[HN Gopher] Choosing learning over autopilot
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Choosing learning over autopilot
Author : evakhoury
Score : 30 points
Date : 2026-01-13 18:46 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (anniecherkaev.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (anniecherkaev.com)
| joe_mamba wrote:
| From the author:
|
| _> ai-generated code is throw-away code_
|
| Mate, most code I ever written across my career has been throw
| away code. The only exception being some embedded code that's
| most likely on the streets to this day. But most of my desktop
| and web code has been thrown away by now by my previous employers
| or replaced by someone else's throwaway code. There's no shame in
| that and no pride in that either, I'm just paid to "put the fries
| in the bag", that's it.
|
| Most of us aren't building DOOM, the Voyager probe or the Golden
| Gate bridge here, epic feats of art and engineering designed to
| last 30-100+ years, we're just plumbers hacking something quickly
| to hold things together until the music chairs stop playing and I
| have no issue offloading that to a clanker if I can, so i can
| focus on the things I enjoy doing. Do you think I grew up
| dreaming about writing GitHub Actions yaml files for a living?
|
| Oh and BTW, code being throwaway, is the main reason demand and
| pay for web SW engineers has been so high. In industries where
| code is one-and-done, pay tends to scale down accordingly since a
| customer is more than happy to keep using your C app on a Window
| XP machine down in the warehouse, instead of keep paying you to
| keep rewriting it every year in a facier framework in the cloud.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| RAG, llm pipeline industry just continues in the same fashion
| of throwing even more glue, insanely slow, expensive, but works
| due to somehow companies having money to waste, perpetually.
| Not that much different from the whole Apache stack or similar
| gluey expensive and slow software.
|
| There is similar mindless glue in all tech stacks. LLMs are
| trained on it, and successfully do more of it.
|
| Even AI companies just wastefully do massive experiments with
| suboptimal data and compute bandwidth.
| dgxyz wrote:
| Yeah this is what kills me. Most of the problems we solve are
| pretty simple. We just made the stacks really painful and now
| LLMs look sensible because they are trained to reproduce that
| same old crap mindlessly.
|
| What the hell are we really doing?
|
| What looked sensible to me is designing a table, form and
| report in Microsoft Access in 30 minutes without requiring 5
| engineers and writing 50k lines of React and fucking around
| with kubernetes and microservices to get there.
|
| LLMs just paste over the pile of shit we build on.
| spion wrote:
| cold take speculation: the architecture astronautics of the
| Java era probably destroyed a lot of the desire for better
| abstractions and thinking over copy-pasting, minimalism and
| open standards
|
| hot take speculation: we base a lot of our work on open
| source software and libraries, but a lot of that software
| is cheaply made, or made for the needs of a company that
| happens to open-source it. the pull of the low-quality
| "standardized" open source foundations is preventing
| further progress.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I feel like a lot code is pretty sticky actually. I spend two
| weeks working on a feature and most likely that code will live
| for a time period measured in years. Even the deprecation
| period for a piece of software might be measured in years.
| m463 wrote:
| It's kind of amazing that the really mainstream jobs create and
| pitch throwaway code, while a few key niche jobs, with little
| demand, can really create enduring products.
|
| Kind of like designing a better social media interface probably
| pays 100x what a toilet designer would be paid, but a better
| toilet would benefit the world 1000x.
| esafak wrote:
| The difference between economic value and social value.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| Which is why I dislike the GDP being thrown around in
| discussions as the ultimate dick measuring metric. High
| economic value activities don't translate or don't trickle
| down into high social value environments.
|
| For example, I went to visit SF as young lad and I was
| expecting to be blown away given the immense wealth that
| area generates, but was severely disappointed with what I
| saw on the street. I used to think my home area of Eastern
| Europe is kind of a shithole, but SF beats that hands down.
| Like there's dozens of places on this planet that are way
| nicer to live in than SF despite being way poorer by
| comparison.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| The missing step seems to be identifying what is worth learning
| and your goals. Will learning X actually benefit you? We already
| do this with libraries, they save us a great deal of time
| partially by freeing us from having to learn everything required
| to implement that library, and we use them despite those
| libraries often being less than ideal for the task.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I respect this choice, but also I feel like one might need to
| respect that it may end up not being particularly "externally"
| valuable.
|
| Which is to say, if it's a thing you love spending your time on
| and it tickles your brain in that way, go for it, whatever it is.
|
| But (and still first takeaways) if the goal is "making good and
| useful software," today one has to be at least open to the
| possibility that "not using AI" will be like an accountant not
| using a calculator.
| spion wrote:
| Has anyone measured whether doing things with AI leads to any
| learning? One way to do this is to measure whether subsequent
| related tasks have improvements in time-to-functional-results
| with and without AI, as % improvement. Additionally two more
| datapoints can be taken: with-ai -> without-ai, and without-ai ->
| with-ai
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| How many people could, from scratch, build a ball point pen?
|
| Do we have to understand the 100 years of history behind the tool
| or the ability to use it? Some level of repair knowledge is
| great. Knowing the spring vs ink level is also helpful.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| Following up - I am the most excited about using computers
| because the barrier from intent to product are being dropped.
| At this point my children can 'code' software without knowing
| anything other than intent. Reality is being made manifest.
| Building physics into a game would take a decade of experience
| but today we can say "allow for collision between vehicles".
|
| If you have ever gone running the ability to coordinate four
| limbs, maintain balance, assert trajectory, negotiate uneven
| terrain, and modify velocity and speed at will is completely
| unknown to 99.9% of mortals who ever lived and yet is possible
| because 'biological black box hand wave'.
| amelius wrote:
| > What scares me most is an existential fear that I won't learn
| anything if I work in the "lazy" way.
|
| You're basically becoming a manager. If you're wondering what AI
| will turn you into just think of that manager.
| belval wrote:
| I get where the author is coming from, but (I promise from an
| intellectually honest place) does it really matter?
|
| Modeling software in general greatly reduced the ability of
| engineers to compute 3rd, 4th and 5th order derivatives by hand
| when working on projects and also broke their ability to create
| technical drawing by hand. Both of those were arguably proof of a
| master engineer in their field, yet today this would be mostly
| irrelevant when hiring.
|
| Are they lesser engineers for it? Or was it never really about
| derivatives and drawings, and all about building bridges,
| engines, software that works?
| esafak wrote:
| I can't believe I took a mandatory technical drawing class.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Post is clearly very heavily glued together/formatted and more by
| an LLM, but it's sort of fascinating how bits and spurts of the
| author's lowercase style made it through unscathed.
| dandano wrote:
| Lately I have had the cursed vision as I'm building a new IoT
| product. I have to learn _so_ much, so I have stopped using
| claude code. I find directly altering my code too hands off.
|
| Instead I still use claude in the browser mainly for high level
| thinking/architecture > generating small chunks of code > copying
| pasta-ing it over. I always make sure I'm reading said
| library/code docs as well and asking claude to clarify anything
| I'm unsure of. This is akin to when I started development using
| stackoverflow just 10x productive. And I still feel like I'm
| learning along the way.
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