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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"I can also write lines of code for free. I have the same superpowers you do..."

Boy oh boy can I tell that people have still not internalized this. Yes, your HTTP proxy with a list of features as long as my arm would have been impressive 5 years ago, at least on some level. Today, I can prompt it into existence as easily as you did, and if I am prompting it into existence I can build a custom one with just the features I need, that integrates into my logging & metrics, etc., and perhaps most importantly, I can literally do that more quickly than I can evaluate your project. AI has eliminated the space of open source projects where evaluation of your project takes longer than prompting it into existence does for me.

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The premise of this argument is that using AI takes no skill, and experience using AI doesn't matter, and that domain expertise in software development won't help you build better software with AI.

I don't think any of those things are true.

I think the argument is more that jerf has that skill, experience, and domain expertise.

A person maintaining a sizeable open-source project is overwhelmingly likely to have all three.

Right after I posted, I realized this hole in what I was saying.

Reflecting a bit more, I agree with you, but only in cases where the author of the open source project doesn't aggressively shun the use of AI in their own work. Folks that refuse to engage with AI (even open source project maintainers) will find themselves lacking the skill with AI that others have. So I can imagine a future where those open-source maintainers will get pull requests written with AI that they themselves could never produce.

I'm not sure I believe my own argument here, but I think it follows from "using AI to produce something worthwhile is a skill".

Yes, that's precisely the thought which lead me to the "overwhelmingly likely" hedging.

I think you'll find most of the people creating the HTTP proxy servers and brand new AI harnesses and git or ssh config managers and all of the other things that we already have way too many versions of are not our best software engineers anyhow. I like to analyze things in terms of how much of the real world they've encountered [1], and one of the reasons I would just put my own solutions together is a lot of these manifested major projects with huge lists of "features" have either one user, or in many cases, zero, which is to say even the author isn't actually using it, and I might as well put together my 1-user project myself.

[1]: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/

What about the price to verify your newly borne vibe coded project. At least the person who published it has a chance to have used their project to valid/solve their own problem and then was nice enough to publish it back to be freely used vs costing $10 to prompt it into existence

So why submit a PR at all if you're not even going to try to understand the aims of the project?

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