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Comment by osti | Hacker News Reader

I think Jane Street is an Anthropic investor, so take it fwiw.

With a huge pile of salt

> In July 2025, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) alleged that Jane Street used multiple entities for market manipulation and barred it from accessing the market.

Anyone with knowledge of Indian regulatory culture would not take this as dispositive.

https://dataintellect.com/blog/sebi-vs-jane-street-index-man...

And here's some rather more clueful analysis instead of what looks like AI-generated marketing blogspam:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-07-07/jan... (https://archive.fo/0PQ2E)

That bloomberg which spread fake news about india selling gold which it had to retreat. I will sbi over foreign news peddlers.

Such as them not paying the required bribes

Incompetent SEBI went after Jane Street for closing an arb, what about it?

As I understand Jane Street they have done great things for OCaml and they also do their own web framework (I guess that big money bin needs a lot of dashboards).

I think the designer here takes a wrong approach and sort of falls into engineer envy where he wants to make prototypes as deep and realistic as possible. And that is not really the most important part of the design job.

The most important thing is that the right thing gets build (why do we need a JSQL input box? what do we actually want? what are other ways to do this?). And this is often better done with pen and paper sketches, meetings, observation, discussions ... rather than too quickly narrowing on a particular design and spinning into discussions on whether buttons should be on the left or on the right, LLM intricacies etc.

Taking it slow with paper and interviews works if you think about what you're doing. The other option now is shut down brain and press the slot machine lever one more time. One of the designs has got to be good soon.

This. LLMs helping implement many ideas is a curse and the results speak for themselves.

As a non-designer I want to see a thought through 1-2 ideas, not 10 ideas you coded with llm and now the burden of thinking which one is better and why is for some reason is on me.

(I’m the author) making ideas legible and testing them with users is part of the design process regardless of tooling. You can summarize this article as “I find LLMs more effective at making ideas legible vs figma - for the work I’m doing at Jane Street”. This has helped me iterate and it helps me test with users and get better feedback from them. I’m not just prompting “make no design mistakes” over and over.

No matter how nuanced your your workflow is, there are some people on HN that just hate AI and will see it as "slot machine go brr" no matter what you say. It is generally pointless to engage with such people.

Great article, by the way.

And there's people that just complain that others don't see enough nuance to everything, applying zero nuance themselves.

People are much better at saying what they don’t want rather than thinking about what they do. It’s more effective to throw everything in using LLMs, then using human judgment to sculpt away.

>> It’s more effective to throw everything in using LLMs, then using human judgment to sculpt away.

Not really. Maybe its effective from designer side but from other side that has to review all those ideas it is exhausting and counterproductive. Especially when it is in code.

You really don't need a real prototype for most things. Simple visual is more than enough to present an idea and explain etc. In fact, it is often much better as you can see all flows in canvas at once.

With interactive prototype to see all flows of a feature you have to go through each one, which again is very uneffective.

Even if they're not, I'm not sure if we should care a quantitative trading firm's opinions on frontend design...

Why not ? They might have client facing apps or internal research applications. Such a weird comment.

Jane St's hiring bar is higher than 99% of the tech industry, maybe even 99.5-99.9%. Blog posts from companies like this are interesting in the same way that papers from well respected journals are interesting.

The whole HN is one huge AI ad now.

It's a cult. And frankly, I am not interested in churches or cults.

In between some old family history and recent US politics, I think there are other things I'd rather reserve the weighty word "cult" for... However, should it arise, one of the features that might convince me is this:

In the name of "loyalty" or "faith" cults require members to burn their bridges, actively cutting off their own potential to escape to any other social support network. That may mean creating enemies out of former associates, humiliating rituals or blackmail material, or simply ruining their reputations through obvious lies.

I don't particularly care about the US or US politics since 2016.

Unless you invade a country again and we have to deal with the Fallout for years to come, that is.

For example: I have banned all news about Trump administration from my home.

It's simply not interesting. He is a toddler, and I have a toddler of my own.

I think I did quite enough to be vague and oblique on that context, so that it wasn't the focus, and any reader could avoid the topic... if they chose to.

What the leader of the free world says or does is definitely interesting to us.

Not to me. He turns around and changes his opinion more often than his underwear.

And he is not the leader of the free world.

Not since they bombed Vietnam.

The utility of current-era AI may well be overstated, and the business models of certain companies might be doubtful, but that doesn't make AI it a "cult".

AI is not a cult, HN regarding AI is.

It's boring and it's viral and if you refuse to participate, there are still people annoying you with their beliefs.

It's a fucking tool, like a fucking shovel.

"It's a fucking tool, like a fucking shovel."

The difference is, if you talk with your shovel, you are talking with yourself.

But talking to AI gives you answers and more smart ones, than most humans do. So it is still a tool, but of a very different kind.

And here is where we disagree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

We are no further to general artificial intelligence than we were a decade ago.

Thanks, but I don't need to click, that to know what is inside.

And to be honest, a LLM could have give me the same response.

(But I made no claims of AGI btw.)

> And to be honest, a LLM could have give me the same response.

It could, or it could've hallucinated something :)

But then again, I could too, if I smoked enough or fell on my head.

Plus it would've produced more CO2 than I did, hopefully :)

> if I smoked enough or fell on my head.

Did it hurt, you know, when you fell?

The problem here is you're complaining about cult members, then acting like one of the anthrocentric cult members yourself. I agree that we should build a human centered world, but ignoring our many faults won't get us anywhere.

I disagree that we should build a human centered world.

We already did that and it's hell for a myriad of other lifeforms.

If you blindly ignore all the drawbacks, preach that "future is now" and whoever is not using the slot machine "will be left behind", then you're in a cult.

An opinion held, in my estimation, by a tiny (but noisy) minority of people who have always existed; the trend obsessed rebuild-the-world types who probably think that AI will soon be able to write unaided a kernel in Rust superior in 100% of metrics to Linux.

I’m looking for an alternative too..

I thought we were too anti-AI?

Depends which agent you ask to cherry pick comments for sentiment analysis.

Pro- or anti-AI, it's seemingly related or tangentially related to half of the discussions on HN.

I think AI programming just has a bliss period for a lot of people where it feels like you can solve every problem with a prompt. And you can, for a time. Eventually the chickens come home to roost and you realise what a mess you made.

Give it some time. We’ll figure out what LLMs are good and bad at. I think vibe engineering will eventually go up on the wall next to static vs dynamic typing and vi vs eMacs.

At least, that assumes AI models won’t keep improving by leaps and bounds. We’re in a transition period. It’s gonna be chaos.

Hey, at least vi vs emacs is fun, no matter how crappy as an editor Emacs is, no one is getting paid by privacy invasive corporate, to sway people, to cash out more money

Yesterday I needed a tool for a specific task. In 1 hour I created a working tool with antigravity. Is it something I'd publish or sell or offer to others? Probably not, but I found that quite impressive. It is an extension of the idea "now I can program and create everything."

Besides I remember what kind of code we had when we first started coding with AI and now with all these coding agents etc. it has become quite impressive.

However, at the end it is still a tool and needs to be used accordingly.

You can create anything you need as long as what you need is a disposable script, a scotch-taped together single page app, or a complex problem and you have thousands of dollars to throw at tokens.

I've been playing with local models for some time, and I've been pleasantly surprised of late. A meager rtx 5080 with 16gb can give pretty good results now. The ecosystem is also improving pretty quickly.

I have a feeling at some point we will have a "Windows 95" moment (when computing really became personal for the masses) in AI, and things will significantly change shape again.

What local model do you recommend these days? I’ve got a 4090, mostly sitting idle.

qwen 3.5 with 9b is being a pretty decent workhorse for me, even with context around 4k.

The answer to which ai model, in mid 2026, is always qwen. Depending on your ram, it’s qwen3.5-9b, qwen3.6-35b-a3 in a 3 or 4 bit quant, or qwen3.6-27b. I’m told a bigger model quantized is better than a smaller model unquantized. In 16Gb vram on 10 year old hardware i can run a 3bit quant of qwen3.6-35b-a3 at ~30tokens/sec, and it can do a lot.

I think there’s a good chance low effort AI content and vibecoding effectively become an eternal September

> eventually the chickens come home to roost and you realise what a mess you made

But a lot of times they don't. Devs building websites for small businesses used to be a thing, and it was almost universally a crap product. Practically every restaurant in my small town has been able to take control of their own website with AI, and it's a better experience for everyone.

Rapid digitisation meant a lot of low-value work wound up being done by high-value people. The economy is pivoting away from that configuration. The high-value folks getting displaced are pissed, partly rightly, partly out of spite. The folks who had to pay those bills are ecstatic, mostly overexuberantly, but in part correctly.

Until what they need is free or has a heavily subsidized cost. We keep forgetting that

I can use a local model to build a restaurant website. The model generates code fast enough that even my 10 year old server can generate all the code needed in about an hour. It will use about 50 cents of electricity and be better than 90% of the restaurant websites out there.

I’m curious what you’re using for that (if you’re inclined to share).

I saw that blog post about running local models on a Xeon based server so I benchmarked a bunch of local models on it. The server is dual Xeons with 256 GB of DDR4 and I found it capable of running some things locally. It's slow but still faster than coding things manually. Also that was just an example. Even my 6 year old 6900XT is faster.

How is that relevant? The convenience for restaurants owners is how easy, cheap, non-technical, and fast the process is. You proceeded to make a point that does not match any of these four prerequisites

That era is already long gone. Those things have been built in Wix for over a decade. And since then, I haven't had any friends or family ask me for a simple site. The low-value work is already automated.

Your comment is valid, but not for the reason you think. What you should be talking about is the grunt work done in our field to non-trivial applications. Adding a search box to a table, or add an extra field to a form, etc.

So you think about a ticket that often might take a few hours, but in badly architected system might take a week, add a field to a class, edit the DB structure (maybe manually, maybe through via an ORM generated migration), add it to DTOs, add a validator, add it to the FE definitions, edit the page layout, etc..

Low value work that until now had to be performed by high-value employees.

> Low value work that until now had to be performed by high-value employees

The current trend is a proliferation of internal tooling. I've honestly found quite a bit of it useful. The rest is the usual should-have-been-a-Google-form nonsense.

> That era is already long gone. Those things have been built in Wix for over a decade.

I think there's still a lot more custom work than you'd expect. A recent example: My mum is ex-president of a small international NGO. When I visited earlier today, she was bemoaning how the lady who runs their NGO's website charges them an arm and a leg for small changes. As a result, the website is constantly out of date. The current site is entirely built on top of wordpress. There is, of course, politics. This lady holds the login credentials to everything. And she holds them close to her chest.

I showed my mum what we could do with claude design. Claude whipped up a much better looking, working version of (part) of the website in about 5 minutes. I think LLMs aren't quite at the point that my mum could manage the website herself. You do need a little technical knowledge. My mum just doesn't know what to ask for. But we're really close. I've offered to be a human frontend to LLMs for them going forward, if she can wrest control from the "webmaster".

I suspect conversations like this are happening everywhere at the moment. There are an incredible number of small websites out there. Most of them, claude or chatgpt could reimplement in 5 minutes tops.

There's absolutely no way I'd be advising friends or family to run a site vibe coded themself, that's nuts.

This is more a problem of your Mum mismanaging her contractors. She should be threatening hellfire down on this contractor for withholding the admin username + password.

Generating the site with Claude would be a pretty stupid choice for her right now, if she needs something more than a basic info site, word press is still king, but she should be able to do info updates herself.

OTOH, you might be able to ask Claude to do the changes for you.

> There's absolutely no way I'd be advising friends or family to run a site vibe coded themself, that's nuts.

Yeah, I'm going to act as a human claude frontend. But I don't think we're that far off.

the site is not much more complex than a “basic info site”. There are a few small dynamic elements - like a list of donors populated dynamically and a box to sign up to the mailing list. Sites like this are trivially easy for Claude. I got claude to do a mockup based on a screenshot. Its 5 minute mockup has a much nicer design and layout than the current website. 1 Claude code prompt later and it was functional.

But yeah, short term I’ll see if Claude can just update Wordpress directly. I don’t want to spend my weekends learning wordpress. But if Claude can do it for me? Great.

> I think vibe engineering will eventually go up on the wall next to static vs dynamic typing and vi vs eMacs.

What do you mean by "vibe engineering"?

It really depends on what you mean by this on how people can agree or disagree with you.

My guess is that in any sense that you mean it, you're almost certainly wrong. AI coding and engineering will continue to improve until any developer who refuses to use it will be unemployable at corporate gigs, and outcompeted even in freelance stuff.

Well, confirmation bias. You see what support your beliefs, ignoring anti AI articles being promoted.

It's also a huge ad for microprocessors. I mean don't people realize we did math before microprocessors? We even had mechanical machines which were much more elegant than these electronic abominations. /s

I was literally reading through another thread[0] where the OP claimed that HN is anti-AI. I guess HN is decently balanced afterall?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420827

And the comments you reply to prove the point made by Dang.

It’s some Sun Tzu shit. Create a sense of inevitability such that they win the war for financial capital without any fighting, then hope the tech catches up before Capitalists realize they’ve been fleeced. The Dotcom bubble was the same scam.

This, absolutely. It's pure chutzpah, acting like you've already won and poisoning minds with inevitablism, alreadism and FOMO.

Do you still know the Art of War by Sun Tzu?

Maybe a random employees mildly interesting blog post is not exactly where we need to look for a psyop. But that is maybe what they want you to think.

Gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket.

I myself, I pump my investments at least twice a day. Once in the morning, right after I work out. And then once right after lunch.

I want to, that's not why I do it. I do it cause I fuckin' need to.

Most are. Some are paid for.

I'm not saying AI isn't a good tool. However the less you understand what you're using and what you're doing the further you stand to geopardize the business you're working for.

Jane Street is an investor in most things.

How much does that matter?

Surely, we would expect Jane Street to invest in one of the major AI companies, right?

This is why hn is the best. First comment helps to decide if we need to read the article or not .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com