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Comment by eloisius | Hacker News Reader

> If it is a hype, then one that produces lots of working code. Way faster than I can type it. And I am fast.

I covered that:

> It's fanatics claiming that it has multiplied their productivity by some incredible factor, but never showing the receipts, or when they do it's always something trivial like a calorie counter app.

There is no shortage of "working code" out there. GitHub is reportedly falling over from all the working code. Where's your business? Who's using it? Why aren't products better yet? It's a mirage. Your "working code" is the same thing as gen-AI "street photography" images. No one wants to see them, yet it's pumped out in vast enough amounts that it's choking the spaces that are ostensible for photography. The low quality, low investment nature of it excites the lazy wanna-bes who leave a trail of half-baked, soon-forgotten detritus behind them.

Show us the receipts.

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You’re making solid points but I do think that, at least, programming is changing to be around AI generation. Even if not much has changed in terms of visible output. AI may add some marginal GDP growth, nothing explosive. Switching from file cabinets to computers didn’t result in face melting productivity gains despite totally retooling how information flows through a business.

I don't disagree that it is useful. I, personally use it ping-pong coding problems before I break ground (although I never let opencode out of plan mode). It's marginally better than the plain old internet was for getting help before Google allowed SEO to ruin it, and I believe we're watching that edge get cannibalized in realtime as more and more LLM content ends up in the sources that LLMs synthesize in their answers.

If there are any face-melting characteristics to this whole thing it's how much money has been poured into it.

" It's marginally better than the plain old internet was for getting help"

Ok, so as an example, I have a old 2D game of mine. Custom written voxel engine for a shooter game with completely destroyable world. Works great, but 2D.

I always dreamed of making it 3D, but never found the time. It would have been a huuuge effort doing it on my own.

Some days ago I pointed fable at the engine and basically said, make it 3D.

And it did. Took some hours. Not by copying other voxel engines, but by making my engine 3D. (I know because I know there is no game on the market like this)

So yes, I knew the domain and thought long and hard about it and the core is handwritten and battle tested and that probably helped steering it in the right direction. But I did not wrote a single line of this new code. And it works awesome.

This is not what I call marginally improvement. But you do you.

Wow, the world can finally play your 2D game in 3D. I'm sure it's very fun.

Sorry, I don't feel the need to proof anything to you. Was trying to have a interesting conversation.

And I mean no wonder github is drowning in garbage, now that anyone can "code"

"The low quality, low investment nature of it excites the lazy wanna-bes who leave a trail of half-baked, soon-forgotten detritus behind them."

But would you also call Linus Torvalds a lazy wannabe?

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