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I'm amazed at this question and the responses you're getting. These last few years, I've noticed that the tone around AI on HN changes quite a bit by waking ti

I'm amazed at this question and the responses you're getting. These last few years, I've noticed that the tone around AI on HN changes quite a bit by waking time zone. EU waking hours have comments that seem disconnected from genAI. And, while the US hours show a lot of resistance, it's more fear than a feeling that the tools are worthless. It's really puzzling to me. This is the first time I noticed such a disconnect in the community about what the reality of things are. To answer your question personally, genAI has changed the way I code drastically about every 6 months in the last two years. The subtle capability differences change what sorts of problems I can offload. The tasks I can trust them with get larger and larger. It started with better autocomplete, and now, well, agents are writing new features as I write this comment.

the_mitsuhiko 11mo ago
> EU waking hours have comments that seem disconnected from genAI. And, while the US hours show a lot of resistance, it's more fear than a feeling that the tools are worthless. I don't think it's because the audience is different but because the moderators are asleep when Europeans are up. There are certain topics which don't really survive on the frontpage when moderators are active.
- jagged-chisel 11mo ago
  I'm unsure how you're using "moderators." We, the audience, are all 'moderators' if we have the karma. The operators of the site are pretty hands-off as far as content in general. This would mean it is because the audience is different.
  - uoaei 11mo ago
    The people who "operate" the website are different from the people who "moderate" the website but both are paid positions. This fru-fru about how "we all play a part" is only serving to obscure the reality.
    - throwaway13337 11mo ago
      As an anonymous coward on HN for at least a decade, I'd say that's not really true. When paul graham was more active and respected here, I spoke negatively about how revered he was. I was upvoted. I also think VC-backed companies are not good for society. And have expressed as much. To positive response here. We shouldn't shit on one of the few bastions of the internet we have left. I regret my negativity around pg - he was right about a lot and seems to be a good guy.
      - TheMayorOfDunce 11mo ago
        Yeah, I avoid telling people about HN. It’s too rare and pleasant of an anomaly to risk getting morphed into X/Bluesky/Reddit.
    - delinka 11mo ago
      I'm sure this site works quite differently from what you say. There's no paid team of moderators flicking stories and comments off the site because management doesn't like them. There's dang who I've seen edit headlines to match the site rules. Then there's the army of users upvoting and flagging stories, voting (up and down) and flagging comments. If you have some data to backup your sentiments, please do share it - we'd certainly like to evaluate it.
      - verdverm 11mo ago
        HN brought on a second mod (Tim, this year, iirc) My email exchanges with Dang, as part of the moderation that happens around here, have all been positive 1. I've been moderated, got a slowdown timeout for a while 2. I've emailed about specific accounts, (some egregious stuff you've probably never seen) 3. Dang once emailed me to ask why I flagged a story that was near the top, but getting heavily flagged by many users. He sought understanding before making moderation choices I will defend HN moderation people & policies 'til the cows come home. There is nothing close to what we have here on HN, which is largely about us being involved in the process and HN having a unique UX and size
      - uoaei 11mo ago
  - the_mitsuhiko 11mo ago
    I’m referring to the actual moderators of this website removing posts from the front page.
    - verdverm 11mo ago
      that's a conspiracy theory The by far more common action is for the mods to restore a story which has been flagged to oblivion by a subset of the HN community, where it then lands on the front page because it already has sufficient pointage
      - the_mitsuhiko 11mo ago
        It's not controversial to say that submissions are being moderated, that's how this (and many other) sites work. I haven't made any claims about how often it happens, or how it relates to second-chance moderation. What I'm pointing out is just that moderation isn't the same at different times of the day and that this sometimes can explain what content you see during EU and US waking hours. If you're active during EU daytime hours and US morning hours, you can see the pattern yourself. Tools like hnrankings [1] make it easy to watch how many top-10 stories fall off the front page at different times of day over a few days. [1]: https://hnrankings.info/ https://hnrankings.info/
        verdverm 11mo ago
        > I’m referring to the actual moderators of this website removing posts from the front page. This is what you said. There has only been one until this year, so now we have two. The moderation patterns you see are the community and certainly have significant time factors that play into that. The idea that someone is going into the system and making manual changes to remove content is the conspiracy theory
- jamesblonde 11mo ago
  Anything sovereign AI or whatever is gone immediately when the mods wake up. Got an EU cloud article? Publish it at 11am CET, it's disappears around 12.30.
GiorgioG 11mo ago
Despite the latest and greatest models…I still see glaring logic errors in the code produced in anything beyond basic CRUD apps. They still make up fields that don’t exist, assign a value to a variable that is nonsensical. I’ll give you an example, in the code in question, Codex assigned a required field LoanAmount to a value from a variable called assessedFeeAmount…simply because as far as I can tell, it had no idea how to get the correct value from the current function/class.
- lbreakjai 11mo ago
  That's why I don't get people that claim to be letting an agent run for an hour on some task. LLMs tend to do so many small errors like that, that are so hard to catch if you aren't super careful. I wouldn't want to have to review the output of an agent going wild for an hour.
  - snoman 11mo ago
    Who says anyone’s reviewing anything? I’m seeing more and more influencers and YouTubers playing engineer or just buying an app from an overseas app farm. Do you think anyone in that chain gives the first shit what the code is like? It’s the worst kind of disposable software.
  - hattmall 11mo ago
    The agent reviews the code. The agent has access to tools. It writes the code, runs it through a test, reads the error, fixes the code, keeps going. It passes the code off to another agent with a prompt to review code and give it notes. They pass it back and forth, another agent reads and creates documentation. It keeps going and passes things back. Now that's the idea anyway. Of course they all will lie to each other and there's hallucinations every step of the way. If you want to see a great example look at the documentation for the TEMU marketplace API. The whole API system, docs, examples etc appears to be vibe coded and lots of nonsensical formatting, methods that don't work and parameters in example that just say "test" or "parameters", but they are presented as working examples with actual response examples (like a normal API) but it largely appears to just be made up!
- 11mo ago
nickphx 11mo ago
ai is useless. anyone claiming otherwise is dishonest
- wahnfrieden 11mo ago
  no
- ghurtado 11mo ago
  That could even be argued (with an honest interlocutor, which you clearly are not) The usefulness of your comment, on the other hand, is beyond any discussion. "Anyone who disagrees with me is dishonest" is some kindergarten level logic.
- whattheheckheck 11mo ago
  What are you doing at your job that ai can't help with at all to consider is completely use less?
- wiseowise 11mo ago
  Useless for what?
- ulfw 11mo ago
  [Deleted as Hackernews is not for discussion of divergent opinions]
  - wiseowise 11mo ago
    > It's not useless but it's not good for humanity as a whole. Ridiculous statement. Is Google also not good for humanity as a whole? Is Internet not good for humanity as a whole? Wikipedia?
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - Nition 11mo ago
      Chlorofluorocarbons, microplastics, UX dark patterns, mass surveillance, planned obsolescence, fossil fuels, TikTok, ultra-processed food, antibiotic overuse in livestock, nuclear weapons. It's a defensible claim I think. Things that people want are not always good for humanity as a whole, therefore things can be useful and also not good for humanity as a whole.
bdangubic 11mo ago
the disconnect is quite simple, there are people that are professionals and are willing to put the time in to learn and then there’s vast majority of others who don’t and will bitch and moan how it is shit etc. if you can’t get these tools to make your job easier and more productive you ought to be looking for a different career…
- siva7 11mo ago
  It's disheartening. I got a colleague, very senior, who dislikes AI for a myriad of reasons and doesn't want to adapt if not forced by mgmt. I feel from 2022-2024 the majority of my colleagues were in this camp - either afraid from AI or because they looked at it as not something a "real" developer would ever use. 2025 it seemed to change a bit. American HN seemed to adapt more quickly while EU companies are still lacking the foresight to see what is happening on the grand scale.
  - wat10000 11mo ago
    I'm pretty senior and I just don't find it very useful. It is useful for certain things (deep code search, writing non-production helper scripts, etc.) and I'm happy to use it for those things, but it still seems like a long way off for it to be able to really change things. I don't foresee any of my coworkers being left behind if they don't adopt it.
    - TheMayorOfDunce 11mo ago
      AI gives you either free expertise or free time. If you can make software above the level of Gemini or Claude output, then have it write your local tools, or have it write synthetic data for tests, or have it optimize your zshrc or bash profile. Maybe have it implement changes your skip level wants to see made, which you know they are amateurish, unsound garbage with revolting UI. Rather than waste your day writing ill-advised but high quality code just to show them how it’s a bad idea, you can have AI write code for you, to illustrate your point without spending any real work hours on it. Just in my office, I have seen “small tools” like Charles Proxy almost entirely disappear. Everyone writes/shares their AI-generated solutions now rather than asking cyber to approve a 3rd party envfile values autoloader to be whitelisted across the entire organization.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
GoatInGrey 11mo ago
The main line of contention is how much autonomy these agents are capable of handling in a competitive environment. One side generally argues that they should be fully driven by humans (i.e. offloading tedious tasks you know the exact output of but want to save time not doing) while the other side generally argues that AI agents should handle tasks end-to-end with minimal oversight. Both sides have valid observations in their experiences and circumstances. And perhaps this is simply another engineering "it depends" phenomenon.
what 11mo ago
Can you show us the features AI wrote while you wrote this comment?

the_mitsuhiko 11mo ago

> EU waking hours have comments that seem disconnected from genAI. And, while the US hours show a lot of resistance, it's more fear than a feeling that the tools are worthless. I don't think it's because the audience is different but because the moderators are asleep when Europeans are up. There are certain topics which don't really survive on the frontpage when moderators are active.

jagged-chisel 11mo ago
I'm unsure how you're using "moderators." We, the audience, are all 'moderators' if we have the karma. The operators of the site are pretty hands-off as far as content in general. This would mean it is because the audience is different.
- uoaei 11mo ago
  The people who "operate" the website are different from the people who "moderate" the website but both are paid positions. This fru-fru about how "we all play a part" is only serving to obscure the reality.
  - throwaway13337 11mo ago
    As an anonymous coward on HN for at least a decade, I'd say that's not really true. When paul graham was more active and respected here, I spoke negatively about how revered he was. I was upvoted. I also think VC-backed companies are not good for society. And have expressed as much. To positive response here. We shouldn't shit on one of the few bastions of the internet we have left. I regret my negativity around pg - he was right about a lot and seems to be a good guy.
    - TheMayorOfDunce 11mo ago
      Yeah, I avoid telling people about HN. It’s too rare and pleasant of an anomaly to risk getting morphed into X/Bluesky/Reddit.
  - delinka 11mo ago
    I'm sure this site works quite differently from what you say. There's no paid team of moderators flicking stories and comments off the site because management doesn't like them. There's dang who I've seen edit headlines to match the site rules. Then there's the army of users upvoting and flagging stories, voting (up and down) and flagging comments. If you have some data to backup your sentiments, please do share it - we'd certainly like to evaluate it.
    - verdverm 11mo ago
      HN brought on a second mod (Tim, this year, iirc) My email exchanges with Dang, as part of the moderation that happens around here, have all been positive 1. I've been moderated, got a slowdown timeout for a while 2. I've emailed about specific accounts, (some egregious stuff you've probably never seen) 3. Dang once emailed me to ask why I flagged a story that was near the top, but getting heavily flagged by many users. He sought understanding before making moderation choices I will defend HN moderation people & policies 'til the cows come home. There is nothing close to what we have here on HN, which is largely about us being involved in the process and HN having a unique UX and size
    - uoaei 11mo ago
- the_mitsuhiko 11mo ago
  I’m referring to the actual moderators of this website removing posts from the front page.
  - verdverm 11mo ago
    that's a conspiracy theory The by far more common action is for the mods to restore a story which has been flagged to oblivion by a subset of the HN community, where it then lands on the front page because it already has sufficient pointage
    - the_mitsuhiko 11mo ago
      It's not controversial to say that submissions are being moderated, that's how this (and many other) sites work. I haven't made any claims about how often it happens, or how it relates to second-chance moderation. What I'm pointing out is just that moderation isn't the same at different times of the day and that this sometimes can explain what content you see during EU and US waking hours. If you're active during EU daytime hours and US morning hours, you can see the pattern yourself. Tools like hnrankings [1] make it easy to watch how many top-10 stories fall off the front page at different times of day over a few days. [1]: https://hnrankings.info/ https://hnrankings.info/
      - verdverm 11mo ago
        > I’m referring to the actual moderators of this website removing posts from the front page. This is what you said. There has only been one until this year, so now we have two. The moderation patterns you see are the community and certainly have significant time factors that play into that. The idea that someone is going into the system and making manual changes to remove content is the conspiracy theory
jamesblonde 11mo ago
Anything sovereign AI or whatever is gone immediately when the mods wake up. Got an EU cloud article? Publish it at 11am CET, it's disappears around 12.30.

GiorgioG 11mo ago

Despite the latest and greatest models…I still see glaring logic errors in the code produced in anything beyond basic CRUD apps. They still make up fields that don’t exist, assign a value to a variable that is nonsensical. I’ll give you an example, in the code in question, Codex assigned a required field LoanAmount to a value from a variable called assessedFeeAmount…simply because as far as I can tell, it had no idea how to get the correct value from the current function/class.

lbreakjai 11mo ago
That's why I don't get people that claim to be letting an agent run for an hour on some task. LLMs tend to do so many small errors like that, that are so hard to catch if you aren't super careful. I wouldn't want to have to review the output of an agent going wild for an hour.
- snoman 11mo ago
  Who says anyone’s reviewing anything? I’m seeing more and more influencers and YouTubers playing engineer or just buying an app from an overseas app farm. Do you think anyone in that chain gives the first shit what the code is like? It’s the worst kind of disposable software.
- hattmall 11mo ago
  The agent reviews the code. The agent has access to tools. It writes the code, runs it through a test, reads the error, fixes the code, keeps going. It passes the code off to another agent with a prompt to review code and give it notes. They pass it back and forth, another agent reads and creates documentation. It keeps going and passes things back. Now that's the idea anyway. Of course they all will lie to each other and there's hallucinations every step of the way. If you want to see a great example look at the documentation for the TEMU marketplace API. The whole API system, docs, examples etc appears to be vibe coded and lots of nonsensical formatting, methods that don't work and parameters in example that just say "test" or "parameters", but they are presented as working examples with actual response examples (like a normal API) but it largely appears to just be made up!
11mo ago

nickphx 11mo ago

ai is useless. anyone claiming otherwise is dishonest

wahnfrieden 11mo ago
no
ghurtado 11mo ago
That could even be argued (with an honest interlocutor, which you clearly are not) The usefulness of your comment, on the other hand, is beyond any discussion. "Anyone who disagrees with me is dishonest" is some kindergarten level logic.
whattheheckheck 11mo ago
What are you doing at your job that ai can't help with at all to consider is completely use less?
wiseowise 11mo ago
Useless for what?
ulfw 11mo ago
[Deleted as Hackernews is not for discussion of divergent opinions]
- wiseowise 11mo ago
  > It's not useless but it's not good for humanity as a whole. Ridiculous statement. Is Google also not good for humanity as a whole? Is Internet not good for humanity as a whole? Wikipedia?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Nition 11mo ago
    Chlorofluorocarbons, microplastics, UX dark patterns, mass surveillance, planned obsolescence, fossil fuels, TikTok, ultra-processed food, antibiotic overuse in livestock, nuclear weapons. It's a defensible claim I think. Things that people want are not always good for humanity as a whole, therefore things can be useful and also not good for humanity as a whole.

bdangubic 11mo ago

the disconnect is quite simple, there are people that are professionals and are willing to put the time in to learn and then there’s vast majority of others who don’t and will bitch and moan how it is shit etc. if you can’t get these tools to make your job easier and more productive you ought to be looking for a different career…

siva7 11mo ago
It's disheartening. I got a colleague, very senior, who dislikes AI for a myriad of reasons and doesn't want to adapt if not forced by mgmt. I feel from 2022-2024 the majority of my colleagues were in this camp - either afraid from AI or because they looked at it as not something a "real" developer would ever use. 2025 it seemed to change a bit. American HN seemed to adapt more quickly while EU companies are still lacking the foresight to see what is happening on the grand scale.
- wat10000 11mo ago
  I'm pretty senior and I just don't find it very useful. It is useful for certain things (deep code search, writing non-production helper scripts, etc.) and I'm happy to use it for those things, but it still seems like a long way off for it to be able to really change things. I don't foresee any of my coworkers being left behind if they don't adopt it.
  - TheMayorOfDunce 11mo ago
    AI gives you either free expertise or free time. If you can make software above the level of Gemini or Claude output, then have it write your local tools, or have it write synthetic data for tests, or have it optimize your zshrc or bash profile. Maybe have it implement changes your skip level wants to see made, which you know they are amateurish, unsound garbage with revolting UI. Rather than waste your day writing ill-advised but high quality code just to show them how it’s a bad idea, you can have AI write code for you, to illustrate your point without spending any real work hours on it. Just in my office, I have seen “small tools” like Charles Proxy almost entirely disappear. Everyone writes/shares their AI-generated solutions now rather than asking cyber to approve a 3rd party envfile values autoloader to be whitelisted across the entire organization.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

GoatInGrey 11mo ago

The main line of contention is how much autonomy these agents are capable of handling in a competitive environment. One side generally argues that they should be fully driven by humans (i.e. offloading tedious tasks you know the exact output of but want to save time not doing) while the other side generally argues that AI agents should handle tasks end-to-end with minimal oversight. Both sides have valid observations in their experiences and circumstances. And perhaps this is simply another engineering "it depends" phenomenon.

what 11mo ago

Can you show us the features AI wrote while you wrote this comment?