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Comment by supern0va | Hacker News Reader

>I was worried this time last year that by this time this year, companies would have slashed their engineering teams down to a handful and everything would be driven by mostly autonomous agents with human guidance. But it just hasn't happened.

I find this somewhat puzzling. I thought things were moving quickly, but at this time last year I couldn't even get Claude (using Cursor) to spin me up a service skeleton that would compile, let alone do anything meaningful.

I know it feels like a long time somehow, but it was only between November and February that things started to actually somewhat work without significant hand holding. Even now, it seems like we're still figuring out how to fully leverage the current models and tooling, even in organizations that have largely gotten on board.

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It's not all that surprising that people were worried and believed this. The AI companies and infrastructure companies partnering with them have spent a lot of money and time trying to convince people this is the case year after year. The critical clue people miss is that everyone claiming that has very clear financial incentives to convince people that's the case even when they know it isn't. Anyone who was actually building with LLMs and judging for themselves based on its performance knew fully well that wasn't the case year after year.

I've said this before: if anthropic (et al) thought they genuinely had a shot at replacing even 30% of white collar work, they would ABSOLUTELY NOT warn ANYONE. They would do what oil, leaded gas, and cigarette companies did. Swear under oath this is completely safe, commit GRIEVOUS societal harm that you explicitly promised wouldn't happen, and then end up in history books instead of jail for reasons beyond my ability to fathom.

No. The very fact they are trying to "warn" us means it's all marketing.

This has been corroborated for me on the engineering front that I can't find a single IC I respect who actually thought there was any evidence AI was going to live up to the hype. I saw a lot of people I always thought were idiots/sycophants/brown nosers go insane with AI. Never saw anyone id trust to help me cross a street blindfolded say more that "I may be wrong, but I'm not seeing any evidence yet".

Fwiw , you're conflating multiple things and consequently drawing premature conclusions.

It can be massively over hyped for it's current capacity and decimate the white collar work.

A lot of the difference of opinion is down to their point of view. At my dayjob, LLMs will not live up to anything because the enterprise is not structured to take advantage of it's strength. That's unlikely to change within the foreseeable future.

I strongly suspect you mostly talked with people coming from just such a background, because it's hard to go beyond our own bubbles

Sure, naturally. And yet parent commenter is remarking that simultaneously no AI-true-believer startups have supplanted the old money, and simultaneously despite much talk the bigcos have not slashed headcount to tiny AI-powered teams.

Hmm, isn't that just down to the fact people always vastly underestimate the amount of work software takes?

It takes a lot of time to successfully deliver a product. Even at the more "extreme" end of expectation - like saying it's a X10 multiplier (I'd disagree on that, it's more like 0.5-3 - depending on the type of work you're working on) you'd still need multiple years to go from first line of code to displacing established players. Things just don't change that fast.

Depends on the bigco IMO. I'm not sure what kind of layoff numbers for Year Three of genAI would grab your attention, but I assure you, hundreds of thousands have mine.

The layoffs started years before LLMs became practical coding tools.

So you're saying companies correctly estimated the need to cut staff to remain competitive and did so -- or at least, some state of affairs empirically indistinguishable from this. Not much of an argument, sorry to say

Yes, this... all the hype from the leading AI companies just pattern-matched so many past cases where things didn't pan out. really giving me the bad vibes..

>The critical clue people miss is that everyone claiming that has very clear financial incentives to convince people that's the case even when they know it isn't.

Social media is flooded with bots pushing this narrative - coding is dead, engineers are all cooked, the latest model is scarily good, "what am I for?", etc.

A good rule of thumb is that if it's a human being and not a bot, they'll use the word "slop" at some point.

coding harnesses improvements mattered more than llm improvements this past year. You could solve problems on claude sonnet on claude code that you couldn't solve a year prior.

Nope. If you use pi and its extremely minimal harness you can see a _lot_ of difference in models.

> at this time last year I couldn't even get Claude (using Cursor) to spin me up a service skeleton that would compile, let alone do anything meaningful

I've been using it to do this for 2 years now. And many people with me. The change you mention is one of is primarily one of Overton windows, of vibes.

>I've been using it to do this for 2 years now. And many people with me. The change you mention is one of is primarily one of Overton windows, of vibes.

I suspect this may have depended on the specific framework. I quite literally could not get Claude (in Cursor) to give me a basic Micronaut setup in a fresh workspace with essentially a "hello, world" API. I would guess that if you're using something like Python and FastAPI, it might have been an easier task or better represented in the data.

The difference that I observed in the Opus 4.5 era is that Claude could take a service framework it has never seen before (proprietary corp) and figure it out.

Which harness software were you using for this 2 years ago? VS Code Copilot? Cursor?

Aider for me

Very successful by just being careful and walking it forward.

Yes its about 2 years, August 2024 from git it looks like.

I've had success with Aider from October of 2025 (from my git logs). I have to differ from the general sentiment over here. The tools and models are good enough to make a change in the way work is done. Of course, Big Tech. will move fast and make mistakes but this is qualitatively different from other recent hypes (e.g. crypto/NFT). It has had genuine impact on people and their lives and a lot of simpler jobs with larger teams have been replaced by these models and one operator.

Exactly the same for me. Sonnet 3.5+Aider made it possible.

I got downvoted though, apparently you and me are liars, haha. Easier to believe that than admit that their take of "I adopted it exactly when it became viable, now it's good, and before that it was a waste of time" was wrong. They're the people who were loudly claiming here last summer it was useless, asking "show me anything useful that has been coded using LLMs". Come to think of it, it has now been a few months since I saw one of those. Used to be every other thread.

Exact same for me as WhatIsDukka.

Yeah, I strongly remember getting Sonnet 3.5 with Aider to boostrap an (albeit basic) project and getting it to work. Especially vivid because I told my roommate at the time about it and he also tried it out and was also shocked. I'd put maybe $20 in credits into the API haha. Feels so quaint, it's almost a foregone conclusion with the current models and harnesses.

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