to one
| of a few frontier models (Chinese, US or otherwise)
|
| and b) only a few companies worldwide have the GPU power to run
| inference with those models in a reasonable time
|
| then don't we already have a massive amount of centralization?
|
| That is also something I keep wondering with agentic coding -
| being able to realize your epic fantasy hobby project you've on
| and off been thinking about for the last years in a couple of
| afternoons is absolutely amazing. But if you do the same with
| work projects, how do you solve the data protection issues? Will
| we all now just hand our entire production codebases to OpenAI or
| Anthropic etc and hope their pinky promises hold?
|
| Or will there be a race for medium-sized companies to have their
| own GPU datacentets, not for production but solely for internal
| development and code generation?
| silexia wrote:
| AI has a significant risk of directly leading to the extinction
| of our species, according to leading AI researchers. We should be
| worried about a lot more than job losses.
| etamponi wrote:
| > Hours instead of weeks.
|
| And then goes on describing two things for which I bet almost
| anyone with enough knowledge of C and Redis could implement a POC
| in... Guess what? Hours.
|
| At this point I am literally speechless, if even Antirez falls
| for this "you get so quick!!!" hype.
|
| You get _some_ speed up _for things you could anyway implement_.
| You get past the "blank screen block" which prevents you from
| starting some project.
|
| These are great useful things that AI does for you!
|
| Shaving off _weeks_ of work? Let's come back in a couple of month
| when he'll have to rewrite everything that AI has written so
| well. Or, that code would just die away (which is another great
| use case for AI: throw away code).
|
| People still don't understand that writing code is a way to
| understand something? Clearly you don't need to write code for a
| domain you already understand, or that you literally created.
|
| What leaves me sad is that this time it is _Antirez_ that writes
| such things.
|
| I have to be honest: it makes me doubt of my position, and I'll
| constantly reevaluate it. But man. I hope it's just a hype post
| for an AI product he'll release tomorrow.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| "Nah uh I'm not falling for hype _you're_ falling for hype."
| nephihaha wrote:
| Universal Basic Income is not the panacea it's claimed to be.
|
| UBI gives government more control over individuals' finances,
| especially those without independent means. Poverty is also the
| result of unfair taxation, where poor people face onerous taxes
| while receiving less and less in return, and the wealthy avoid
| tax at every turn. Or that it is difficult for people to be self-
| employed due to red tape favouring big business. UBI does not
| address those issues.
|
| UBI also centralises control at the expense of local self-
| determination and community engagement.
| fsflover wrote:
| Shallow dismissals are against HN Guidelines,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| nephihaha wrote:
| The term "shallow" is entirely subjective here. I have edited
| the comment because of your reaction.
| darepublic wrote:
| In my current work project I am consulting llm frequently as a
| type of coding search engine. I also use it to rubber duck my
| designs. Most of the coding was done myself though. But even that
| feels perhaps quaint and I feel like it may be wasting time
| remix2000 wrote:
| Honestly, coding with a chatbot's "help" just slows me down. Also
| the progress in chatbot space is minimal (at least it feels like
| that from an end user perspective), essentially nonexistent since
| like 2024. I only use them cause all search engines are broken on
| purpose now. It's truly terrible times we live in, but not
| because the robots could replace us, rather because nontechnical
| managers are detached from reality as they always were and want
| us to believe that.
| hollowturtle wrote:
| The worst blow for me was search engines, you're so right that
| are broken on purpose now, that's a total bummer. Also
| wondering how Google is not loosing money from non shown ads in
| search
| burgerone wrote:
| There's this infinite war between the two opposing sides. "It's
| going to change programming forever" vs "Why not just use your
| brain". I much prefer option two for all the good reasons. Saying
| that AI is awesome doesn't actually adress all its issues.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| What is infinite about that (or any) war? Things always change
| and "just do/use x" consistently, eventually, does not win.
| lrvick wrote:
| As a security engineer that regularly architects and helps
| implement new defense tactics that no LLM has trained on, I
| choose not to use LLMs at all, like a cave man.
|
| Being differently trained and using different tools than almost
| everyone else I know in engineering my entire career has allowed
| me to find solutions and vulnerabilities others have missed time
| and time again. I exclusively use open source software I can
| always take apart, fully understand, and modify as I like. This
| inclination has served me well and is why I have the skillsets I
| do today.
|
| If everyone is doing things one way, I instinctively want to
| explore all the other ways to train my own brain to continue to
| be adversarial and with a stamina to do hard experiments by hand
| when no tools exist to automate them yet.
|
| Watching all my peers think more and more alike actually scares
| me, as they are all talking to the same LLMs. None for me,
| thanks.
|
| "But this magic proprietary tool makes my job so much easier!!"
| has never been a compelling argument for me.
| stareatgoats wrote:
| Not even antirez can sway the skeptics here. People that have
| garnered too many upvotes in the countless comments about how
| worthless AI is compared to real programmers will need much more
| to leave their fortresses.
|
| But maybe we should cherish these people. Maybe it's among them
| we find the embryo to the resistance - people who held out when
| most of us were seduced - seduced into giving the machine all our
| knowledge, all our skills, all the secrets about us we were not
| even aware of ourselves - and setting it up to be orders of
| magnitude more intelligent than any of us, combined. And finally
| - just as mean, vindictive and selfish as most of the people in
| the training data on which it was trained.
|
| Maybe it's good to stay skeptical a bit longer.
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