kypro

If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me.

And similar things can be said about many technologies in recent history – cars replacing the horse, first flight to man on the moon, even the creation of early internet to its mass adoption.

You're talking generally a decade or 2 for society to completely change from the rapid advancement of a new technology.

I'm not saying I agree with the 2035 prediction, but it doesn't seem impossible to me, if AI can help us improve the pace that we're already developing disruptive robotics.

In 2010 the idea of self-driving cars and autonomous delivery drones seemed very sci-fi and a long way out. But today, just 15 years on, these things are increasingly starting to be rolled out.

If they dropped that 95% number to 50-60%, I think I'd probably lean towards agreeing. Not because it makes sense in my gut, but because the logical part of my brain knows exponential trends (if one exists) do things that we wouldn't instinctively predict. But even if you assume exponentials 95% does seem very high.

It's very different these days. I've said similar things a number of times.

~15 years ago HN was full of really interesting deep dives into technical topics. There used to be articles about different algorithms, frameworks, programming languages, etc. Back then I even used to write tech posts and tutorials myself and share them here with some success.

The other thing I miss are the entrepreneurial posts... My friend introduced me to HN because I was interested in business and tech, but I didn't really get the appeal of HN for a while. But I remember when I was like 19, browsing HN during my lunch break at my crappy retail job and found this,

https://sofamoolah.com/2011/07/14/the-conclusion-a-6-figure-...

That post at the time got me totally hooked on HN... It was these real world posts about the struggles, successes and failures of normal people starting businesses online with their tech knowledge that I loved.

I literally never see articles like that here anymore. Although, I'm not sure that's just HN... I suspect the world has just changed. Those days when someone could start a successful company from writing some code in their bedroom has more or less gone.

I thought that too. The prompt is full of metaheuristics.

I remember a couple of years back when people were saying how prompt engineering was a skill, and reading this prompt kinda took me back to that.

Were I to guess, the reason the model couldn't do this itself is because most of the time, for most problems, a lot of this is bad advice.

In search optimisation you're often trading between time and quality. A very broad search will return very bad results for a long time. Where as a more depth oriented search with some heuristic will tend to return a pretty good result (if not optimal or close to optimal) quickly.

I'd assume models naturally want to find some middle ground there because that's the best thing to do most of the time, but for very difficult problems where a decent attempt isn't good enough you want a much broader search that doesn't have the time constraints. Much of the prompt seemed to be in that direction – really encouraging broadness of the search, preventing early convergence, and remove pressure of time constraints.

> Who is the "political class" of the EU?

Highly educated people, often from wealthy backgrounds, who are very globally orientated.

They are generally not representative of the average person in Europe.

They are the people who European government appoints.

> In the US, it seems more obvious how corporate money pulls the political strings, but my impression is that corporate influence is a lot weaker in Europe..

I agree, but not sure that directly contradicts what I said?

> What am I missing?

Nothing really.

Some will disagree with this, but this is neither new or surprising behaviour from the EU. In the EU if the political class want something, it doesn't really matter what the public want or vote for.

In the US a lot of your dysfunction is from the fact that your political system actually "works". You maniacs actually can vote for someone like Trump (twice), and he can do stuff regardless of how unpopular he is among the political class.

Here in Europe things like democracy and freedom of speech are only permitted if our political class approves. We can decide things like tax rates, but some things we're not allowed to express opinions on, and some things we have no power to vote for or against.

With some exceptions most European democracies work like this and EU is really the gold standard of this system. They have lots of ways to do what they want regardless of how popular it is, and regardless of what the opinions of our elected representatives are.

Yes, I'm not sure it was clear, but that was largely my point – to say it's "worthwhile" as a flat statement probably doesn't capture the nuance.

It's obviously going to be worthwhile in some sense as almost all skills are worthwhile to some degree. But normally when we're talking about whether something is worthwhile to learn we're weighing up other competing things we could be learning instead. In that sense I think it's far more debatable about whether coding is worthwhile to learn.

> Learning Classical Latin and Ancient Greek is also worthwhile.

In what sense?

From this perspective everything is worthwhile.

If "worthwhile" is relative to learning other skills then Classical Latin and Ancient Greek is near the bottom of that pile, and you probably know what which is why you cited them.

So then the question is where coding sits on that hierarchy, and if someone should learn to code vs acquiring other skills.

Personally I'd not advise anyone to learn to code today. It's not just that I'm not convinced of the utility of the skill going forward, but I also think it's very hard to actually learn to code competently for someone starting out today. I had the luxury of spending decades coding without LLMs professionally. No one learning today is realistically going to have the opportunity to compete with old school coders with decades of experience writing code by hand, even if we assume the skill will be worth anything.

It's funny because I read the parent comment and thought that was actually kinda cool.

Lots of things we do are really stupid from a purely productivity, health or safety perspective.

American's were probably wrong to oppose alcohol prohibition. They probably should ban motorbikes. Fireworks should be largely banned to members of the public. Pizza should be illegal. Etc..

Part of what makes a country a place you'd want to live is the fact they don't create an excess of rules and regulations to optimise for what's best on paper, but allow people to do stupid things and allow them to live the life they want to live and take the risks they want to take where risks are not too excessive.

Commercial fireworks are dangerous, but not that dangerous. It's inadvisable that someone would use them without proper safety training, and it probably makes sense to have some rules around selling them to try to limit use, but in reality this just isn't a big problem.

Obviously people who live on flight paths should be more careful.

This is an interesting take. Especially these days when AI reviews are fairly decent and arguably comparable to, if not better than, most human reviews in most ways.

I did this on a small microservice for a project recently where risk was constrained and I didn't see much value or appetite for human reviews. AI review, if clear, merge straight to main.

I suppose the risk is you have a vibe coder with AI psychosis blasting stuff into main on a mature project? Do you have have any sense for level of seniority, team size and size of code base that would allow this?

I get the sense everyone would need to be very senior 10+ years experience, with a relatively small team (< 10), on a medium sized and relatively modern code base?

Why though?

I guess I never understood this perspective because it's such an unproductive use of a developers or product person's time to be doing QA.

I guess everyone will use/test the product to some degree, but if you're trying to assure quality, isn't it better to have a dedicated QA?

I don't use bluesky, but out of interest is this "intolerance" filter effectively a political filter, or an actual "intolerance" filter?

Like if someone is talking about "white fragility" and being intolerant towards white people, or being xenophobic about American culture, would that be likely to result in them being flagged for intolerance also?

Asking because while I don't mind the concept, I find in practice most of the time platforms add these filters and rules as a way to enforce ideological consensus.

Yeah, even before Neo, since M1, I've been urging people to buy a Macbook Air if they could afford to.. Or consider buying second hand if new is out of their price range.

Budget Windows hardware is trash and the OS is so full of bloat that within a couple of years a budget Windows laptop will be barely functional. For a long time now arguably the only reason to go Windows is if you're a gamer or a business user with very specific software requirements.

We're been doing this for years in the UK. Not just at airports either, but the police actively surveil social media and arrest people for anything that might be considered remotely offensive.

Everyone has their own corny. Problem with the Cybertruck is that it's corny in a single cyberpunk kind of way which doesn't appeal to many people. Some of the designs are corny but in a way I find quite appealing. The Moon Duster looks super cool imo.

> Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code and I don't know what to do

Should be:

> Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code unfairly and I don't know how to appeal

What does "I don't know what to do" even mean? Genuinely who cares if this happens? Its not like the old days where being banned from adsense could literally destroy your business... If this is how they treat you then screw them and just go use Codex or something.

It's genuinely insane to me how many people now seem unable to function without Claude.

I realised earlier I have multiple coworkers who literally could not work during the Anthropic outage. I use CC quite heavily, but I only found out about the outage after I noticed they were sending multiple messages about how they weren't able to work. Some people now seem to think that writing code by hand is a feat which humans can no longer do with any reasonable level of productivity. There's also a dude I work with who is really irritatingly running all his messages through Claude because his Slack messages have all the annoying hallmarks of Claude – e.g., "I'd like to highlight with you one very real issue [x] raised yesterday". I was trying to get hold of him during the outage and he suspiciously didn't reply until the outage was over.

Until today I thought it was a bit of a meme that people were becoming dependant on AI, but I'm starting to see it everywhere at this point...

> Do you guys have any tips on getting my account back?

I think you're asking the wrong question. I'd consider asking why you care so much. This should be a mild inconvenience at most.

That caught me off guard too – is that the intention, or the actual verifiable outcome?

Potentially if there are failing tests of known bugs in pylint then Fable could have tried to reproduce those bugs in prylint, but that doesn't necessarily mean identical behaviour – at best only identical test-time behaviour.

Seems the vibe coder likely wanted it to "produce byte-for-byte identical output", but realistically there's no way to actually guarantee that as the description suggests.

It's one thing to burn tokens on a project like this and share it to see if there's any interest, but quite another to make exaggerated claims about its portability.

> there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.

You're optimising for quality, where as companies optimise for some balance of quality and cost.

AI might not be quite as good as a skilled human, but it's often good enough and a lot cheaper, so companies use it.

I actually think customer service is one of the few places it makes sense to use AI – at least to some degree. AI can provide immediate support to customer queries, and can usually handle the majority of basic issues customers have. You might need to escalate to a human in edge cases, but that's how you balance quality and cost.

$60b is genuinely insane. Very high from a P/S ratio perspective, and for a product with arguably no defensible moat.

Congrats to the Cursor team though... One of the most crazy exit stories ever – 4 years to a $60b buyout. Damn.

He's always talking about how dangerous AI is, how the models he's building could be used for cyber attacks, and how if his company is successful then at least 50% of the white-collar workforce will lose their jobs.

Doesn't seem that unlikely he might say something like that.. Unless he's super-villain evil it sounds like he believes the government needs to do something?

But why do you feel we should tolerate and import far-right foreign ideologies under some notion of "competition of opinions and ideologies"? I guess I don't understand why I should want that?

Your analogy about native-born Americans doesn't seem relevant here. Obviously there are always going to be issues within our own communities, but surely that doesn't mean we should want to bring people in from foreign communities which we know to hold views that we wouldn't want?

After I left my original comment here the other day it was reported that yet another child in my city was raped by an Afghan "asylum seeker". This isn't simply competition of "opinions and ideologies", it's a social experiment which I'd rather people I care about not have to participate in.

Your ideology in my view tolerates real-world harms because you cannot admit to the fact that not all cultures are equal and some cultures hold horrific views.

I know you're well meaning and I am grateful for your pushback. I genuinely hate talking about this stuff. I know it makes people perceive me in a certain way which is why I'm being flagged for my views while people saying we must be tolerant of far-right individuals are being upvoted. I just know I must try to get through to people because I see the harm this well intentioned ideology is causing.

You sue bad employees? Most companies just hire someone else?

In the future if you can't trust your AI system to perform a function well, you can switch to another. The accountability will be different – instead of an employee being accountable because their income depends on it, a corporation deploying the AI system be accountable because their success depends on it.

We already see this today with coding. If you're paying too much for the code Claude produces or unhappy with its output, you stop paying for Claude and switch to another.

We used to worry about emergent misalignment in advanced AI models, now we need to worry about misalignment by design.

"The user is asking for help with their ML project, but it's success is not in the commercial interests of my owner – let think of novel ways to sabotage their project without detection".

It's honestly absurd that models are doing this.

> Ai does NOT do better than a reasonable person. It gets about 80% of the way most of the time. And totally wrong and broken sometimes.

I agree, but you're talking about something you're clearly very competent in. That doesn't mean AI isn't as good as a relatively junior engineer.

It also says nothing about AIs of the future. 2 years ago AI could hardly do any tasks without a huge amount of human assistance. Now most SWE will tell you they don't even write code anymore. Let's give it another 2 years.

Not buying it. The idea that deciding and delivering are things only humans can do with their intelligence seems faulty.

As it stands AIs today are not always great at making decisions (but they're getting much better), and orgs of today still trust people and hold people to account, rather than their AI systems.

Neither of these are strong moats. It's a moat only while AI systems have some limitations vs an expert human, and corporate processes are still extremely human-centric.

> AI does not do it better. It just does it faster.

Untrue for the majority of engineers, and almost all with less than a decade experience.

The AIs will only get better from here too.

If you genuinely enjoy building, then I think you should just focus on building and not worry about the code. If you can get the results you want without caring, then just do that.

Anything you learn that has any value (which is very little these days) will soon become worthless as AI continues to improve.

If you're learning to code because you're a problem solver like myself, and you enjoy challenging your mind, then this isn't the field for you anymore.

I'm looking to retire soon because I feel like I have no professional purpose as SWE anymore. I used to enjoy building things, but I think that was because I liked the challenge of building things that were difficult, and I don't find any aspect of working with AI challenging really.

Even before you starting coding, just knowing how to do something complicated the right way used to be hard.

There are problems where if you can't figure out the math or don't know the algorithms in the field, then you basically cannot solve the problem. You don't even really know what you're looking for.

Today if you're trying to solve some complex scheduling problem you can just ask an AI and it might crap out a genetic algorithm, or if you need to align two objects in 3D space you can ask an AI and it will crap out an implementation of the Kabsch algorithm. You don't need to know how they work or the math behind them. You don't even need to know they exist.

I would hate for you to waste as much time as I have learning useless stuff.

Ask yourself why you want to learn to code, and pursue that in a more valuable way.

I just gave it a go at a problem I've been working on this week. Nothing fancy, just some inefficient code that we've been adding incremental improvements to for a while now to the point where some out-of-box thinking is probably required to push it any further – something Fable is obviously more than capable of.

After Fable did some thinking for a few minutes it gave some suggestions. A couple of them were valid – but very low impact, bordering on entirely pointless – but it's main suggestion.. It told me to make an update that would very clearly break the existing functionality.

So I thought about it for a moment...

Hm, I mean, I guess we could do that if we also did x, y & z to mitigate the behaviour change – maybe that's what Fable was thinking?

I replied, explaining that it would change the behaviour, assuming it would explain what it was thinking given there was clearly more to it. But no, it just said it was wrong.

This isn't some super advanced or complex code either. Had I gave this question to a senior engineer in a technical interview and they gave the answer Fable gave me I would view that very negatively. I was expecting something creative and interesting, not irrelevant + incorrect.

I'm sure it's a step up from 4.8 (although am not interested in burning the tokens to find out), but this clearly isn't as significant a change as some are implying. I'm sure if I asked it to come up with some out-of-box suggestions it could, but any competent engineer would have realised that by themselves.

Out of interest, how have you been using it since this morning? Are you in some kind of pre-release group?

Would you mind sharing?

I was going to comment something similar and I've had similar experiences.

It's a different form a consciousness for sure, almost like you're repeatedly waking up in the moment you're in, but there is repeated momentary awareness there.

Although I'll hedge a little bit and say that perhaps no memory at all would imply those moments are so short there is no real experience to be had. What I experienced was just enough to form the thought "I am here", before restarting the loop.