Doches

I'll take that challenge.

Even if you're 100% accurate that the advent of LLMs means that the field of software engineering has effectively devolved into prompt engineering and AI-wrangling, that is a change that we should fight with full-throated, actual-Luddite levels of defense. Your own analogy – the way a tiny, tiny core of 'real' engineers develop game engines, and then the entire field of game development just 'scripts' those engines – sends up a ton of red flags for me.

(Aside: as an erstwhile game developer 'just scripting game engines' is...underselling the craft of programming in game development, but whatever).

For a long time game development has been a weird shadow version of the rest of the tech industry. We're influenced by the same macro trends (e.g. ZIRP, VC fads) and the mood and zeitgeist generally rhyme as a result. But if you look at the drive to unionise game developers vs. same impulse in the mainstream tech industry the feeling is COMPLETELY different.

What's the incentive to unionise if you're a SWE at Meta, Palantir, or Google? Your job is pretty great, your work-life balance is at least not fundamentally out of control, and your STARTING salary puts you in the top 10% of US households. It is probably the last remaining holdout of the 1970s upper-middle-class dream jobs.

And if you're the equivalent engineer at EA, Activision, or Ubisoft? You can expect seasonal layoffs, a good work-life balance means you sleep at home instead of under your desk at least once a week, and your take-home pay is just sufficient to let you split the rent on an outer LA apartment that's just inside tolerable commuting range. Equity? What's that? Management treats you like a disposable cog AND BRAGS ABOUT IT, like they have for the last thirty years.

This is what we want to become? This is the future we're embracing?

> I’ll collect some money and retire in a couple years. Hopefully the open source world stays the same until then.

As someone who explicitly did this and is now out the other side: can confirm, this is the way.

I hereby propose "Tomcam's Iron Law of Revenue": if you have to ask how a product will make money, the answer is "Advertising."

Visual Studio Code was first released in 2015; Intellij (the original JetBrains IDE) was first released in 2001. Even Atom -- the editor that Microsoft forked to make VSCode -- had its first public release in 2014.

It's safe to say that JetBrains IDEs are something other than "crappy VSCode clones."

Why would they? If there’s one agency that’s spiritually aligned with DOGE — in terms of incompetence, malice, and sheer cruelty — it’s ICE/CBP.

> Builders can leverage their soft skills like taste, intuition and empathy into their product design.

If you're 'vibe coding' are you really...building something? Kinda sorta devalues the term "builder", in my opinion. At most I'd concede that if you're micro-managing an AI to generate code for you we should call you a "manager".

Is the guy talking about his ideal building design an architect? Is an armchair general _actually_ a general? So why should someone who 'builds' a piece of software by talking to an AI about it a 'builder'?

> his company is pure evil

Would you mind elaborating on why you'd call Palantir 'evil' in particular? I wouldn't exactly hold the company up a a role model of good corporate citizenship, but I also wouldn't put them down as particularly more 'evil' than your average multinational. Say, on a level with -- to pull an example not-quite-entirely out of thin air -- Airbus.

As someone who lived in the sud-ouest during the yellow vests protests, "very very low tolerance for social violence" is...not my general impression of the French people.

(Low tolerance for fascism, yes, obviously. But "social violence" is pretty much what passes for entertainment on a Saturday morning)

Good thing not all of us write software for a business.

I write little utilities for my parents, games for my son, a web shop for my wife. I write social spaces for myself and my friends. I write tools for myself.

I write software for strangers on the internet. I write software when I’m drunk, to test myself. Sometimes I write software simply for the joy of writing it, and it never runs again after that first “ah, finally!” moment. Aah, time well spent.

Equating “writing software” with “fulfilling business goals” is…quite depressing. Get outside! Feel the sunshine on your face! Write your own image-processing DSL, just for the sheer unbridled hell of it! Learn Nim! Why not?

(Ok, maybe skip the last one)

I think the final point illustrates this one pretty succinctly: 'what will be left will no longer give us the joy of hacking.' Personally I build my own version of almost every software tool for which I regularly (like, daily) use a UI. So for e.g. personal note-taking, continuous integration, server orchestration, even for an IDE: I could use Apple Notes, CircleCI, Chef, VSCode, but I instead build my own versions of these.

I'm not a masochist; they're often built on top of components, e.g. my IDE uses the Monaco editor. But working on these tools gives me a sense of ownership, and lets me hack them into exactly the thing I want rather than e.g. the thing that Microsoft's (talented! well-paid! numerous!) designers want me to use. Hacking on them brings me joy, and gives me a sense of ownership.

Like an idealised traditional carpenter, I make (within reason) my own tools. Is this the most rational, engineering-minded approach? I mean, obviously not. But it brings me joy -- and it also helps me get shit done.

> We fight in the same wars, are owned by the same corporations, and sit beside each other at the same international bodies.

> We have broadly similar attitudes to democracy.

> We share the same aversion to enforcing our borders.

> We both hate the French.

I know this is meant as satire, but it reads like an absolutely savage indictment of Anglo-American culture and the state of...everything, on both sides of the Atlantic. I clicked the link expecting light snark and some faintly humorous commentary on Farage and/or Trump, and by the time I'd finished reading I was in as black a mood as the author.

Good god, enough with the AI hypegen! Are you yourself an LLM?

I'm going to be downvoted to oblivion for this comment (and I should be, because it's absolutely contrary to the rules and spirit of HN) but I am so, so tired of seeing low-effort comments subtly hyping LLMs on posts that are completely unrelated. You could ask this question in half of HN discussions and it would almost always be pointless.

It's particularly pointless in this case, since you obviously didn't read TFA; the README ends with:

> DungeonDash was developed by Md Faizan Alam using Node.JS and various npm libraries

That you've used the full marketing term for a particular LLM (why not just say "Claude"?) just makes this read like braindead astroturfing. And it's appearing all over the place on HN, and (IMHO) dragging down the quality of discussion. This is an interesting question if the project was AI-assisted, but otherwise it's of equal interest to "Did you use VSCode to write this?" which, I mean, I guess could be interesting but is just an unrelated side-discussion about tools. And you haven't even put in the effort to ask the question in an interesting, discussion-sparking way! Did you have GPT-2 generate this question for you?

/end snark, /end rant, and bring on the negative karma.

Palantir has been doing exactly this for more than a decade...

App Store policy (written or otherwise? It's hard to say.) only levies the 30% on digital goods delivered in the app. Uber, for example, doesn't pay 30% of rider fees to Apple.

Patreon is in this weird gray area because you kinda-sorta are getting digital goods delivered via the Patreon app, depending on how you look at it. And obviously if there's a way that Apple can squint and say it falls under their purview, they will...

This article reads like an uneducated rant in so, so many ways. Apple rolling over its sleep and squashing Patreon isn't 'enshittification', it's just textbook monopoly abuse. And if you want to rail about the nuance of Apple's business practices you can at least not typo the name of two of their flagship products ("Iphone and Ipad").

> The fact that it's a felony to get your Iphone apps from anyone except Apple means that whatever policies Apple makes for the app store have the force of law.

The EC and US DOJ would like a word, please.

> It's special that we make our own tools

I've always taken this to heart, but not necessarily with programming languages. Any piece of software that helps run my business that I can reasonably make and maintain myself, I do. I build my own CI/CD app, orchestration/deployment tool, task planner, bug tracker, release note editing & publishing tools, blog editor, logstash/viewer for exceptions, etc.

Does building (and especially maintaining!) all of these tools take up a lot of time, and distract me from the primary business of building the software that I actually sell? Sure, of course it does. But it also keeps me fresh and forces me to expand the scope of ideas that I regularly work with, and keeps me from becoming "that guy who makes that one app" and who isn't capable of moving outside of his comfort zone.

And while that doesn't (yet) extend to building my own tools in my own languages, it certainly does extend to writing my own DSLs for things like configuration management or infrastructure. My tools may be homerolled and second-rate, but they're mine (dammit!) and -- this part is important -- no one can take them away from me or catch me out with a licensing rug-pull.

The author of TFA read Charles Murray's Coming Apart and has inexpertly regurgitated (to the extent of just copy-pasting the figures) that book's central thesis while failing to understand its nuance and context. If you're interested in this idea -- and you should be, because it's important! -- then you should just skip the article and read the (vastly superior) book.

> Being emotionally available, participating in chores, providing a comfortable lifestyle while not working all the time, being reasonably well-read and good conversationalist, etc.

I...honestly cannot tell if this is meant ironically. Those things seem like table stakes for being an adult. It's not "expecting more of them" to simply expect people to...grow up, and help care for the other people in their lives. You write "participating in chores" as if that's one of a list of demands!

That's not a demand; that's just...life.

I’ve probably made dozens of tools for myself that no one else uses, but — sort of by definition — none of them are publicly available. Who needs my orchestration app, access control UI, or Jenkins replacement? Nobody, that’s who.

But a few years ago I took a couple weeks out and polished up one my personal tools for public use, and since then it’s seen exactly one other user. So, uhh, I guess that counts? It’s called Saascast (https://saascast.io), and it builds revenue forecasts based on your Stripe subscription data. Took me probably two weeks to build, and required maybe half an hour of maintenance per month on average.

I use it every.single.day, though.

This is one of the more thoughtful, nuanced criticisms of the current LLM fad that I've read, and I'm delighted to see it make it show up on HN. The author starts off with a series of well-thought experiments that show Github Copilot generating _pretty valid_ frontend code, code that works and fulfills the prompt: but code that ignores every web accessibility rule of thumb in the most egregious ways. Sure, yes, bad web devs write bad code, and Copilot is -- on its best day -- a perfectly cromulent bad developer. Yawn, news at 11, etc.

But where he takes those examples and where his thoughts end up is where this essay really hit home for me:

> As more and more of the internet is generated by LLMs, more and more of it will reinforce biases. Then more and more LLMs will consume that biased content, use it for their own training, and the cycle will accelerate exponentially.

And 'biases' here isn't the usual "models are woke-lobotomized!" yammering, but rather a thoughtful take on how the use of LLMs for code generation may, at least for the current state of LLMs, slowly normalize _writing worse code_.

Sure, but the challenge with that idea is that -- as with so many things -- which half do you cut? It helps if you think of games as _media_ rather than as _software_. Sure, at least half of movies released in a given year are crap, but how can you know (beyond a baseline quality/craftsmanship level) which ones are going to be a hit and which ones will flop?

Fun to see this on HN today; I just finished it last night, on a recommendation from a friend. It was great, and left me full of unfinished thoughts -- just what you want from a good SF yarn.

For folks who enjoyed the ideas in it I can heartily recommend qntm's short story Lena (https://qntm.org/lena), which explores some of the same ideas but with a hefty dollop of (implied, but all the more intense for it) psychological horror.

Yawn. This is all just shakedown from pandemic-era overhiring, when zero interest rates made it economical to hire whole engineering _organizations_ just to keep them from going elsewhere. Meta alone has hired 30,000 since the beginning of 2021; what were those folks ever even going to work on?

The tide is going out, and a whole lot of engineering orgs (and, frankly, mid-tier engineers) are going to find out who's treading water and who's swimming naked.

Not just JetBrains: surely Unity has been another strong driver of cross-platform .Net use. If nothing else it’s certainly provided a reason to use C# for folks not coming from a Windows platform app developer background!

Certainly for me C# is “the Unity language.” I’m dimly aware that it has some vague Microsoft association, but I don’t think I’ve even seen a piece of MS tooling for it in…many years. Unity + JetBrains Rider has been a pleasant gamedev environment.

It’s not often that you see short fiction on HN, but I’m really grateful that this made it today. Be sure to read through to the Author’s Note if you skim the story, since it contexualises some of the rougher scenes.

The author wrote this to exorcise some of their own demons, but the story is also a…useful prophylactic against those demons in its own right. This brightened my day, or at least infused it with some much-needed philosophy.

Watching this unfold I was really hoping that the long-term solution here would be Apple moving (or at least announcing a move) Watch assembly to the US, if only to get around the _import_ ban. I realize that would take...rather a long time to set up, but it would have been one hell of a win (for the US, not so much for Apple).

I’ve always liked Robert Heinlein’s proposal: a two-house legislature, where the lower house only writes new laws and the upper house only repeals existing laws.

> I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?

One piece of this really jumped out at me: the projection of overall energy demand to shrink from 2900 TWh to 900 TWh over the next 27 years. The article waives that away by pointing to efficiency gains from electrification and decarbonisation — but that’s just a stupendous change in consumption over a quite short period of time.

I would honestly like a deeper explanation of how electrification will produce such a wild decrease! That’s shrinking energy use by more than 2/3, and presumably after taking into account population/industry growth…? Or are the authors just wildly pessimistic (not…unmerited) about Britain’s trajectory over the next quarter-century? What am I missing here?

> We’ve been motivated by the improvements we’re seeing in our telemetry data, and we’re convinced that our efforts this year are having a positive effect on Firefox users.

Mozilla gets a lot of flak (especially around here!) for their sometimes heavy-handed usage analytics, but it's nice to see that used for its stated purpose! Great use of data here.