Hacker News Reader

I multi task much more now that i can farm off small coding assignments to agents. i pay hndreds per month in tokens. for my role personally its been a massive paradigm shift.

There are absolutely folks like you out there and I don’t doubt the productivity increase. The challenge is you are not the norm and the hundreds per month from you and others like you are a drop in the bucket of what’s needed to pay for all this.

To each his own, but multi-tasking feels bad to me. I want to spend my life pursuing mastery of a craft, not lazily delegating. Not that everyone should have the same goals, but the mastery route feels like it's dying off. It makes me sad.

I get it that some people just want to see the thing on the screen. Or your priority is to be a high status person with a loving family etc.. etc... All noble goals. I just don't feel a sense of fulfillment from a life not in pursuit of something deeper. The AI can do it better than me, but I don't really care at the end of the day. Maybe super-corp wants the AI to do it then, but it's a shame.

> I want to spend my life pursuing mastery of a craft, not lazily delegating.

And yet, the Renaissance "grand masters" became known as masters through systematizing delegation:

https://smarthistory.org/workshop-italian-renaissance-art/

I have wondered about that actually. Thanks, I'll read that, looks interesting.

Surely Donald Knuth and John Carmack are genuine masters though? There's the Elon Musk theory of mastery where everyone says you're great, but you hire a guy to do it, and there's the <nobody knows this guy but he's having a blast and is really good> theory where you make average income but live a life fulfilled. On my deathbed I want to be the second. (Sorry this is getting off topic.)

Masters of what though?

Steve Jobs wrote code early on, but he was never a great programmer. That didn’t diminish his impact at all. Same with plenty of people we label as "masters" in hindsight. The mastery isn’t always in the craft itself.

What actually seems risky is anchoring your identity to being the best at a specific thing in a specific era. If you're the town’s horse whisperer, life is great right up until cars show up. Then what? If your value is "I'm the horse guy," you're toast. If your value is taste, judgment, curiosity, or building good things with other people, you adapt.

So I’m not convinced mastery is about skill depth alone. It's about what survives the tool shift.

I won't insult the man, but I never liked Steve Jobs. I'd rather be Wozniak in that story.

"taste, judgment, curiosity, or building good things with other people"

Taste is susceptible to turning into a vibes / popularity thing. I think success is mostly about (firstly just doing the basics like going to work on time and not being a dick), then ego, personality, presentation, etc... These things seem like unfulfilling preoccupations, not that I'm not susceptible to them like anyone else, so in my best life I wouldn't be so concerned about "success". I just want to master a craft and be satisfied in that pursuit.

I'd love to build good things with other people, but for whatever reason I've never found other people to build things with. So maybe I suck, that's a possibility. I think all I can do is settle on being the horse guy.

(I'm also not incurious about AI. I use AI to learn things. I just don't want to give everything away and become only a delegator.)

Edit: I'm genuinely terrified that AI is going to do ALL of the things, so there's not going to be a "survives the shift" except for having a likable / respectable / fearsome personality

> Steve Jobs wrote code early on, but he was never a great programmer. That didn’t diminish his impact at all.

I doubt Jobs would classify himself as a great programmer, so point being?

> So I’m not convinced mastery is about skill depth alone. It's about what survives the tool shift.

That's like saying karate masters should drop the training and just focus on the gun? It does lose meaning.

I like how you compare people to renaissance painters to inflate their egos

Inflate whose ego? Mine? It seemed more like a swipe than ego-inflation, but I was happy to see the article anyway.

The other surprising skill from this whole AI craze is, it turns out that being able to social engineer an LLM is a transferable skill to getting humans to do what you want.

One of the funniest things to see nowadays is the opposite tho, some people expecting similar responses from people but getting thrashed as we are not LLMs programmed to make them feel good

It seems you are a bit obsessed with the Renaissance? Are you building a "vibeart" platform?

I lazily delegate things that can be automated, which frees me up to do actual feature development.

Might work for you, but if I multi task too much, the quality of my output drops significantly. Where I work, that does not fly. I cannot trust any agent to handle anything without babysitting them to avoid going off the rails - but perhaps the tools I have access to just aren't good (underlying model is claude 4.5, so it the model isn't the cause).

I've said this in the past and I'll continue to say it - until the tools get far better at managing context, they will be hard locked for value in most use cases. The moment I see "summarizing conversation" I know I'm about to waste 20 minutes fixing code.

If you can predict that hitting “summarize conversation” equals rework, what can you change upstream so you avoid triggering it? Are you relying on the agent to carry state instead of dumping it into .MD files? What happens if your computer crashes?

> so it the model isn't the cause

Thing is, the prompts, those stupid little bits of English that can't possiu matter all that much? It turns out they affect the models performance a ton.

I think it depends on the project and the context, but I developed my own task management system particularly because of this challenge. I'm starting to extend this with verification gates as well.

If I worked on different types of systems with different types of tasks I might feel the same way as you, i think AI works well in specific targeted use cases, where some amount of hallucination can be tolerated and addressed.

What models are you using, I use opus 4.5, which can one shot a surprising ratio of tasks.

> the "markets" are anything but rational

No, they are rational. At least those with a lot of money.

> None of the investments going on have followed any semblance of fundamentals - it's all pure instinct and chasing hype

That's not what investments are about. Their fundamentals are if they can get a good return on their money. As long as the odds of the next sucker to buy them up exists it is a good investment.

> AI is basically a toy for 99% of us.

You do pay for toys right? Toy shops aren't irrational?

> AI is basically a toy for 99% of us.

So you're at the "first they laugh at us" stage then.

OK, but not everything that gets to that stage moves on to the next, let alone the stage after that.

But I will give you this, the "first they ignore us" stage is over, at least for many people.