From my experience in big and medium sized companies or even startups I would say that this was already the state of things before AI. Most leaders and top management were following internal committees, that were following consultants recommendations, that were themselves recommending what others were doing and was hype and/or following Gartner like "studies". The motivation was equally dubious, and many developers already had problem with management and product direction, but many didn’t bother to question it. AI just makes it obvious.
Nike has Nike SB for skateboard and they are (were?) awesome, the last two pairs I bought lasted more than 5 years being worn everyday. For comparison Vans last at best 6 months for me.
I think the parent is talking about quality stuff, and is specifically addressing that in contrast spam is increasing. It’s especially true in video games, more games then ever are released, but the amount of actually enjoyable quality game has barely increased. Last time I checked SoA models were still very lacking at game design, let alone capable of creating a finished original and fun game.
Europe explicitly does not provide security guarantees to Taiwan. A large majority of Europeans would not support an intervention. Seen from here sure it would be a loss for Democracy, but there are bigger problems today like climate change and global stability. War for and democracy at all costs narratives doesn’t work like in the US.
I’m in Europe, and I have the same sentiment regarding salary. The difference is I’m more than happy with a simple life and experiences that don’t cost too much money. I have free healthcare, plenty of time for social or outdoor activities. Travels and material things are nice, but I feel like young people are forgetting it doesn’t get better than spending time with friends and family and laughing with them or enjoying nature. Whether you makes 50k a year or you are a billionaire it’s the same (not talking about genuinely poor people obviously). Driving a lambo is additional fun, but that’s hardly what makes a day interesting in itself for me, so sometimes I’m not sure what younger people obsessed with getting rich, at least in Europe, are chasing.
The US had the strongest military in the world using outdated 20th century metrics. The new reality is the world is watching the US losing the war against Iran, depleting critical weapons inventories that need China’s supply chain to be rebuilt.
One way insulation does not exist. If your house is insulated to keep the heat inside, it is also very good at keeping the heat outside / cold inside.
Also tangentially many Europeans seem to be confusing insulation with inertia, saying their house is correctly insulated against the heat when in fact it’s just a stone building that is taking more time to heat up. At the extreme you have European churches buildings that are very badly insulated but stay cold most of summer because of all the stone mass.
One thing Europeans have yet to realize is that good insulation only works when the nights are cold enough to evacuate the heat before it reaches the inside, and that during a strong heatwave there is no adaptation possible, AC is needed.
You should rewatch Office Space, The Matrix or Fight Club to remind you what a typical office job was like in the 90s and what Gen X grew up with. Thinking you are entitled to a fun and creative job is more like a Millenials fantasy to me.
At their core all these self help books are not teaching you how to reshape your speech, but emotional intelligence. They are teaching better understanding of other and yourself. You can then use this understanding to have more fulfilling relations, or more easily manipulate others if you are less well intentioned. The line is very easy to draw, being honest is natural, you say the truth and are open to genuinely understand and build on the other person responses. On the other hand manipulating takes a very different mindset of faking being open to what others are saying.
Bitcoin has a 1.5T market cap with 0 revenue. I think Musk really got his eyes opened when he started playing with Dogecoin a few years ago. He applied the lessons successfully with Tesla, making the company an empty shell PR vehicle to support the TSLA "token".
Interesting chart that confirms hiring dynamics for SE have not much to do with AI despite all the PR, as in 2023 models and agents capabilities were quite limited, and now that capabilities increase hiring is picking up. I hope more journalists will start to challenge that narrative.
I guess we are simply not doing the same job. I’m customer facing, and the bread and butter of my job is to create software for the customer and client’s needs and constraints using proven tools and solutions, exactly like in civil engineering. Sometimes there are projects that require innovation, and yes some can specialize in innovative projects, but that’s not the majority of projects. In fact in my study in university the specialization between software, electrical, civil, etc. happens late in the cursus.
Thanks I think that explains part of the misunderstanding: I’m from a country where engineer is a regulated title, you can’t call yourself a software engineer if you indeed didn’t go through a comparable certification to a civil engineer.
I dont understand why software engineers insist on keeping the craftsmanship aspect of writing code. Compare to other engineering disciplines, like civil engineering. Engineering was never about going in the field yourself to build things with your own hands. You can become a great civil engineer without building bridges that fail yourself. To me it doesn’t matter that the thing I design is built with a crane or AI. I can design quality control processes too to ensure the thing is built up to standard, I don’t have to build the thing myself to be sure. There is nothing wrong with artisanal code crafting, I appreciate this too, but professionally that’s not engineering. It seems AI is just forcing us to clear the confusion the hard way.
I'm not in the field but I think it's because historically neural nets were looked down and deemed unpromising because they lacked understanding, compared to Symbolic AI or SVM for example. Since the Deep Learning revolution, which is engineering driven, the trend has inverted, research to understand and theory are seen as the things that hindered progress with neural nets in the past.
To me it was already quite intuitive, we are not really managing the psychological state: at its core a LLM try to make the concatenation of your input + its generated output the more similar it can with what it has been trained on. I think it’s quite rare in the LLMs training set to have examples of well thought professional solution in a hackish and urgency context.
I understand why they might be anxious, but my point is it’s unrelated to the technology itself. Imagine people denying the internet works in 2000 because of the Dotcom bubble. Same with layoffs, they are not really due to AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_corporate_m...), it’s a political discussion. And the antiwork vibe is not new, I have strong political convictions on how we should more equally redistribute capital gains so that even if AI was able to replace software engineers it would not be an issue but again that is political.
LLMs tooling brings a lot to senior devs. I have 15 YOE, I own a small agency, we are shipping faster, with less bugs, and believe it or not we are hiring, because we are able to take more work and grow, as it is logical without the political issues plaguing the US in particular. The market is already adjusting, hence why to me we are way past the point of developing professionally without LLMs.
So no I don’t get why the political topics are not discussed elsewhere and the irrational denial of the technology because of said political issues.
How can you still can't distinguish between using LLMs as tools and a non technical person vibe coding? I have yet to run into any serious software engineer that had to dive into a legacy codebase or an unknown tech stack and found no value in e.g. Claude Code for general understanding and refactoring. Not even talking about coding, just the capacity of generating custom contextualised documentation and examples tailored to your constraints and skills on the fly is ridiculously helpful.
> We are SO past the point of software being developed without LLMs at _all_
That's exactly why I've given up on programming, development or career subreddits. There are a lot of interesting software engineering challenges opening up, but instead of discussing it like professionals it all gets drowned in a big negative mixture of rants against the financial AI bubble, companies using AI as an excuse to lay off, and a general antiwork vibe. All these subreddits have become feel good/bad echo chambers for angry teens and students with no real world professional experience.
I’m not sure because in many modern open world games you are just like a Uber driver following GPS from checkpoint to checkpoint. It would with old school games that relied on memorizing the world and had minimal or even no map indications.
The reasoning is by being polite the LLM is more likely to stay on a professional path: at its core a LLM try to make your prompt coherent with its training set, and a polite prompt + its answer will score higher (gives better result) than a prompt that is out of place with the answer. I understand to some people it could feel like anthropomorphising and could turn them off but to me it's purely about engineering.
When the incumbent shoot themselves in the foot. Google and Microsoft are consultancy driven bureaucracies with abysmal product culture. At best Google will be the one providing the back end, but it’s very unlikely to me they’ll win the end user product space.
The problem is not that individual action is not useful, it’s that governments and companies are actively discouraging it, because every success for climate change is a bad news item. People buying less cars? Climate change win, economic problem. People buying less stuff, consumption down? Huge climate change win, very bad economic news. Even on progressive news outlets they’re doing it.
Here in Europe even before Trump’s second mandate it was clear governments didn’t really want individual action to take off. And it’s even worse now. Because short and mid term it’s a choice between climate and GDP. And western governments and companies are fundamentally incapable of long term action that is painful short term.
> It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.
No, it's more like some folks like me are passionate about building/creating things that are useful or enjoyable, not about the tooling itself. I learned to use computers because I wanted to make things with them, like music. I got into programming because I wanted to create video games and apps. I enjoy programming because I'm passionate about the end result, but not about programming itself. Look at other engineering disciplines, do civil engineers complain that they are not paving the roads themselves?
I don't find it's a new mentality on Hacker News, to me it was always about broadening the hacker mentality outside of programming. Maybe it's more like the Venn diagram of people passionate about computers and programming for the sake of it and software engineers and builders used to completely overlap, but it is starting to drift, so the fact that we belong to different crowd is becoming more apparent.
> another car sees a gap and changes lanes in front of you
Usually if you maintain the slightly slower speed you had to maintain a safe following distance it doesn't matter, as the distance will either increase or they'll leave for another lane. You have to get used to drivers doing messy things in front of you, but at a safe distance. When doing this you are in fact helping the traffic becoming more fluid.