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Comment by discreteevent | Hacker News Reader

People are using AI to write code. But HN is the wrong place to try to figure out how much they are using it. This site is full of bots and shills and has become a wasteland since AI. You can tell by the way they make short super confident (even ridiculous) statements in order to try to bully the insecure into buying into the hype. It matches exactly the patterns you used to see with crypto. Even the more subtle comments are often lacking in any kind of specifics. Of course there are some genuine AI users also but the point is that the overall volume of comments is completely unrepresentative of reality.

The tradgedy is that HN used to be a great place to get honest and well argued opinion and anecdotes about new technologies and the different tradeoffs etc.

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I think the combination of YC being “a place for founders” and the proliferation of useless AI startups, each with its own little weird AI-booster founder, probably has added to this phenomenon as well.

I recently saw a video where one of these founders showed their “programming” setup, and it was a cashier’s microphone wherein he whispers sweet nothings to the LLM, because of course he doesn’t write code anymore (who even reads code nowadays, am I right?!). I think this is the type of individual who’s lost in the bubble sauce that ends up writing the most absurd comments around here.

How do you know these are bots and not Redditors? There's an HN sub on Reddit, and one of the hallmarks of Reddit are the 'mic drop' big pivotal one liner comments that get upvoted or cause lots of replies or engagement.

But I do feel, to reply to you, that crypto was a lot more critically received on HN than AI is right now. We're too busy debating humanity's end rather than if this crap actually works.

For those of us who actually work with technology (not product managers, executives or salespeople, this stuff doesn't work well at scale. It might in a research department at Google or a hedge fund, less so in the messy corporate world.

> one of the hallmarks of Reddit are..

and LLMs are, in turn, trained on reddit content..

^ This.

I can't remember when I started reading HN. Possibly as late as around 2017/18. I lost one account I had when I changed company, and this is my latest account. Obviously you can't tell for sure, but I know that I am not a bot and I know that every single developer in my company (only a few hundred) have agents writing almost all of their code. I'm in the fintech industry (trading side). I have a lot of connections from my long career in the industry. Everyone else is using coding agents too.

I don't think I could find a job in my industry if I tried that didn't want me to write code using coding agents.

Obviously I can't prove any of this, so try emailing a recruiter and test it for yourself.

From what I can tell, a lot of newly registered users are equally as vehemently against AI as there are those that are pro. I guess we see things through our own personal filter.

God, that’s depressing. The mass suicide of an entire trade.

That depends on how you see it. I started off studying physics, but transitioned to CS. I found I was good at CS and loved tinkering, but the tinkering was always for the exploration of problems. That was always the point, not typing characters on a screen.

I admit, there is/was a certain element of enjoying the zone during development sessions. But mostly, it was the problems, not the tool.

I happened to become good at coding, and good at doing it in a corporate setting, so I adapted my habits, learned to write the best sort of code that keeps a production system solid and fast. But as I say, typing the characters was never really the point. Now a very fast assistant helps me type the characters. I guide it very closely. A lot of the time I have to correct it. Often if I know it is going to probably take a wrong direction I'll write the skeleton of the code I want, write the skeleton of the tests to prove it, and give it this as a "spec". This gets fantastic results.

I haven't lost my trade at all.

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