[HN Gopher] The Value of Things
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The Value of Things
Author : vinhnx
Score : 39 points
Date : 2026-01-25 10:31 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (journal.stuffwithstuff.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (journal.stuffwithstuff.com)
| xqb64 wrote:
| I'm literally considering a career switch from software
| engineering to electrical engineering and electronics, and
| naturally going back to school, because the AI and the way it's
| used in writing software has sucked out all the meaning in it for
| me.
| ge96 wrote:
| Yeah I'm the same, I enjoy thinking of a system of things,
| doing it, not typing a couple of commands and a bunch of code
| is generated. It's not the rote process but feeling like I
| worked for it/doing it. Similar argument is "why buy milk" you
| can get a cow, milk it yourself, kind of thing. Which I see
| that, some people don't care what the code looks like, does it
| work.
| ge96 wrote:
| Tangent: reality perception is funny, like why hike, you
| could just watch someone else hike... I think jewelry is
| worthless (waste of money to buy) but others don't that kind
| of thing.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Meaningful or not, that's _a lot_ of work and money for a pay
| cut, fewer options, and worse job prospects [0].
|
| [0] Most of the new EE Grads I see go into software
| engineering.
| xqb64 wrote:
| I mean, it's not like I'm going to forget how to write code
| any time soon. I'm currently recovering from the n-th tough
| burnout, and I feel like I need a shift toward something new
| and meaningful. When it comes to job opportunities, from my
| perspective, knowing the entire stack (not in the webdev
| sense, but rather both hardware and software) makes you
| highly attractive on the market, in both worlds. So, while I
| genuinely can't predict what I'll end up doing 5 years from
| now, I do feel like it's time to familiarize myself with the
| other side of the entire stack.
| Etheryte wrote:
| That's one possible way to look at it. The other, perhaps more
| positive way to look at it, is that similar to autocomplete,
| AI-assisted tools have made the boring parts less boring and
| left more space for the interesting bits. I use them every now
| and then for chores and such which I would put off otherwise,
| but there is certainly no shortage of interesting problems that
| they can't tackle. Now I just have more time to focus on those.
| xqb64 wrote:
| I'll admit that I'd used github copilot while I worked on one
| of my projects, and I couldn't help it but notice a rather
| significant cognitive decline whenever I set out to take over
| and start hammering out the code myself. I just can't allow
| cognitive declines.
| vsgherzi wrote:
| I'm in the same boat, I'm hoping firmware / embedded might be
| better in this regard due to the inherit constraints. If not
| then EE is probably the only other option. Anyone else have
| thoughts on this? I'm craving a more civil engineering approach
| to rigor rather than the mess of modern software. Perhaps that
| means software just isn't for me.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I'm definitely wanting to do something with more of a civil
| engineering approach to rigour. More and more I think
| software is full of children who don't care and don't know
| the meaning of responsibility.
| nextos wrote:
| Maybe formal methods have a chance of becoming mainstream
| now? [1]
|
| This would increase the rigor of software engineering and
| put it on par with civil engineering.
|
| [1] https://martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/ai-formal-
| verificati...
| acedTrex wrote:
| Absolutely the same boat here as well sadly. As I sit here
| reviewing another PR with // do the thing
| doThing()
|
| dotted everywhere, I am very much over it.
| agcat wrote:
| This is a really good piece especially the part on what and why
| makes sense to build with AI or not
| dzink wrote:
| The author attributes meaning for the giver and hopefully
| receiver to time spent by the giver. They argue less time spent
| for same utility lowers the meaning.
|
| I see something very different:
|
| 1. The government post shared as an example of efficiency to
| utility increase has glaring errors: "journey-level developers".
| You will never achieve any improvement on government code bases
| if the people leading the effort can't pay attention to the most
| basic and broadcasted elements of the job. AI used by junior
| developers will only compound the massive complexity of
| government systems to the point where they are not fixable by
| seniors and they are not usable by humans.
|
| 2. The time spent doing something, meaningful or not, with care
| is a training for that person into attention to detail, which is
| absolutely critical to getting things right. People who lazily
| lean on generating more without attention to detail, don't see
| the real point of the work - it's not to add more stuff to less
| space (physical or mental) faster. It's to make the existing
| space better and bigger by needing less in it. The rest is just
| mental and physical complexity overload. We are about to drawn in
| that overload like hoarders next to a dumpster.
|
| 3. If you ever live in a small home you may noticed that the joy
| of getting things (usually derived from dopamine-seeking
| behaviors like shopping or making, or shopping for ingredients so
| you can make things, or from getting toys for your kids or other
| people getting toys for your kids) will quickly overload any
| space in your living quarters. Your house becomes unbearably
| small and it becomes impossible to find things in piles or
| drawers filled with other things if nobody ever organizes them.
| We all have become dopamine adduces or the world has turned us
| into such and there are few if any humans willing and capable of
| organizing that world. So most people today will be paralyzed
| with a million choices that were never organized or pruned down
| by the owner or their predecessors. The overwhelming feeling
| would be to escape the dread of organization into more dopamine-
| generating behaviors. We need more of the "moms" who clean up our
| rooms after we've had fun with all the legos we can now generate.
| Or we will all be living in a dumpster before too long.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| The screenplay part made me think. While it's true that an LLM
| could potentially generate a better^ script, while writing scriot
| the author would probably had had many ideas that did not make it
| to the final draft. Yet those ideas would definitely influence
| the final product, the movie. There's probably only so much you
| can put in the script really.
|
| Meaning for the brother is one thing, but as a potential watcher,
| I would almost always prefer a movie that someone really cared
| about^^.
|
| ^: depending on the definition of "better"
|
| ^^: as a fallible human being I am not perfect at detecting that
| care, but there had definitely been cases in my life when someone
| was talking about a thing that I would not really care about
| otherwise, but their passion made the talk extremely interesting
| and memorable
| camgunz wrote:
| I love Nystrom's writing, and he's so good at it because he's
| written so much. A huge part of the value of things is how we
| grow in the making of them, and I worry that in a world where we
| accept generative slop, we'll never have the opportunity to
| woodshed enough to become excellent at a craft.
|
| I'm a good engineer because I've written tons of code, I've taken
| no shortcuts, and I've focused on improving over my many
| iterations. This has enabled me to be an effective steward of
| generative coding (etc) models, but will younger engineers ever
| get the reps necessary to get where I am? Are there other ways to
| get this knowledge and taste? Does anyone know or care?
|
| We're in the anthropocene now, and while probably everyone who
| knows what that is understands we have the largest effect on the
| Earth, it also means we now also have the largest effect on
| ourselves. We're so, so bad at taking this seriously. We can
| unleash technology that idiocracies western civilization inside
| of a generation, I know this because we keep lunging towards it
| with ever increasing success. But we can't just shamble around
| and let Darwin awards sort things out. We have nukes and virology
| labs, not to mention a climate change crisis to deal with. If the
| US political system falls apart because Americans under 65 spend
| between 2-3 hours on social media a day, that's a failed state
| with a lot of firepower to shoot around haphazardly.
|
| And why do we keep building things that enfeeble us? Did we need
| easier access to delivery food and car rides, or did we need
| easier access to nutritious food and more walkable neighborhoods?
| Did we need social media with effectively no protections against
| propaganda/misinformation? We know that cognitive ability and
| executive function decline with LLM use. Can it really be that we
| think we're actually too smart and we need to turn it down a
| notch?
|
| There are actual problems to solve, and important software to
| write. Neither algorithmic feeds nor advertising platforms fall
| under those categories. LLMs are supposed to solve the problem of
| "not enough software"--Nystrom points at this explicitly with the
| Washington Department of Ecology ad. But we never had a "not
| enough software problem", rather we had a "not enough beneficial
| software" problem.
|
| LLMs aren't improving the situation. We don't have people
| building their own OSes, (real, working) browsers, word
| processors and spreadsheet programs, their own DAWs or guitar amp
| modelers, their own Illustrators or Figmas. Instead you have
| companies squeezing their workers and contractors, while their
| products enshittify.
|
| I'm too tired to write a conclusion. I'm pretty sure we're
| fucked. But hey look, the cars drive themselves.
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