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Comment by bgwalter | Hacker News Reader

It is nice that he speaks about some of the downsides as well.

In many respects 2025 was a lost year for programming. People speak about tools, setups and prompts instead of algorithms, applications and architecture.

People who are not convinced are forced to speak against the new bureaucratic madness in the same way that they are forced to speak against EU ChatControl.

I think 2025 was less productive, certainly for open source, except that enthusiasts now pay the Anthropic tax (to use the term that was previously used for Windows being preinstalled on machines).

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>>"I think 2025 was less productive"

I think 2025 is more productive for me based on measurable metrics such as code contribution to my projects, better ability to ingest and act upon information, and generally I appreciate the Anthropic tax because Claude genuinely has been a step-change improvement in my life.

> more productive for me based on measurable metrics such as code contribution to my projects

Isn‘t it generally agreed upon that counting contributions, LoC or similar metrics is a very bad way to gauge productivity?

I don't care about industry metrics when I'm building my own AI research robotics platform and it's doing what I ask it to do, proving itself in the real world far better than any performative best-practice theatrics in the service of risible MBA-grade effluvia masquerading as critical discourse.

During 2025 I've almost exhausted my personal TODO-list of small applications and created a few extra ones.

This would've never happened without a Claude Pro (+ChatGPT) subscription.

And as I'm not American, none of them are aimed to be subscription based SaaS offerings, they're just simple CLI applications for my personal use. If someone else enjoys them, good for them. =)

> In many respects 2025 was a lost year for programming. People speak about tools, setups and prompts instead of algorithms, applications and architecture.

I think the opposite. Natural language is the most significant new programming language in years, and this year has had a tremendous amount of progress in collectively figuring out how to use this new programming language effectively.

> and this year has had a tremendous amount of progress in collectively figuring out how to use this new programming language effectively.

Hence the lost year. Instead of productively building things, we spent a lot of resources on trying to figure out how to build things.

Maybe it's because I'm a data scientist and not a dedicated programmer/engineer, but setup+tooling gains this year have made 2025 a stellar year for me.

DS tooling feels like it hit much a needed 2.0 this year. Tools are faster, easier, more reliable, and more reproducible.

Polars+pyarrow+ibis have replaced most of my pandas usage. UDFs were the thing holding me back from these tools, this year polars hit the sweet spot there and it's been awesome to work with.

Marimo has made notebooks into apps. They're easier to deploy, and I can use anywidget+llms to build super interactive visualizations. I build a lot of internal tools on this stack now and it actually just works.

PyMC uses jax under the hood now, so my MCMC workflows are GPU accelerated.

All this tooling improvement means I can do more, faster, cheaper, and with higher quality.

I should probably write a blog post on this.

I'm glad there has been a break in endless bikeshedding over TDD, OOP, ORM(partially) and similar.

Absolutely. So much noise.

"There’s an AI for that" lists 44,172 AI tools for 11,349 tasks. Most of them are probably just wrappers…

As Cory Doctorow uses enshittification for the internet, for AI/LLM there should be something like a dumbaification.

It reminds me late 90s when everything was "World Wide Web". :)

Gold rush it is.

This is just the Blockchain and Web3 (NTF) crazes all over again on the surface.

Every single grifter from those times is slapping AI on everything that moves or doesn't move.

But the difference is that the blockchain was (and still is) a solution looking for a problem. LLMs can solve actual problems today.

> algorithms, applications and architecture.

Which one is that? Endless leetcode madness? Or constant bikeshedding about today's flavor of MVC (MVI, MVVM, MVVMI) or whatever else bullshit people come up with instead of actually shipping?

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