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Comment by snoren | Hacker News Reader

Oh man, lots of dead ideas. Atm attention is more important than ever, cos delivering on ideas got easier. Getting the attention your product needs got harder

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A lot of these are just sticking a ui in front of someone else's AI and silently feeding it extra prompts.

This adds a tiny amount of value, sure, but enough to gamble millions on? Obviously not.

No wonder they failed

Did delivering quality really get easier? I'm certainly not seeing it in the software I use. Delivering scale doesn't mean the mission was executed well.

Judging from everyone I know, it will take people a lot of time to learn and accept a lesson from decades ago(one from before some of us were even born and I'm in my mid 30's): lines of code is a shit metric. Sloppers tend to believe that something seemingly working = production ready = good execution. And the metric, of course, is lines of code or "tokens". Until then, the list on this website will keep growing exponentially.

Does it seem like even senior developers are forgetting this axiom? Or do we feel as though it's been obviated by LLM grokking swaths of text for us?

TBH I'm so arrogant, I always suspect there's redundant nonsense in any code module I haven't myself inspected. LLM code is no different.

Seniors are no different and that infuriates me even more. The few times I felt lazy and let an AI do a simple function for me, all hell broke loose. I'm starting to think that many people were never that senior to begin with: Writing the code accounts for very little of what development requires and is often the easy part. Understanding the problem and finding the sweet spot/optimal compromise, edge cases and how you can break it is what has always been difficult. Seeing github explode with slop and github(microsoft/openai) themselves push even harder should be a wake up call for anyone that understands what development is: not writing the code but having someone else go through it, analyze it, understand the problem you are trying to solve and why you made the decisions that you made - that pretty much always takes a lot more time than writing the actual code. And then I see someone push 20 commits in a day, each being 5000 lines, jam packed with emojis and other slop and tell me that they carefully reviewed all of them? Yeah, that's bullshit, mate.

I'm easily pushing 20 commits a day, but I won't pretend to have reviewed it all, let alone carefully. What I did was design it all carefully.

But, for some projects, yes—I still do line-by-line code review with a colleague.

Then again, a lot of my efforts are explicit refactor aimed at reducing LOC and tidying the codebase with, eg DRY.

> The few times I felt lazy and let an AI do a simple function for me, all hell broke loose.

This is confusing, because LLMs are more than capable of implementing "a simple function." How did you spec it out?

I once worked at a fairly large corp that considered itself tech-forward (it was a retail ecommerce company), and at one point they just decided to demote all engineers one level because they somehow finally realized that everyone they had been calling "Senior" were definitely not at that level.

> I always suspect there's redundant nonsense in any code module I haven't myself inspected.

I don't think this is arrogance in the sense that it's probably correct. It is however pretty easy to take that line of thinking into an arrogant attitude though, which is the real issue.

Just like how more RAM and compute in the cloud made us worse engineers (no need to turn your brain on to tune performance).

When the brain is off for one thing, it's off for the rest as well. There is a lot of talk about "we don't have to think about code so we can think of ideas", but that's not how it works. We just don't think.

They should put microphones in the cloud servers so you can hear the fans spin up when you run a program. It's a bit more impactful than a silent CPU usage graph.

Just use RPM sensors and room temperature?

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