[HN Gopher] Eight more months of agents
___________________________________________________________________
Eight more months of agents
Author : arrowsmith
Score : 198 points
Date : 2026-02-08 11:00 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (crawshaw.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (crawshaw.io)
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| In the past couple days I've become less skeptical of the
| capabilities of LLMs and now more alarmed by them, contra the
| author. I think if we as a society continue to accept the
| development of LLMs and the control of them by the major AI
| companies there will be massively negative repercussions. And I
| don't mean repercussions like "a rogue AI will destroy humanity"
| per se, but these things will potentially cause massive social
| upheaval, a large amount of negative impacts on mental health and
| cognition, etc. I think if you see LLMs as powerful but not
| dangerous you are not being honest.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| I see them as powerful and dangerous. The goal for decades now
| is to reduce the human population to 500 million. All human
| technology was pushed to this end, covertly. If we suddenly
| have a technology that renders white collar workers useless, we
| will get to that number faster than expected.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I don't believe that is true, but if it WAS true that human
| technology was covertly pushed to this end: there are people
| out there who are demanding that this technology come up with
| social manipulations (using language) to reduce the human
| population to a SPECIFIC 500 million.
|
| Or less.
|
| And I don't think it's collar color they're going to be
| checking against.
|
| So I guess I'm saying I agree that this is powerful and
| dangerous. These are language models, so they're more
| effective against humans and their languages. And self-
| preservation, empathy, humanity do not play a role as there
| is nobody in there to be offended at the notion of
| intentionally killing more than 9/10 of humanity... for some
| definitions of humanity, ones I'm sympathetic to.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| There are some good things here:
|
| First, we currently have 4 frontier labs, and a bunch of 2nd
| tier ones following. The fact that we don't have just oAI or
| just Anthropic or just Google is good in the general sense, I
| would say. The 4 labs racing each other and trading SotA status
| for ~a few weeks is good for the end consumer. They keep each
| other honest and keep the prices down. Imagine if Anthropic
| could charge 60$ /MTok or oAI could charge 120$ /MTok for their
| gpt4 style models. They can't in good part because of the
| competition.
|
| Second, there's a bunch of labs / companies that have released
| and are continuing to release open mdoels. That's as close to
| "intelligence on tap" as you can get. And those models are
| ~6-12 months behind the SotA models, depending on your usecase.
| Even though the labs have largely different incentives to do
| so, a lot of them are still releasing open models. Hopefully
| that continues to hold. So not all control will be in the hands
| of big tech, even if the "best" will still be theirs. At some
| point "good enough" is fine.
|
| There's also the thing about geopolitics being involved in
| this. So far we've seen the EU jumping the gun on regulation,
| and we're kinda sorta paying for it. Everyone is still confused
| about what can or cannot be done in the EU. The US seems to be
| waiting to see what happens, and China will do whatever they
| do. The worst thing that can happen is that at some point the
| big players (Anthropic is the main driver) push for regulatory
| capture. That would really suck. Thankfully atm there's this
| lingering thinking that "if we do it, the others won't so we'll
| be on the back foot". Hopefully this holds, at least until the
| "good enough" from above is out :)
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| I'm not just concerned about control by one company, I'm
| concerned by control for the profit motive, and probably
| concerned about the wisdom of using these things for anything
| except extremely limited use cases (breakthrough scientific
| research, etc.). I think tech people have a bad tendency of
| viewing this through the lens of platform wars type stakes,
| and there are much bigger problems with AI. The fact that an
| alarming number of ex-and-current Anthropic people I've met
| think the world is going to end is something we should take
| heed of!
|
| The AI labs started down this path using the Manhattan
| Project as a metaphor and guess what? It's a good metaphor
| and we should embrace most of the wider implications of that
| (though I'd love to avoid all the MAD/cold war bullshit this
| time).
| hasperdi wrote:
| > It sounds like someone saying power tools should be outlawed in
| carpentry.
|
| I see this a lot here
| sp33der89 wrote:
| All metaphors break down at a certain point, but power tools
| and generative AI/LLMs being compared feels like somebody is
| romanticizing the art of programming a bit too much.
|
| Copyright law, education, just the sheer scale of things
| changing because of LLMs are some things off the top of my head
| why "power tools vs carpentry" is a bad analogy.
| Keyframe wrote:
| if that someone is clumsy, had an active war going on against
| basic tools before, and wandered into the carpentry from
| completely different area, then power tools might be a bad
| idea.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Yes because A tech-bro AIs dream is hundreds of thousands of
| developers being let go and replacing them with no code tools.
|
| Sure, replace me with AI, but I better get royalties on my
| public contributions. I like many other developers have kids
| and other responsibilities to pay for.
|
| We did not share our work publicly to be replaced. The same way
| I did not lend my neighbour my car so he could run me over,
| that was implicit.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| We've been doing this to other professions for half a
| century. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Are you really going to appeal to nature here? As a species
| we are basically magic. We have gone to the moon, cured
| countless diseases and many other amazing things, but not
| to stop being taken advantage of? Is it too high of an ask?
| dagss wrote:
| On HN lately? Haven't seen anything about outlawing. But I see
| a lot of "powertools don't work and make me slower"
| habinero wrote:
| They're not powertools lol. Tech has plenty of powertools and
| we automated the crap out of our job already.
|
| Writing code has never been the limiting factor, it's
| everything else that goes into it.
|
| Like, I don't mind that there's a bunch of weekend warriors
| out here building shoddy gazebos and sheds with their brand
| new overpriced tools, incorrecting each other on the best way
| to do things. We had that with the bitcoin and NFT bros
| already.
|
| What I do roll my eyes at is when the bros start talking
| about how they're totally going to build bridges and planes
| and it's gonna be soooo easy to get to new places, just slap
| down a bridge.
|
| Uh huh. Y'all do not understand what building those actually
| entails lol.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I don't trust the idea of "not getting", "not understanding", or
| "being out of touch" with anti-LLM (or pro-LLM) sentiment. There
| is nothing complicated about this divide. The pros and cons are
| both as plain as anything has ever been. You can disagree - even
| strongly - with either side. You can't "not understand".
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > There is nothing complicated about this divide [...] You
| can't "not understand"
|
| I beg to differ. There are a whole lot of folks with
| astonishingly incomplete understanding about all the facts here
| who are going to continue to make things very, very
| complicated. Disagreement is meaningless when the relevant
| parties are not working from the same assumption of basic
| knowledge.
| illusive4080 wrote:
| Bolstering your point, check out the comments in this thread:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1qy9dcs/who_has_compl.
| ..
|
| There's a lot of unwillingness to even attempt to try the
| tools.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Those people are absolutely going to get left in the dust.
| In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive
| force multipliers.
| skydhash wrote:
| It doesn't matter how fast you run if it's not the
| correct direction.
| baq wrote:
| Good LLM wielders run in widening circles and get to the
| goal faster than good old school programmers running in a
| straight line
| skydhash wrote:
| I still haven't seen those mythical LLM wielders in the
| wild. While I'm using tools like curl, jq, cmus, calibre,
| openbsd,... that has been most certainly created by those
| old school programmers.
| uludag wrote:
| I try to avoid LLMs as much as I can in my role as SWE.
| I'm not ideologically opposed to switching, I just don't
| have any pressing need.
|
| There are people I work with who are deep in the AI
| ecosystem and it's obvious what tools they're using It
| would not be uncharitable in any way to characterize
| their work as pure slop that doesn't work, buggy,
| untested adequately, etc.
|
| The moment I start to feel behind I'll gladly start
| adopting _agentic AI tools_ , but as things stand now,
| I'm not seeing any pressing need.
|
| Comments like these make me feel like I'm being gaslit.
| kombookcha wrote:
| We are all constantly being gaslit. People have insane
| amounts of money and prestige riding on this thing paying
| off in such a comically huge way that it can absolutely
| not deliver on it in the foreseeable future. Creating a
| constant pressing sentiment that actually You Are Being
| Left Behind Get On Now Now Now is the only way they can
| keep inflating the balloon.
|
| If this stuff was self-evidently as useful as it's being
| made out to be, there would be no point in constantly
| trying to pressure, coax and cajole people into it. You
| don't need to spook people into using things that are
| useful, they'll do it when it makes sense.
|
| The actual use-case of LLMs is dwarfed by the massive
| investment bubble it has become, and it's all riding on
| future gains that are so hugely inflated they will leave
| a crater that makes the dotcom bubble look like a
| pothole.
| match_condition wrote:
| Ah, right, so it's a "skill issue" when GPT5.3 has no
| idea what is going on in a private use case.
| jfreds wrote:
| Literally yes
| korallus wrote:
| Then where is all this new and amazing software? If LLM
| can 10x or 100x someones output we should've seen an
| explosion of great software by now.
|
| One dude with an LLM should be able to write a browser
| fully capable of browsing the modern web or an OS from
| scratch in a year, right?
| kjksf wrote:
| That's a silly bar to ask for.
|
| Chrome took at least a thousand man years i.e. 100 people
| working for 10 years.
|
| I'm lowballing here: it's likely way, way more.
|
| If ai gives 10x speedup, to reproduce Chrome as it is
| today would require 1 person working for 100 years, 10
| people working for 10 years or 100 people working for 1
| year.
|
| Clearly, unrealistic bar to meet.
|
| If you want a concrete example:
| https://github.com/antirez/flux2.c
|
| Creator of Redis started this project 3 weeks ago and use
| Claude Code to vibe code this.
|
| It works, it's fast and the code quality is as high as
| I've ever seen a C code base. Easily 1% percentile of
| quality.
|
| Look at this one-shotted working implementation of jpeg
| decoder: https://github.com/antirez/flux2.c/commit/a14b0f
| f5c3b74c7660...
|
| Now, it takes a skilled person to guide Claude Code to
| generate this but I have zero doubts that this was done
| at least 5x-10x faster than Antirez writing the same code
| by hand.
| matsemann wrote:
| That's one of the sentiments I don't quite grasp, though.
| Why can't they just learn the tools when they're stable?
| So far it's been sooo many changes in workflows,
| basically relearn the tools every three months. It's
| maybe a bit more stabilized the last year, but still one
| could spend an enormous amount of time twiddling with
| various models or tools, knowledge that someone else
| probably could learn quicker at a later time.
|
| "Being left in the dust" would also mean it's impossible
| for new people / graduates to ever catch up. I don't
| think it is. Even though I learned react a few years
| after it was in vogue (my company bet on the wrong
| horse), I quickly got up to speed and am just as
| productive now as someone that started a bit earlier.
| duggan wrote:
| Not the person you asked, but my interpretation of "left
| in the dust" here (not a phrasing I particularly agree
| with) would be the same way iOS development took off in
| the 2010s.
|
| There was a land rush to create apps. Basic stuff like
| the flash light, todo lists, etc, were created and found
| a huge audience. Development studios were established,
| people became very successful out of it.
|
| I think the same thing will happen here. There is a first
| mover advantage. The future is not yet evenly
| distributed.
|
| You can still start as an iOS developer today, but the
| opportunity is different.
| lapcat wrote:
| I'm not sure your analogy is applicable here.
|
| The introduction of the App Store did not increase
| developer productivity per se. If anything, it decreased
| developer productivity, because unless you were already
| already a Mac developer, you had to learn a programming
| language you've never used, Objective-C, (now it's
| largely Swift, but that's still mainly used only on Apple
| platforms) and a brand new Apple-specific API, so a lot
| of your previous programming expertise became obsolete on
| a new platform. What the App Store did that was valuable
| to developers was open up a new market and bring a bunch
| of new potential customers, iPhone users, indeed
| relatively wealthy customers willing to spend money on
| software.
|
| What new market is brought by LLMs? They can produce as
| much source code as you like, but how exactly do you
| _monetize_ that massive amount of source code? If
| anything, the value of source code and software products
| will drop as more is able to be produced rapidly.
|
| The only new market I see is actually the developer tool
| market for LLM fans, essentially a circular market of LLM
| developers marketing to other LLM developers.
|
| As far as the developer job market is concerned, it's
| painfully clear that companies are in a mass layoff mood.
| Whether that's due to LLMs, or whether LLMs are just the
| cover story, the result is the same. Developer
| compensation is not on the rise, unless you happen to be
| recruited by one of the LLM vendors themselves.
|
| My impression is that from the developer perspective,
| LLMs are a scheme to transfer massive amounts of wealth
| from developers to the LLM vendors. And you can bet the
| prices for access to LLMs will go up, up, up over time as
| developers become hooked and demand increases. To me, the
| whole "OpenClaw" hype looks like a crowd of gamblers at a
| casino, putting coins in slot machines. One thing is for
| certain: the house always wins.
| duggan wrote:
| My take is more optimistic.
|
| I think it will make prototyping and MVP more accessible
| to a wider range of people than before. This goes all the
| way from people who don't know how to code up to people
| who know very well how to code, but don't have the free
| time/energy to pursue every idea.
|
| Project activation energy decreases. I think this is a
| net positive, as it allows more and different things to
| be started. I'm sure some think it's a net negative for
| the same reasons. If you're a developer selling the same
| knowledge and capacity you sold ten years ago things will
| change. But that was always the case.
|
| My comparison to iOS was about the market opportunity,
| and the opportunity for entrepreneurship. It's not magic,
| not yet anyway. This is the time to go start a company,
| or build every weird idea that you were never going to
| get around to.
|
| There are so many opportunities to create software and
| companies, we're not running out of those just because
| it's faster to generate some of the code.
| lapcat wrote:
| What you just said seems reasonable. However, what the
| earlier commenter said, which led to this subthread,
| seems unreasonable: those people unwilling to try the
| tools "are absolutely going to get left in the dust."
|
| Returning to the iOS analogy, though, there was only a
| short period of time in history when a random developer
| with a flashlight or fart app could become successful in
| the App Store. Nowadays, such a new app would flop, if
| Apple even allowed it, as you admitted: "You can still
| start as an iOS developer today, but the opportunity is
| different." The software market in general is not new.
| There are already a huge number of competitors. Thus,
| when you say, "This is the time to go start a company, or
| build every weird idea that you were never going to get
| around to," it's unclear why this would be the case.
| Perhaps the barrier to entry for competitors has been
| lowered, yet the competition is as fierce as ever (unlike
| in the early App Store).
|
| In any case, there's a huge difference between "the
| barrier to entry has been lowered" and "those who don't
| use LLMs will be left in the dust". I think the latter is
| ridiculous.
|
| Where are the original flashlight and fart app developers
| now? Hopefully they made enough money to last a lifetime,
| otherwise they're back in the same boat as everyone else.
| duggan wrote:
| > In any case, there's a huge difference between "the
| barrier to entry has been lowered" and "those who don't
| use LLMs will be left in the dust". I think the latter is
| ridiculous.
|
| Yeah, it's a bit incendiary, I just wanted to turn it
| into a more useful conversation.
|
| I also think it overstates the case, but I do think it's
| an opportunity.
|
| It's not just that the barrier to entry has been lowered
| (which it has) but that someone with a lot of existing
| skill can leverage that. Not everyone can bring that to
| the table, and not everyone who can is doing so. That's
| the current advantage (in my opinion, of course).
|
| All that said, I thought the Vision Pro was going to
| usher in a new era of computing, so I'm not much of a
| prognosticator.
| lapcat wrote:
| > it's a bit incendiary
|
| > I also think it overstates the case
|
| I think it's a mistake to defend and/or "reinterpret" the
| hype, which is not helping to promote the technology to
| people who aren't bandwagoners. If anything, it drives
| them away. It's a red flag.
|
| I wish you would just say to the previous commenter, hey,
| you appear to be exaggerating, and that's not a good
| idea.
| sowbug wrote:
| I didn't read the comment as such a direct analogy. It
| was more recalling a lesson of history that maybe doesn't
| repeat but probably will rhyme.
|
| The App Store reshuffled the deck. Some people recognized
| that and took advantage of the decalcification. Some of
| them did well.
|
| You've recognized some implications of the reshuffle
| that's currently underway. Maybe you're right that
| there's a bias toward the LLM vendors. But among all of
| it, is there a niche you can exploit?
| palata wrote:
| > In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive
| force multipliers.
|
| What do you get from it? Say you produce more, do you get
| a higher salary?
|
| What I have seen so far is the opposite: if you don't
| produce more, you risk getting fired.
|
| I am not denying that LLMs make me more productive. Just
| saying that they don't make me more wealthy. On the other
| hand, they use a ton of energy at a time where we as a
| society should probably know better. The way I see it, we
| are killing the Earth because we produce too much. LLMs
| help us produce more, why should we be happy?
| Schlagbohrer wrote:
| (Imagine me posting the graph of worker productivity in
| the US climbing quickly over time while pay remains flat
| or falls)
| coldtea wrote:
| I only wish I was there when that cocky "skilled dev" is
| laid off.
| mono442 wrote:
| Using these tools comes down to basically just writing
| what you want in a natural language. I don't think it
| will be a problem to catch up if they need to.
| jfreds wrote:
| Context management, plan mode versus agent mode, skills
| vs system prompt, all make a huge difference and all take
| some time to build intuition around.
|
| Not all that hard to learn, but waiting for things to
| settle down assumes things are going to settle down. Are
| they? When?
| jryan49 wrote:
| Someone will package up all that intuition and skills and
| I imagine people won't have to do any of these things in
| future.
| habinero wrote:
| You wait for everyone to go broke chasing whatever, and
| then take their work for your own. It's not that hard to
| copy and paste.
| asa400 wrote:
| That these facets of use exist at all are indicative of
| immature product design.
|
| These are leaked implementation details that the labs are
| forcing us to know because these are weak, early products
| and they're still exploring the design space. The median
| user doesn't want to and shouldn't have to care about
| details like this.
|
| Future products in this space won't have them and future
| users won't be left in the dust by not learning them
| today.
|
| Python programmers aren't left behind by not knowing
| malloc and free.
| derefr wrote:
| The negative impacts of generative AI are most sharply being
| felt by "creatives" (artists, writers, musicians, etc), and the
| consumers in those markets. If the OP here is 1. a programmer
| 2. who works solely with other programmers and 3. who is "on
| the grind", mostly just consuming non-fiction blog-post content
| related to software development these days, rather than paying
| much attention to what's currently happening to the world of
| movies/music/literature/etc... then it'd be pretty easy for
| them to not be exposed very much to anti-LLM sentiment, since
| that sentiment is entirely occurring in these other fields that
| might have no relevance to their (professional or personal)
| life.
|
| "Anti-LLM sentiment" _within_ software development is nearly
| non-existent. The biggest kind of push-back to LLMs that we see
| on HN and elsewhere, is effectively just _pragmatic skepticism_
| around the effectiveness /utility/ROI of LLMs when employed for
| specific use-cases. Which isn't "anti-LLM sentiment" any more
| than skepticism around the ability of junior programmers to
| complete complex projects is "anti-junior-programmer
| sentiment."
|
| The difference between the perspectives you find in the
| creative professions vs in software dev, don't come down to
| "not getting" or "not understanding"; they really are a
| question of relative exposure to these pro-LLM vs anti-LLM
| ideas. Software dev and the creative professions are acting as
| entirely separate filter-bubbles of conversation here. You can
| end up entirely on the outside of one or the other of them by
| accident, and so end up entirely without exposure to one or the
| other set of ideas/beliefs/memes.
|
| (If you're curious, my own SO actually has this filter-bubble
| effect from the opposite end, so I can describe what that looks
| like. She _only_ hears the negative sentiment coming from the
| creatives she follows, while also having to dodge endless AI
| slop flooding all the marketplaces and recommendation feeds she
| previously used to discover new media to consume. And her job
| is one you do with your hands and specialized domain knowledge;
| so none of her coworkers use AI for literally anything.
| [Industry magazines in her field say "AI is revolutionizing
| her industry" -- but they mean _ML_ , not generative AI.] She
| has no questions that ChatGPT could answer for her. She doesn't
| have any friends who are productively co-working with AI. She
| is 100% out-of-touch with pro-LLM sentiment.)
| remich wrote:
| I think this is an interesting point, my one area of
| disagreement is that there is no "anti-LLM sentiment" in the
| programming community. Sure, plenty of folks expressing
| skepticism or disagreement are doing so from a genuine place,
| but just in reading this site and a few email newsletters I
| get I can say that there is a non-trivial percent in the
| programming world who are adamantly opposed to LLMs/AI. When
| I see comments from people in that subset, it's quite clear
| that they aren't approaching it from a place of skepticism,
| where they could be convinced given appropriate evidence or
| experiences.
| bitwize wrote:
| But there's a difference. Being opposed to AI-generated
| art/music/writing is valid because humans still contribute
| something extraordinarily meaningful when they do it
| themselves. There's no market for AI-generated music, and
| AI-generated art and writing tends to get called out right
| away when it's detected. People _want_ the human expression
| in human-generated art, and the AI stuff is a weak
| placeholder at best.
|
| For software the situation is different. Being opposed to
| LLM-generated software is just batshit crazy at this point.
| The value that LLMs provide to the process makes learning
| to use them, objectively, an absolute must; otherwise you
| are simply wasting time and money. Eric S. Raymond put it
| something like "If you call yourself a software engineer,
| you have no excuse not to be using these tools. Get your
| thumb out of your ass and _learn_. "
| skydhash wrote:
| Ok, I'll bite. What's there to learn that you can tie
| directly to an increase of productivity?
|
| I can say "learn how to use vim makeprg feature so that
| you can jump directly to errors reported by the build and
| tool" and it's very clear where the ROI. But all the AI
| hypers are selling are hope, prayers, and rituals.
| baq wrote:
| I'm not an AI hyper, I just don't code manually anymore.
| Tickets take about as much time to close as before, but
| the code shipped now has higher test coverage, higher
| performance, better concurrency error handling, less
| follow-up refactor PRs, less escapes to staging/prod and
| better documentation; some of it is now also modeled in a
| model checker.
| skydhash wrote:
| So the code was an unknown (to the world) X quality, but
| now it's X+k quality? How does that help me exactly?
| baq wrote:
| I don't care to be honest, it's up to you to learn to use
| the tool.
| imron wrote:
| > I just don't code manually anymore
|
| I'm curious about what industry you are in and the tech
| stack you are using?
| baq wrote:
| without revealing too much generic saas at non-toy scale,
| 95% TS + postgres + 5% a very long tail of other stuff.
| bitwize wrote:
| The skill is learning to supply the LLM with enough
| context to do anything a developer does: turn specs into
| code, check its work including generating and running
| tests, debug and analyze the code for faults or errors,
| and run these in a loop to converge on a solution. If
| you're about to do something by hand in an IDE, STOP.
| Think about what the LLM will need to know to perform
| that task for you.
|
| It may take some human intervention, but the productivity
| results are pretty consistent: tasks that used to take
| weeks now take hours or days. This puts in reach the
| ability to try things you wouldn't countenance otherwise
| due to the effort and tedium involved. You'd have to be a
| damn fool not to take advantage of the added velocity.
| This is why what we do is called "engineering", not a
| handicraft.
| skydhash wrote:
| An engineering take on this would have provided numbers
| like success and failure rate, guaranteed results,
| operation manuals,...
|
| > This puts in reach the ability to try things you
| wouldn't countenance otherwise due to the effort and
| tedium involved.
|
| If you're talking about prototypes, a whiteboard is way
| cheaper and less time consuming than an agent.
| overgard wrote:
| > "Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly
| non-existent.
|
| Strong disagree right there. I remember talking to a
| (developer) coworker a few months ago who seemed like the
| biggest AI proponent on our team. When we were one-on-one
| during a lunch though, he revealed that he really doesn't
| like AI that much at all, he's just afraid to speak up
| against it. I'm in a few Discord channels with a lot of
| highly skilled (senior and principal programmers) who mostly
| work in game development (or adjacent), and most of them
| either mock LLMs or have a lot of derision for it. Hacker
| News is kind of a weird pro-AI bubble, most other places are
| not nearly as keen on this stuff.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >"Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly
| non-existent
|
| This is certainly untrue. I want to say "obviously", which
| means that maybe I am misunderstanding you. Below are some
| examples of negative sentiments programmers have - can you
| explain why you are not counting these?
|
| NOTE: I am not presenting these as an "LLMs are bad"
| argument. My own feelings go both ways. There is a lot that's
| great about LLMs, and I don't necessarily agree with every
| word I've written below - some of it is just my paraphrasing
| of what other people say. I'm only listing examples of what
| drives existing anti-LLM sentiment in programmers.
|
| 1. Job loss, loss of income, or threat thereof
|
| These two are exacerbated by the pace of change, since so
| many people already spent their lives and money establishing
| themselves in the career and can't realistically pivot
| without becoming miserable - this is the same story for every
| large, fast change - though arguably this one is very large
| and very fast even by those standards. Lots of tech
| leadership is focusing even more than they already were on
| cheap contractors, and/or pushing employees for unrealistic
| productivity increases. I.e. it's exacerbating the "fast >
| good" problem, and a lot of leadership is also overestimating
| how far it reduces the barrier to creating things, as opposed
| to mostly just speeding up a person's existing capabilities.
| Some leadership is also using the apparent loss of job
| security as leverage beyond salary suppression (even less
| proportion of remote work allowed, more surveillance, worse
| office conditions, etc).
|
| 2. Happiness loss (in regards to the job itself, not all the
| other stuff in this list)
|
| This is regarding people who enjoy writing/designing programs
| but don't enjoy directing LLMs; or who don't enjoy debugging
| the types of mistakes LLMs tend to make, as opposed to the
| types of mistakes that human devs tend to make. For these
| people, it's like their job was forcibly changed to a
| different, almost unrelated job, which can be miserable
| depending on why you were good at - or why you enjoyed - the
| old job.
|
| 3. Uncertainty/skepticism
|
| I'm pushing back on your dismissal of this one as "not anti-
| LLM sentiment" - the comparison doesn't make sense. If I was
| forced to only review junior dev code instead of ever writing
| my own code or reviewing experienced dev code, I would be
| unhappy. And I love teaching juniors! And even if we ignore
| the subset of cases where it doesn't do a good job or assume
| it will soon be senior-level for every use case, this still
| overlaps with the above problem: The mistakes it makes are
| not like the mistakes a human makes. For some people, it's
| more unnatural/stressful to keep your eyes peeled for the
| kinds of mistakes it makes. For these people, it's a shift
| away from objective, detail-oriented, controlled, concrete
| thinking; away from the feeling of making something with your
| hands; and toward a more wishy-washy creation experience that
| can create a feeling of lack of control.
|
| 4. Expertise loss
|
| A lot of positive outcomes with LLMs come from being already
| experienced. Some argue this will be eroded - both for new
| devs and existing experienced devs.
|
| 5. The training data ownership/morality angle
| baq wrote:
| > 4. Expertise loss
|
| > A lot of positive outcomes with LLMs come from being
| already experienced. Some argue this will be eroded - both
| for new devs and existing experienced devs.
|
| This is true, but the pace of progress is so mind blowing
| the experts we have now might just be enough until the
| whole industry becomes obsolete (10-20 years assuming the
| lower bound of the trend line holds?)
| bitwize wrote:
| Facebook's algorithm has picked up on the idea that "I like
| art". It has subsequently given me more examples of (human-
| created) art in my feed. Art from comic book artists, art
| from manga-style creators, "weird art", even a make-up artist
| who painted a scene from _Where the Wild Things Are_ on her
| face.
|
| I _like_ this. What 's more, while AI-generated art has a
| characteristic sameyness to it, the human-produced art
| _stands out_ in its originality. It has character and soul.
| Even if it 's bad! AI slop has made the human-created stuff
| seem even more striking by comparison. The market for human
| art isn't going anywhere, just like the audience for human-
| played chess went nowhere after Deep Blue. I think people
| will pay a premium for it, just to distinguish themselves
| from the slop. The same is true of writing and _especially_
| music. I know of _no one_ who likes listening to AI-generated
| music. Even Sabrina Carpenter would raise less objection.
|
| The same, I'm afraid, cannot be said for software--because
| there is little value for human expression in the code
| itself. Code is--almost entirely--strictly utilitarian. So we
| are now at an inflection point where LLMs can generate and
| validate code that's nearly as good, if not better, than what
| we can produce on our own. And to _not_ make use of them is
| about as silly as Mel Kaye still punching in instruction
| opcodes in hex into the RPC-4000, while his colleagues make
| use of these fancy new things called "compilers". They're
| off building unimaginably more complex software than they
| could before, but hey, he gets his pick of locations on the
| rotating memory drum!
|
| I'm one of the nonexistent anti-LLMers when it comes to
| software. I hate talking to a clanker, whose training data
| set I don't even have access to let alone the ability to
| understand how my input affects its output, just to do what I
| do normally with the neural net I've carried around in my
| skull and trained extensively for this very purpose. I _like_
| working directly with code. Code is not just a product for
| me; it is a medium of thought and expression. It is a
| formalized notation of a process that I can use to understand
| and shape that process.
|
| But with the right agentic loops, LLMs can just do more,
| faster. There's really no point in resisting. The marginal
| value of what I do has just dropped to zero.
| baq wrote:
| I don't code anymore basically, but I have no issues
| accepting that there are huge gaps in the training sets in
| e.g. finance code bases. There is a long tail of niches to
| still code (semi) manually in.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| > "Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly
| non-existent.
|
| I see it all the time in professional and personal circles.
| For one, you are shifting the goalpost on what is "anti-llm",
| two, people are talking about the negative social, political
| and environmental impacts.
|
| What is your source here?
| moron4hire wrote:
| Yeah, "not understanding" means they aren't engaging with the
| issue honestly. They go on to compare to carpentry, which is a
| classic sign the speaker understands neither carpentry or
| software development.
|
| The anti-LLM arguments aren't just "hand tools are more pure."
| I would even say that isn't even a majority argument. There are
| plenty more arguments to make about environmental and economic
| sustainability, correctness, safety, intellectual property
| rights, and whether there are actual productivity gains
| distinguishable from placebo.
|
| It's one of the reasons why "I am enjoying programming again"
| is such a frustrating genre of blog post right now. Like, I'm
| soooo glad we could fire up some old coal plants so you could
| have a little treat, Brian from Middle Management.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _How I program with agents_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221655 - June 2025 (295
| comments)
| dirkc wrote:
| > Using anything other than the frontier models is actively
| harmful
|
| If that is true, why should one invest in learning now rather
| than waiting for 8 months to learn whatever is the frontier model
| then?
| fusslo wrote:
| snarky answer: so you can be that 'AI guy' at your office that
| everyone avoids in the snackroom
| ej88 wrote:
| It's not like you need to take a course. The frontier models
| are the best, just using them and their harnesses and figuring
| out what works for your use case is the 'investing in
| learning'.
| recursive wrote:
| How could it be actively harmful if it wasn't harmful last
| month when it _was_ the frontier model?
| senko wrote:
| Because you might want to use LLMs _now_. If not, it 's
| definitely better to not chase the hype - ignore the whole
| shebang.
|
| But if you _do_ want to use LLMs for coding _now_ , not using
| the best models just doesn't make sense.
| jonas21 wrote:
| So that you can be using the current frontier model for the
| next 8 months instead of twiddling your thumbs waiting for the
| next one to come out?
|
| I think you (and others) might be misunderstanding his
| statement a bit. He's not saying that using an old model is
| harmful in the sense that it outputs bad code -- he's saying
| it's harmful because some of the lessons you learn will be out
| of date and not apply to the latest models.
|
| So yes, if you use current frontier models, you'll need to
| recalibrate and unlearn a few things when the next generation
| comes out. But in the meantime, you will have gotten 8 months
| (or however long it takes) of value out of the current
| generation.
| properbrew wrote:
| You also don't have to throw away everything you've learnt in
| those 8 months, there's some things that you'll subtly pickup
| that you can carry over into the next generation as well.
| RobMurray wrote:
| Also a lot of what you learn is how to work around
| limitations of today's models and agent frameworks. That
| will all change, and I imagine things like skills and
| subagents will just be an internal detail that you don't
| need to know about.
| RGamma wrote:
| There's not that much learning involved. Modern SOTA models are
| much more intelligent than what they used to be not long ago.
| It's quite scary/amazing.
| dmk wrote:
| The real insight buried in here is "build what programmers love
| and everyone will follow." If every user has an agent that can
| write code against your product, your API docs become your actual
| product. That's a massive shift.
| anthuswilliams wrote:
| I'm very much looking forward to this shift. It is SO MUCH more
| pro-consumer than the existing SaaS model. Right now every app
| feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns,
| enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation. It feels
| like every time I ask for programmatic access to SaaS tools in
| order to simplify a workflow, I get stuck in endless meetings
| with product managers trying to "understand my use case", even
| for products explicitly marketed to programmers.
|
| Using agents that interact with APIs represents people being
| able to own their user experience more. Why not craft a
| frontend that behaves exactly the the way YOU want it to,
| tailor made for YOUR work, abstracting the set of products you
| are using and focusing only on the actual relevant bits of the
| work you are doing? Maybe a downside might be that there is
| more explicit metering of use in these products instead of the
| per-user licensing that is common today. But the upside is
| there is so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark
| patterns, useless upselling, and so on.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken
| UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and
| user manipulation
|
| OK, but: that's an economic situation.
|
| > so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns,
| useless upselling, and so on.
|
| Right, so there's less profit in it.
|
| To me it seems this will make the market _more_ adversarial,
| not less. Increasing amounts of effort will be expended to
| prevent LLMs interacting with your software or web pages. Or
| in some cases exploit the user 's agentic LLM to make a bad
| decision on their behalf.
| 13pixels wrote:
| the "exploit the user's agentic LLM" angle is
| underappreciated imo. we already see prompt injection
| attacks in the wild -- hidden text on web pages that tells
| the agent to do things the user didn't ask for. now scale
| that to every e-commerce site, every SaaS onboarding flow,
| every comparison page.
|
| it's basically SEO all over again but worse, because the
| attack surface is the user's own decision-making proxy. at
| least with google you could see the search results and
| decide yourself. when your agent just picks a vendor for
| you based on what it "found," the incentive to manipulate
| that process is enormous.
|
| we're going to need something like a trust layer between
| agents and the services they interact with. otherwise it's
| just an arms race between agent-facing dark patterns and
| whatever defenses the model providers build in.
| anthuswilliams wrote:
| Maybe. Or maybe services will switch to charging per API
| call or whatever instead of monthly or per-seat. Who can
| predict the future?
|
| I mean, services _could_ make it harder to use LLMs to
| interact with them, but if agents are popular enough they
| might see customers start to revolt over it.
| 13pixels wrote:
| This extends further than most people realize. If agents are
| the primary consumers of your product surface, then the entire
| discoverability layer shifts too. Right now Google indexes your
| marketing page -- soon the question is whether Claude or GPT
| can even find and correctly describe what your product does
| when a user asks.
|
| We're already seeing this with search. Ask an LLM "what tools
| do X" and the answer depends heavily on structured data,
| citation patterns, and how well your docs/content map to the
| LLM's training. Companies with great API docs but zero presence
| in the training data just won't exist to these agents.
|
| So it's not just "API docs = product" -- it's more like
| "machine-legible presence = existence." Which is a weird new
| SEO-like discipline that barely has a name yet.
| dagss wrote:
| But if you try some penny-saving cheap model like Sonnet [..bad
| things..]. [Better] pay through the nose for Opus.
|
| After blowing $800 of my bootstrap startup funds for Cursor with
| Opus for myself in a very productive January I figured I had to
| try to change things up... so this month I'm jumping between
| Claude Code and Cursor, sometimes writing the plans and having
| the conversation in Cursor and dump the implementation plan into
| Claude.
|
| Opus in Cursor is just so much more responsive and easy to talk
| to, compared to Opus in Claude.
|
| Cursor has this "Auto" mode which feels like it has very liberal
| limits (amortized cost I guess) that I'm also trying to use more,
| but -- I don't really like to flip a coin and if it lands up head
| then waste half hour discovering the LLM made a mess the LLM and
| try again forcing the model.
|
| Perhaps in March I'll bite the bullet and take this authors
| advice.
| written-beyond wrote:
| Just use Codex 5.3 in codex cli, the $20/mo plan is basically
| limitless at least for me and I keep reasoning efforts high.
|
| You can enjoy it while it lasts, OpenAI is being very liberal
| with their limits because of CC eating their lunch rn.
| rmonvfer wrote:
| Yeah, I can't recommend gpt-5.3-codex enough, it's great!
| I've been using it with the new macOS app and I'm impressed.
| I've always been a Claude Code guy and I find myself using
| codex more and more. Opus is still much nicer explaining
| issues and walking me through implementations but codex is
| faster (even with xhigh effort) and gets the job done 95% of
| the time.
|
| I was spending unholy amounts of money and tokens (subsidized
| cloud credits tho) forcing Opus for everything but I'm very
| happy with this new setup. I've also experimented with
| OpenCode and their Zen subscription to test Kimi K2.5 an
| similar models and they also seem like a very good
| alternative for some tasks.
|
| What I cannot stand tho is using sonnet directly (it's fine
| as a subagent), I've found it to be hard to control and
| doesn't follow detailed instructions.
| jorl17 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what's your flow? Do you have codex write
| plans to markdown files? Just chat? What languages or
| frameworks do you use?
|
| I'm an avid cursor user (with opus), and have been trying
| alternatives recently. Codex has been an immense letdown. I
| think I was too spoiled by cursor's UX and internal
| planning prompt.
|
| It's incredibly slow, produces terribly verbose and over-
| complicated code (unless I use high or xhigh, which are
| even slower), and missed a lot of details. Python/django
| and react frontend.
|
| For the first time I felt like I could relate to those
| people who say it doesn't make them faster," because they
| have to keep fixing the agent's shot, never felt that with
| opus 4.5 and 4.6 and cursor
| written-beyond wrote:
| Codex cli is a very performant cli though, better than
| any other cli code assistant I've used.
|
| I mean does it matter what code it's producing? If it
| renders and functions just use it. I think it's better to
| take the L on verbose code and optimizing the really ugly
| bits by hand in a few minutes than be kneecapped every 5
| hour by limits and constant pleas to shift to Sonnet.
| drsalt wrote:
| you've always been a Claude Code guy? this has existed less
| than a year.
| rl3 wrote:
| To be fair that still feels like an eternity somehow.
|
| Perhaps AI time is the inverse of Valve time.
| redanddead wrote:
| I was born clutching a Claude Code shell, you peasant.
|
| The first sentence out of my mouth was a system prompt
| baq wrote:
| +1, codex 5.2 was really good and 5.3 seems to be better at
| everything; caveat - I had little time to test it.
| dagss wrote:
| Thanks a lot, after today I have fully switched to Codex I
| think.
|
| This vscode extension makes it almost as easy to point codex
| to something as when doing it in cursor:
|
| https://github.com/suzukenz/vscode-copy-selection-with-
| line-...
| dakolli wrote:
| I promise you you're just going to continue to light money on
| fire. Don't fall for this token madness, the bigger your
| project gets, the less capable the llm will get and the more
| you spend per request on average. This is literally all
| marketing tricks by inference providers. Save your money and
| code it yourself, or use very inexpensive llm methods if you
| must.
|
| I think we are going to start hearing stories of people going
| into thousands in CC debt because they were essentially
| gambling with token usage thinking they would hit some startup
| jackpot.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| You can rent a GPU server and run your own Qwen models.
|
| It's 90 percent the same thing as Claude but with flat-rate
| costs.
| dagss wrote:
| Compared to the salary I loose by not taking a consulting gig
| for half a year, these $800 arent't all that much. (I guess
| depending on definition of bootstrap, mine might not be, as I
| support myself with saved consulting income.)
|
| Startup is a gamble with or without the LLM costs.
|
| I have been coding for 20 years, I have a good feel for how
| much time I would have spent without LLM assistance. And if
| LLMs vanish from the face of the earth tomorrow, I still
| saved myself that time.
| dakolli wrote:
| Well if you've been "coding" for 20 years you should have
| known after a pretty short period of time it doesn't save
| you any time.
| emmawirt wrote:
| Curious what you mean by "agent harness" here... are you
| distinguishing between true autonomous agents (model decides next
| step) vs workflows that use LLMs at specific nodes? I've found
| the latter dramatically more reliable for anything beyond
| prototyping, which makes me wonder if the "model improvement" is
| partly better prompting and scaffolding.
| crawshaw wrote:
| Hi, author here. I mean the piece of code that calls the model
| and executes the tool calls. My colleague Philip calls it "9
| lines of code": https://sketch.dev/blog/agent-loop
|
| We have built two of them now, and clearly the state of the art
| here can be improved. But it is hard to push too much on this
| while the models keep improving.
| tiny-automates wrote:
| the harness being "9 lines of code" is deceptive in the same
| way a web server is "just accept connections and serve
| files."
|
| the hard part isn't the loop itself -- it's everything around
| failure recovery.
|
| when a browser agent misclicks, loads a page that renders
| differently than expected, or hits a CAPTCHA mid-flow, the
| 9-line loop just retries blindly. the real harness innovation
| is going to be in structured state checkpointing so the agent
| can backtrack to the last known-good state instead of
| restarting the whole task. that's where the gap between
| "works in a demo" and "works on the 50th run" lives.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| An agent harness is what enables the user to seamlessly
| interact with both a model and tool calls. Claude Code is an
| agent harness. +----------------------------+
| | User |
| +--------------+-------------+ |
| V +----------------------------+ | Agent
| Harness | | (software interface) |
| +------+--------------+------+ | |
| V V +------------+ +------------+ |
| Models | | Tools | +------------+ +------------+
|
| Here's an example of a harness with less code:
| https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/blob/fdcd9ab783104285764...
| Herring wrote:
| _> In 2000, less than one percent lived on farms and 1% of
| workers are in agriculture. That was a net benefit to the world,
| that we all don 't have to work to eat._
|
| The jury's still out on that one, because climate change is an
| existential risk.
| gradus_ad wrote:
| Existential? Maybe to beachfront property owners
| Herring wrote:
| Everybody gangsta until the permafrost starts leaking massive
| amounts of methane.
| esafak wrote:
| Did you know that 10% of the world's population lives in
| coastal zones at low elevations?
| ares623 wrote:
| But they'll just disappear into thin air peacefully when
| that happens right? It's not like they're gonna fight tooth
| and nail to find a place to survive, that'd be rude.
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| Idiot
| joefourier wrote:
| The author is correct in that agents are becoming more and more
| capable and that you don't _need_ the IDE to the same extent, but
| I don 't see that as good. I find that IDE-based agentic
| programming actually encourages you to read and understand your
| codebase as opposed to CLI-based workflows. It's so much easier
| to flip through files, review the changes it made, or highlight a
| specific function and give it to the agent, as opposed to through
| the CLI where you usually just give it an entire file by typing
| the name, and often you just pray that it manages to find the
| context by itself. My prompts in Cursor are generally a lot more
| specific and I get more surgical results than with Claude Code in
| the terminal purely because of the convenience of the UX.
|
| But secondly, there's an entire field of LLM-assisted coding
| that's being almost entirely neglected and that's code
| autocomplete models. Fundamentally they're the same technology as
| agents and should be doing the same thing: indexing your code in
| the background, filtering the context, etc, but there's much less
| attention and it does feel like the models are stagnating.
|
| I find that very unfortunate. Compare the two workflows:
|
| With a normal coding agent, you write your prompt, then you have
| to at least a full minute for the result (generally more,
| depending on the task), breaking your flow and forcing you to
| task-switch. Then it gives you a giant mass of code and of course
| 99% of the time you just approve and test it because it's a slog
| to read through what it did. If it doesn't work as intended, you
| get angry at the model, retry your prompt, spending a larger
| amount of tokens the longer your chat history.
|
| But with LLM-powered auto-complete, when you want, say, a
| function to do X, you write your comment describing it first,
| just like you should if you were writing it yourself. You
| instantly see a small section of code and if it's not what you
| want, you can alter your comment. Even if it's not 100% correct,
| multi-line autocomplete is great because you approve it line by
| line and can stop when it gets to the incorrect parts, and you're
| not forced to task switch and you don't lose your concentration,
| that great sense of "flow".
|
| Fundamentally it's not _that_ different from agentic coding -
| except instead of prompting in a chatbox, you write comments in
| the files directly. But I much prefer the quick feedback loop,
| the ability to ignore outputs you don 't want, and the fact that
| I don't feel like I'm losing track of what my code is doing.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| The other thing about non-agent workflows is they're much, much
| less compute intensive. This is going to matter.
| wavemode wrote:
| I agree with you wholeheartedly. It seems like a lot of the
| work on making AI autocomplete better (better indexing, context
| management, codebase awareness, etc) has stagnated in favor of
| full-on agentic development, which simply isn't suited for many
| kinds of tasks.
| dsign wrote:
| Look, I'm very negative about this AI thing. I think there is a
| great chance it will lead to something terrible and we will all
| die, or worse. But on the other hand, we are all going to die
| anyway. Some of us, the lucky ones, will die of a heart attack
| and will learn of our imminent demise in the second it happens,
| or not at all. The rest of us will have it worse. It has _always_
| been like that, and it has only gotten more devastating since we
| started wearing clothes and stopped being eaten alive by a
| savanna crocodile or freezing to death during the first snowfall
| of winter.
|
| But if AI keeps getting better at code, it will produce entire
| in-silico simulation workflows to test new drugs or even to
| design synthetic life (which, again, could make us all die, or
| worse). Yet there is a tiny, tiny chance we will use it to fix
| some of the darkest aspects of human existence. I will take that.
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| That's stupid. If you genuinely think that there's a great
| chance AI will kill us all, you wouldn't spin the wheel just
| for some small vague chance that it doesn't and something good
| (what exactly, nobody knows) will happen
| habinero wrote:
| A lot of very silly people have convinced themselves and you of
| this, but it is not true, was never true, and is never going to
| be true.
|
| We have a lot of actual problems to deal with that aren't
| telling ghost stories about sand. Focus on those.
| Krei-se wrote:
| The author has a github.
| 63 wrote:
| I have no problem with experienced senior devs using agents to
| write good code faster. What I have a problem with is
| inexperienced "vibecoders" who don't care to learn and instead
| use agents to write awful buggy code that will make the product
| harder to build on even for the agents. It used to be that lack
| of a basic understanding of the system was a barrier for people,
| but now it's not, so we're flooded with code written by imperfect
| models conducted by people who don't know good from bad.
| codebolt wrote:
| Where are you encountering all this slop code? At my work we
| use LLMs heavily and I don't see this issue. Maybe I'm just
| lucky that my colleagues all have Uni degrees in CS and at
| least a few years experience.
| post-it wrote:
| > Maybe I'm just lucky that my colleagues all have Uni
| degrees in CS and at least a few years experience.
|
| That's why. I was using Claude the other day to greenfield a
| side project and it wanted to do some important logic on the
| frontend that would have allowed unauthenticated users to
| write into my database.
|
| It was easy to spot _for me_ , because I've been writing
| software for years, and it only took a single prompt to fix.
| But a vibe coder wouldn't have caught it and hackers would've
| pwned their webapp.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| You can also ask Claude to review all the code for security
| issues and code smells, you'd be surprised what it finds.
| We all write insecure code in our first pass through if
| we're too focused on getting the proof of concept worked
| out, security isnt always the very 1st thing coded, maybe
| its the very next thing, maybe it comes 10 changes later.
| blibble wrote:
| > We all write insecure code in our first pass through
|
| no, we don't
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Yes we do, you don't just start a brand new web project
| and spit out CORS rules, authentication schemes, roles,
| etc in one sitting do you? Are you an AI?
| blibble wrote:
| > are you an AI?
|
| no, I'm a competent engineer
|
| maybe you've not worked with any
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| So let me get this straight, you get instructed to build
| an Instagram clone, and you sit down and one shot code
| every single feature for the project? My point is about
| in one sitting, doing EVERYTHING all at once, without
| pausing, without standing up, without breaks. I don't
| know about you but people who tend to rush code out make
| just as many if not worse mistakes than AI does.
|
| I've worked with many competent engineers and have built
| things people couldn't even google help for before AI
| existed, and that surpassed mine and my teams
| expectations both solo and in a team setting, none of
| them were done in one sitting, which is what you're
| suggesting. Everything is planned out, and done
| piecemeal.
|
| For the record, I can one shot an AI model to do all of
| those things, with all the detail they need and get
| similar output as if I gave a human all those tasks, I
| know because I've built the exact tooling to loop AI
| around the same processes competent developers use, and
| it still can do all of it in record time.
| habinero wrote:
| > I can one shot an AI model to do all of those things
|
| Bullshit you can lol. If it's that trivial, create an
| instagram right now and post the code.
| girvo wrote:
| Yes I really do, because this has been a solved problem
| for a while. Also it's necessary to get right because
| retro fitting it later is a pain.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| So if you're going to build a massive application say,
| YouTube, Facebook or Instagram you're going to sit down,
| and write out every template, db model, controller, view
| model, etc in one single sitting for the entire
| application? No bathroom breaks, no lunch, no "I'll
| finish that part tomorrow" you do it ALL in one sitting?
| Because you will miss something, and that's my point,
| nobody gets their first crack at a greenfield project
| 100% in one sitting, you build it up to what it is. The
| AI is used the same way.
| girvo wrote:
| No, the AI writes far less secure code than I do to
| start, even with the SotA models and careful
| prompting/detailed plans.
|
| You've moved the goalposts so far that you're now talking
| about a different game altogether.
| habinero wrote:
| I actually _do_ build all of those things before standing
| something up in prod. Not doing that is insane. Literally
| every web framework has reasonable defaults baked in.
|
| Any competent tech company will have canned ways to do
| all of those things that have already been reviewed and
| vetted
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I never said anything about before hitting production, I
| said do you build everything in one shot when you start a
| brand new project, in one sitting.
| habinero wrote:
| Why are you building and deploying a site critical enough
| to need CSP and user security & so on in one sitting lol
|
| Anyways, yes, if I know I'm gonna need it? Because every
| framework has reasonable defaults or libraries for all of
| those things, and if you're in a corporate environment,
| you have vetted ways of doing them
|
| 1. import middleware.whatever
|
| 2. configure it
|
| 3. done
|
| Like, you don't write these things unless you need custom
| behavior.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The issue isn't when the programmers start using it. It's
| when the project managers start using it and think that
| they're producing something similar to the programmers
| bdangubic wrote:
| the number of experienced, senior programmers though, who are
| in "anti-LLM" camp, is still fairly staggering.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| I mean when the tag line is "this will replace senior
| engineers and you, the senior engineer, _must_ be _forced_ to
| use it "
|
| Then yeah, it makes sense.
| girvo wrote:
| Yeah I'm baffled why people are surprised that senior+
| engineers who are being told in one breath they will be
| replaced by this tool and also they MUST use this tool to
| make it better to replace them aren't happy about it or
| want to use it willingly.
|
| I also find it wild how we're sleepwalking into this, but
| I'm also part of the problem and using these things too.
| ares623 wrote:
| If you're forced to use it by company mandate then that's
| fine. If you're not forced and still use it being fully
| aware, then I wish you well.
| girvo wrote:
| I'm forced to yes. It's tracked.
| lins1909 wrote:
| Why is that staggering? That feels like a pretty dramatic
| expression. Is it a foregone conclusion that one must use
| agents?
| remich wrote:
| We're in a transition phase, but this will shake out in the
| near future. In the non-professional space, poorly built
| vibecoded apps simply won't last, for any number of reasons.
| When it comes to professional devs, this is a problem that is
| solved by a combination of tooling, process, and management:
|
| (1) Tooling to enable better evaluation of generated code and
| its adherence to conventions and norms (2) Process to impose
| requirements on the creation/exposure of PRDs/prompts/traces
| (3) Management to guide devs in the use of the above and to
| implement concrete rewards and consequences
|
| Some organizations will be exposed as being deficient in some
| or all of these areas, and they will struggle. Better
| organizations will adapt.
| etamponi wrote:
| The unfortunate reality is that (1) and (2) is what many,
| many engineers would like to do, but management is going
| EXACTLY in the opposite direction: go faster! Go faster! Why
| are you spending time on these things
| post-it wrote:
| > Agent harnesses have not improved much since then. There are
| things Sketch could do well six months ago that the most popular
| agents cannot do today.
|
| I think this is a neglected area that will see a lot of
| development in the near future. I think that even if development
| on AI models stopped today - if no new model was ever trained
| again - there are still decades of innovation ahead of us in
| harnessing the models we already have.
|
| Consider ChatGPT: the first release relied entirely on its
| training data to answer questions. Today, it typically does a few
| Google searches and summarizes the results. The model has
| improved, but so has the way we use it.
| kevmo314 wrote:
| Really? I hardly think it's neglected. The Claude Code harness
| is the only reason I come back to it. I've tried Claude via
| OpenCode or others and it doesn't work as well for me. If
| anything, I would even argue that prior to 4.6, the main reason
| Opus 4.5 felt like it improved over months was the harness.
| tiny-automates wrote:
| agreed, and i'd go further - the harness is where evaluation
| actually happens, not in some separate benchmark suite. rhe
| model doesn't know if it succeeded at a web task. the harness
| has to verify DOM state, check that the right element was
| clicked, confirm the page transitioned correctly. right now
| most harnesses just check "did the model say it was done" which
| is why pass rates on benchmarks don't translate to production
| reliability. the interesting harness work is building
| verification into the loop itself, not as an afterthought.
| uludag wrote:
| > I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so
| many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write
| actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who
| are fearful about the changes agents are bringing.
|
| It might be just me but this reads as very tone deaf. From my
| perspective, CEOs are seething at the mouth to make as many
| developers redundant as possible, not being shy about this
| desire. (I don't see this at all as inevitable, but tech leaders
| have made their position clear)
|
| Like, imagine the smugness of some 18th century "CEO" telling an
| artisan, despite the fact that he'l be resigned to working in
| horrific conditions at a factory, to not worry and think of all
| the mass produced consumer goods he may enjoy one day.
|
| It's not at all a stretch of the imagination that current tech
| workers may be in a very precarious situation. All the slopware
| in the world wouldn't console them.
| overgard wrote:
| I bought Steve Yegge's "Vibe Coding" book. I think I'm about
| 1/4th of the way through it or so. One thing that surprised me
| is there's this naivete on display that workers are going to be
| the ones to reap the benefits of this. Like, Steve was using an
| example of being able to direct the agent while doing leisure
| activities (never mind that Steve is more of an
| executive/thought leader in this company, and, prior to LLMs,
| seemed to be out of the business of writing code). That's a
| nice snapshot of a reality that isn't going to persist..
|
| While the idea of programmers working two hours a day and
| spending the rest of it with their family seems sunny, that's
| absolutely not how business is going to treat it.
|
| Thought experiment... CEO has a team of 8 engineers. They do
| some experiments with AI, and they discover that their
| engineers are 2x more effective on average . What does the CEO
| do?
|
| a) Change the workweek to 4 hours a day so that all the
| engineers have better work/life balance since the same amount
| of work is being done.
|
| b) Fire half the engineers, make the 4 remaining guys pick up
| the slack, rinse and repeat until there's one guy left?
|
| Like, come on. There's pushback on this stuff not because the
| technology is bad, (although it's overhyped), but because the
| no sane person trusts our current economic system to provide
| anything resembling humane treatment of workers. The super rich
| are perfectly fine seeing half the population become
| unemployed, as far as I can tell, as long as their stock
| numbers go up.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| Haven't read that book, but agree that if anyone thinks the
| workers are likely to capture the value of this productivity
| shift, they haven't been paying attention to reality.
|
| Though at the same time I also think a lot of the CEO-types
| (at least in the pure software world) who believe they are
| going to capture the value of this productivity shift are
| also in for a rude awakening because if AI doesn't stall out,
| its only a matter of time from when their engineers are
| replaceable to when their company doesn't need to exist at
| all anymore.
| yojat661 wrote:
| You missed option c. C) keep all 8 engineers so the team can
| pump out features faster, all still working 8 hour days. The
| ceo will probably be forced to do it to keep up with their
| competition.
| ares623 wrote:
| in addition to B, the best part is the 4 fired engineers can
| go around and say "we'll do the same work as those 4 for 10%
| less" and so on.
|
| "AI won't replace you. The guy who's about to get fired but
| has more to lose is going to replace you."
| monus wrote:
| > Along the way I have developed a programming philosophy I now
| apply to everything: the best software for an agent is whatever
| is best for a programmer.
|
| Not a plug but really that's exactly why we're building sandboxes
| for agents with local laptop quality. Starting with remote
| xcode+sim sandboxes for iOS, high mem sandbox with Android
| Emulator on GPU accel for Android.
|
| No machine allocation but composable sandboxes that make up a
| developer persona's laptop.
|
| If interested, a quick demo here
| https://www.loom.com/share/c0c618ed756d46d39f0e20c7feec996d
|
| muvaf[at]limrun[dot]com
| panny wrote:
| I see a lot of people here saying things like:
|
| >ah, they're so dumb, they don't get it, the anti-LLM people
|
| This is one of the reasons I see AI failing in the short term. If
| I call you an idiot, are you more or less likely to be open
| minded and try what I'm selling? AI isn't making money, 95% of
| companies are failing with AI
|
| https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...
|
| I mean, your AIs might be a lot more powerful if it was
| generating money, but that's not happening. I guess being
| condescending to the 95% of potential buyers isn't really working
| out.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Listen to this guy. I've been using his code for a long time, and
| it works. I am a happy customer of his service, and it works. I
| listen to his advice and it works.
| gip wrote:
| > In 2026, I don't use an IDE any more.
|
| I don't think it is the best way to look at it. I think that now
| every team has the power to build and maintain an internal agent
| (tool + UX) to manager software products. I don't necessarily
| think that chat-only is enough except for small projects, so
| teams will build agent that gives them access to the level of
| abstraction that works best.
|
| It's a data point but this weekend (e.g. in 2 days) I build a
| desktop + web agent that is able to help me reason on system
| design and code. Built with Codex powered by the Codex SDK. It is
| high quality. I've been a software engineer and director of
| engineering for 10 years. I'm blown away.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I'm not saying this is definitely a bot. However, this is the
| 7th time I've read a post and thought it might be an OpenAI
| promotion bot, clicked on the username, and noticed that the
| account was created in 2011.
|
| I have yet to do this and see any other year. Was there someone
| who bought a ton of accounts in 2011 to farm them out? A data
| breach? Was 2011 just a very big year for new users? (My own
| account is from 2011)
| loveparade wrote:
| It's definitely a bot, just like probably around 10% of
| comments on HN at this point, and the majority of upvotes.
| And it's only increasing.
|
| Calling it bot is a bit dismissive though. It's an agent!
| redanddead wrote:
| it is giving a very agentic vibe
| gip wrote:
| Care to have a phone call with who you call a bot tonight?
|
| If so, send a DM on twitter to @edfixyz with your phone
| number and I will call you immediately. Or give me your
| twitter handle.
|
| I'm tired of that BS - when people don't like what you
| write they call you a bot.
| redanddead wrote:
| 2011 just so happened to be 4 years before a very important
| year: 2015 -- The founding of OpenAI. Unrelated note, have
| you tried Codex and the Codex SDK?
| gip wrote:
| I'm not a bot. You are saying that because for some reason
| you resent people who have a good experience with Codex /
| OpenAI. Curious what that is - people hate the CEO or what?
|
| I like Claude Code too btw.
|
| The crazy thing here is that I wrote the initial comment
| myself!
| redanddead wrote:
| That's exactly what a bot would say
| sarchertech wrote:
| > It's a data point but this weekend (e.g. in 2 days) I
| build a desktop + web agent that is able to help me reason
| on system design and code. Built with Codex powered by the
| Codex SDK. It is high quality. I've been a software
| engineer and director of engineering for 10 years. I'm
| blown away.
|
| Assuming you're not a bot. It's nothing to do with you
| having a good experience, it's the way you wrote about that
| experience that sounds like a product placement.
|
| I asked OpenAIs very own ChatGPT 5.2 powered by OpenAI to
| tell you why it sounds like a product placement:
|
| " Because it hits a bunch of "native ad / testimonial"
| tells at once: * Brand-name density in a tiny space. "Built
| with Codex powered by the Codex SDK" repeats the same brand
| in two adjacent phrases, like copy that's trying to lodge a
| name in your head rather than naturally describe a build. *
| Overly polished value signals. "High quality" is a generic
| superlative with no concrete evidence (features, metrics,
| constraints, tradeoffs). Ads often lean on verdict words
| instead of specifics. * Credential + astonishment combo.
| "I've been a software engineer and director of engineering
| for 10 years" is classic authority framing, immediately
| followed by "I'm blown away." That's a common testimonial
| structure: I'm hard to impress - I'm impressed. * Time-
| compressed "miracle build" narrative. "This weekend (in 2
| days) I build a desktop + web agent..." reads like the "you
| can do it fast/easily now" story arc you see in promos. Not
| impossible--just a familiar marketing shape. * "It's a data
| point" language. That phrase feels like social-proof
| seeding: "don't treat this as hype, just one datapoint,"
| which paradoxically makes it feel more like deliberate
| persuasion. * No friction or downsides. Real engineer
| excitement usually includes at least one caveat (bugs,
| rough edges, limitations, cost, setup pain). The total
| absence makes it sound curated. * Benefit phrased like
| positioning. "Able to help me reason on system design and
| code" is basically a product pitch line (target user +
| problem + outcome) rather than a personal anecdote ("it
| helped me untangle X design and refactor Y")."
| dmos62 wrote:
| Curious what kind of agent did you build? I'm building a
| programming agent myself, it's intentionally archaic in that
| you run it by constantly copy-pasting from-to fresh ChatGPT
| sessions (: I'm finding it challenging to have it do good
| context management: I'm trying to solve this by declaring parts
| of code or spec as "collections" with an overview md file
| attached that acts like a map of why/where/what, but that can't
| scale indefinitely.
| gip wrote:
| Send an DM on twitter to @edfixyz (one of my account) and
| I'll reply with a link to the website tomorrow to give you a
| sense. Can't share a link here, it will kill my backend.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Care to send me a link on my email? It's in my about. I
| don't use my X account and can't seem to login, the
| verification SMS never arrives.
| dude250711 wrote:
| _> ...and director of engineering for 10 years. I 'm blown
| away._
|
| It's always the CTO types who get most enthusiastic.
| dmos62 wrote:
| > the best software for an agent is whatever is best for a
| programmer
|
| My conclusion as well. It feels paradoxical, maybe because on
| some level I still think of an LLM as some weird gadget, not a
| coworker. Context ephemerality is more or less the only veritable
| difference from a human programmer, I'd say. And, even then,
| context introduction with LLMs is a speedrun of how you'd do it
| with new human members of a project. Awesome times we live in.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| > To me that statement is as obvious as "water is wet".
|
| Water is not wet. Water makes things wet. Perhaps the inaccuracy
| of that statement should be taken as a hint that the other
| statements that you hold on the same level are worthy of
| reconsideration.
| baq wrote:
| The good old classic technically correct and completely besides
| the point observation.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| Yes, technically HN is full of these kinds of corrections...
| but HN isn't actually wet.
| swyx wrote:
| username checks out
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| > Pay through the nose for Opus or GPT-7.9-xhigh-with-cheese.
| Don't worry, it's only for a few years.
|
| > You have to turn off the sandbox, which means you have to
| provide your own sandbox. I have tried just about everything and
| I highly recommend: use a fresh VM.
|
| > I am extremely out of touch with anti-LLM arguments
|
| 'Just pay out the arse and run models without a sandbox or in
| some annoying VM just to see them fail. Wait, some people are
| against this?'
| dude250711 wrote:
| Well, not 'against' per se, just watching LLM-enthusiasts
| tumble in the mud for now. Though I have heard that if I don't
| jump into the mud this instance, I will be left behind
| apparently for some reason. So you either get left behind or
| get a muddy behind, your choice.
| pferde wrote:
| Everybody keeps saying the models are getting better, the
| tooling is getting better, people are discovering better
| practices...
|
| So why not just wait out this insane initial phase, and if
| anything is left standing afterwards and proves itself, just
| learn that.
| kjksf wrote:
| Because there's nothing to learn. "learning" to use claude
| code is less effort than learning how to use the basics of
| git.
|
| They provide value today so I'm using them today.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| In case you missed the several links, exe.dev is his startup
| which provides sandboxing for agents. So it makes sense he
| wants to get people used to paying for agents and in need of a
| good sandbox.
| imron wrote:
| > By far the greatest IDE I have ever used was Visual Studio C++
| 6.0 on Windows 2000
|
| Visual C++ 6 was incredible! My favourite IDE of all time too.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Poor fellow has never used IntelliJ IDEA.
| imron wrote:
| Yes I have.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Local models are decent now. Qwen3 coder is pretty good and
| decent speed. I use smaller models (qwen2.5:1.5b) with keyboard
| shortcuts and speech to text to ask for man page entries, and get
| 'em back faster than my internet connection and a "robust"
| frontier model does. And web search/RAG hides a multitude of
| sins.
|
| _" Using anything other than the frontier models is actively
| harmful"_ - so how come I'm getting solid results from Copilot
| and Haiku/Flash? Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, Review, Modify,
| Repeat. Loops with fancy heuristics, optimized prompts, and
| decent tools, have good results with most models released in the
| past year.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Have you used the frontier models recently? It's hard to
| communicate the difference the last 6 months has seen.
|
| We're at the point where copilot is irrelevant. Your way of
| working is irrelevant. Because that's not how you interact with
| coding AIs anymore, you're chatting with them about the code
| outside the IDE.
| timr wrote:
| > Have you used the frontier models recently?
|
| Yes.
|
| > It's hard to communicate the difference the last 6 months
| has seen.
|
| No, it isn't. The hypebeast discovered Claude code, but
| hasn't yet realized that the "let the model burn tokens with
| access to a shell" part is the key innovation, not the model
| itself.
|
| I can (and do) use GH Copilot's "agent" mode with older
| generation models, and it's fine. There's no step function of
| improvement from one model to another, though there are
| always specific situations where one outperforms. My current
| go-to model for "sit and spin" mode is actually Grok, and I
| will splurge for tokens when that doesn't work. Tools and
| skills and blahblahblah are nice to have (and in fact, part
| of GH Copilot now), but not at all core to the process.
| gjulianm wrote:
| Honestly, I've been using the frontier models and I'm not
| sure where people are seeing these massive improvements. It's
| not that they're bad, it's just that I don't see that much of
| an improvement the last 6 months. They're so inconsistent
| that it's hard to have a clear idea of what's happening. I
| usually switch between models and I don't see either those
| massive differences either. Not to mention that sometimes
| models regress in certain aspects (e.g., I've seen later
| models that tend to "think" more and end up at the same
| result but taking far more time and tokens).
| ncruces wrote:
| I have.
|
| Just this month I've burned through 80% of my Copilot quota
| of Claude Opus 4.6 in a couple of days to get it to help me
| with a silly hobby project: https://github.com/ncruces/dbldbl
|
| It did help. The project had been sitting for 3 years without
| trig and hyperbolic trig, and in a couple days of spare time
| I'm adding it. Some of it through rubber ducking chat and/or
| algorithmic papers review (give me formulas, I'll do it),
| some through agent mode (give me code).
|
| But if you review the PR written in agent mode, the model
| still lies to my face, in trivial but hard to verify ways.
| Like adding tests that say cosh(1) is this number at that
| OEIS link, and both the number and the OEIS link are wrong,
| but obviously tests pass because it's a lie.
|
| I'm not trying to bash the tech. I use it at work in limited
| but helpful ways, and use hobby stuff like this as a testbed
| precisely to try to figure out what they're good at in a low
| stakes setting.
|
| But you trust the plausibly looking output of these things at
| your own peril.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Just to be clear: I mean Copilot CLI. I had used the IDE, and
| it was terrible; I tried the CLI, and for some reason it was
| much better. I explain carefully what I want, and it iterates
| until it's done, quickly, on cheap models.
|
| If you check the docs, smaller, faster, older models are
| recommended for 'lightweight' coding. There's several reasons
| for this. 1) a smaller model doesn't have as good deep
| reasoning, so it works okay for a simple ask. 2) small
| context, small task, small model can produce better results
| than big context, big task, big model. The lost-in-the-middle
| problem is still unsolved, leading to mistakes that get worse
| with big context, and longer runs exacerbate issues. So small
| context/task that ends and starts a new loop (with planning &
| learning) ends up working really well and quickly.
|
| There's a difference between tasks and problem-solving,
| though. For difficult problems, you want a frontier reasoning
| model.
| symfrog wrote:
| Any sufficiently complicated LLM generated program contains an ad
| hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of
| half of an open source project.
| kakacik wrote:
| We had an effort recently where one much more experienced dev
| from our company ran Claude on our oldish codebase for one
| system, with the goal of transforming it into newer structure,
| newer libraries etc. while preserving various built in
| functionalities. Not the first time this guy did such a thing
| and he is supposed to be an expert.
|
| I took a look at the result and its maybe half of stuff missing
| completely, rest is cryptic. I know that codebase by heart
| since I created it. From my 20+ years of experience correcting
| all this would take way more effort than manual rewrite from
| scratch by a senior. Suffice to say thats not what upper
| management wants to hear, llm adoption often became one of
| their yearly targets to be evaluated against. So we have a
| hammer and looking for nails to bend and crook.
|
| Suffice to say this effort led nowhere since we have other high
| priority goals, for now. Smaller things here & there, why not.
| Bigger efforts, so far sawed-off 2-barrel shotgun loaded with
| buckshot right into both feet.
| kjksf wrote:
| Not to take away from your experience but to offer a
| counterpoint.
|
| I used claude code to port rust pdb parsing library to
| typescript.
|
| My SumatraPDF is a large C++ app and I wanted visibility into
| where does the size of functions / data go, layout of
| classes. So I wanted to build a tool to dump info out of a
| PDB. But I have been diagnosed with extreme case of
| Rustophobiatis so I just can't touch rust code. Hence, the
| port to typescript.
|
| With my assistance it did the work in an afternoon and did it
| well. The code worked. I ran it against large PDB from
| SumatraPDF and it matched the output of other tools.
|
| In a way porting from one language to another is extreme case
| of refactoring and Claude did it very well.
|
| I think that in general (your experience notwithstanding)
| Claude Caude is excellent at refactorings.
|
| Here are 3 refactorings from SumatraPDF where I asked claude
| code to simplify code written by a human:
|
| https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a472d3.
| .. https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/5624
| aa... https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a
| 40bc9...
|
| I hope you agree the code written by Claude is better than
| the code written by a human.
|
| Granted, those are small changes but I think it generalizes
| into bigger changes. I have few refactorings in mind I wanted
| to do for a long time and maybe with Claude they will finally
| be feasible (they were not feasible before only because I
| don't have infinite amount of time to do everything I want to
| do).
| pja wrote:
| "I want this thing, but in a different language" seems to
| be something that the current generation of cutting edge
| LLMs are pretty good at.
|
| Translating a vibe is something the Ur-LLMS (GPT3 etc) were
| very good at so it's not entirely surprising that the
| current state of the art is to be found in things of a
| "translate thing X that already exists into context Y"
| nature.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| All software before LLMs had a copious number of bugs, many of
| which were never fixed.
| entropyneur wrote:
| > I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art,
| but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have
| skillsaws.
|
| Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge
| seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x
| increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Org processes have not changed. Lots of the devs I know are
| enjoying the speedup on mundane work, consuming it as a
| temporary lifestyle surplus until everything else catches up.
|
| You can't saw faster than the wood arrives. Also the layout of
| the whole job site is now wrong and the council approvals were
| the actual bottleneck to how many houses could be built in the
| first place... :/
| gbuk2013 wrote:
| Basically this. My last several tickets were HITL coding with
| AI for several hours and then waiting 1-2 days while the code
| worked its way through PR and CI/CD process.
|
| Coding speed was never really a bottleneck anywhere I have
| worked - it's all the processes around it that take the most
| time and AI doesn't help that much there.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I'm seeing it slightly differently. So much of our new
| slowdown is rework because we've seen a bunch more API and
| contract churn. The project I'm on has had more rework than I
| care to contemplate and most of it stems from everyone's
| coding agents failing to stay synced up with each other on
| the details and their human handlers not noticing the
| discrepancies until we're well into systems integration work.
|
| If I may hijack your analogy, it would be like if all the
| construction crews got really fast at their work, so much so
| that the city decided to go for an "iterative construction"
| strategy because, in isolation, the cost of one team trying
| different designs on-site until they hit on one they liked
| became very small compared to the cost of getting city
| planners and civil engineers involved up-front. But what
| wasn't considered was the rework multiplier effect that comes
| into play when the people building the water, sewage,
| electricity, telephones, roads, etc. are all repeatedly
| tweaking designs with minimal coordination amongst each
| other. So then those tweaks keep inducing additional design
| tweaks and rework on adjacent contractors because none of
| these design changes happen in a vacuum. Next thing you know
| all the houses are built but now need to be rewired because
| the electricity panel is designed for a different mains
| voltage from the drop and also it's in the wrong part of the
| house because of a late change from overhead lines in the
| alleys to underground lines below the street.
|
| Many have observed that coding agents lack object permanence
| so keeping them on a coherent plan requires giving them such
| a thoroughly documented plan up front. It actually has me
| wondering if optimal coding agent usage at scale resembles
| something of a return to waterfall (probably in more of a
| Royce sense than the bogeyman agile evangelists derived from
| the original idea) where the humans on the team mostly spend
| their time banging out systems specifications and testing
| protocols, and iteration on the spec becomes somewhat more
| removed from implementing it than it is in typical practice
| nowadays.
| csande17 wrote:
| It's not 10x, but
| https://www.ft.com/content/5ac2ee5f-f8bd-4f39-a759-3c5c50c8b...
| has some graphs suggesting a 1.5x increase in metrics like
| "number of new apps published in the iOS App Store" and "lines
| of code committed by US GitHub users".
|
| People haven't noticed because the software industry was
| already mostly unoriginal slop, even prior to LLMs, and people
| are good at ignoring unoriginal slop.
| bananaflag wrote:
| I think, if there were to be a noticeable increase in software
| quantity due to agentic coding, we should test it by looking
| into indie games.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| According to SteamDB (and Reddit), 2024 and 2025 both saw
| about 19.000 games released on Steam - there's a big jump
| between '23 and '24 of about 5000 games, but oddly it
| plateaued then.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1pl7kg1/over_1900.
| ..
| co_king_3 wrote:
| LLMs are unusably bad at generating game code
| sdoering wrote:
| Quite a few - and I know I am only speaking for myself - live
| on my different computers. I created a few CLI tools that make
| my life and that of my agent smoother sailing for information
| retrieval. I created, inspired by a blog post, a digital
| personal assistant, that really enables me to better juggle
| different work contexts as well as different projects within
| these work contexts.
|
| I created a platform for a virtual pub quiz for my team at my
| day job, built multiple pandingpages for events, debugged dark
| table to recognize my new camera (it was to new to be included
| in the camera.xml file, but the specs were known). I debugged
| quite a few parts of a legacy shitshow of an application, did a
| lot of infrastructure optimization and I also created a massive
| ton of content as a centaur in dialog with the help of Claude
| Code.
|
| But I don't do "Show HN" posts. And I don't advertise my builds
| - because other than those named, most are one off things, that
| I throw away after this one problem was solved.
|
| To me code became way more ephemeral.
|
| But YMMV - and that is a good thing. I also believe that way
| less people than the hype bubble implies are actually really
| into hard core usage like Pete Steinberger or Armin Ronacher
| and the likes.
| mkvoid wrote:
| If you recall it, would you mind sharing the blog post that
| inspired the digital personal assistant?
| overfeed wrote:
| > Quite a few - and I know I am only speaking for myself -
| live on my different computers
|
| I use AI/agents in quite similar ways, and even rekindled
| multiple personal projects that had stalled. However, to
| borrow OPs parlance, these are not "houses" - more like sheds
| and tree-houses. They are fun and useful, but not moving the
| needle on housing stock supply, so to speak.
| arrrg wrote:
| To me the hard problem isn't building things, it's knowing what
| to build (finding the things that provide value) and how to
| build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something that
| makes something possible that wasn't possible before).
|
| I don't see AI helping with knowing what to build at all and I
| also don't see AI finding novel approaches to anything.
|
| Sure, I do think there is some unrealized potential somewhere
| in terms of relatively low value things nobody built before
| because it just wasn't worth the time investment - but those
| things are necessarily relatively low value (or else it would
| have been worth it to build it) and as such also relatively
| limited.
|
| Software has amazing economies of scale. So I don't think the
| builder/tool analogy works at all. The economics don't map.
| Since you only have to build software once and then it doesn't
| matter how often you use it (yeah, a simplification) even
| pretty low value things have always been worth building. In
| other words: there is tons of software out there. That's not
| the issue. The issue is: what it the right software and can it
| solve my problems?
| c048 wrote:
| I wonder what happened to the old addage of "only 10% of the
| time you actually spend coding, the rest of the time is
| figuring out what is needed".
|
| At the same time I see people claiming 100x increases and how
| they produce 15k lines of code each day thanks to AI, but all
| I can wonder is how these people managed to find 100x work
| that needed to be done.
| shinycode wrote:
| I agree. It's really easier to build low-impact tools for
| personal use. I managed to produce tools I would never have
| had time to build and I use them everyday. But I will never
| sell them because it's tailored to my needs and it makes no
| sense to open source anything nowadays. For work it's
| different, product teams still need to decide what to build
| and what is helpful to the clients. Our bugs are not self-
| fixed by AI yet. I think Anthropic saying 100% of their code
| is AI generated is a marketing stunt. They have all reasons
| to say that to sell their tool that generates code. It sends
| a strong signal to the industry that if they can do it, it
| could be easier for smaller companies. We are not there yet
| from a client perspective asking a feature and the new
| feature is shipped 2 days later in prod without human
| interactions
| pzo wrote:
| > To me the hard problem isn't building things, it's knowing
| what to build (finding the things that provide value) and how
| to build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something
| that makes something possible that wasn't possible before).
|
| The problem with this that after doing this hard work someone
| can just copy easily your hard work and UI/UX taste. I think
| distribution will be very important in the future.
|
| We might end up that in future that you have already in
| social media where influencers copy someones post/video and
| not giving credits to original author.
| kombookcha wrote:
| >The problem with this that after doing this hard work
| someone can just copy easily your hard work and UI/UX
| taste.
|
| Or indeed, somebody might steal and launder your work by
| scooping them up into a training set for their model and
| letting it spit out sloppy versions of your thing.
| rtcoms wrote:
| For m, I'm demotivated to work on many ideas thinking that
| anyone can easily copy it or OpenClaw/Nanobot will easily
| replicate 90% of that unctionality.
|
| So now need to think of different kind of ideas, something on
| line of games that may take multiple iteration to get
| perfected.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >thinking that anyone can easily copy it
|
| I mean this is how it's always been throughout history.
|
| Creating something new is hard, copying something in terms
| of energy spent, is far easier. This is software or
| physical objects that don't require massive amounts of
| expensive technology to reproduce.
| meowface wrote:
| In a few decades, AIs will probably be better at those than
| most humans. Possibly even sooner.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm sure there's plenty of new software being released and
| built by agents, but the same problem as handcrafted software
| remains - finding an audience. The easier and quicker it is to
| build software, or the more developers build software, the more
| stuff is thrown at a wall to see what sticks, but I don't think
| there's more capacity for sticktivity, if my analogy hasn't
| broken down by now.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| You aren't notcing it?
|
| Small and mid sized companies are getting custom software now.
|
| Small software is able to be packed with extra features instead
| of bare minimum.
| arghwhat wrote:
| The real outcome is mostly a change in workflow and a
| reasonable increase in throughput. There might be a 10x or even
| 100x increase in creation of tiny tools or apps (yay to another
| 1000 budget assistant/egg timer/etc. apps on the app/play
| store), but hardly something one would notice.
|
| To be honest, I think the surrounding paragraph lumps together
| _all_ anti-AI sentiments.
|
| For example, there is a big difference between "all AI output
| is slop" (which is objectively false) and "AI enables sloppy
| people to do sloppy work" (which is objectively true), and
| there's a whole spectrum.
|
| What bugs me personally is not at all my own usage of these
| tools, but the increase in workload caused by _other_ people
| using these tools to drown me in nonsensical garbage. In recent
| months, the extra workload has far exceeded my own productivity
| gains.
|
| For the non-technical, imagine a hypochondriac using chatgpt to
| generate hundreds of pages of "health analysis" that they then
| hand to their doctor and expect a thorough read and opinion of,
| vs. the doctor using chatgpt for sparring on a particular
| issue.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >people using these tools to drown me in nonsensical garbage
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
|
| >The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order
| of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
| amarble wrote:
| This weekend I tried what I'd call a medium scale agentic
| coding project[0], following what Anthropic demonstrated last
| week autonomously building a C-compiler [1]. Bottom line is,
| it's possible to make demos that look good, but it really
| doesn't work well enough to build software you would actually
| use. This naturally lends itself to the "everybody is taking
| about how great it is but nobody is building anything real with
| it" construct we're in right now. It is great, but also not
| really useful.
|
| [0] https://www.marble.onl/posts/this_cost_170.html
|
| [1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler
| nathias wrote:
| yes, there is a very large increase in TUI tools
| conartist6 wrote:
| It's AI features and 10x more bugs. Microsoft is leading the
| way.
| wongarsu wrote:
| At my $work this manifests as more backlog items being ticked
| off, more one-off internal tooling, features (and tools)
| getting more bells-and-whistles and much more elaborate UI.
| Also some long-standing bugs being fixed by claude code.
|
| Headline features aren't much faster. You still need to gather
| requirements, design a good architecture, talk with
| stakeholders, test your implementation, gather feedback, etc.
| Speeding up the actual coding can only move the needle so much.
| n4pw01f wrote:
| I am seeing shit tons of chatbots for everything under the sun
| being onboarded at corporate
| 8note wrote:
| do you have the right expectations?
|
| rather than new stuff for everyone to use, the future could
| easily be everyone building their own bespoke tools for their
| own problems.
| only2people wrote:
| >this is why I'm building
|
| My clipart folder of that kid with the lolipop continues to stay
| relevant
| ares623 wrote:
| guys it's an ad
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Nah, it's not, really
| nickcw wrote:
| > Some believe AI Super-intelligence is just around the corner
| (for good or evil). Others believe we're mistaking philosophical
| zombies for true intelligence, and speedrunning our own brainrot
|
| Not sure which camp I'm in, but I enjoyed the imagery.
| MrSandingMan wrote:
| > In 2000, less than one percent lived on farms and 1% of workers
| are in agriculture. That was a net benefit to the world, that we
| all don't have to work to eat.
|
| Not obvious
|
| > To me that statement is as obvious as "water is wet".
|
| Well... is water *wet* or does it *wet things*? So not obvious
| either.
|
| I'm really dubious when reading posts posing some things as
| obvious or trivial. In general they are not.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| Its funny how many variations of meaning people assign to agent
| related terms. Conflating agent with cli and as opposite spectrum
| of ide is a new one i did not encounter before. I run agents with
| vscode-server also in a vm and would not give up the ability to
| have a proper gui anytime i feel like and also being able to
| switch seamless between more autonomous operation and more
| interactive seems useful at any level.
| piokoch wrote:
| "In 2026, I don't use an IDE any more."
|
| Just a question? What IDE feature is obsolete now? Ability to
| navigate the code? Integration with database, Docker, JIRA,
| Github (like having PR comments available, listed, etc), Git?
| Working with remote files? Building the project?
|
| Yes, I can ask copilot to build my project and verify tests
| results, but it will eat a lot of tokens and added value is
| almost none.
| Havoc wrote:
| Disagree with the point about anything less than opus being
| harmful to learning.
|
| Much of my learning still requires experimentation - including
| lots of token volume so hitting limits is a problem.
|
| And secondly I'm looking for workflows that build the thing
| _without_ needing to be at the absolute edge of the LLM
| capability. Thats where fragility and unpredictability live.
| Where a new model with slightly different personality is released
| and it breaks everything. I'd rather have flow that is simple and
| idiot proof that doesn't fall apart at the first sign of non-
| bleeding edge tokens. That means skipping the gains from
| something opus could one shot ofc but that's acceptable to me
| thegrim000 wrote:
| "Eight more months of Bitcoin. It's usage continues to
| dramatically expand. The amount of transactions is increasing
| exponentially. Soon, fiat currencies will collapse, all replaced
| by Bitcoin transactions. If you haven't converted your assets
| over to Bitcoin you're going to be left behind and lose it all. I
| can't even understand people that don't see the obvious technical
| superiority of Bitcoin, such people are going to go through rough
| times."
| webdevver wrote:
| >I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful
| about the changes agents are bringing.
|
| The 'fear' is about losing ones livelihood and getting locked out
| of homeownership and financial security. its not complicated.
| life is actually largely determined by your access to capital,
| despite whatever fresh coping strategy the afflicted (and the
| afflicting) like to peddle.
|
| the quality of life versus capital availability is very non-
| linear. there is a step-change around the $500k mark where you
| reach 'orbital velocity', where as long as you dont suffer severe
| misfortune or make mistakes, you will start accelerating upwards
| (albeit very slowly.)
|
| under that line, you are constantly having to fight 'gravity'.
|
| basically everyone in tech is openly or quietly aiming to get
| there, and LLMs have made that trek ever more precarious than
| before.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _Along the way I have developed a programming philosophy I now
| apply to everything: the best software for an agent is whatever
| is best for a programmer._
|
| I agree with this and I think it's funny to see people publish
| best practices for working with AI that are like, "Write a clear
| spec. Have a style guide. Use automated tests."
|
| I'm not convinced it's 100% true because I think there are code
| patterns that AI handles better than humans and vice versa. But I
| think it's true enough to use as a guiding philosophy.
| vedhant wrote:
| The sandboxing pain is real. Sadly, a new VM seems like the most
| simple and viable solution. I don't think the masses are doing
| any sandboxing at all. We really need a sandbox solution that is
| sort of dynamic and doesn't pester the user with allow/deny
| requests. It has to be intelligent and keep up with the llm
| agents.
| conartist6 wrote:
| IDEs are going to come roaring back.
|
| As the author says, there's nothing wrong with the idea of the
| IDE. Of course you want to be using the best, most powerful
| tools!
|
| AI showed us that our current-gen text-editor-first IDEs are
| massively underserving the needs of the public, yes, but it
| didn't really solve that problem. We still need better IDEs! What
| has changed is that we now understand how badly we need them.
| (source: I am an IDE author)
| sandgrownun wrote:
| I agree with his assessment up until this point in time, it is
| where we currently are. But it seems to me there is still a large
| chunk of engineers who don't extrapolate capability out to the
| engineer being taken out of the loop completely. Imo, it happens
| in fairly short order. 2-3 years.
| symfrog wrote:
| On what basis are you making that prediction?
| jmull wrote:
| Regarding the shift away from time spent on agriculture over the
| last century or so..
|
| > That was a net benefit to the world, that we all don't have to
| work to eat.
|
| I'm pretty sure most all of us are still working to have food to
| eat and shelter for ourselves and our families.
|
| Also, while the on-going industrial and technological revolution
| has certainly brought benefits, it's an open question as to
| whether it will turn out to be a net benefit. There's a large-
| scale tragedy of the commons experiment playing out and it's hard
| to say what the result will be.
| gurjeet wrote:
| > By far the greatest IDE I have ever used was Visual Studio C++
| 6.0 on Windows 2000. I have never felt like a toolchain was so
| complete and consistent with its environment as there.
|
| +1. I've tried many times, and failed, to replicate the joy of
| using that toolchain.
| redkoala wrote:
| What are those 3 sentences that the author typed to replicate
| Stripe for his situation?
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