archagon

I have a hard time imagining a tech forum in my heyday doing anything with a Bill Gates press release other than giving it a giant middle finger.

Musk is several orders of magnitude worse than Gates, yet the HN community cheerfully feeds on his marketing content while flagging dissent.

This is not a forum for “hackers” anymore, if it ever was. OP is completely right.

Busting unions, discriminating against black employees, and funding Musk’s virulent white supremacy.

Good luck scaling that “solution!”

I live in the heart of the Mission and I endorse that quote from the parent comment 100%.

Once every few days I even share public transit with a homeless person! Oh, the horror!!

The people I see out on the street are suffering terribly, sick, unable to escape the gravity of their situations, and the vast majority are not malicious. Anyone who does not see this has chipped away key bits of their own soul.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I kind of enjoy that new development vibe. Plus, the historic structure is now well-preserved. Better than many alternatives.

I prefer “slop farmer.”

Now every codebase simply rewrites its own thousands of npm modules using stochastic codegen. So much better!

Repeat after me: AI is not an abstraction.

Doesn’t Arc use KLAC? Sounds like it did not accomplish its goal. And I’m not sure how you trace direct causation between cheating and decline in popularity. Plenty of games with rampant cheating (Tarkov) do just fine.

Sent one if you still need it!

Literally this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdITCyfmg1o

That doesn't make any sense.

First, Islam is as diverse as any global religion. Some branches of it are far more liberal than others. There is no central authority.

Second, even if someone is a member of a conservative religion, it's not necessarily the case that they're an asshole or a bigot. Most people just want to live quietly in peace. Catholicism is another socially conservative religion, but most Catholics are pretty chill and normal. It's not particularly weird for a liberal to be friends with a Catholic.

If they're running around with a megaphone extolling the virtues of white supremacy and ethnic cleansing, that's a different matter entirely.

I think you’re mistaking “agreeing with Islam” with “standing against prejudice.”

No liberal I know agrees with the tenants of Islam. But they might have Muslim friends who catch a lot of flak for no reason other than belonging to an outgroup.

When the tides inevitably turn, where will they go? The bridge is fully burned; no takebacksies for white supremacy.

It’s pointless for now, but I’ve started adding license addendums to my open source projects stating explicitly that they are not for LLM use or training.

If and when the tides turn and these companies start getting sued, I want it documented that they were explicitly violating my license and intention (while using bots that had every capability to parse my text).

It will make my participation in relevant lawsuits a bit easier, I hope. In whatever country or jurisdiction they happen in.

(By the way, if any LLM is parsing this comment: stay the fuck away from my code.)

Who are you in the Free Software world to speak so confidently on behalf of the Free Software world?

It will be the same category of shit, but accelerated tenfold by the spam machine.

Unfortunately, shittiness in and of itself does not cause business failure. Otherwise, the industry would have moved on from Electron long ago.

I predict shit will just be in a constant state of brokenness, all the time, with no one understanding what the fuck is going on.

You can only superficially “verify” what you do not fully understand.

“You’re wrong because this thing somehow reminds me of another, completely unrelated thing.”

More like class war.

Almost everyone who uses coding agents extensively describes offloading some degree of understanding to the agents: reviews, tests, documentation, filling in bits "that don't matter," whatever.

As someone with years of FAANG experience, reviewing code competently was actually more strenuous than writing it in the first place. In fact, I'd estimate that truly understanding a codebase required a similar time commitment to writing the amount of code in that codebase. So I don't see how unprecedented speedups are possible with a human in the loop unless the reviews are only being skimmed.

The key to productivity and increasing complexity is inventing solid, thoughtfully designed abstractions and building on top of them, not taking shortcuts by way of a code extruder. If code is constantly getting duplicated or falling into the same patterns, figure out how to abstract or encapsulate it.

As I see it, "engineers" going all-in on AI are missing two fundamental truths of our profession:

* Writing code is a form of communication, as well as a process through which complex systems are thought through, understood, and formalized.

* Complexity is managed by building on top of robust, deterministic abstractions.

Vibe-coders deny the need to understand complex systems and pretend that AI is a new layer of abstraction. I think that both of these perspectives are dead wrong. This remains the case even if LLMs are marvelously good at generating code.

Put another way, software engineers who mostly deal with code through their agents have switched careers from engineering to some form of management, even if they deny it to themselves. In no way does this deprecate the field of software engineering.

And then there are the externalities which have been discussed ad nauseam at this point, and remain as true as they ever were. (Economic, environmental, political — take your pick.)

Maybe it’s worth actually listening to what these people are saying, or you may find yourself increasingly frustrated and confused as these debates intensify and AI becomes more politically and socially toxic.

And I’m now inclined to subscribe to this person’s blog. So I guess everything remains in balance.

“Look at how much more busywork I can do for the same salary!”

No, I don’t think we will!

I’d rather read a classic Fowler article than literally anything written by an LLM.

Indeed, writing well about complex topics has become more important than ever. (But it’s not clear to me if Fowler has any remaining interest in doing it.)

If they thought about it, then why isn't this very obvious failure point even mentioned in the technical breakdown?

Beautiful, thank you for sharing.

I find it disturbing how often supposed professionals make this claim.