jaredcwhite

Markdown with front matter? Pppfff.

Challenge: I'll only switch to this brave new world of "LLM compilers" if the "spec language" is XML.

=)

Make it so, HN brain trust!

Hilarious! Year of the Agent, hahahaha. Good one!

Most people? I'd suggest few people see LLMs as tools for thought and more that they're slop machines being cynically forced upon workers by capitalists with dollar signs in their eyes. Over and over and over again we see real-world studies showing that the people far more excited about genAI are managers than the people doing the actual work.

Just because a bunch of people tell you the practice of performing the art form of producing software via handwriting code is over doesn't mean it's over. This form of hyperbole is intended to overwhelm your reason, get you to forget your own expertise, and trick you into engaging with the topic in a fearful manner (literally FOMO). Don't fall for this cheap stunt.

> You’ve built a space that looks like focus but feels like depletion. And you’ve been blaming yourself for the fatigue. The room is the problem. Not you.

I see this kind of weird pacing and dumb "it's not X, it's Y" stuff ALL the time with slop posts on LinkedIn. Classic LLM tells.

Sure, let's throw more wild amounts of money at a wildly unprofitable company with no clear roadmap to profitability any time in the near-term, and in the long-term it's very probable that any arguably-useful use cases for LLM-based technology will be a commodity anyone can run anywhere.

My gosh, this bubble can't burst soon enough. It's a form of torture to keep waiting on the pain we all know is coming…

The only way to win is not to play. Opt out of everything. Total ban on usage of anything genAI. Trust me, you'll still be mad at the world sometimes, but in your own life you'll be far happier.

Reminds me of that famous speech by Mon Mothma:

“We are launching our own Rebel Star to blow up planets which support the Empire. It’s totally better than the Death Star and not unethical at all. Join us to build a better future for the galaxy!”

Yeah, M4 was the generation when the minimum got bumped up to 16GB.

I've been running Asahi Fedora GNOME on a Mac mini M1 for some while now (using it right now in fact) with almost zero complaints. A really solid and usable setup. I could see myself buying a used MacBook Air M3 down the road once this work is all finished up, which is very exciting. The prices are already pretty reasonable, even for a 16GB RAM model!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Why was this flagged? Oh right, this is HN. eyeroll

Honestly that's what makes this all the more dangerous. He's trying to have his cake and eat it too: accept all of the hype and all of the propaganda, but then couch it in the rhetoric of "oh I'm so concerned I can remain in a sort of moderate & empathetic position and not fall prey to tribalism and flame wars."

There's no both-sides-ing of genAI. This is an issue akin to street narcotics, mass weapons of war, or forever chemicals. You're either on the side of heavy regulation or outright bans, or you're on the side of tech politics which are directly harmful to humanity. The OP is not a thoughtful moderate because that's not how any of this works.

I don't understand why an interesting demo is buried here inside of some of the most ridiculous propaganda I've ever read on the topic of genAI.

It really makes me not have any interest in the actual thing you're showing.

Imagine if Wendy Carlos wrote an article about how it's cool she could use this new piece of technology called a Moog Modular synthesizer to create a recording of Bach, and now harpsichords are dead, acoustic instruments suck, and all Baroque music will be made on modular synthesizers forever more.

Unfortunately with AI it's much worse because it's more like if Wendy Carlos has slurped up all Baroque music ever recorded by everyone and then somehow regurgitated that back out as slop with some algorithmic modifications.

I'm sorry, I'm unable to accept that's where we're at now.

You need an explanation of how people make norms & laws regarding what is acceptable or unacceptable in society and industry?

“We can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

Actually we can. And we will.

Yup. Enshittification, right on track.

(I continue to be shocked how many people—who should know better—are in denial that the entire "industry" of Generative AI is completely and utterly unsustainable and furthermore on a level of unsustainability we've never before seen in the history of computer technology.)

I took have gone back to using an old Mac laptop lying around, running iTunes, and syncing music to my old iPod Classic. I was surprised that ALAC was supported even way back when, so I can listen to high-res lossless audio!

Saying "well the world sucks so what's new" isn't a perspective a lot of folks are going to resonate with. Just because we can recognize troubling patterns from the past in the present doesn't mean we just volunteer to lie down and take a boot to the neck. Positive change is always possible. Always.

I'm so completely over these types of articles. Just as the AI techbros want to convince people that "the genie is out of the bottle" and that these services & practices are inevitable, it is also the case the the cohort of people who explicitly eschew using genAI is significant and growing. Nobody is being convinced reading this…like "wow, I vowed never to use genAI as a software developer, and then suddenly I read this article and now I've seen the light!"

Never used Spotify, never will. I also, as a producer, pulled my music off that service a long time ago.

I'm also not very happy with Apple Music anymore either. The lack of UX care regarding the service is noticeable. It suffers from weird bugs and tracks which suddenly won't play all the time. This is not the Apple which lovingly created the first few versions of iTunes.

So I've started to collect a solid collection of lossless music files myself, a combination of CD rips, Bandcamp and Qobuz downloads. And I'm using alternate player software to access them, depending on the platform I happen to use. I don't use any server. I manually sync the music files between canonical storage systems (my iPhone, my Linux desktop, and my Mac desktop). I've even gotten my old iPod Classic out of mothballs and started messing around with it. So much fun!

This is what a pipeline which includes genAI tools should look like: using them for placeholders/prototypes/internal demos only, and making sure everything is properly labeled so it's replaced by correct, production assets created by real artists.

Good for them to disclose this and do the right thing. Seems to be the expected path for follow in 2026 now that the hype cycle is crashing to a halt.

I've been running "VSCode" via code-server as a self-hosted solution so I can fire up an IDE on any device including my iPad. I still use code-server, but increasingly when I'm at my Mac/Linux desktops (yes I have both!) I have been using Zed and it's gotten really good. The only major feature I miss is a visual Git Graph, but since I can still load code-server when I need that, no biggie.

I was genuinely surprised that I can use Zed to remote into my server and it works great with Ruby tooling like Solargraph LSP and Rubocop. Everything in the UI is refreshingly minimalist and quite snappy. Good stuff.

I don't see this as an either/or. It's great to be able to remote SSH into a personal server and do whatever you need to do to tweak and deploy software via the CLI alone. And I do believe those are skills every developer should cultivate.

But for day-to-day dev tasks, having VSCode/code-server/Zed/Neovim/whatever floats your boat, with all the lovely extensions and fonts and syntax highlighting and type hints and whatever you like to use, that's awesome and nothing to shrink back from.

If people need AI assistance to handle all their "boilerplate" all the time, the much larger problem is needing so much damn boilerplate written all the time.

The job of anyone developing an application framework, whether that's off the shelf or in-house, is to reduce the amount of boilerplate any individual developer needs to write to an absolute bare minimum. The ultimate win isn't to get "AI to write all your boilerplate." It's to not need to write boilerplate at all.

100% test coverage, for most projects of modest size, is extremely bad advice.

I'm sad programmers lacking a lot of experience will read this and think it's a solid run-down of good ideas.

I disagree with your insinuation that being creative with your mind as a human being is a form of recreation or personal growth or whatever (working out at the gym) whereas "creativity" on behalf of work projects gets done by Big Tech's generative algorithms. It becomes even more confusing because then later on you say "I inevitably will use AI to do many of these Gym tasks" …huh? So now even the creative "gym tasks" are done by AI too? Apparently our personal goals will shrink to a freakishly tiny little list by the end zone of your thought experiment!

"Now they're not." ???

For me, there isn't the slightest difference from before 2022 and after 2022, since I continually choose to boycott genAI services, and as an activist in the Pro-Craft movement, encourage others to do the same.

In fact it's an excellent shorthand. I make it a point to look up what all the AI boosters endlessly posting puff pieces on LinkedIn actually do for a living, and almost without exception it's someone who is directly attempting to profit off of exponential slop machine growth. Or as I like to say:

"The future of money is gold obtained from prospecting." –VP of Shovels, ShovelsCorp.

This essay falls under a growing category I call "start off sounding like you agree with critics of GenAI, then subtly attempt to undercut all of the power of their arguments."

The best way to engage with these sorts of articles is to completely ignore all stated advice and move on. There is no "separation of moving things on the job vs. moving things at the gym" when it comes to creative craft, the entire analogy is completely absurd.