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Comment by dmantis | Hacker News Reader

I can't find a very good comment from HN from a few months ago with this churn of AI posts, but the idea was quite right: there were tinkerers, who loved a problem solving process, and entrepreneurs, who don't care about the problem itself and beauty of a neat solution, but only the end products to sell.

Entrepreneurs currently are in heaven, and tinkerers are in hell.

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I disagree hard. I am a tinkerer wannabe entrepreneur and I'm having the time of my life.

I just one shot a plugin for my wife's sketchup(the ability to easily export 2D from sketchup) in Ruby. I don't even know what Ruby looks like.

Simultaneously, I am fine tuning my mail setup(FreeBSD/postfix/dovecot/OpenDKIM/etc) using ChatGPT and Claude.

I set it up long before these AI things was a thing... But I am loving that I can take my rickety server held together by duct tape(though I had done things "right") STRONG, simply because it frees me from tedious, tedious shell scripting. I can focus my energy on that fun shit, not trying to remember the shell dialect I am currently employing...

It sounds like you're not a tinkerer in the sense that the parent post used the word.

And furthermore there is a huge difference between "works for me" software and a proper software product.

I'm not so sure, I love tinkering but mostly see the code as a means to an end.

AI lets me flesh out both hardware and software side projects quickly that I never had time for. Most of them are experiments that won't be shared.

It's nice to have Codex/Claude whip up an SPI DMA driver while I'm doing something more fun, for example.

I think that tinkerers is the wrong term.

I consider myself a professional. I lean towards understanding problems, making sure that they're fixed once and for all, and being able to foresee issues that the users will encounter and that product cannot see. And while I enjoy coding, code is secondary to all this. Yet I'm in Hell.

We're losing our ability (and time) to understand problems, we prefer churning out patches fast than actually fixing them, we delegate meaningful choices to an AI that has no ability to predict issues, we remove the opportunity to review and we end up leaving testing to the end user. As far as I can judge, we have stopped building products and are now shipping glorified demos.

Also, I can't speak for other products, but on the type of features I work on, AI is blatantly incompetent, but our C-suite just refuses to believe it, assuring us that it's just us having difficulties with the transition.

> I can't speak for other products, but on the type of features I work on, AI is blatantly incompetent

I do chat with the web interfaces of LLMs quite a bit as my workflow. I’m always baffled by how rarely it arrives at the correct solution.

I pose a question with code snippets, it gives me some incorrect answer. I pose a better question, and it gives me another wrong answer. Wash rinse repeat several times; not until the LLM gets the right answer, but until I pose the question specific enough that I can answer it myself.

I do find this loop of question refinement quite beneficial, but man it makes me terrified of vibe coded applications. 9/10 times the LLM doesn’t even get in the ballpark of the problem, let alone the solution.

Not only that, but even when you get the LLM to give you the right answer, if you ask it to turn that answer into actual code committed to your repo, it usually destroys something else in the process.

Also bad news for those of us who felt software quality was shit before LLMs.

Yes, I've concluded a few years ago that VC money has been really bad for software quality.

The bias in this comparison is insane. “Tinkerer” is a pejorative, normally used to downplay one’s (own) ability or impact. It’s often used to mean “unserious” or “amateur”.

The same comparison could be said the other way around: there are entrepreneurs, who care deeply about the product, inside and out; and scammers, who don’t care about the problem itself or the beauty of a a neat solution, but only the sales of the end product.

Entrepreneurs currently are in hell, and a scammers are in heaven.

I don’t think either is more apt or more offensive, they just appeal to whichever side of the fence your on.

My bad, I'm not a native English speaker.

I've always though that about tinkering as in "being in love to work with inner working of things and understanding the internals, mastering stuff". Nothing pejorative.

You were right with your usage of tinkerer, he was just offended

“Unskilled” is quite literally in the definition of tinkerer. It explicitly implies a lack of mastery.

Tinkering is more or less synonymous with dabbling, which is used more these days. Synonyms with tinkerer would be amateur, hobbiest, dabbler. There’s definitely an implied interest in how things work, but also strongly implies that one is not serious about what they’re doing.

More in line with your definition would be artisan or craftsman; although fwiw craftsman can have a negative slant in modern (American) English as some people use it in lieu of blue-collar workers.

Other way around: Artisan is the negative one with implied pretentiousness, craftsman is the positive one that implies high skill.

I agree artisan can be a bit pretentious, but calling someone an artisan != calling someone pretentious, whereas calling someone a craftsman (to some people) == calling someone blue collar, someone who works in the crafts/went to craft school.

I think the term in the original comment that you're referring to was "craftsman", not "tinkerer".

Since there is an entire AI community[0], claiming 135,000 members, that labels themselves 'tinkerers', any pejorative meaning in tinkerer is long gone. Probably in the same way as 'hacker' was once a rather pejorative term to the general public.

[0] https://aitinkerers.org/

The definition of tinkerer is “An unskilled person who tries to fix or mend”. Someone making a slack channel with a diminuative moniker does not change the meaning of the word.

You would not want a surgeon who says that they’ve tinkered around with surgery. You would not want a pilot who says they’re tinkered around with piloting.

Synonyms are quite literally beginner; dilettante; novice; pretender; uninitiate.

I am not challenging the definition, only your "pejorative" connotation, which is simply incorrect. Everyone is a beginner at some point. Does that make "beginner" pejorative?

Depends. If you’re using is disparagingly, then yes, it is a pejorative.

For example from the original analogy, if you told an entrepreneur that because they didn’t use AI, they were not an entrepreneur, but instead “unskilled” or a “beginner”, that would be disparaging; pejorative.

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