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Comment by tomhow | Hacker News Reader

[Stub for offtopicness, including but not limited to comments replying to original title rather than article's content]

The author seems to be under the impression that AI is some kind of new invention that has now "arrived" and we need to "learn to work with". The old world is over. "Guaranteeing patches are written by hand" is like the Tesla Gigafactory wanting a guarantee that the nuts and bolts they purchase are hand-lathed.

No worries, I also judge you for relying on JavaScript for your "simple blog".

Doesn't even work on older browsers either.

Claude said to use Markdown, text file or HTML with minimal CSS. So it means the author does not know how to prompt.

The blog itself is using Alpine JS, which is a human-written framework 6 years ago (https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine), and you can see the result is not good.

Ha, I came her to make the same comment.

Two completely unnecessary request to: jsdelivr.net and net.cdn.cloudflare.net

I wrote it while playing with alpine.js for fun just messing around with stuff.

Never actually expected it to be posted on HN. Working on getting a static version up now.

Ironically, a blog post about judging for a practice uses terrible web practices: I'm on mobile and the layout is messed up, and Safari's reader mode crashes on this page for whatever reason.

On Safari mobile you even get a white page, which is almost poetic. It means it pushes your imagination to the max.

Mobile layout should be fixed now, I also just threw up a quick static version here as well https://static.jaysthoughts.com/

Yes, I will judge you for requiring javascript to display a page of such basic nature.

You could do with using an LLM to make your site work on mobile.

I'll surely care that a stranger on the internet judges me about the tools I use kor I don't).

7 comments.

3 have obviously only read the title, and 3 comments how the article require JS.

Well played HN.

That's typical for link sharing communities like HN and Reddit. His title clearly struck a nerve. I assume many people opened the link, saw that it was a wall of text, scanned the first paragraph, categorized his point into some slot that they understand, then came here to compete in HN's side-market status game. Normal web browsing behavior, in other words.

This exactly why the guideline about titles says:

Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

This title counts as linkbait so I've changed it. It turns out the article is much better (for HN) than the title suggests.

I did not posted the article, but I know who wrote it.

Good change btw.

Back in the day they would judge people for turning on a lightbulb instead of lighting a candle.

In a few years people who don't/can't use AI will be looked at like people who couldn't use a computer ~20 years ago.

It might not solve every problem, but it solves enough of them better enough it belongs in the tool kit.

I think it will be the opposite. AI causes cognitive decline, in the future only the people who don't use AI will retain their ability to think. Same as smartphone usage, the less the better.

>Same as smartphone usage, the less the better.

That comparison kind of makes my point though. Sure you can bury your face into Tik Tok for 12hrs a day and they do kind of suck at Excel but smartphones are massively useful and used tools by (approximately) everyone.

Someone not using a smartphone in this day and age is very fairly a 'luddite'.

I disagree, smartphones are very narrowly useful. Most of the time they're used in ways that destroy the human spirit. Someone not using a smartphone in this day and age is a god among ants.

A computer is a bicycle for the mind; an LLM is an easy-chair.

One could argue (truthfully!) that cars cause the decline of leg muscles. But in many situations, cars are enough better than walking, so we don't care.

AI may reach that point - that it's enough better than us thinking that we don't think much anymore, and get worse at thinking as a result. Well, is that a net win, or not? If we get there for that reason, it's probably a net win[1]. If we get there because the AI companies are really good at PR, that's a definite net loss.

All that is for the future, though. I think that currently, it's a net loss. Keep your ability to think; don't trust AI any farther than you yourself understand.

[1] It could still not be a net win, if AI turns out to be very useful but also either damaging or malicious, and lack of thinking for ourselves causes us to miss that.

You’re really saying that getting worse at thinking may be a net win, and comparing atrophied leg muscles to an atrophied mind? I think humanity has lost the plot.

Which took better thinking, assembly or Java? We've lost our ability to think well in at least that specific area. Are we worse off, or better?

Java and Assembly are the same in the dimension of cognitive burden. Trying to reason about this fundamentally new thing with analogies like this will not work.

> Java and Assembly are the same in the dimension of cognitive burden.

Yeah... pretty sure you've never programmed in assembly if you think that.

It's interesting that AI proponents say stuff like, "Humans will remain interested in other humans, even after AI can do all our jobs." It really does seem to be true. Here for example we have a guy who's using AI to make a status-seeking statement i.e. "I'm playing a strong supporting role on the 'anti-AI thinkers' team therefore I'm high status". Like, humans have an amazing ability to repurpose anything into status markers. Even AI. I think that if AI replaces all of our actual jobs then we'll still spend our time doing status jobs. In a way this guy is living in the future even more than most AI users.

For now, yes, because humans are doing most of jobs better than AI. In 10 years time, if the AI's are doing a better job, people like author need to learn all the ropes if they wanna catch up. I don't think LLMs will destroy all jobs, i think those who learn them and use them properly, and those professionals will outdo people who don't use these tools just for the sake of saying I'm high status I dont use these tools.

If AI will do better job than humans what ropes are there to learn? You just feed in the requirements and AI poops out products.

This often is brought up that if you don't use LLMs now to produce so-so code you will somehow magically completely fall off when the LLMs all of a sudden start making perfect code as if developers haven't been learning new tools constantly as the field as evolved. Yes, I use old technology, but also yes I try new technology and pick and choose what works for me and what does not. Just because LLMs don't have a good place in my work flow does not mean I am not using them at all or that I haven't tried to use them.

Good on you. You are using it and trying to keep up. Keep doing that and try to push what you can do with it. I love to hear that!

You can judge all you want. You'll eventually appear much like that old woman secretly judging you in church.

Most of the current discourse on AI coding assistants sounds either breathlessly optimistic or catastrophically alarmist. What’s missing is a more surgical observation: the disruptive effect of LLMs is not evenly distributed. In fact, the clash between how open source and industry teams establish trust reveals a fault line that’s been papered over with hype and metrics.

FOSS project work on a trust basis - but industry standard is automated testing, pair programming, and development speed. That CRUD app for finding out if a rental car is available? Not exactly in need for a hand-crafted piece of code, and no-one cares if Junior Dev #18493 is trusted within the software dev organization.

If the LLM-generated code breaks, blame gets passed, retros are held, Jira tickets multiply — the world keeps spinning, and a team fixes it. If a junior doesn’t understand their own patch, the senior rewrites it under deadline. It’s not pretty, but it works. And when it doesn’t, nobody loses “reputation” - they lose time, money, maybe sleep. But not identity.

LLMs challenge open source where it’s most vulnerable - in its culture. Meanwhile, industry just treats them like the next Jenkins: mildly annoying at first, but soon part of the stack.

The author loves the old ways, for many valid reasons: Gabled houses are beautiful, but outside of architectural circles, prefab is what scaled the suburbs, not timber joints and romanticism.

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