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It was written with 10% higher expectations, 10% higher bar (it was raised in a transformative way) and 10% fewer sloppy thoughts, by a rockstar 100x commenter who uses enterprise AI to blast their KPIs through the pipeline each day.

Sometimes they even circle back to blast their pipeline several times in the same day, all thanks to AI.

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Thank you for that incredibly thoughtful comment, caseyy! You are at the forefront of the high quality content that Hacker News is known for. I am so glad that we have this opportunity to speak with each other in a textual medium, where it's trivial to have the useful tools of AI mediate our conversation.

In fact, to ensure that my comments are 100% more legible and 500% more useful to the end comment consumer, I will leverage AI in all comment responses here on out for at least 10% of my words! This change will ensure excellence and improve results, and most of all, will not in any way lower the high standard of comments you've come to expect from me.

My new Comment Advisory Panel is fully ready to engage with any and all commentors who want advice on how to use AI to make even better comments.

> Productivity expectations will rise (from the screenshot)

This should tell you everything you need to know. It’s not about AI, it’s about using AI to use as an excuse to do what most corporations were already doing: extract more work out of employees without getting them a pay raise, and if they can’t provide that, get rid of them.

> It’s not about AI, it’s about using AI to use as an excuse to do what most corporations were already doing: extract more work out of employees without getting them a pay raise

What's the point of tools if they don't make people work better?

> What's the point of tools if they don't make people work better?

You just covered exactly that.

In the short term, I fear the most useful application of AI is as a bargaining chip in favor of upper management. That is because while AI might not be able to replace development, it makes developers compete against perceived alternative that doesn't take wages or healthcare. The whole ~80% as good for 10% of the cost philosophy etc.

The headline already rubbed me the wrong way, but seeing this made me immediately cancel my Duolingo subscription. I encourage others to do the same.

Why? I don’t see anything wrong with an AI first approach. I think it’s a good way to cover your bases before actually diving into coding.

Duolingo sucks anyway, it's become a gameified mess, rather than actually teaching necessary grammar and language concepts.

It's actually stunning how off-putting it is. I started Duolingo because I was in a relationship with someone and wanted to learn their language. I paid for subscription because I didn't want to be assaulted with ads and upsells (and I believe in paying for software in general and I think subscriptions can be a fair business model), but even as a paying customer it was miserable!

It's so fucking lousy with gems and upsells and quests and "try the AI call, you get one for free and then you can upgrade to a more expensive subscription!". The gamification of everything in Duolingo is so bad. And, as you say: I feel like I'm wasn't learning any of the fundamentals, can't you just tell me how to conjugate this verb and then testing me instead of making a dumb guessing game out of it?

Compare it to (say) YouTube Premium: I know a lot of people hate it, and that it's an expensive subscription, but I honestly think it's pretty fair. All the commercialization and upsell go away entirely, you get a very clean experience for something that I use more than any other streaming service. Don't mind paying for it at all. Not Duolingo though, I cancelled it after a week and a half.

Plus Duolingo has become insanely expensive. I re-installed the app recently and my heart skipped a beat when I saw the pricing. The app left my phone shortly thereafter.

> it's become a gameified mess, rather than actually teaching necessary grammar and language concepts.

They would be seen as a stuffy edtech companion app if they did the unsexy work of teaching. Gamification = user growth and engagement = investor money.

mine just expired last week. have been considering renewing it. looks like i won't be renewing after all

That is why I try to steer away projects whose ultimate goal is to remove people jobs, automatic cash out systems, AI, ecormerce sites for big retail chains that close down their physical shops, ....

Duolingo are not the only ones, I am aware of a project where the whole translation team for internal trainings was replaced by AI automatic translation of training materials.

Any developer that celebrates AI vibe coding, is going to get some bad vides in the coming years.

This will be one of the defining features of politics in the next decades I predict. I'm coming around to the belief that yes, AI will unlock productivity for some use case. I ask more productive sure, but for who?.

Wages have lost their relationship with productivity for some time, and while the gains will be privatized, the costs (energy grid, Data center land use, and the carbon emissions) will be born by us all.

Oh 100%. As far as I am concerned, anybody that has touched that stuff is blacklisted and radioactive.All its gonna take is a little prick and the financing on the whole house of cards falls apart.

So don't think my hostile opinion towards developers that are involved in using AI to abuse their fellow humans is going to be remotely rare in the future. All the necessary preconditions are already there and the only reason it hasn't been noticed yet is because the people that fucked up are still able to get jobs at companies riding AI funding to do AI work.

Look what happened to a lot of the crypto bros. Now multiply that by 10 and the amount of nasty shit they were doing to other workers by 10 and I don't think people are going to take it as lightly as a lot of the crypto bros got off, which was usually just a black mark and severe down leveling when they came back to work at actual companies.

> Imposing rules on developers like the requirement that they use AI for every task, no matter how small, and work through LLMs first instead of writing code feels like an idea that comes from non-developers looking to make a thought leadership splash.

Or trying to write an earnings call headline. The more you mention how much you use AI, the higher your share price climbs!

Well, even the so called best model, o3 makes huge errors, there is a lot of bark in these models, but enough bite. So if and when they see the AI is a bit less than what people project it to be, they might begin cutting back on ambitious plans.

It comes from the idea that plenty of people don't like to explore and try things out.

When I ask my collueges than you have the few enthusiasts and then the rest.

The announcement sounds like 'start learning to use These tools' not vibecoding

I've tried them, and say without a doubt, that I hate them. I've never even really been a fan of intellisence.

I hated co-pilot, it kept guessing and then I ended up spending more time reading and altering.. It took me out of the zone.

I think this is a common gameplay from companies which are basically reaching their peak of what they will be able to do, but they have to keep growing somehow. Duolingo is basically a dying company if you think about it, like the growth is done, the other company which recently made news, Shopify is another one of these. You do not see them 10xing their revenue in any way again, so they have to play all of these games to squeeze more from the company by basically cutting people, and these are all steps to that goal. I would expect again other companies like Dropbox to also follow a similar path.