It's fun, but every new model release makes me even less interested to create cool stuff. Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?
It's a lot of mind games involved, going for specific openings, repeating same moves as last match, doing a poor by surprising, move etc.
Many GMs said that to win a match you have to play non-ideal moves many times, otherwise it will likely end in a draw.
I built a phone app recently, not released to the public, just an idea I had for ages but could never spend the time actually building. Its 100% vibe coded, and took me a few weekends to build... I'm talking a few hours in total.
The point I'm making is that you now have the power to create stuff you would never have had the time to build. You can think big, wild stuff. Experimentation. Throw-away code.
What a time to be alive!
Before it was cool to share an app you made, but now? What's the point of sharing an app, if the other person can make their own, even better suited for their needs, in a few seconds?
Building production ready software also takes hours to months, depending on the scope of the project.
In my opinion now is the best time for building apps that you sell to users.
I think the next 2-4 months are the best time ever to build and sell software. But it has to sell now. It will likely be obsolete in 1 year, and no one will care anymore.
I think this is the last easy chance to capture an audience.
If local one can be one-shotted?
Or not everyone would care or know how to use AI...
1. know how to do it well 2. maintain it 3. host it (if online)
The ultimate truth behind all those loud slogans.
I was thinking about this yesterday and realized that I don't even want to play only my own games (made by LLMs or me), I explicitly want to experience what other people have come up with, what stories they have invented.
And yes, might be it's all made by LLMs in the future, but that's another discussion. In "art" I think it still matters, I care about how it's made, not only that it exists.
EDIT: "And if you don't have a serious go to market plan with a latent user base you're SOL" ths is probably true though :D
I was thinking about writing something and hopefully starting a community/resource area around hyper-personalized software, it's so easy to make now. I was thinking about how it'd be useful to have a place to share these, for ideation, sharing techniques and the ability for LLMs to riff on something already existing. It's not quite like open source's advantage of having many people contribute to the same project, but rather something that is closer to evolution, giving the next generation a place to start modifying.
Would you have any interest in sharing what you've made?
It's a collaborative mapping app. I hope to release and opensource it one day. Under the hood uses MQTT for users to subscribe to map updates from other users.
The problem with it, like other apps of this nature, is that it requires the "network effect". ie. enough people using it to make it useful. So I'm trying to make it useful for a small group or organisation.
I have a million ideas flying around in my head, and given the capabilities of modern LLMs, they are all within reach. It can be a bit overwhelming sometimes...
I have fun ideas that are kind of complex and I can just experiment and see now with a couple spare hours on the weekend.
Trying to explain to my non software engineering friends that they could build any small app they have an idea for and they’re like I wouldn’t know how, and I’m like, you just ask and you can literally figure it out now so quick.
Maybe software engineers are the most excited and the most cynical.
But it's not just tech – my lack of interest in learning and creating is starting to generalise with the models. Music, writing, coding, maths, etc...
I need to get used to switching my head off and asking the AIs to think for me whenever I need to engage my brain. It still feels very unnatural.
The brain loves these kinds of shortcuts.
I don't need to think about the fine motor skills of hitting a baseball, it's just a motion now, and the game is still fun.
Because that's how creating software is starting to feel.
> Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?
Post-work society is an inevitability if we don't destroy our planet.
If we had something like a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but for work, I think meaningfulness would be the top of the pyramid. For most people in the world, not going hungry or affording housing are reasons enough to do work. Getting to do work you find meaningful is truly a privilege.
None of these people question whether their jobs are really necessary for the few things we really need: food, shelter, warmth, health etc.
A couple of generations ago most women were employed in the least bullshit job of all: running a household. But now they're all wage slaves too. So yeah, it does work.
Highest violent crime rates:
Memphis, Tennessee: ~2,400–2,500 per 100k
St. Louis, Missouri: ~2,000–2,100 per 100k
Detroit, Michigan: ~1,700–2,000 per 100k
Little Rock, Arkansas: ~1,600–1,800 per 100k
Baltimore, Maryland: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Oakland, California: ~1,400–1,900 per 100k
New Orleans, Louisiana: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Birmingham, Alabama: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Milwaukee, Wisconsin: ~1,100–1,600 per 100k
Cleveland, Ohio: ~1,500–1,600 per 100k
Most popular holiday destinations:
New York City, New York
Orlando, Florida
Las Vegas, Nevada
Maui, Hawaii
Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
San Francisco, California
Miami, Florida
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
New Orleans, Louisiana
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina/Tennessee
Highest overall crime rates:
Memphis, Tennessee
Oakland, California
Portland, Oregon
Detroit, Michigan
Seattle, Washington
Denver, Colorado
Albuquerque, New Mexico
St. Louis, Missouri
Little Rock, Arkansas
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Many of the same places, it turns out, and now the overlap with popular holiday destinations has dropped from 1 to 0.
https://coolidgelawfirmaz.com/crime-increase-over-the-holida...
It would be fun to get to post-work society, but hard to imagine atm. TPTB won't let it happen
Soon we will have some machines that can replace 50% of jobs, and this will happen basically overnight...
It's not "a lot of jobs", it's "all jobs".
WWI: -20 000 000 extra mouths to feed
WWII: -80 000 000 extra mouths to feed
WWIII: you extrapolate
• Lots of people aren't aware of what the models can do.
• They also aren't paying attention, and getting their attention is hard.
• Their impression of AI was formed by cheap low quality AI like free ChatGPT as of two years ago, Google AI overviews or Microsoft Copilot. So they think it sucks.
• A LOT of executives got burned by early pilots that overpromised then failed. Enterprise IT is a wasteland of dead AI pilots.
• Their IT systems are difficult to connect to models because they lack proper APIs or auth systems. Note the huge emphasis on fast computer use in the Astra announcement. A lot of work can only be done by clicking things.
• Executives don't want to let employees go, but aren't sure they can find new work for them either.
The last point is worth dwelling on. HN is full of socialists who imagine corporate executives as cigar smoking top hat wearers who chuckle all the way to the bank. The reality is more mundane: most executives don't want to lay people off and will fight hard to avoid doing so.
The average person in a position to make an AI project work either isn't incentivized with stock - this is often the case outside the US even for quite high ranking execs - or they are but don't believe laying people off will raise the share price enough to be worth the pain.
Also, executives often measure their success and self-worth by how many people report to them. Laying off half their department, even if it gets them a monetary bonus, would lead directly to a loss of social status as they can no longer say they manage 1,000 people but only 200, which matters if their social circle are all managers too (and for their wives, girlfriends, etc).
Layoffs suck and people HATE doing them, which is why companies often resort to forced percentage based layoffs to get managers to do it. If the incentives aren't there, the average executive will just sit on obvious AI deployment opportunities and/or deliberately sabotage them because getting rid of people is just all downside for them with no upside.
So institutions have enormous inertia. Model capabilities will run far ahead of what is actually used in reality, and this will continue for decades. It does mean that startups have a better chance than ever of outcompeting much larger incumbents though, as not hiring is far easier than firing.
These are productivity increases, sure, but still are $2000, $8000, $14000 of labor.
And doesn't count continued increase build time, more features, maintenance. The $20/mo SaaS isn't going away, and work can't pay you to endlessly tinker on fun internal projects and save $1200 of subscriptions for your $120k/yr salary.
It's fun, but SaaS is going to shift to more feature rich and we're going to see a ton of smaller projects that were pains to get started that can now work in a short amount of time.
Companies are going to get a huge surge of random internal projects and have to debate whether all the upkeep is valid for the pet projects, or if it's people fucking around at an untold scale.
"I am the best economist in UK!"
Is it?
I can't see a future in which almost every system (both physical and virtual) are not automated and optimized by autonomous entities.
What do you do when everyone is out of a job?
If you don't want pitchforks and riots in the streets, you give everyone UBI and housing so society doesn't collapse.
As much as I’d love UBI to happen, in current geopolitiks it’s a no-go. People are not happy with having what the others have.
The world is a fucking mess and they still believe in fairytales.
The beach houses, mansions, mountain views could be vacation places, or used as libraries, or simply dismantled for the materials.
The "slums" on noisy roads could be eliminated entirely and used for something people don't need to be at.
We'd move to a more equal distribution of assets closer to the middle line.
Stop hiding behind rainbows and say what you mean.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
> The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
Ah yes because these AI companies are just gonna give away the models for free that I use with my free computer and free smartphone while I eat with my free food in my free apartment.
Will the AI choose to give you those freebies? It will if you behave.
we should be more concerned by post-wages society
Work will always exist regardless how useful it is
Especially in current world, where for each type of problem there are 200 vibe coded tools.
- Lots of diseases which kill indiscriminately,
- Thousands of people each year feel the need to commit suicide in ways that affect others profoundly, like via train,
- Shoe and clothing sizes are inconsistent and unreliable,
- Male pattern baldness,
- Over dependence on cars for transport, which are noisy, smelly and dangerous,
- Obesity,
- We can buy cigarettes and alcohol freely, but not any decent drugs like MDMA.
But, you can create cool stuff just for yourself. That’s the upside. It’s just hard to make a living on cool stuff for yourself.
I built several projects at home, many involving learning e.g. graphics programming and rendering, that would never be useful in my professional work, but which were intrinsically interesting and enabled me to build other, more useful projects later on. It also gave me greater confidence in my abilities as an engineer, and cursory skills I learned in the process did help in my professional work.
Now it feels like what’s the point. The machines can or will be able to build anything I could want, useful or not, faster and with less frustration. I probably won’t be able to be employed as an engineer long enough to build a career on said skills. And I can’t mentally justify not spending that time with friends and family, when the expected return is basically zero.
I still find math, science, and engineering interesting and intrinsically rewarding, but in a closer sense to how one might feel about playing video games. The information is or will eventually be useless, so it isn’t worth spending a significant amount of time on.
Eventually I plan on learning some physical skills, like renovating, working with electronics and plumbing. I doubt robotics will render that useless very quickly.
I find that very motivating. I can do things alone that would have required a team only one year ago.
It's true, it's fun to have those systems, maybe I care more about them than the product, because the promise is "better, cheaper results in the future". But those systems are software too, and only tools, and will likely too be obsolete in 1 year from now.
I think it's a bit better when creating stuff now with a very short-term view: create something that is useful NOW, it doesn't matter it won't be useful tomorrow. Create it now and get it into the hands of people now.
People SHOULD feel like making a useless Mario Kart clone isn't worth the effort anymore. They should, instead, be trying to figure out how to actually use these models to make something that doesn't feel like a useless Mario Kart clone.
Software will be more like a "proof of work", where people would still pay $100 for good software that took $10k tokens to build.
Fast at first especially to a PoC but then you hit a time when the arch just gets so grimy it falls over, you ship the wrong thing and you end up in rework hell. This isn’t guaranteed but when it’s teams of people slinging slop it gets worse and worse, the best devs burn out from trying to manage the ones who believe AI will save them.
Its like the problems of outsourcing all the time
My philosophical take is that there are different types of coders, the ones who did it because they wanted to see their design be implemented and those who love the technical puzzle (with obvious overlap). The technical puzzle is taking a hit currently, but I think it will still exist in some form; the designer trying to get something implemented still loves the design work primarily which is sorely lacking in current LLMs, but if they don't have enough technical knowledge they will still get slapped in the face by technical gaps and bugs that LLMs make.
For corporate stuff, I think bureaucracy and issues with churn reduce the effectiveness of using an LLM because the most effective way might be anathema to corporate fiefdoms and structure. The churn is a problem for everyone though...
People will get "starter" projects that they can tweak themselves, and that come with AI instructions for development.
Imagine wanting to create a high quality RPG game. You could spend days prompting and hundreds of dollars in tokens, or you can buy a "RPG starter kit" that contains all the systems already impmemented and tested and markdown files on how the AI can add features, test, deploy, etc.
Why bother doing that when it would be vastly easier on a modern computer?
I've retreated to doing stuff with my hands. Wokdwork, DIY, that kind of thing. At least for now and the foreseeable future that doesn't seem pointless. Only problem is it's hard work yet nobody would pay me for it.
I might go more into table-tennis coaching, probably people would still prefer to be coached by a real person and not a robot for a very long time.
Funnily enough, I used to work on pre-LLM natural language processing at an insurance company about 10 years ago. One of the call centre staff quipped about us taking their jobs. I hadn't given it a moment's thought beforehand, but I said something then that I think still stands today. I said that what we are trying to do is automate the boring parts of your job so that you have more time to do the part that really matters: being there, being human, for someone in their time of need.
When my mum died at home this year, my dad called the local GP practice to let someone know and was greeted by a chatbot. This is someone who has just lost their wife of 40 years and doesn't really know what to do. Imagine having to deal with a chatbot in this time. It didn't work and he got frustrated and gave up, exasperated.
I took over but instead called a local hospice charity that had been involved and got straight through to a person. In no more than 60 seconds I had said everything that needed to be said, it was acknowledged with genuine sympathy and the wheels were in motion for the next steps.
This is what we need society to be like. We should use computers for the things they are good at, but we don't need them to be like people, because we have people for that.
I am so sorry for your loss.
I agree, some things should be automated, something should never be. I think it will take us quite some time to realize which is which, and the consequences involved.
The problem with AI now is that it seems to be taking over all the things nice, and making it harder to appreciate human-made things. It's like being in a museum with 99 AI-generated paintings, and 1 human-made one. Whould would enjoy visiting that museum? You don't even know which one is the human-made one. This is how it feels now, what's the point of creating "hand-made" stuff when it gets lost in a sea of slop? Both parties are upset (creator for not getting attention, viewer for not knowing anymore what is real or not, or what was made and curated by a human or not).
I made a random tweet yesterday, that "the future is offline". I do think we will get fatigue from having access to infinite, hyper-personalized content, so much that we will completely disregard ALL content.
I also lost my 31yo partner to cancer last year, and the only thing she cared most about was being remembered and knowing that she had done something meaningful in her life, that she left some impact on this world. AI is taking many of those opportunities, to make impact.
In this game of work/development, you can't make sure that other humans don't "cheat". Our work won't compete anymore with other human's work, but with a computer.
Also, creating something with AI doesn't really feel like you made it yourself.
And, if you make it without AI, most of the times it feels pointless, why spend 30 days on working on something that can be done faster and better in 1 hour?
I am not saying about doing things for fun, but about creating useful things.
Yes, you can do "hand-crafted" things, and people appreciate that, but for code, people aren't able to see the craft anyway.
If the motive is profit then you should be adopting AI just like you have adopted any other skill or tool of your profession.
I mentioned this in another comment, but we are social animals, we get most joy by sharing what we have created. And the problem now is that it's getting very hard to share and discover genuine creations vs AI-generated ones.
I have started building my own Digital Audio Workstation. The point is not to build something to compete with Ableton. The point is to build something and make music with it. If it is a good tool then I should be able to make good music with it and release the music. Actually, the DAW should be the secret sauce of the music and something I wouldn't want to give away.
This feels a lot more like computing in the 90s after taking an odd 25 year detour of an obsession with the tools themselves instead of what the tools can actually do.
> This feels a lot more like computing in the 90s after taking an odd 25 year detour of an obsession with the tools themselves instead of what the tools can actually do.
Like, professional electronic music artists spend 10s of thousands of hours in a DAW, but at that point it just becomes second nature and the tool disappears so they can focus entirely on the music.
There's got to be someone to listen to your music in order for that secret sauce to have any meaning.
What's the use of any "secret sauce" in something that only you listen to, because everyone else is either content with AI slop "music", or better yet "create" it for themselves just like you "create" your secret DAW?
You can't cherry pick somebody's opinion and assume it applies to everybody.
> even the people working on it
I don't think luddites constructed textile machines themselves.
Now it's just the product for the world, which was where most of the value was anyways.
It's a big paradigm shift and the industry is quickly going to shed people who needed the process to care about the product and we'll be left with people whose motivation to build the product (or money) is enough.
They won't even have to ask for a specific product, they will just state their problems/needs.
I know we're getting closer to robots that can do all that but I don't believe we're there yet.
It’s kind of like saying what’s the point of poetry when a dictionary exists
I used GPT 5.6 Sol Extra High (Fast) for the last month, around 4-5h per day, and it managed to acomplished most of the tasks it had. It didn't really impress and often the end result needed one or two tweaks/fixes, but it did work and could create e2e solutions.
Now it feels like whatever I learn will be obsolete in 2 months.
Some even for large clients, and they work well in production, clients are happy, yet I feel no connection to the work. If the client says something, I just copy-paste it to the AI and it fixes it/implements it.
There is too much code and complexity to check if the changes are ok, apart from seeing it if it seems visually ok and if the problem is fixed live. It almost always works, but it definitely doesn't have the same feeling as thinking of the problem, finding a solution, and implementing it, part which most developers enjoy in their work.
To me, the challenge in software is to reduce this complexity to keep it manageable. Probably AI can manage more complexity than a human being, but it seems to be difficult to prevent or reduce that complexity in the first place. How is your experience once the complexity is too hard for a frontier LLM to handle, or for you to prompt the correct direction towards it?
Tell it stuff like "use caching", "use library X", "make sure that it works when offline", etc.
And then basically live test it and see if it works as expected, and tell it more improvements/changes to make.
Almost all my projects are continously updated almost daily, based on my feedback and some automated systems (i.e. SEO feedback loops)
Imagine Bob Ross prompting a robot what to paint...
How long and much have you been using LLMs for?
I think it takes ~1 year of heavy usage for this feeling to set in, it's like the 5 stages of grief, there's different phases.
Now a big overwhelm come from the fact that the AI can work a lot faster than I can verify/check manually. Combined with the fact that not using the 100% usage of the subscription feels like wasting money/potential, leads to a feeling that I should always be doing more, where at the same time, it's getting hard to remember what am I even doing, when working on 3-4 projects at once.
And I do work in multiple projects at once, because that's how AI works best nowadays, if you have two threads running for the same project, it gets buggy or wasted tokens (like two people working in the same file at the same time, merge conflicts ,etc.)
So the solution is to have the AI work on many, independent tasks at once, but it gets overwhelming for a single person to keep track of all...
Leaving unused subscription percentage is getting rarer, however. I am about to bump up my plan, which is starting to feel like a drug addict's tolerance.