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People with low confidence will be super excited for AI because it solves problems they weren’t even thinking about.
Executives that don’t write code are super excited about AI because hopefully it means they can continue to high low confidence people, which are plentiful and cost less.
I am sitting on the sidelines watching in disbelief. I don’t use AI and don’t plan to. I used to write JavaScript for a living and still get JavaScript job alerts from a lot of job boards. The compensation for JavaScript work is starting to shoot through the roof as employers are moving away from garbage like React and Angular. The recent jobs are becoming fewer and are more reliant upon people with tons of experience that can actually program. Clearly AI is not replacing positions for higher talent with greater than 8-12 years experience.
I don't get it. Proudly saying you don't plan to use better tools is not some 'cool' look or the brag you think it is. You're just making yourself less valuable and being ignorant on purpose.
Cool.
You sound like my Grandmother who refused to even look at a computer screen. Literally the same. It's amazing it's coming from so called tech-literate people in the field.
Sad.
People would lose their minds when they discovered I did not pray at the cult of jQuery and then later React and so forth. I didn't need them. I was more productive without them and still managed to produce applications that executed dramatically faster with substantially less code. AI tools fall into this same camp. What could they provide me that I cannot do better myself at this point in my career? That is a serious question, by the way.
AI tools might work well for you. I am not you. Affirming your bias with baseless assumptions void of evidence will not make you a better programmer. Real developers write their own original code and/or architecture plans. Real engineers measure things and live or die by those measurements.
AI is just another tool. It is not a skill and will not compensate for skills. Perhaps I will use AT later to write test automation because that is something that is very simple to validate and likewise something I really don't want to bother with.
Nice tired no true Scotsman argument. You literally sound like a stubborn boomer refusing to see the change. You sound ignorant, not wise.
I've created several multi-modal AI applications deployed in production; fully created through Codex and Claude code. SOC2 compliant and created in a month, not years.
You can be an old man, but you don't need to have an old man mentality.
You wouldn't hire someone who only knows how to use a typewriter in a world of computers. No big deal, right? "A computer is just 'another tool', why should I not be fine with my typewriter?"
Literally fucking blows my mind I'm even having this discussion on this website, with people who should know better.
Good luck, you will need it.
Would suck to have someone be your manager who refuses to even understand the new tools, much less use them; you will make a GREAT manager.
I'm honestly in disbelief that people in the field can be this purposefully ignorant, and proudly at that.
Execs will not put up with managers who are not going to use the best tools. I expect soon you will be forced to, or you're out.
Also, I've been writing code for over 20 years. I started programming LUA and ActionScript back in 2000 when I was 10 years old.
Your days are numbered old man.
The reality of success in this industry has nothing to do with tools. Its all about KPIs (however your organization defines them), superior planning/communication skills, and leading people. The people that produce the most with the least maintenance overhead are the people most well rewarded. Simply just not getting fired is not a metric of success.
Your analysis couldn't be further from reality, except the ADHD part, lmao.
I have the industry figured out buddy, it's you who thought they did, but doesn't anymore.
"Yes, it sucks now, but believe me it won't be for long" spiel has been hyped for several years now.
Oh, don't get me wrong, these tools are amazing. But just yesterday a very small refactoring resulted in 480 fully duplicated lines in a 5000-line codebase (on top of extremely bad DB access patterns) despite all the best shamanic rituals this world has to offer [1].
So yeah, senior engineers especially use these tools daily, and keep being completely honest about their issues and shortcomings. Unlike the hype and scam artists.
[1] Oh, sorry. I meant to say skills, context engineering and management, memory, prompt engineering.
Get better rituals. PEBCAK.
(The only people who say that are scammers and peddlers, and the only people who believe that are juniors or don't know how to code at all)
I'm not some starry eyed junior; I have built multi-modal agents being used in production on government contract work in the field, right this second.
You all can go fuck yourselves, you neo-luddites will be the first out the door. Good riddance.
The simple truth is, these senior devs have no idea how to use these new tools to their capabilities.
It's a simple case of PEBCAK; ironic considering most of them would be the ones throwing that term around 20 years ago.
You're all a bunch of ignorant old men yelling at literal cloud servers.
I'm done with this place. /g/ and /r/accelerate are the only places left not filled with idiots anymore.
As for your promise of a great leap at some vague point in the future, that's such a widely-mocked AI industry trope at this point that it's a little embarrassing you went there.
I don't know what happened to this place, but it went from actual young people sharing information on the newest things in tech, tech philosophy, interesting stuff; to now old men yelling at the clouds about the new tech.
What we seem to be seeing with AI is that the prospect of completely changing the way you work is threatening for a lot of people, and of course so is the prospect of losing your job. When people are faced with something threatening, a common reaction is to criticize it in every possible way - you can’t admit anything about it is good because that risks encouraging the threat. It’s not exactly rational, but it’s what people often do.
HN has never been exempt from that, it’s just that AI is a big change that brings out this instinct in many more people.
Hubris.
This has been your constant mantra for 3 years now and is part of the reason people are underwhelmed.
But here we are.
Over time and usage the limitations of a thing become apparent.
And even staying within the comfort of AI enthusiasm: Google wasn't exactly leading in this race. If you have this much confidence in what those presenters and engineers at Google told you, you now have some opportunities to make a lot of money.
Anyone here who is currently 'underwhelmed'; please get through all 5 levels here and then say the same thing.
This is just the beginning. I seriously can't believe this place turned into neo-boomerism ideology on tech. I honestly don't get it, just makes me think everyone here talking about being seniors and architecture and blah blah; don't actually know shit, and aren't actually good at what they do.
Did you have AI Agent summarise this for you?
Maybe you should try reading a bit more.
https://codelabs.developers.google.com/way-back-home-level-5...
That is the completed instructions for the fifth level, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to actually read more and find the rest of the steps on their own.
I spent some time chatting with Google engineer who put this together, Ayo Adedeji, at UCLA's SAIRS conference.
You asked about Google and what impressed me so much, going through this exercise, while not exactly helpful for me and my work directly (I'm doing similar things but completely in the Azure ecosystem), it is definitely a great display of how agents are more than just an 'LLM' that everyone here seems to think is equivalent to AI.
It's seriously the opposite feeling of imposter syndrome at this point, I'm in my 30's, a senior data engineer myself at a F200 company; I can't believe so many of my peers are so behind and ignorant of what is going on, confident enough to makes publicly lasting comments about how 'unreliable', 'bad', 'slop'; 'AI will never this or that'.
It's incredible what is going on.
I’m not sure why you’re still here, you’re just fueling your own unhealthy grievance at this point.
Improving such uses cases is mostly an artisanal endeavor, sometimes a few-shot prompt improves things, sometimes it improves things at the expense of kind of overfitting it, sometimes structured reasoning works, sometimes it doesn't, or sometimes it works and then the latency and token explodes, etc etc....
And yet a lot of teams don't see this problem because they don't care much about evaluations, and will only find this issues in production a few months after deployment.
Are those who care about evaluation luddites?
Much to the opposite, I think healthy skepticism is a sign of maturity. The overeager embracing of hype cycles is extremely cringe.
> I just got back from a SAIRS conference at UCLA and talked directly with some of the presenters and engineers at Google.
Cringe, as I was saying.
Conferences are just mutual fart smelling, swagger, and expensing trips on company momey. I am not against it, but treating your participation in some conference as a sign of the future is very silly.
Every conference I participated always overhyped every current bullshit.
"AI-insiders" are trying to market their tools to you. See Anthropic's continuous lithany of "all programmers will be replaced in 6 months" while they struggle to make their TUI API wrapper consume less than 2-4 GB of RAM (they brought it down from 68 GB[1]), or have a decent uptime.
[1] Yes, you read it right. They had to buy a team of actual engineers to do the job: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987
I am dismissing the neo-luddites because they are stupid and wrong, not because I am in a pro-AI bubble.
If you don't want to be bothered to argue your points, and this place truly chaps your ass to the degree it does, why even waste your time commenting at all when, according to you, there's a more fun place with bigger brains that-a-way, as far as you're concerned? points
I mean, it takes more energy and effort to be angry and annoyed than to just move on and leave us luddites in the dust.
I feel like I'm living in some kind of bizzarro world now when I read anything AI related on HN. It's insane.
Or: they actually understand the tech, and see its limitations. Unlike wide-eyed neophytes and zealots.
Tech forum doesn't mean "uncritically accept and love any and all technology".
Oh, and they don't find the need to sling insults like monkey sling feces just because someone doesn't agree with them.
I'm sure you super qualified rando's on HN know and understand the tech and know its limitations better than the Google engineers actually making the stuff.
Real ripe coming from a guy who can't even refactor a few lines of code correctly with an AI.
I couldn't roll my eyes any harder.
You could foster that high-level dialogue you seem to value so much by trying to better articulate your view so that the plebs understand, kinda like I suggested just there. Ya know, "be the change you want to see in the world" and all that, but okay...
But it's also been anti-Javascript, anti-cloud, anti-social-media, anti-crypto, anti-React, and so on.
I would therefore not in a million years expect it to be pro-LLM, and this is so obvious to me that I'm a bit suspicious of your motives for acting confused about it, as if it was ever any different.
It was never any of these things, and you're misremembering if you think it was. There's never been a mono-opinion held by some all-encompassing hivemind.