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> I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools. It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways. It doesn't feel like blockchain at all. Blockchain

> I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools. It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways. It doesn't feel like blockchain at all. Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers). AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. People who have the time, knowledge and critical thinking skills to verify its outputs and steer it toward better answers. My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. The real problem isn’t AI itself; it’s the overblown promise that it would magically turn anyone into a programmer, architect, or lawyer without effort, expertise or even active engagement. That promise is pretty much dead at this point.

antihero 1y ago
It sounds like you are lacking inspiration. AI is a tool for making your ideas happen not giving you ideas.
- throw101010 1y ago
  I find your comment funny considering the OP, it's literally OpenAI claiming ChatGPT can start conversations now (in extenso give you inspiration/ideas).
jsheard 1y ago
> My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. Has your productivity objectively, measurably improved or does it just feel like it has improved? Recall the METR study which caught programmers self-reporting they were 20% faster with AI when they were actually 20% slower.
- jasonsb 1y ago
  Objectively. I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago, but the biggest breakthrough has been overcoming procrastination. When AI handles over 50% of the work, there’s a 90% chance I’ll finish the entire task faster than it would normally take me just to get started on something new.
  - svachalek 1y ago
    I don't think it's helped me do anything I couldn't do, in fact I've learned it's far easier to do hard things myself than trying to prompt an AI out of the ditches it will dig trying to do it. But I also find it's great for getting painful and annoying tasks out of the way that I really can't motivate to do myself.
    - wiml 1y ago
      I think there might be cases, for some people or some tasks, where the difficulty of filling in a blank page is greater than the difficulty of fixing an entire page of errors. Even if you have to do all the same mental work, it feels like a different category of work.
    - cheema33 1y ago
      > I don't think it's helped me do anything I couldn't do I am seeing a pattern here. It appears that AI isn't for everyone. Not everyone's personality may be a good fit for using AI. Just like not everybody is a good candidate for being a software dev, or police officer etc. I used to think that it is a tool. Like a car is. Everybody would want one. But that appears not be the case. For me, I used AI every day as a tool, for work and and home tasks. It is a massive help for me.
      - noobly 1y ago
        It’s weird how divisive it is. For me it’s completely dependent on the quality of the output. Lately, it’s been more of a hinderance.
      - majormajor 1y ago
        What home tasks do you use it for? It's hard for me to imagine many. It's not doing the dishes or watering the plants. If I wanted to rearrange the room I could have it mock up some images, I guess...
        joemazerino 1y ago
- logicprog 1y ago
  The design of that study is pretty bad, and as a result it doesn't end up actually showing what it claims to show / what people claim it does. https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-by-ai-evaluating-an-rct-and-what-it-tells-us-about-developer-productivity/ https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-...
  - singron 1y ago
    I don't think there is anything factually wrong with this criticism, but it largely rehashes caveats that are already well explored in the original paper, which goes through unusual lengths to clearly explain many ways the study is flawed. The study gets so much attention since it's one of the few studies on the topic with this level of rigor on real-world scenarios, and it explains why previous studies or anecdotes may have claimed perceived increases in productivity even if there wasn't any actual increases. It clearly sets a standard that we can't just ask people if they felt more productive (or they need to feel massively more productive to clearly overcome this bias).
    - logicprog 1y ago
      > it largely rehashes caveats that are already well explored in the original paper, which goes through unusual lengths to clearly explain many ways the study is flawed. ... The study gets so much attention since it's one of the few studies on the topic with this level of rigor on real-world scenarios, Yes, but most people don't seem aware of those caveats, and this is a good summary of them, and I think it does undercut the "level of rigour" of the study. Additionally, some of what the article points out is not explicitly acknowledged and connected by the study itself. For instance, if you actually split up the tasks by type, some tasks show a speed up and some show a slowdown, and the qualitative comments by developers about where they thought AI was good/bad aligned very well with which saw what results. Or (iirc) the fact that the task timing was per task, but developer's post hoc assessments were a prediction of how much they thought they were sped up on average across all tasks, meaning it's not really comparing the same things when comparing how developers felt vs how things actually went. Or the fact that developers were actually no less accurate in predicting times to task completion overall wrt to AI vs non-AI. > and it explains why previous studies or anecdotes may have claimed perceived increases in productivity even if there wasn't any actual increases. Framing it that way assumes as an already established fact that needs to be explained that AI does not provide more productivity Which actually demonstrates, inadvertently, why the study is so popular! People want it to be true, so even if the study is so chock full of caveats that it can't really prove that fact let alone explain it, people appeal to it anyway. > It clearly sets a standard that we can't just ask people if they felt more productive Like we do for literally every other technological tool we use in software? > (or they need to feel massively more productive to clearly overcome this bias). All of this assumes a definition of productivity that's based on time per work unit done, instead of perhaps the amount of effort required to get a unit of work done, or the extra time for testing, documentation, shoring up edge cases, polishing features, that better tools allow. Or the ability to overcome dread and procrastination that comes from dealing with rote, boilerplate tasks. AI makes me so much more productive that friends and my wife have commented on it explicitly without needing to be prompted, for a lot of reasons.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  If you want another data point, you can just look at my company github (https://github.com/orgs/sibyllinesoft/repositories https://github.com/orgs/sibyllinesoft/repositories). ~27 projects in the last 5 weeks, probably on the order of half a million lines of code, and multiple significant projects that are approaching ship readiness (I need to stop tuning algorithms and making stuff gorgeous and just fix installation/ensure cross platform is working, lol).
  - shafyy 1y ago
    Lines of codes is not a measure of anything meaningful on its own. The mere fact that you suggest this as prove that you are more productive makes me think you are not.
    - CuriouslyC 1y ago
      The SWE industry is eagerly awaiting your proposed accurate metric. I find that people who dismiss LoC out of hand without supplying better metrics tend to be low performers trying to run for cover.
      - oofbey 1y ago
        Loc is so easy to game. Reformat. Check in a notebook. Move things around. Pointless refactor. If nobody is watching loc, it’s generally a good metric. But as soon as people start valuing it, it becomes useless.
        sebastiennight 1y ago
        See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law and, in the case of "Lines of code" as a metric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
      - dmamills 1y ago
        A metric I'd be interested in is the number of clients you can convince to use this slop.
- jama211 1y ago
  Not this again. That study had serious problems. But I’m not even going to argue about that. I want to raise something no one else seems to mention about AI in coding work. I do a lot of work now with AI that I used to code by hand, and if you told me I was 20% slower on average, I would say “that’s totally fine it’s still worth it” because the EFFORT level from my end feels so much less. It’s like, a robot vacuum might take way longer to clean the house than if I did it by hand sure. But I don’t regret the purchase, because I have to do so much less _work_. Coding work that I used to procrastinate about because it was tedious or painful I just breeze through now. I’m so much less burnt out week to week. I couldn’t care less if I’m slower at a specific task, my LIFE is way better now I have AI to assist me with my coding work, and that’s super valuable no matter what the study says. (Though I will say, I believe I have extremely good evidence that in my case I’m also more productive, averages are averages and I suspect many people are bad at using AI, but that’s an argument for another time).
  - blks 1y ago
    Often someone’s personal productivity with AI means someone else have to dig through their piles of rubbish to review PR they committed. In your particular case it sounds like you’re rapidly loosing your developer skills, and enjoy that now you have to put less effort and think less.
    - wussboy 1y ago
      We know that relying heavily on Google Maps makes you less able to navigate without Google Maps. I don't think there's research on this yet, but I would be stunned if the same process isn't at play here.
      - lukan 1y ago
        I know that I am better at navigating with google maps than average people, because I navigated for years without it (partly on purpose). I know when not to trust it. I know when to ignore recommendations on recalculated routes. Same with LLMs. I am better with it, because I know how to solve things without the help of it. I understand the problem space and the limitations. Also I understand how hype works and why they think they need it (investors money). In other words, no, just using google maps or ChatGPT does not make me dumb. Only using it and blindly trusting it would.
- tunesmith 1y ago
  Data point: I run a site where users submit a record. There was a request months ago to allow users to edit the record after submitting. I put it off because while it's an established pattern it touches a lot of things and I found it annoying busy work and thus low priority. So then gpt5-codex came out and allowed me to use it in codex cli with my existing member account. I asked it to support edit for that feature all the way through the backend with a pleasing UI that fit my theme. It one-shotted it in about ten minutes. I asked for one UI adjustment that I decided I liked better, another five minutes, and I reviewed and released it to prod within an hour. So, you know, months versus an hour.
  - paulryanrogers 1y ago
    Is the hour really comparable to months spent not working on it?
    - rpdillon 1y ago
      He's referring to the reality that AI helps you pick up and finish tasks that you otherwise would have put off. I see this all day every day with my side projects as well as security and customer escalations that come into my team. It's not that Giant Project X was done six times as fast. It's more like we were able to do six small but consequential bug fixes and security updates while we continued to push on the large feature.
    - jama211 1y ago
      “If you make a machine that can wash the dishes in an hour, is that more productive than not doing the dishes for months?” - Yes! That’s the definition of productivity!! The dishes are getting done now and they weren’t before! lol
- bozhark 1y ago
  Yes, for me. Instead of getting overwhelmed doing to many things, I can offload a lot of menial and time-driven tasks Reviews are absolutely necessary but take less time than creation
  - jama211 1y ago
    Exactly. Is HN full of old codgers demanding that we can’t possibly use a calculator because that might mean we’d lose the precious skill of how to use a slide rule? The old man energy in here is insane
- james_marks 1y ago
  Yesterday is a good example- in 2 days, I completed what I expected to be a week’s worth of heads-down coding. I had to take a walk and make all new goals. The right AI, good patterns in the codebase and 20 years of experience and it is wild how productive I can be. Compare that to a few years ago, when at the end of the week, it was the opposite.
  - al_be_back 1y ago
    makes no sense. how are you comparing yesterday with a "a few years ago" ?
- rpdillon 1y ago
  My personal project output has gone up dramatically since I started using AI, because I can now use times of night where I'm otherwise too mentally tired, to work with AI to crank through a first draft of a change that I can then iterate on later. This has allowed me to start actually implementing side projects that I've had ideas about for years and build software for myself in a way I never could previously (at least not since I had kids). I know it's not some amazing GDP-improving miracle, but in my personal life it's been incredibly rewarding.
  - animex 1y ago
    This, 1000x. I had a dozen domains and projects on the shelf for years and now 8 of them have significant active development. I've already deployed 2 sites to production. My github activity is lighting up like a Christmas tree.
  - boogieknite 1y ago
    i find a lot of value in using it to give half baked ideas momentum. some sort of "shower thought" will occur to me for a personal project while im at work and ill prompt Claude code to analyze and demonstrate an implementation for review later on the other hand i believe my coworker may have taken it too far. it seems like productivity has significantly slipped. in my perception the approaches hes using are convoluted and have no useful outcome. im almost worried about him because his descriptions of what hes doing make no sense to me or my teammates. hes spending a lot of time on it. im considering telling him to chill out but who knows, maybe im just not as advanced a user as him? anyone have experience with this?
    - r_lee 1y ago
      Do you mean like convoluted agentic stuff, markdown files etc? Or like AI delusion?
      - boogieknite 1y ago
        the former it started as an approach to a mass legacy code migration. sound idea with potential to save time. i followed along and understood his markdown and agent stuff for analyzing and porting legacy code i reviewed results which apply to my projects. results were mixed bag but i think it saved some time overall. but now i dont get where hes going with his ai aspirations my best attempt to understand is he wants to work entirely though chats, no writing code, and hes doing so by improving agents through chats. hes really swept up in the entire concept. i consider myself optimistic about ai but his enthusiasm feels misplaced its to the point where his work is slipping and management is asking him where his results are. were a small team and management isnt savvy enough to see hes getting NOTHING done and i wont sell him out. however if this is a known delusional pattern id like to address it and point to a definition and/or past cases so he can recognize the pattern and avoid trouble
- yokoprime 1y ago
  I'm objectively faster. Not necessarily if I'm working on a task I've done routinely for years, but when taking on new challenges I'm up and running much faster. A lot of it have to do with me offloading doing the basic research while allowing myself to be interrupted; it's not a problem that people reach out with urgent matters while I'm taking on a challenge I've only just started to build towards. Being able to correct the ai where I can tell it's making false assumptions or going off the rails helps speed things up
- Kiro 1y ago
  The "you only think you're more productive" argument is tiresome. Yes, I know for sure that I'm more productive. There's nothing uncertain about it. Does it lead to other problems? No doubt, but claiming my productivity gains are imaginary is not serious. I've seen a lot of people who previously touted that it doesn't work at all use that study as a way to move the goalpost and pretend they've been right all along.
  - m_fayer 1y ago
    We’re being accused of false consciousness!
  - chrysoprace 1y ago
    I would be interested to know how you measure your productivity gains though, in an objective way where you're not the victim of bias. I just recently had to rate whether I felt like I got more done by leaning more on Claude Code for a week to do a toy project and while I _feel_ like I was more productive, I was already biased to think so, and so I was a lot more careful with my answer, especially as I had to spend a considerable amount of time either reworking the generated code or throwing away several hours of work because it simply made things up.
    - Kiro 1y ago
      It sounds like you're very productive without AI or that your perceived gains are pretty small. To me, it's such a stark contrast that asking how I measure it is like asking me to objectively verify that a car is faster than walking.
      - laserlight 1y ago
        “I'm eating fewer calories yet keep putting on weight.” There's a reason self-reported measures are questioned: they have been wildly off in different domains. Objectively verifying that a car is faster than walking is easy. When it's not easy to objectively prove something, then there are a lot that could go wrong, including the disagreements on the definition of what's being measured.
- m_fayer 1y ago
  It seems like the programming world is increasingly dividing into “LLMs for coding are at best marginally useful and produce huge tech debt” vs “LLMs are a game changing productivity boost”. I truly don’t know how to account for the discrepancy, I can imagine many possible explanations. But what really gets my goat is how political this debate is becoming. To the point that the productivity-camp, of which I’m a part, is being accused of deluding themselves. I get that OpenAI has big ethical issues. And that there’s a bubble. And that ai is damaging education. And that it may cause all sorts of economic dislocation. (I emphatically Do Not get the doomers, give me a break). But all those things don’t negate the simple fact that for many of us, LLMs are an amazing programming tool, and we’ve been around long enough to distinguish substance from illusion. I don’t need a study to confirm what’s right in front of me.
  - Sharlin 1y ago
    I’d love to know whether and to what extent the people for which AI has been a huge boost are those who were already producing slop, and now they have AI that can produce that slop much faster.
    - Eisenstein 1y ago
      By framing it in such a way you are making personal and it becomes less about defending the process of using AI and more about defending their integrity as a developer. You will not get anything useful when someone responds in that way, just a heated argument where they feel deeply insulted and act accordingly.
      - jama211 1y ago
        Well said
    - jama211 1y ago
      Sheesh, how do you expect to be taken seriously when you sneer through gritted teeth like that? I work with many developers of varying skill levels, all of which use AI. The only ones who have attempted to turn in slop are ones that basically turned out that they can’t code at all and didn’t keep their job long. Those who know what they’re doing, use it as a TOOL. They carefully build, modify, review and test everything and usually write about half of it themselves and it meets our strict standards. Which you would know if you’d listened to what we’ve been telling you in good faith.
- tomrod 1y ago
  I'm not who you responded to. I see about a 40% to 60% speed up as a solution architect when I sit down to code and about a 20% speedup when building/experimenting with research artifacts (I write papers occasionally). I have always been a careful tester, so my UAT hasn't blown up out of proportion. The big issue I see is rust it generates code using 2023-recent conventions, though I understand there is some improvement in thst direction. Our hiring pipeline is changing dramatically as well, since the normal things a junior needs to know (code, syntax) is no longer as expensive. Joel Spolsky's mantra to higher curious people who get things done captures well the folks I find are growing well as juniors.
- citizenkeen 1y ago
  I have a very big hobby code project I’ve been working on for years. AI has not made me much more productive at work. I can only work on my hobby project when I’m tired after the kids go to bed. AI has made me 3x productive there because reviewing code is easier than architecting. I can sense if it’s bad, I have good tests, the requests are pretty manageable (make a new crud page for this DTO using app conventions). But at work where I’m fresh and tackling hard problems that are 50% business political will? If anything it slows me down.
  - jama211 1y ago
    Bureaucracy is often a bottleneck
- mountainriver 1y ago
  There have been plenty of studies showing the opposite. Also a sample size of 16 ain’t much
- luc_ 1y ago
  We're choosing to offload processing that our brain could be doing but we're too lazy to do it or the perceived value for us to do it is. I think there are consequences to this especially as we give the machine free information of how we twist and turn it into actually understanding what we mean. Interesting to consider that if our first vibecode prompt isn't what we actually want; it can train on how we direct it further. Offloading human intelligence is useful but... we're losing something.
  - Fade_Dance 1y ago
    The majority of people seem to offload most of their thinking as is, and actively avoid things like critical thinking, confronting their own biases, seeking push-back against their own beliefs, etc. As with many other technologies, AI can be an enabler of this, or it can be used as a tool to empower and enhance learning and personal growth. That ultimately depends on the human to decide. One can dramatically accelerate personal and professional growth using these tools. Admittedly the degree to which one can offload tasks is greatly increased with this iteration, to the extent that at times you can almost seem like offloading your own autonomy. But many people already exist in this state, exclusively parroting other people's opinions without examining them, etc.
    - luc_ 1y ago
      Yeah real talk. It can really play to folks bias towards laziness and the fact that it's being controlled by corporations / (the few) / (the ultra-wealthy) should give us pause to consider the level of control it does and will influence over the majority of people...
- itake 1y ago
  I think its Apples to Oranges. The performance gains come from being able to ask specific questions about problems I deal with and (basically) have a staff engineer that I can bounce ideas off of. I am way faster at writing tasks on problems I am familiar with vs an AI. But me trying to figure out the database I should deeply look at for my usecase or debug android code when I don't know kotlin has saved me 5000x time.
- dmackerman 1y ago
  The thing is, most programming is mundane. Rename files, move them, make sure imports are correct, make sure builds pass...AI can do all of these with very high accuracy (most of the time).
swalsh 1y ago
" Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented " Actually AI may be more like blockchain then you give it credit for. Blockchain feels useless to you because you either don't care about or value the use cases it's good for. For those that do, it opens a whole new world they eagerly look forward to. As a coder, it's magical to describe a world, and then to see AI build it. As a copyeditor it may be scary to see AI take my job. Maybe you've seen it hilucinate a few times, and you just don't trust it. I like the idea of interoperable money legos. If you hate that, and you live in a place where the banking system is protected and reliable, you may not understand blockchain. It may feel useless or scary. I think AI is the same. To some it's very useful, to others it's scary at best and useless at worst.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- yieldcrv 1y ago
  "I'm not the target audience and I would never do the convoluted alternative I imagined on the spot that I think are better than what blockchain users do"
- esafak 1y ago
  People in countries with high inflation or where the banking system is unreliable are not using blockchains, either.
  - eric_cc 1y ago
    Do you have any proof to support this claim? Stable coins use alone is in the 10's (possibly hundreds now) of billions in daily transaction globally. I'd be interested to hear your source for your claim.
    - esafak 1y ago
      I'm from a high inflation country. Let's see your evidence of use in such countries, since you are throwing numbers out.
9rx 1y ago
> AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. No more powerful than I without the A. The only advantage AI has over I is that it is cheaper, but that's the appeal of the blockchain as well: It's cheaper than VISA. The trouble with the blockchain is that it hasn't figured out how to be useful generally. Much like AI, it only works in certain niches. The past interest in the blockchain was premised on it reaching its "AGI" moment, where it could completely replace VISA at a much lower cost. We didn't get there and then interest started to wane. AI too is still being hyped on future prospects of it becoming much more broadly useful and is bound to face the same crisis as the blockchain faced if AGI doesn't arrive soon.
- fn-mote 1y ago
  Blockchain only solves one problem Visa solves: transferring funds. It doesn't solve the other problems that Visa solves. For example, there is no way to get restitution in the case of fraud.
  - 9rx 1y ago
    Yes, that is one of the reasons it hasn't been able to be used generally. But AI can't be used generally either. Both offer niche solutions for those with niche problems, but that's about it. They very much do feel the same, and they are going to start feeling even more the same if AGI doesn't arrive soon. Don't let the niche we know best around here being one of the things AI is helping to solve cloud your vision of it. The small few who were able to find utility in the blockchain thought it was useful too
- buffalobuffalo 1y ago
  Blockchain only has 2 legitimate uses (from an economic standpoint) as far as I can tell. 1) Bitcoin figured out how to create artificial scarcity, and got enough buy-in that the scarcity actually became valuable. 2)Some privacy coins serve an actual economic niche for illegal activity. Then there's a long list of snake oil uses, and competition with payment providers doesn't even crack the top 20 of those. Modern day tulip mania.
oblio 1y ago
> My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. If you don't mind me asking, what do you do?
domatic1 1y ago
>> Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented so useless there is almost $3 Trillion of value on blockchains.
- unbalancedevh 1y ago
  Unfortunately, the amount of money invested in something isn't indicative of it's utility. For example: the tulip mania, beanie babies, NFTs, etc.
- sumeno 1y ago
  No there isn't. These ridiculous numbers are made up by taking the last price a coin sold for and multiplying it by all coins. If I create a shitcoin with 1 trillion coins and then sell one to a friend for $1 I've suddenly created a coin with $1 trillion in "value"
  - fylo 1y ago
    I'm not sure the 3 trillion includes shit coin valuations. Typically volume and liquidity are factored in for any serious analysis. Your assessment of valuation is probably just as true for traditional currencies and stocks. I guess the main difference is regulation.
  - iammrpayments 1y ago
    Good luck with the SEC when you open your exchange
    - sumeno 1y ago
      It's 2025, financial crimes are legal
  - michaelscott 1y ago
    3 trillion is just the top 5 or 6
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
Terr_ 1y ago
> the most useless technology Side-rant pet-peeve: People who try to rescue the reputation of "Blockchain" as a promising way forward by saying its weaknesses go away once you do a "private blockchain." This is equivalent to claiming the self-balancing Segway vehicles are still the future, they just need to be "improved even more" by adding another set of wheels, an enclosed cabin, and disabling the self-balancing feature. Congratulations, you've backtracked back to a classic [distributed database / car].
- eru 1y ago
  Going off on a tangent: the blockchain people have paid my salary for a few years now, and I still don't own any blockchain assets. I do like the technology for its own sake, but I agree that it's mostly useless today. (At least most of it. The part of blockchain that's basically 'git' is useful, as you can see with git. Ie an immutable, garbage colected Merkle-tree as a database, but you trust that Linux Torvalds has the pointer to the 'official' Linux kernel commit, instead of using a more complicated consensus mechanism.) However there's one thing that's coming out of that ecosystem that has the potential to be generally useful: Zero Knowledge Proofs. To quote myself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45357320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45357320): Yes, what Zero Knowledge proofs give you however is composability. Eg suppose you have one system that lets you verify 'this person has X dollars in their bank account' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Honduras' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Germany', then whether the authors of these three systems ever intended to or not, you can prove a statement like 'this person has a prime number amount of dollars and has a passport from either Honduras or Germany'. I see the big application not in building a union. For that you'd want something like Off-The-Record messaging probably? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging Where I see the big application is in compliance, especially implementing know-your-customer rules, while preserving privacy. So with a system outlined as above, a bank can store a proof that the customer comes from one of the approved countries (ie not North Korea or Russia etc) without having to store an actual copy of the customer's passport or ever even learning where the customer is from. As you mentioned, for this to work you need to have an 'anchor' to the real world. What ZKP gives you is a way to weave a net between these anchors.
eric_cc 1y ago
> Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers) This is an incredibly uneducated take on multiple levels. If you're talking about Bitcoin specifically, even though you said "blockchain", I can understand this as a political talking about 8 years ago. But you're still banging this drum despite the current state of affairs? Why not have the courage to say you're politically against it or bitter or whatever your true underlying issue is?
- snicky 1y ago
  How is the current state of affairs different from 8 years ago? I don't want to argue, just a genuine question, because I don't follow much what's happening in the blockchain universum.
  - Yiin 1y ago
    I often pay for freelance work using crypto because it's much easier than dealing with banking infra to send payments to dozen of different countries. Sure you lose safety bank provides, but so you do when using cash.
    - bloqs 1y ago
      so nothing has changed and blockchain is still a solution looking for a problem
- cheema33 1y ago
  I am in the camp that thinks that Blockchain is utterly useless for most people. Perhaps you can tell us about some very compelling use cases that have taken off.
  - rabf 1y ago
    https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/nasdaq-makes-push-launch-trading-tokenized-securities-2025-09-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/nasdaq-makes-push-l... https://corporate.visa.com/en/solutions/crypto/stablecoins.html https://corporate.visa.com/en/solutions/crypto/stablecoins.h... https://www.barrons.com/articles/sofi-blockchain-money-transfer-4092d6c6 https://www.barrons.com/articles/sofi-blockchain-money-trans...
deleted 1y ago
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glouwbug 1y ago
This is funny, because my personal view is that AI’s biggest pitfall is that it allows the unqualified to build what they think they’re qualified for
- mrcwinn 1y ago
  Yes, learning and creating should be reserved only for the licensed!
  - glouwbug 1y ago
    It is in many fields. They're Professional Engineers, and they build nearly everything that's important to a society. Software is overrun by literally anyone and everyone because it's not a protected field of engineering
    - yakz 1y ago
      Hang on, my understanding of the situation is that only PEs are allowed to sign off on the design of a thing. They don't have to design it, and they almost certainly don't build it. Am I wrong?
      - glouwbug 1y ago
        The stamp is legally binding. The company you work for isn't gonna protect you financially if the bridge you stamped falls. This is how they protect their profession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches
coolestguy 1y ago
>Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers). You think a technology that allows millions of people all around the world to keep & trustlessly update a database, showing cryptographic ownership of something "the most useless technology ever invented"?
otabdeveloper4 1y ago
> Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented You can use blockchains to gamble and get rich quick, if you're lucky. That's a useful thing. Unlike "AI", which only creates more blogspam and technical debt in the world.
Geste 1y ago
Bad take about blockchain. Being able to send value across borders without intermediaries is unheard of in human history.
- aprilthird2021 1y ago
  No it's not. It's existed for a thousand years in Asia through the hawala system. I mean, you need an intermediary. But with blockchain your intermediary is the exchange, the developers of the cryptocurrency, etc.
  - Dilettante_ 1y ago
    >with blockchain your intermediary is the exchange, the developers of the cryptocurrency, etc. You are mistaken. The transfer of cryptocurrencies takes place on the blockchain ledger. That's, like, the core "thing". If you choose to bank with an exchange, that's like you bringing your cash money to a regular bank and depositing it. And the developers are no more intermediaries to your transaction than the Mint is an intermediary to your cash transaction.
    - aprilthird2021 1y ago
      I'm not mistaken. For an average person, they need to: 1. Understand how to use the technology and onboard onto it. In this case the technology is whichever blockchain and cryptocurrency. 2. Convert their money into the cryptocurrency. For this they need an exchange. Then they can send money to others who also went through those steps. Thus, there must be some kind of interaction with documentation made by devs for step 1 and a transfer of currency to an exchange for step 2. 2 middlemen/intermediaries.
      - Dilettante_ 1y ago
        All of that is entirely besides the point of this thread of conversation, which was concerning the transfer without intermediaries. The point was that if you are in possession of the currency, you are in full control with no one to interfere(or interfere by withholding cooperation) in the way that a bank would. You also do not need an exchange. You need to find a person willing to trade whatever for your cryptocurrency, exchanges merely make this more convenient but are by no means the only option. And saying onboarding requires an intermediary is like saying using a powerdrill or hooking up a washing machine requires an intermediary. The knowledge is so widely available and not contingent on a single or even few authorities that it's like picking fruit from a tree. It's just there.
ericfr11 1y ago
Take a look at new payments protocols for m AI agents
aprilthird2021 1y ago
> The real problem isn’t AI itself; it’s the overblown promise that it would magically turn anyone into a programmer, architect, or lawyer without effort, expertise or even active engagement. That promise is pretty much dead at this point. If that's dead, as you say, it would mean billions in value destruction for every tech stock. They have already promised so far beyond that.
- neumann 1y ago
  Yes, they are going to blow a lot of money on blowing hot air into this
eru 1y ago
There are two main use cases for blockchain assets at the moment: - Gambling (or politely called, speculation or even 'investment') - Ransomware payments, but that's a distant second I guess you say that influencers make money off the first? There's a third group making money off blockchain: the people making markets and running the infrastructure.
- Eisenstein 1y ago
  You forgot money laundering and paying for illegal things.
  - eru 1y ago
    No, I left them out deliberately. At some point in the past, you could perhaps buy illicit drugs with bitcoin, but that has largely died out, as far as I can tell. You can't even buy a pizza anymore.
- Jommi 1y ago
  and sending money cross borders to your family and paying suppliers outside of your country and having a multi-currency account without insane fees and automating finance and upgrading financial systems to modern tech
  - eru 1y ago
    I found interacting with the blockchain world to be much higher in fees than when going via the real finance route.
neya 1y ago
> AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. HN crowd is generally anti-AI, so you're not going to get a lot of positive feedback here. As a developer and someone who runs my own company, AI helps save me tons of hours - especially with research tasks, code audits - just to see if I've missed something, rapid frontend interface development and so much more if we go beyond the realm of just code. YMMV but I use ChatGPT even for stuff like cooking recipes based on whatever's inside my fridge. And this maybe just me, but I feel like my usage of Google has probably gone down to 50-60%. All this for $20 is really insane. Like you said, "people who are willing to put in work" really matters - that usually means being more intentional about your prompts, giving it as much context as possible.
- dns_snek 1y ago
  > HN crowd is generally anti-AI, so you're not going to get a lot of positive feedback here. Is this a joke? The front page of HN is 99% AI-positive. Things have calmed down a bit but there was a time when it felt like every other article on the front page was promoting AI.
- neumann 1y ago
  Rather than anti-AI, I think most of the HN crowd are educated enough about underlying technology and it's capabilities to see the snake oil being pushed. Most of us would have given it a good go (and probably still use it daily), just know the difference between its actual limitations and the dreams that are being sold.
  - neya 1y ago
    Is it really snake oil if it actually has meaningful time savings? Dismissing AI completely off as just snake oil seems to be extreme.
Frieren 1y ago
> AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. People who have the time, knowledge and critical thinking skills to verify its outputs and steer it toward better answers. My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. That sounds like calling stupid and lazy to anyone that is not able to get their "productivity skyrocketed" with LLMs. The reality is that LLMs are mostly a search engine that lies time to time. No, people is not stupid nor lazy for not gaining any substantial productivity using LLMs. The technology is just not able to do what big tech corporations say it can do.
player1234 1y ago
How did you measure this skyrocketed productivity? Please share your results and methodology!
username332211 1y ago
> It doesn't feel like blockchain at all. Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers). Given the prevailing trend of virtually all modern governments in the developed world that seems to be rather short-sighted. Who knows, if you won't be made a criminal for dissenting? Or for trying to keep your communication private?
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  Honestly, "only useful for crime" is the only part of blockchain that I like. What I don't like is the energy use of PoW, the centralization tendencies of PoS, and the general unusability of any existing coins as either a medium of exchange or a store of value. I'd love an anonymous digital cash that didn't boil the oceans, enrich oligarchs, or encourage speculation. It's just that blockchain cryptocurrencies are not that.
mapcars 1y ago
> Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers). Are you sure you are not confusing blockchain with crypto coins? Blockchain as a decentralised immutable and verifiable ledger actually has use in 0-trust scenarios.
- ryandvm 1y ago
  Actual "0-trust scenarios" are incredibly elusive in the real world. It pretty much comes down to illegal or "extra-legal" transactions. Almost nobody in the real world has a practical interest in carrying out transactions with people they don't trust and people that our outside the jurisdiction of their legal framework. It turns out that most people actually like being able to press criminal charges or have the ability to bring a law suit when the transaction goes south.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - lucasban 1y ago
    How is blockchain technology mutually exclusive from being able to take legal action against e.g. fraud? Sure there are implementations that can be used that way, but the core idea of a blockchain could be used to do the opposite as well, for example by making transaction information public and verifiable.
    - kspacewalk2 1y ago
      At some point in its lifecycle, it's no longer enough to hear about what a technology "could be used" for, because the time has come to judge it on its actual real world uses.
- kylebenzle 1y ago
  [dead]
tigerBL00D 1y ago
Only is not AI. It's LLM, diffusion models and what have you. The term AI became so overloaded that it means almost nothing these days. AGI is still hard to reach for, but it doesn't stop all kinds of spin artists from trying.
bossyTeacher 1y ago
>AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. Can we please call this technology transformers? Calling it AI makes it seem something more than it is (ie 2100 tech or something like that). Yes, transformers are great but it would be naive to ignore that much of the activity and dreams sold have no connection with reality and many of those dreams are being sold by the very people that make the transformers (looking at you, OpenAI)

antihero 1y ago

It sounds like you are lacking inspiration. AI is a tool for making your ideas happen not giving you ideas.

throw101010 1y ago
I find your comment funny considering the OP, it's literally OpenAI claiming ChatGPT can start conversations now (in extenso give you inspiration/ideas).

jsheard 1y ago

> My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. Has your productivity objectively, measurably improved or does it just feel like it has improved? Recall the METR study which caught programmers self-reporting they were 20% faster with AI when they were actually 20% slower.

jasonsb 1y ago
Objectively. I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago, but the biggest breakthrough has been overcoming procrastination. When AI handles over 50% of the work, there’s a 90% chance I’ll finish the entire task faster than it would normally take me just to get started on something new.
- svachalek 1y ago
  I don't think it's helped me do anything I couldn't do, in fact I've learned it's far easier to do hard things myself than trying to prompt an AI out of the ditches it will dig trying to do it. But I also find it's great for getting painful and annoying tasks out of the way that I really can't motivate to do myself.
  - wiml 1y ago
    I think there might be cases, for some people or some tasks, where the difficulty of filling in a blank page is greater than the difficulty of fixing an entire page of errors. Even if you have to do all the same mental work, it feels like a different category of work.
  - cheema33 1y ago
    > I don't think it's helped me do anything I couldn't do I am seeing a pattern here. It appears that AI isn't for everyone. Not everyone's personality may be a good fit for using AI. Just like not everybody is a good candidate for being a software dev, or police officer etc. I used to think that it is a tool. Like a car is. Everybody would want one. But that appears not be the case. For me, I used AI every day as a tool, for work and and home tasks. It is a massive help for me.
    - noobly 1y ago
      It’s weird how divisive it is. For me it’s completely dependent on the quality of the output. Lately, it’s been more of a hinderance.
    - majormajor 1y ago
      What home tasks do you use it for? It's hard for me to imagine many. It's not doing the dishes or watering the plants. If I wanted to rearrange the room I could have it mock up some images, I guess...
      - joemazerino 1y ago
logicprog 1y ago
The design of that study is pretty bad, and as a result it doesn't end up actually showing what it claims to show / what people claim it does. https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-by-ai-evaluating-an-rct-and-what-it-tells-us-about-developer-productivity/ https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-...
- singron 1y ago
  I don't think there is anything factually wrong with this criticism, but it largely rehashes caveats that are already well explored in the original paper, which goes through unusual lengths to clearly explain many ways the study is flawed. The study gets so much attention since it's one of the few studies on the topic with this level of rigor on real-world scenarios, and it explains why previous studies or anecdotes may have claimed perceived increases in productivity even if there wasn't any actual increases. It clearly sets a standard that we can't just ask people if they felt more productive (or they need to feel massively more productive to clearly overcome this bias).
  - logicprog 1y ago
    > it largely rehashes caveats that are already well explored in the original paper, which goes through unusual lengths to clearly explain many ways the study is flawed. ... The study gets so much attention since it's one of the few studies on the topic with this level of rigor on real-world scenarios, Yes, but most people don't seem aware of those caveats, and this is a good summary of them, and I think it does undercut the "level of rigour" of the study. Additionally, some of what the article points out is not explicitly acknowledged and connected by the study itself. For instance, if you actually split up the tasks by type, some tasks show a speed up and some show a slowdown, and the qualitative comments by developers about where they thought AI was good/bad aligned very well with which saw what results. Or (iirc) the fact that the task timing was per task, but developer's post hoc assessments were a prediction of how much they thought they were sped up on average across all tasks, meaning it's not really comparing the same things when comparing how developers felt vs how things actually went. Or the fact that developers were actually no less accurate in predicting times to task completion overall wrt to AI vs non-AI. > and it explains why previous studies or anecdotes may have claimed perceived increases in productivity even if there wasn't any actual increases. Framing it that way assumes as an already established fact that needs to be explained that AI does not provide more productivity Which actually demonstrates, inadvertently, why the study is so popular! People want it to be true, so even if the study is so chock full of caveats that it can't really prove that fact let alone explain it, people appeal to it anyway. > It clearly sets a standard that we can't just ask people if they felt more productive Like we do for literally every other technological tool we use in software? > (or they need to feel massively more productive to clearly overcome this bias). All of this assumes a definition of productivity that's based on time per work unit done, instead of perhaps the amount of effort required to get a unit of work done, or the extra time for testing, documentation, shoring up edge cases, polishing features, that better tools allow. Or the ability to overcome dread and procrastination that comes from dealing with rote, boilerplate tasks. AI makes me so much more productive that friends and my wife have commented on it explicitly without needing to be prompted, for a lot of reasons.
CuriouslyC 1y ago
If you want another data point, you can just look at my company github (https://github.com/orgs/sibyllinesoft/repositories https://github.com/orgs/sibyllinesoft/repositories). ~27 projects in the last 5 weeks, probably on the order of half a million lines of code, and multiple significant projects that are approaching ship readiness (I need to stop tuning algorithms and making stuff gorgeous and just fix installation/ensure cross platform is working, lol).
- shafyy 1y ago
  Lines of codes is not a measure of anything meaningful on its own. The mere fact that you suggest this as prove that you are more productive makes me think you are not.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    The SWE industry is eagerly awaiting your proposed accurate metric. I find that people who dismiss LoC out of hand without supplying better metrics tend to be low performers trying to run for cover.
    - oofbey 1y ago
      Loc is so easy to game. Reformat. Check in a notebook. Move things around. Pointless refactor. If nobody is watching loc, it’s generally a good metric. But as soon as people start valuing it, it becomes useless.
      - sebastiennight 1y ago
        See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law and, in the case of "Lines of code" as a metric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
    - dmamills 1y ago
      A metric I'd be interested in is the number of clients you can convince to use this slop.
jama211 1y ago
Not this again. That study had serious problems. But I’m not even going to argue about that. I want to raise something no one else seems to mention about AI in coding work. I do a lot of work now with AI that I used to code by hand, and if you told me I was 20% slower on average, I would say “that’s totally fine it’s still worth it” because the EFFORT level from my end feels so much less. It’s like, a robot vacuum might take way longer to clean the house than if I did it by hand sure. But I don’t regret the purchase, because I have to do so much less _work_. Coding work that I used to procrastinate about because it was tedious or painful I just breeze through now. I’m so much less burnt out week to week. I couldn’t care less if I’m slower at a specific task, my LIFE is way better now I have AI to assist me with my coding work, and that’s super valuable no matter what the study says. (Though I will say, I believe I have extremely good evidence that in my case I’m also more productive, averages are averages and I suspect many people are bad at using AI, but that’s an argument for another time).
- blks 1y ago
  Often someone’s personal productivity with AI means someone else have to dig through their piles of rubbish to review PR they committed. In your particular case it sounds like you’re rapidly loosing your developer skills, and enjoy that now you have to put less effort and think less.
  - wussboy 1y ago
    We know that relying heavily on Google Maps makes you less able to navigate without Google Maps. I don't think there's research on this yet, but I would be stunned if the same process isn't at play here.
    - lukan 1y ago
      I know that I am better at navigating with google maps than average people, because I navigated for years without it (partly on purpose). I know when not to trust it. I know when to ignore recommendations on recalculated routes. Same with LLMs. I am better with it, because I know how to solve things without the help of it. I understand the problem space and the limitations. Also I understand how hype works and why they think they need it (investors money). In other words, no, just using google maps or ChatGPT does not make me dumb. Only using it and blindly trusting it would.
tunesmith 1y ago
Data point: I run a site where users submit a record. There was a request months ago to allow users to edit the record after submitting. I put it off because while it's an established pattern it touches a lot of things and I found it annoying busy work and thus low priority. So then gpt5-codex came out and allowed me to use it in codex cli with my existing member account. I asked it to support edit for that feature all the way through the backend with a pleasing UI that fit my theme. It one-shotted it in about ten minutes. I asked for one UI adjustment that I decided I liked better, another five minutes, and I reviewed and released it to prod within an hour. So, you know, months versus an hour.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  Is the hour really comparable to months spent not working on it?
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    He's referring to the reality that AI helps you pick up and finish tasks that you otherwise would have put off. I see this all day every day with my side projects as well as security and customer escalations that come into my team. It's not that Giant Project X was done six times as fast. It's more like we were able to do six small but consequential bug fixes and security updates while we continued to push on the large feature.
  - jama211 1y ago
    “If you make a machine that can wash the dishes in an hour, is that more productive than not doing the dishes for months?” - Yes! That’s the definition of productivity!! The dishes are getting done now and they weren’t before! lol
bozhark 1y ago
Yes, for me. Instead of getting overwhelmed doing to many things, I can offload a lot of menial and time-driven tasks Reviews are absolutely necessary but take less time than creation
- jama211 1y ago
  Exactly. Is HN full of old codgers demanding that we can’t possibly use a calculator because that might mean we’d lose the precious skill of how to use a slide rule? The old man energy in here is insane
james_marks 1y ago
Yesterday is a good example- in 2 days, I completed what I expected to be a week’s worth of heads-down coding. I had to take a walk and make all new goals. The right AI, good patterns in the codebase and 20 years of experience and it is wild how productive I can be. Compare that to a few years ago, when at the end of the week, it was the opposite.
- al_be_back 1y ago
  makes no sense. how are you comparing yesterday with a "a few years ago" ?
rpdillon 1y ago
My personal project output has gone up dramatically since I started using AI, because I can now use times of night where I'm otherwise too mentally tired, to work with AI to crank through a first draft of a change that I can then iterate on later. This has allowed me to start actually implementing side projects that I've had ideas about for years and build software for myself in a way I never could previously (at least not since I had kids). I know it's not some amazing GDP-improving miracle, but in my personal life it's been incredibly rewarding.
- animex 1y ago
  This, 1000x. I had a dozen domains and projects on the shelf for years and now 8 of them have significant active development. I've already deployed 2 sites to production. My github activity is lighting up like a Christmas tree.
- boogieknite 1y ago
  i find a lot of value in using it to give half baked ideas momentum. some sort of "shower thought" will occur to me for a personal project while im at work and ill prompt Claude code to analyze and demonstrate an implementation for review later on the other hand i believe my coworker may have taken it too far. it seems like productivity has significantly slipped. in my perception the approaches hes using are convoluted and have no useful outcome. im almost worried about him because his descriptions of what hes doing make no sense to me or my teammates. hes spending a lot of time on it. im considering telling him to chill out but who knows, maybe im just not as advanced a user as him? anyone have experience with this?
  - r_lee 1y ago
    Do you mean like convoluted agentic stuff, markdown files etc? Or like AI delusion?
    - boogieknite 1y ago
      the former it started as an approach to a mass legacy code migration. sound idea with potential to save time. i followed along and understood his markdown and agent stuff for analyzing and porting legacy code i reviewed results which apply to my projects. results were mixed bag but i think it saved some time overall. but now i dont get where hes going with his ai aspirations my best attempt to understand is he wants to work entirely though chats, no writing code, and hes doing so by improving agents through chats. hes really swept up in the entire concept. i consider myself optimistic about ai but his enthusiasm feels misplaced its to the point where his work is slipping and management is asking him where his results are. were a small team and management isnt savvy enough to see hes getting NOTHING done and i wont sell him out. however if this is a known delusional pattern id like to address it and point to a definition and/or past cases so he can recognize the pattern and avoid trouble
yokoprime 1y ago
I'm objectively faster. Not necessarily if I'm working on a task I've done routinely for years, but when taking on new challenges I'm up and running much faster. A lot of it have to do with me offloading doing the basic research while allowing myself to be interrupted; it's not a problem that people reach out with urgent matters while I'm taking on a challenge I've only just started to build towards. Being able to correct the ai where I can tell it's making false assumptions or going off the rails helps speed things up
Kiro 1y ago
The "you only think you're more productive" argument is tiresome. Yes, I know for sure that I'm more productive. There's nothing uncertain about it. Does it lead to other problems? No doubt, but claiming my productivity gains are imaginary is not serious. I've seen a lot of people who previously touted that it doesn't work at all use that study as a way to move the goalpost and pretend they've been right all along.
- m_fayer 1y ago
  We’re being accused of false consciousness!
- chrysoprace 1y ago
  I would be interested to know how you measure your productivity gains though, in an objective way where you're not the victim of bias. I just recently had to rate whether I felt like I got more done by leaning more on Claude Code for a week to do a toy project and while I _feel_ like I was more productive, I was already biased to think so, and so I was a lot more careful with my answer, especially as I had to spend a considerable amount of time either reworking the generated code or throwing away several hours of work because it simply made things up.
  - Kiro 1y ago
    It sounds like you're very productive without AI or that your perceived gains are pretty small. To me, it's such a stark contrast that asking how I measure it is like asking me to objectively verify that a car is faster than walking.
    - laserlight 1y ago
      “I'm eating fewer calories yet keep putting on weight.” There's a reason self-reported measures are questioned: they have been wildly off in different domains. Objectively verifying that a car is faster than walking is easy. When it's not easy to objectively prove something, then there are a lot that could go wrong, including the disagreements on the definition of what's being measured.
m_fayer 1y ago
It seems like the programming world is increasingly dividing into “LLMs for coding are at best marginally useful and produce huge tech debt” vs “LLMs are a game changing productivity boost”. I truly don’t know how to account for the discrepancy, I can imagine many possible explanations. But what really gets my goat is how political this debate is becoming. To the point that the productivity-camp, of which I’m a part, is being accused of deluding themselves. I get that OpenAI has big ethical issues. And that there’s a bubble. And that ai is damaging education. And that it may cause all sorts of economic dislocation. (I emphatically Do Not get the doomers, give me a break). But all those things don’t negate the simple fact that for many of us, LLMs are an amazing programming tool, and we’ve been around long enough to distinguish substance from illusion. I don’t need a study to confirm what’s right in front of me.
- Sharlin 1y ago
  I’d love to know whether and to what extent the people for which AI has been a huge boost are those who were already producing slop, and now they have AI that can produce that slop much faster.
  - Eisenstein 1y ago
    By framing it in such a way you are making personal and it becomes less about defending the process of using AI and more about defending their integrity as a developer. You will not get anything useful when someone responds in that way, just a heated argument where they feel deeply insulted and act accordingly.
    - jama211 1y ago
      Well said
  - jama211 1y ago
    Sheesh, how do you expect to be taken seriously when you sneer through gritted teeth like that? I work with many developers of varying skill levels, all of which use AI. The only ones who have attempted to turn in slop are ones that basically turned out that they can’t code at all and didn’t keep their job long. Those who know what they’re doing, use it as a TOOL. They carefully build, modify, review and test everything and usually write about half of it themselves and it meets our strict standards. Which you would know if you’d listened to what we’ve been telling you in good faith.
tomrod 1y ago
I'm not who you responded to. I see about a 40% to 60% speed up as a solution architect when I sit down to code and about a 20% speedup when building/experimenting with research artifacts (I write papers occasionally). I have always been a careful tester, so my UAT hasn't blown up out of proportion. The big issue I see is rust it generates code using 2023-recent conventions, though I understand there is some improvement in thst direction. Our hiring pipeline is changing dramatically as well, since the normal things a junior needs to know (code, syntax) is no longer as expensive. Joel Spolsky's mantra to higher curious people who get things done captures well the folks I find are growing well as juniors.
citizenkeen 1y ago
I have a very big hobby code project I’ve been working on for years. AI has not made me much more productive at work. I can only work on my hobby project when I’m tired after the kids go to bed. AI has made me 3x productive there because reviewing code is easier than architecting. I can sense if it’s bad, I have good tests, the requests are pretty manageable (make a new crud page for this DTO using app conventions). But at work where I’m fresh and tackling hard problems that are 50% business political will? If anything it slows me down.
- jama211 1y ago
  Bureaucracy is often a bottleneck
mountainriver 1y ago
There have been plenty of studies showing the opposite. Also a sample size of 16 ain’t much
luc_ 1y ago
We're choosing to offload processing that our brain could be doing but we're too lazy to do it or the perceived value for us to do it is. I think there are consequences to this especially as we give the machine free information of how we twist and turn it into actually understanding what we mean. Interesting to consider that if our first vibecode prompt isn't what we actually want; it can train on how we direct it further. Offloading human intelligence is useful but... we're losing something.
- Fade_Dance 1y ago
  The majority of people seem to offload most of their thinking as is, and actively avoid things like critical thinking, confronting their own biases, seeking push-back against their own beliefs, etc. As with many other technologies, AI can be an enabler of this, or it can be used as a tool to empower and enhance learning and personal growth. That ultimately depends on the human to decide. One can dramatically accelerate personal and professional growth using these tools. Admittedly the degree to which one can offload tasks is greatly increased with this iteration, to the extent that at times you can almost seem like offloading your own autonomy. But many people already exist in this state, exclusively parroting other people's opinions without examining them, etc.
  - luc_ 1y ago
    Yeah real talk. It can really play to folks bias towards laziness and the fact that it's being controlled by corporations / (the few) / (the ultra-wealthy) should give us pause to consider the level of control it does and will influence over the majority of people...
itake 1y ago
I think its Apples to Oranges. The performance gains come from being able to ask specific questions about problems I deal with and (basically) have a staff engineer that I can bounce ideas off of. I am way faster at writing tasks on problems I am familiar with vs an AI. But me trying to figure out the database I should deeply look at for my usecase or debug android code when I don't know kotlin has saved me 5000x time.
dmackerman 1y ago
The thing is, most programming is mundane. Rename files, move them, make sure imports are correct, make sure builds pass...AI can do all of these with very high accuracy (most of the time).

swalsh 1y ago

" Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented " Actually AI may be more like blockchain then you give it credit for. Blockchain feels useless to you because you either don't care about or value the use cases it's good for. For those that do, it opens a whole new world they eagerly look forward to. As a coder, it's magical to describe a world, and then to see AI build it. As a copyeditor it may be scary to see AI take my job. Maybe you've seen it hilucinate a few times, and you just don't trust it. I like the idea of interoperable money legos. If you hate that, and you live in a place where the banking system is protected and reliable, you may not understand blockchain. It may feel useless or scary. I think AI is the same. To some it's very useful, to others it's scary at best and useless at worst.

deleted 1y ago
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yieldcrv 1y ago
"I'm not the target audience and I would never do the convoluted alternative I imagined on the spot that I think are better than what blockchain users do"
esafak 1y ago
People in countries with high inflation or where the banking system is unreliable are not using blockchains, either.
- eric_cc 1y ago
  Do you have any proof to support this claim? Stable coins use alone is in the 10's (possibly hundreds now) of billions in daily transaction globally. I'd be interested to hear your source for your claim.
  - esafak 1y ago
    I'm from a high inflation country. Let's see your evidence of use in such countries, since you are throwing numbers out.

9rx 1y ago

> AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. No more powerful than I without the A. The only advantage AI has over I is that it is cheaper, but that's the appeal of the blockchain as well: It's cheaper than VISA. The trouble with the blockchain is that it hasn't figured out how to be useful generally. Much like AI, it only works in certain niches. The past interest in the blockchain was premised on it reaching its "AGI" moment, where it could completely replace VISA at a much lower cost. We didn't get there and then interest started to wane. AI too is still being hyped on future prospects of it becoming much more broadly useful and is bound to face the same crisis as the blockchain faced if AGI doesn't arrive soon.

fn-mote 1y ago
Blockchain only solves one problem Visa solves: transferring funds. It doesn't solve the other problems that Visa solves. For example, there is no way to get restitution in the case of fraud.
- 9rx 1y ago
  Yes, that is one of the reasons it hasn't been able to be used generally. But AI can't be used generally either. Both offer niche solutions for those with niche problems, but that's about it. They very much do feel the same, and they are going to start feeling even more the same if AGI doesn't arrive soon. Don't let the niche we know best around here being one of the things AI is helping to solve cloud your vision of it. The small few who were able to find utility in the blockchain thought it was useful too
buffalobuffalo 1y ago
Blockchain only has 2 legitimate uses (from an economic standpoint) as far as I can tell. 1) Bitcoin figured out how to create artificial scarcity, and got enough buy-in that the scarcity actually became valuable. 2)Some privacy coins serve an actual economic niche for illegal activity. Then there's a long list of snake oil uses, and competition with payment providers doesn't even crack the top 20 of those. Modern day tulip mania.

oblio 1y ago

> My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. If you don't mind me asking, what do you do?

domatic1 1y ago

>> Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented so useless there is almost $3 Trillion of value on blockchains.

unbalancedevh 1y ago
Unfortunately, the amount of money invested in something isn't indicative of it's utility. For example: the tulip mania, beanie babies, NFTs, etc.
sumeno 1y ago
No there isn't. These ridiculous numbers are made up by taking the last price a coin sold for and multiplying it by all coins. If I create a shitcoin with 1 trillion coins and then sell one to a friend for $1 I've suddenly created a coin with $1 trillion in "value"
- fylo 1y ago
  I'm not sure the 3 trillion includes shit coin valuations. Typically volume and liquidity are factored in for any serious analysis. Your assessment of valuation is probably just as true for traditional currencies and stocks. I guess the main difference is regulation.
- iammrpayments 1y ago
  Good luck with the SEC when you open your exchange
  - sumeno 1y ago
    It's 2025, financial crimes are legal
- michaelscott 1y ago
  3 trillion is just the top 5 or 6
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Terr_ 1y ago

> the most useless technology Side-rant pet-peeve: People who try to rescue the reputation of "Blockchain" as a promising way forward by saying its weaknesses go away once you do a "private blockchain." This is equivalent to claiming the self-balancing Segway vehicles are still the future, they just need to be "improved even more" by adding another set of wheels, an enclosed cabin, and disabling the self-balancing feature. Congratulations, you've backtracked back to a classic [distributed database / car].

eru 1y ago
Going off on a tangent: the blockchain people have paid my salary for a few years now, and I still don't own any blockchain assets. I do like the technology for its own sake, but I agree that it's mostly useless today. (At least most of it. The part of blockchain that's basically 'git' is useful, as you can see with git. Ie an immutable, garbage colected Merkle-tree as a database, but you trust that Linux Torvalds has the pointer to the 'official' Linux kernel commit, instead of using a more complicated consensus mechanism.) However there's one thing that's coming out of that ecosystem that has the potential to be generally useful: Zero Knowledge Proofs. To quote myself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45357320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45357320): Yes, what Zero Knowledge proofs give you however is composability. Eg suppose you have one system that lets you verify 'this person has X dollars in their bank account' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Honduras' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Germany', then whether the authors of these three systems ever intended to or not, you can prove a statement like 'this person has a prime number amount of dollars and has a passport from either Honduras or Germany'. I see the big application not in building a union. For that you'd want something like Off-The-Record messaging probably? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging Where I see the big application is in compliance, especially implementing know-your-customer rules, while preserving privacy. So with a system outlined as above, a bank can store a proof that the customer comes from one of the approved countries (ie not North Korea or Russia etc) without having to store an actual copy of the customer's passport or ever even learning where the customer is from. As you mentioned, for this to work you need to have an 'anchor' to the real world. What ZKP gives you is a way to weave a net between these anchors.

eric_cc 1y ago

> Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers) This is an incredibly uneducated take on multiple levels. If you're talking about Bitcoin specifically, even though you said "blockchain", I can understand this as a political talking about 8 years ago. But you're still banging this drum despite the current state of affairs? Why not have the courage to say you're politically against it or bitter or whatever your true underlying issue is?

snicky 1y ago
How is the current state of affairs different from 8 years ago? I don't want to argue, just a genuine question, because I don't follow much what's happening in the blockchain universum.
- Yiin 1y ago
  I often pay for freelance work using crypto because it's much easier than dealing with banking infra to send payments to dozen of different countries. Sure you lose safety bank provides, but so you do when using cash.
  - bloqs 1y ago
    so nothing has changed and blockchain is still a solution looking for a problem
cheema33 1y ago
I am in the camp that thinks that Blockchain is utterly useless for most people. Perhaps you can tell us about some very compelling use cases that have taken off.
- rabf 1y ago
  https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/nasdaq-makes-push-launch-trading-tokenized-securities-2025-09-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/nasdaq-makes-push-l... https://corporate.visa.com/en/solutions/crypto/stablecoins.html https://corporate.visa.com/en/solutions/crypto/stablecoins.h... https://www.barrons.com/articles/sofi-blockchain-money-transfer-4092d6c6 https://www.barrons.com/articles/sofi-blockchain-money-trans...

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glouwbug 1y ago

This is funny, because my personal view is that AI’s biggest pitfall is that it allows the unqualified to build what they think they’re qualified for

mrcwinn 1y ago
Yes, learning and creating should be reserved only for the licensed!
- glouwbug 1y ago
  It is in many fields. They're Professional Engineers, and they build nearly everything that's important to a society. Software is overrun by literally anyone and everyone because it's not a protected field of engineering
  - yakz 1y ago
    Hang on, my understanding of the situation is that only PEs are allowed to sign off on the design of a thing. They don't have to design it, and they almost certainly don't build it. Am I wrong?
    - glouwbug 1y ago
      The stamp is legally binding. The company you work for isn't gonna protect you financially if the bridge you stamped falls. This is how they protect their profession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches

coolestguy 1y ago

>Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers). You think a technology that allows millions of people all around the world to keep & trustlessly update a database, showing cryptographic ownership of something "the most useless technology ever invented"?

otabdeveloper4 1y ago

> Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented You can use blockchains to gamble and get rich quick, if you're lucky. That's a useful thing. Unlike "AI", which only creates more blogspam and technical debt in the world.

Geste 1y ago

Bad take about blockchain. Being able to send value across borders without intermediaries is unheard of in human history.

aprilthird2021 1y ago
No it's not. It's existed for a thousand years in Asia through the hawala system. I mean, you need an intermediary. But with blockchain your intermediary is the exchange, the developers of the cryptocurrency, etc.
- Dilettante_ 1y ago
  >with blockchain your intermediary is the exchange, the developers of the cryptocurrency, etc. You are mistaken. The transfer of cryptocurrencies takes place on the blockchain ledger. That's, like, the core "thing". If you choose to bank with an exchange, that's like you bringing your cash money to a regular bank and depositing it. And the developers are no more intermediaries to your transaction than the Mint is an intermediary to your cash transaction.
  - aprilthird2021 1y ago
    I'm not mistaken. For an average person, they need to: 1. Understand how to use the technology and onboard onto it. In this case the technology is whichever blockchain and cryptocurrency. 2. Convert their money into the cryptocurrency. For this they need an exchange. Then they can send money to others who also went through those steps. Thus, there must be some kind of interaction with documentation made by devs for step 1 and a transfer of currency to an exchange for step 2. 2 middlemen/intermediaries.
    - Dilettante_ 1y ago
      All of that is entirely besides the point of this thread of conversation, which was concerning the transfer without intermediaries. The point was that if you are in possession of the currency, you are in full control with no one to interfere(or interfere by withholding cooperation) in the way that a bank would. You also do not need an exchange. You need to find a person willing to trade whatever for your cryptocurrency, exchanges merely make this more convenient but are by no means the only option. And saying onboarding requires an intermediary is like saying using a powerdrill or hooking up a washing machine requires an intermediary. The knowledge is so widely available and not contingent on a single or even few authorities that it's like picking fruit from a tree. It's just there.

ericfr11 1y ago

Take a look at new payments protocols for m AI agents

aprilthird2021 1y ago

> The real problem isn’t AI itself; it’s the overblown promise that it would magically turn anyone into a programmer, architect, or lawyer without effort, expertise or even active engagement. That promise is pretty much dead at this point. If that's dead, as you say, it would mean billions in value destruction for every tech stock. They have already promised so far beyond that.

neumann 1y ago
Yes, they are going to blow a lot of money on blowing hot air into this

eru 1y ago

There are two main use cases for blockchain assets at the moment: - Gambling (or politely called, speculation or even 'investment') - Ransomware payments, but that's a distant second I guess you say that influencers make money off the first? There's a third group making money off blockchain: the people making markets and running the infrastructure.

Eisenstein 1y ago
You forgot money laundering and paying for illegal things.
- eru 1y ago
  No, I left them out deliberately. At some point in the past, you could perhaps buy illicit drugs with bitcoin, but that has largely died out, as far as I can tell. You can't even buy a pizza anymore.
Jommi 1y ago
and sending money cross borders to your family and paying suppliers outside of your country and having a multi-currency account without insane fees and automating finance and upgrading financial systems to modern tech
- eru 1y ago
  I found interacting with the blockchain world to be much higher in fees than when going via the real finance route.

neya 1y ago

> AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. HN crowd is generally anti-AI, so you're not going to get a lot of positive feedback here. As a developer and someone who runs my own company, AI helps save me tons of hours - especially with research tasks, code audits - just to see if I've missed something, rapid frontend interface development and so much more if we go beyond the realm of just code. YMMV but I use ChatGPT even for stuff like cooking recipes based on whatever's inside my fridge. And this maybe just me, but I feel like my usage of Google has probably gone down to 50-60%. All this for $20 is really insane. Like you said, "people who are willing to put in work" really matters - that usually means being more intentional about your prompts, giving it as much context as possible.

dns_snek 1y ago
> HN crowd is generally anti-AI, so you're not going to get a lot of positive feedback here. Is this a joke? The front page of HN is 99% AI-positive. Things have calmed down a bit but there was a time when it felt like every other article on the front page was promoting AI.
neumann 1y ago
Rather than anti-AI, I think most of the HN crowd are educated enough about underlying technology and it's capabilities to see the snake oil being pushed. Most of us would have given it a good go (and probably still use it daily), just know the difference between its actual limitations and the dreams that are being sold.
- neya 1y ago
  Is it really snake oil if it actually has meaningful time savings? Dismissing AI completely off as just snake oil seems to be extreme.

Frieren 1y ago

> AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. People who have the time, knowledge and critical thinking skills to verify its outputs and steer it toward better answers. My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. That sounds like calling stupid and lazy to anyone that is not able to get their "productivity skyrocketed" with LLMs. The reality is that LLMs are mostly a search engine that lies time to time. No, people is not stupid nor lazy for not gaining any substantial productivity using LLMs. The technology is just not able to do what big tech corporations say it can do.

player1234 1y ago

How did you measure this skyrocketed productivity? Please share your results and methodology!

username332211 1y ago

> It doesn't feel like blockchain at all. Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers). Given the prevailing trend of virtually all modern governments in the developed world that seems to be rather short-sighted. Who knows, if you won't be made a criminal for dissenting? Or for trying to keep your communication private?

NoGravitas 1y ago
Honestly, "only useful for crime" is the only part of blockchain that I like. What I don't like is the energy use of PoW, the centralization tendencies of PoS, and the general unusability of any existing coins as either a medium of exchange or a store of value. I'd love an anonymous digital cash that didn't boil the oceans, enrich oligarchs, or encourage speculation. It's just that blockchain cryptocurrencies are not that.

mapcars 1y ago

> Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers). Are you sure you are not confusing blockchain with crypto coins? Blockchain as a decentralised immutable and verifiable ledger actually has use in 0-trust scenarios.

ryandvm 1y ago
Actual "0-trust scenarios" are incredibly elusive in the real world. It pretty much comes down to illegal or "extra-legal" transactions. Almost nobody in the real world has a practical interest in carrying out transactions with people they don't trust and people that our outside the jurisdiction of their legal framework. It turns out that most people actually like being able to press criminal charges or have the ability to bring a law suit when the transaction goes south.
- deleted 1y ago
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- lucasban 1y ago
  How is blockchain technology mutually exclusive from being able to take legal action against e.g. fraud? Sure there are implementations that can be used that way, but the core idea of a blockchain could be used to do the opposite as well, for example by making transaction information public and verifiable.
  - kspacewalk2 1y ago
    At some point in its lifecycle, it's no longer enough to hear about what a technology "could be used" for, because the time has come to judge it on its actual real world uses.
kylebenzle 1y ago
[dead]

tigerBL00D 1y ago

Only is not AI. It's LLM, diffusion models and what have you. The term AI became so overloaded that it means almost nothing these days. AGI is still hard to reach for, but it doesn't stop all kinds of spin artists from trying.

bossyTeacher 1y ago

>AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. Can we please call this technology transformers? Calling it AI makes it seem something more than it is (ie 2100 tech or something like that). Yes, transformers are great but it would be naive to ignore that much of the activity and dreams sold have no connection with reality and many of those dreams are being sold by the very people that make the transformers (looking at you, OpenAI)