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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

> You ignored my comment about NFR.

You didn't seem to have a reputable point to address there. Just an assertion.

> I don't think humans and LLMs are actually non-deterministic in the same way?

Perhaps, but the author didn't make that argument. It's definitely easier to quickly vary skill in a model (by switching models) than it is to vary it in humans (by hiring/firing).

I don't see why that's bad. If anything it's better for AI - way easier to say "always use at least Astra/Opus 5.5" than it is to fire your crap employees.

I think some people have had the fortune to never actually work with poor programmers. They exist!

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> You didn't seem to have a reputable point to address there. Just an assertion

I mean in my anecdotal evidence, AI has not been meeting bigger picture requirements and needs hand holding. Even on the newest models. So are you not experiencing that?

> I don't see why that's bad. If anything it's better for AI - way easier to say "always use at least Astra/Opus 5.5" than it is to fire your crap employees.

So you're saying you'd rather have AI make a consistently bad engineer inconsistently mid and a consistently good engineer inconsistently mid over what they usually are?

I much prefer consistency in my engineers. Especially when investing in them helps them improve.

And the reason I think it makes good engineers inconsistently mid is because look at the drop in quality as a customer from big tech which hires top talent. I had to cancel my Spotify subscription because it's become so sloppy.

> AI has not been meeting bigger picture requirements and needs hand holding. Even on the newest models. So are you not experiencing that?

Ah yeah in that case I agree. We're not quite at the point where completely hands-off vibe coding gives good results. But it seems very unlikely that that will still be true in a few years.

I mean I really hope that isn't true and AI stops improving or has some fundamental weakness that means it can never make long term maintainable code. Then I get to have a job! But I'm not going to believe something just because my job depends on it...

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