42 ms·

Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

• pointbob 10mo ago
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• bschmidt25 10mo ago
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• dom96 10mo ago
  > As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I want to write less, just knowing that LLM models are going to be trained on my code is making me feel more strongly than ever that my open source contributions will simply be stolen. Am I wrong to feel this? Is anyone else concerned about this? We've already seen some pretty strong evidence of this with Tailwind.
  • poszlem 10mo ago
    You are not wrong to feel this, because you cannot control what you feel. But it might be worth investigating why you feel this, and why were you writing open source in the first place.
    • abc123abc123 10mo ago
      It is actually very simple to control what you feel, and very much possible. This deterministic idea about our feelings must die quick. Pro-tip, call the psychology department at your local university and they will happily teach you how to control your feelings.
    • DrewADesign 10mo ago
      Job insecurity while a bunch of companies claim LLM coding agents are letting them decimate their workforces is a pretty solid reason to feel like your code is being stolen. Many, if not most tech workers have been very sheltered from the harsher economic realities most people face, and many are realizing that labor demand, rather than being special, is why. A core goal of AI products is increasing the supply of what developer labor produces, which reduces demand for that labor. So yeah— feeling robbed when your donated code is used to train models is pretty rational.
    • supriyo-biswas 10mo ago
      Ultimately most things in life and society where one freely gives (and open source could be said to be one such activity) is also balanced by advising everyone participating in the "system" to also reciprocate the same, without which it becomes an exploitative relationship. Examples of such sayings can be found in most major world religions, but a non-religious explanation of the dynamics at hand follows below. If running an open source model means that I have only given out without receiving anything, there remains the possibility of being exploited. This dynamic has always existed, such as companies using a project and sending in vulnerability reports and the like but not offering to help, and instead demanding, often quite rudely. In the past working with such extractive contributors may have been balanced with other benefits such as growing exposure leading to professional opportunities, or being able to sell hosted versions, consulting services and paid features, which would have helped the maintainer of the open source project pay off their bills and get ahead in life. However with the rise of LLMs, it both facilitates usage of the open source tools without getting a chance to direct their attention towards these paid services, nor allows the maintainer to have direct exposure to their contributors. It also indirectly violates the spirit of said open source licenses, as LLMs can spit out the knowledge contained in these codebases at a scale that humans cannot, thus allowing people to bypass the license and create their own versions of the tools, which are themselves not open source despite deriving their knowledge from such data. Ultimately we don't need to debate about this; if open source remains a viable model in the age of LLMs, people will continue to do it regardless of whether we agree or disagree regarding topics such as this; on the other hand, if people are not rewarded in any way we will only be left with LLM generated codebases that anyone could have produced, leaving all the interesting software development to happen behind closed doors in companies.
  • Freak_NL 10mo ago
    I don't worry about that too much. I still contribute to FOSS projects, and I use FOSS projects. Whenever I contribute, I usually fix something that affects me (or maybe just something I encountered), and fixing it has a positive effect on the users of that software, including me.
  • rolisz 10mo ago
    With Tailwind, wasn't the problem that much fewer people visited the documentation, which showed ads? The LLMs still used Tailwind
  • chrishare 10mo ago
    I think the Tailwind case is more complicated than this, but yes - I think it's reasonable to want to contribute something to the common good but fear that the value will disproportionally go to AI companies and shareholders.
  • bromuro 10mo ago
    I do open source exactly because i’m fine my work can be “stolen”.
    • m4rtink 10mo ago
      Stolen means no attribution and not following the rules of the GPL, instead producing un-attributed AI-washed closed source code owned by companies.
    • arter45 10mo ago
      GPL requires attribution. Some people are fine with their code being used by others for free while still expecting their work to be acknowledged. Code posted on Stackoverflow is apparently CC-BY-SA licensed, which means attribution is still required.
  • RadiozRadioz 10mo ago
    I feel similarly for a different reason. I put my code out there, licensed under the GPL. It is now, through a layer of indirection, being used to construct products that are not under the GPL. That's not what I signed up for. I know the GPL didn't have a specific clause for AI, and the jury is still out on this specific case (how similar is it to a human doing the same thing?), but I like to imagine, had it been made today, there probably would be a clause covering this usage. Personally I think it's a violation of the spirit of the license.
    • luke5441 10mo ago
      GPL works via copyright. Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies. There is no fixing this. The only option is not to publish. There are non-US jurisdictions where you have some options, but since most of them are trained in the US that won't help much.
      • ThunderSizzle 10mo ago
        > Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies. There is no fixing this. They can claim whatever they want. You can still try to stop it via lawsuits and make them claim it in court. Granted, I believe there's already been some jurisdictions that have sided with fair use in those particular cases.
        • zarzavat 10mo ago
          Laws can be changed. This is right now a trillion dollar industry, perhaps later it could even become a billion dollar industry. Either way, it's very important. Strict copyright enforcement is a competitive disadvantage. Western countries lobbied for copyright enforcement in the 20th century because it was beneficial. Now the tables have turned, don't hold your breath for copyright enforcement against the wishes of the markets. We are all China now.
          • luke5441 10mo ago
            Yes, I think Japan added an AI friendly copyright law. If there were problems in the US, they'd just move training there.
  • prodigycorp 10mo ago
    I dont understand the invocation of tailwind here. It doesn't make sense. Tailwind's LLM struggles had nothing to do with open source, it had to do with the fact that they had the same business model as publisher, with ads pointing to their only product.
    • aspaviento 10mo ago
      Exactly, their issue was about a drop in visits to their documentation site where they promote their paid products. If they were making money from usage, their business could really thrive with LLMs recommending Tailwind by default
      • dom96 10mo ago
        AFAIK their issue is that LLMs have been trained on their paid product (Tailwind UI, etc.) and so can reproduce them very easily for free. Which means devs no longer pay for the product. In other words, the open source model of "open core with paid additional features" may be dead thanks to LLMs. Perhaps less so for some types of applications, but for frameworks like Tailwind very much so.
        • prodigycorp 10mo ago
          That's not what Adam said. He said it was a traffic issue.
  • burnermore 10mo ago
    This is an absolute valid concern. We either need strong governmental interventions to these models who don't comply with OSS. Or accept that there definitely wont be open model businesses. Make them proprietary and accept the fact that even permissive licenses such as MIT, BSD Clause 2/3 wont't be followed by anyone while writing OSS. And as for Tailwind, I donno if it is cos of AI.
  • tmplostpwd 10mo ago
    If you don't want people "stealing" your code, you don't want open source. You want source available.
    • pferde 10mo ago
      You're confusing open source with public domain.
  • noosphr 10mo ago
    Use a license that doesn't allow it then. Not everything needs to be mit or gnu.
    • bakugo 10mo ago
      LLMs don't care about licenses. And even if they did, the people who use them to generate code don't care about licenses.
      • noosphr 10mo ago
        Thieves don't care about locks, so doors are pointless.
        • bakugo 10mo ago
          Thieves very much do care about doors and locks, because they are a physical barrier that must be bypassed, and doing so is illegal. Software licenses aren't, AI companies can just take your GPL code and spit it back out into non-GPL codebases and there's no way for you to even find out it happened, much less do anything about it, and the law won't help you either.
  • serf 10mo ago
    I don't understand the mindset because I began my foray into open source exactly because I wanted to distribute and share my code. in other words, i've never been in the position that I felt my charitable givings anywhere were ever stolen. Some people write code and put it out there without caveats. Some people jump into open source to be license warriors. Not me. I just write code and share it. If youre a person, great. if you're a machine then I suppose that's okay too -- I don't want to play musical chairs with licenses all day just to throw some code out there, and I don't particularly care if someone more clever than myself uses it to generate a profit.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
      Me too. I’ve never been a fan of coercive licensing. I don’t consider that “open.” It’s “strings-attached.” I make mine MIT-licensed. If someone takes my stuff, and gets rich (highly unlikely), then that’s fine. I just don’t want some asshole suing me, because they used it inappropriately, or a bug caused them problems. I don’t even care about attribution. I mainly do it, because it forces me to take better care, when I code.
      • immibis 10mo ago
        You wouldn't even be the 100th developer to eventually regret that.
        • ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
          > eventually regret that I'm not exactly sure what you mean. I've been doing it for a couple of decades, so far, and haven't regretted it. Am I holding it wrong? I'd be grateful for some elucidation. Thanks!
      • msla 10mo ago
        There's no such thing as coercive licensing, and thinking there is is buying into the myths proprietary vendors perpetuate because they're tired of not being able to farm labor from Open Source developers. It's very interesting that the "viral" nonsense came from Microsoft, isn't it?
  • oncallthrow 10mo ago
    I want to write less, because quite frankly I get zero satisfaction from having an LLM churn out code for me, in the same way that Vincent van Gogh would likely derive no joy from using Nano Banana to create a painting. And sure, I could stubbornly refuse to use an LLM and write the code myself. But after getting used to LLM-assisted coding, particularly recent models, writing code by hand feels extremely tedious now.
  • ValveFan6969 10mo ago
    [flagged]
  • embedding-shape 10mo ago
    > I want to write less, just knowing that LLM models are going to be trained on my code is making me feel more strongly than ever that my open source contributions will simply be stolen. Am I wrong to feel this? Is anyone else concerned about this? I don't think it's wrong, but misdirected maybe. What do you that someone can "steal" your open source contributions? I've always released most of my code as "open source", and not once has someone "stolen" it, it still sits on the same webpage where I initially published it, decades ago. Sure, it's guaranteed ingested into LLMs since long time ago, but that's hardly "stealing" when the thing is still there + given away for free. I'm not sure how anyone can feel like their open source code was "stolen", wasn't the intention in the first place that anyone can use it for any purpose? That's at least why I release code as open source.
    • krior 10mo ago
      "Open Source" does not equal "No terms on how to share and use the code". Granted, there are such licenses but afaik the majority requires attribution at the minimum.
      • embedding-shape 10mo ago
        Then I'd say they're "breaking the license", not "stolen your project", but maybe I'm too anal about the meaning of words.
        • dom96 10mo ago
          Yeah, fair, I could have been clearer. But yes, that is what I meant: breaking the license.
          • otterley 10mo ago
            I’m unaware of any mainstream Open Source licenses that forbid training an AI model on the work. Are you using one?
            • 10mo ago
  • babarock 10mo ago
    I don't know if you're "wrong", but I do feel differently about this. I've written a ton of open source code and I never cared what people do with it, both "good" or "bad". I only want my code to be "useful". Not just to the people I agree with, but to anyone who needs to use a computer. Of course, I'd rather people use my code to feed the poor than build weapons, but it's just a preference. My conviction is that my code is _freed_ from me and my individual preferences and shared for everyone to use. I don't think my code is "stolen", if someone uses it to make themselves rich.
    • martin-t 10mo ago
      > Not just to the people I agree with, but to anyone who needs to use a computer. Why not say "... but to the people I disagree with"? Would you be OK knowing your code is used to cause more harm than good? Would you still continue working on a hypothetical OSS which had no users, other than, say, a totalitarian government in the middle east which executes homosexuals? Would you be OK with your software being a critical directly involved piece of code for example tracking, de-anonymizing and profiling them? Where is the line for you?
      • layer8 10mo ago
        I agree with the GP. While I wouldn’t be happy about such uses, I see the use as detached from the software as-is, given (assuming) that it isn’t purpose-built for the bad uses. If the software is only being used for nefarious purposes, then clearly you have built the wrong thing, not applied the wrong license. The totalitarian government wouldn’t care about your license anyway. The one thing I do care about is attribution — though maybe actually not in the nefarious cases.
        • martin-t 10mo ago
          > The totalitarian government wouldn’t care about your license anyway. I see this a lot and while being technically correct, I think it ignores the costs for them. In practice such a government doesn't need to have laws and courts either but usually does because the appearance of justice. Breaking international laws such as copyright also has costs for them. Nobody will probably care about one small project but large scale violations could (or at least should) lead to sanctions. Similarly, if they want to offer their product in other countries, now they run the risk of having to pay fines. Finally, see my sibling comment but a lot of people act like Open Source is an absolute good just because it's Open Source. By being explicit about our views about right and wrong, we draw attention to this delusion.
  • risyachka 10mo ago
    Also open source without support has zero value. And you can support only 1-2 projects. Meaning 99% of everything oss released now is de-facto abandonware.
  • samwillis 10mo ago
    I'm convinced that LLMs results in all software needing to be open source (or at the very least source available). In future everyone will expect to be able to customise an application, if the source is not available they will not chose your application as a base. It's that simple. The future is highly customisable software, and that is best built on open source. How this looks from a business perspective I think we will have to find out, but it's going to be fun!
    • jennyholzer4 10mo ago
      [dead]
    • charcircuit 10mo ago
      Why do you think customization can only viably done via changing the code of the application itself. I think there is room for closed source platforms that are built on top of using LLMs via some sort of API that it exposes. For example, iOS can be closed source and LLMs can develop apps for it to expand the capabilities of one's phone. Allowing total customization by a business can allow them to mess up the app itself or make other mistakes. I don't think it's the best interface for allowing others to extend the app.
    • dom96 10mo ago
      I'm convinced of the opposite. I think a lot more software will be closed source so that an LLM cannot reproduce it from its training data for free.
    • MaxBarraclough 10mo ago
      > In future everyone will expect to be able to customise an application, if the source is not available they will not chose your application as a base. It's that simple. This seems unlikely. It's not the norm today for closed-source software. Why would it be different tomorrow?
      • simonw 10mo ago
        Because we now have LLMs that can read the code for us. I'm feeling this already. Just the other day I was messing around with Fly's new Sprites.dev system and I found myself confused as to how one of the "sprite" CLI features worked. So I went to clone the git repo and have Claude Code figure out the answer... and was surprised to find that the "sprite" CLI tool itself (unlike Fly's flycli tool, which I answer questions about like this pretty often) wasn't open source! That was a genuine blocker for me because it prevented me from answering my question. It reminded me that the most frustrating thing about using macOS these days is that so much of it is closed source. I'd love to have Claude write me proper documentation for the sandbox-exec command for example, but that thing is pretty much a black hole.
  • andrewstuart 10mo ago
    I’ve written plenty of open source and I’m glad it’s going into the great training models that help everyone out. I love AI and pay for four services and will never program without AI again. It pleases me that my projects might be helping out.
  • zsoltkacsandi 10mo ago
    > As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I believe open source will become a bit less relevant in it’s current form, as solution/project tailored libraries/frameworks can be generated in a few hours with LLMs.
  • uyzstvqs 10mo ago
    Then why open source something in the first place? The entire point is to make it public, for anyone to use however is useful to him or her, and often to publicly collaborate on a project together. If I made something open source, you can train your LLM on it as much as you want. I'm glad my open source work is useful to you.
    • tw04 10mo ago
      > The entire point is to make it public, for anyone to use however is useful to him or her The entire point isn’t to allow a large corporation to make private projects out of your open source project for many open source licenses. It’s to ensure the works that leverage your code are open source as well. Something AI is completely ignoring using various excuses as to why their specific type of theft is ok.
      • FergusArgyll 10mo ago
        There is an open source world that believes in the MIT license which has no obligation to keep the derivative FOSS
        • dom96 10mo ago
          Even the MIT license requires attribution, all of that gets lost when training an LLM.
          • otterley 10mo ago
            Read all the text of the license carefully: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577208
    • jeroenhd 10mo ago
      Plenty of people will gladly give you their hard work for free if you promise you'll return the favor. Or if you promise not to take your work and make others pay for it when they could just get it for free. Basically, help the people that want to embrace the freedoms of open source, but not the ones that are just in it for the free labour. Or at the very, very least, include a little "thank you" note. AI doesn't hold up its end of the bargain, so if you're in that mindset you now have to decide between going full hands-off like you or not doing any open source work at all.
  • martin-t 10mo ago
    No, you're absolutely right. LLMs are labor theft on an industrial scale. I spent 10 years writing open source, I haven't touched it in the last 2. I wrote for multiple reasons none of which any longer apply: - I believe every software project should have an open source alternative. But writing open source now means useful patterns can be extracted and incorporated into closed source versions _mechanically_ and with plausible deniability. It's ironically worse if you write useful comments. - I enjoyed the community aspect of building something bigger than one person can accomplish. But LLMs are trained on the whole history and potentially forum posts / chat logs / emails which went into designing the SW too. With sufficiently advanced models, they effectively use my work to create a simulation of myself and other devs. - I believe people (not just devs) should own the product they build (an even stronger protection of workers against exploitation than copyright). Now our past work is being used to replace us in the future without any compensation. - I did it to get credit. Even though it was a small motivation compared to the rest, I enjoyed everyone knowing what I accomplished and I used it during job interviews. If somebody used my work, my name was attached to it. With LLMs, anyone can launder it and nobody knows how useful my work was. - (not solely LLM related) I believed better technology improves the world and quality of life around me. Now I see it as a tool - neutral - to be used by anyone for both good and bad purposes. Here's[0] a comment where I described why it's theft based on how LLMs work. I call it higher order plagiarism. I haven't seen this argument made by other people, it might be useful for arguing about those who want to legalize this. In fact, I wonder if this argument has been made in court and whether the lawyers understand LLMs enough to make it. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330
  • zahlman 10mo ago
    > But, in general, it is now clear that for most projects, writing the code yourself is no longer sensible, if not to have fun. I want to write code to defy this logic and express my humanity. "To have fun", yes. But also to showcase what it means when a human engages in the act of programming. Writing code may increasingly not be "needed", but it increasingly is art.
  • andrewstuart 10mo ago
    If you give, and expect something in return, then you are not giving, that is a transaction.
  • ben_w 10mo ago
    > Am I wrong to feel this? There's no such thing as a wrong feeling. And I say this as one of those with the view that AI training is "learning" rather than "stealing", or at least that this is the goal because AI is the dumbest, the most error prone, and also the most expensive way, to try to make a copy of something. My fears about setting things loose for public consumption are more about how I will be judged for them than about being ripped off, which is kinda why that book I started writing a decade ago and have not meaningfully touched in the last 12 months is neither published properly nor sent to some online archive. When it comes to licensing source code, I mostly choose MIT, because I don't care what anyone does with the code once it's out there. But there's no such thing as a wrong feeling, anyone who dismisses your response is blinding themselves to a common human response that also led to various previous violent uprisings against the owners of expensive tools of automation that destroyed the careers of respectable workers.
  • 63stack 10mo ago
    Also why would I use your open source project, when I can just prompt the AI to generate one for me, gracefully stripping the license as a bonus?
  • qsera 10mo ago
    Unless I am missing something, it seems that you only need to use something like the following that was (obtained using quick search, haven't tried) https://archclx.medium.com/enforcing-gpg-encryption-in-github-using-git-remote-gcrypt-9fc289092b25 https://archclx.medium.com/enforcing-gpg-encryption-in-githu... My opinion on the matter is that AI models stealing the open source code would be ok IF the models are also open and remain so, and the services like chatgpt will remain free of cost (at least a free tier), and remain free of ads. But we all know how it is going to go.
  • CraftingLinks 10mo ago
    Not wrong. But i don't share your concerns at all. I like sharing code and if people, and who knows, machines, can make use of it and provide some value however minute, that makes me content.
  • jillesvangurp 10mo ago
    A common intention with opensource is to allow people, and AI tools they use, to reuse, recombine, etc. OSS code in any way they see fit. If that's not what you want, don't open source your work. It's not stealing if you gave it away and effectively told people "do whatever you want". Which is one way licenses such as the MIT license are often characterized. It's very hard to prevent specific types of usage (like feeding code to an LLM) without throwing out the baby with the bathwater and also preventing all sorts of other valid usages. AGPLv3, which is what antirez and Redis use goes to far IMHO and still doesn't quite get the job done. It doesn't forbid people (or tools) to "look" at the code which is what AI training might be characterized as. That license creates lots of headaches for corporate legal departments. I switched to Valkey for that reason. I actually prefer using MIT style licenses for my own contributions precisely because I don't want to constrain people or AI usage. Go for it. More power to you if you find my work useful. That's why I provide it for free. I think this is consistent with the original goals of open source developers. They wanted others to be able to use their stuff without having to worry about lawyers. Anyway, AI progress won't stop because of any of this. As antirez says, that stuff is now part of our lives and it is a huge enabler if you are still interested in solving interesting problems. Which apparently he is. I can echo much of what he says. I've been able to solve larger and larger problems with AI tools. The last year has seen quite a bit of evolution in what is possible. > Am I wrong to feel this? I think your feelings are yours. But you might at least examine your own reasoning a bit more critically. Words like theft and stealing are big words. And I think your case for that is just very weak. And when you are coding yourself are you not standing on the shoulders of giants? Is that not theft?
  • williamcotton 10mo ago
    I've been writing a bunch of DSLs lately and I would love to have LLMs train on this data.
  • fabianholzer 10mo ago
    > Am I wrong to feel this? Why would a feeling be invalid? You have one life, you are under no obligation to produce clean training material, much less feel bad about this.
  • tiborsaas 10mo ago
    Yes. If you didn't care before when contributing to open source who uses your code then it shouldn't matter now that a company picks up your code. You are also contributing this way too. Tailwind is a business and they picked a business model that wasn't resilient enough.
  • oxag3n 10mo ago
    This is a dilemma for me that gets more and more critical as I finalize my thesis. My default mental model was to open source for the sake of contributing back to the community, enhance my ideas and discuss them with whoever finds it interesting. To my surprise, my doctoral advisor told me to keep the code closed. She told me not only LLMs will steal it and benefit from it, but there's a risk of my code becoming a target after it's stolen by companies with fat attorney budgets and there's no way I could defend and prove anything.
  • JacobAsmuth 10mo ago
    This is why I never got into open source in the first place. I was worried that new programmers might read my code, learn how to program, and then start independently contributing the the projects I know and love - significantly devaluing my contributions.
• JackSlateur 10mo ago
  "Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" AI is both a near-perfect propaganda machine and, in the programming front, a self-fulfilling prophecy: yes, AI will be better at coding than human. Mostly because humans are made worse by using AI.
  • zinodaur 10mo ago
    [not an ai booster] I think you are the target of this article. I believe you are misunderstanding the current capacity AI
    • JackSlateur 10mo ago
      I think I spend too much time at work fixing the greatness of AI.
      • edg5000 10mo ago
        Are you hand-fixing the issues or having AI do it? I've found that second pass quality is miles away from an initial implementation. If you're experienced, you'll know exactly where the code smells are. Point this out, and the agents will produce a much better implementation in this second pass. And have those people store the promps in the repo! I put my specifications in ./doc/spec/*.md Every time I got bad results, looking back I noticed my spec was just vague or relied on assumptions. Of course you can't fix your collegues, if they suck they suck and sombody gotta do the mopping :)
      • vouwfietsman 10mo ago
        I think it would make sense to have these issues bubble up into the public consciousness of hackernews. I've never used AI to code, I'm a software architect and currently assume I get little value out of an LLM. It would be useful for me if this debate had a vaguely engineering-smelling quality to it, because its currently just two groups shouting at eachother and handwaving criticism away. If you actually deal with AI generated problems, I love it, please make a post about it so we have something concrete to point to.
• cmiles8 10mo ago
  The “anti-AU hype” phrase oversimplifies what’s playing out at the moment. On the tech side, while things are a bit rough around the edges still the tech is very useful and isn’t going away. I honestly don’t see much disagreement there. The concern mostly comes from the business side… that for all the usefulness on the tech there is no clearly viable path that financially supports everything that’s going on. It’s a nice set of useful features but without products with sufficient revenue flowing in to pay for it all. That paints a picture of the tech sticking around but a general implosion of the startups and business models betting on making all this work. The later isn’t really “anti-AI hype” but more folks just calling out the reality that there’s not a lot of evidence and data to support the amount of money invested and committed. And if you’ve been around the tech and business scene a while you’ve seen that movie before and know what comes next. In 5 years time I expect to be using AI more than I do now. I also expect most of the AI companies and startups won’t exist anymore.
  • antirez 10mo ago
    The blog post title is a joke about the AI hype.
    • iLoveOncall 10mo ago
      Well it completely misses the mark, because your whole article IS hyping up AI, and probably more than anything I've seen before honestly. If it's all meant to be ironical, it's a huge failure and people will use it to support their AI hype.
      • antirez 10mo ago
        I was not clear enough. I wanted to write a PRO-AI blog post. The people against AI always say negative things with using as central argument that "AI is hyped and overhyped". So I, for fun, consider the anti-AI movement a form of hype. It's a joke but not in the sense it does not mean what it means.
        • iLoveOncall 10mo ago
• systemf_omega 10mo ago
  What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.
  • Ekaros 10mo ago
    By their promises it should get so good that basically you do not need to learn it. So it is reasonable to wait until that point.
    • dkdcio 10mo ago
      this is a straw man, nobody serious is promising that. it is a skill like any other that requires learning
      • Ekaros 10mo ago
        OpenAI is going to get to AGI. And AGI should in minutes build a system that takes vague input and produces fully functioning product out of it. Isn't singularity being promised by them?
        • dkdcio 10mo ago
          you’re just repeating the straw man. if you can’t think critically and just regurgitate every dumb thing you hear idk what to tell you. nobody serious thinks a “singularity” is coming. there’s not even a proper definition of “AGI” your argument amounts to “some people said stupid shit one time and I took it seriously”
      • robot-wrangler 10mo ago
        I agree about skills actually, but it's also obvious that parent is making a very real point that you cannot just dismiss. For several years now and far short of wild AGI promises, the answer to literally every issue with casual or production AI has been something like "but the rate of model improvement.." or "but the tools and ecosystem will evolve.." If you believe that uncritically about everything else, then you have to answer why agentic workflows or MCP or whatever is the one thing that it can't evolve to do for us. There's a logical contradiction here where you really can't have it both ways.
• bluGill 10mo ago
  I'm trying not to fall for it, but when I try ai to write code it fails more often than not - at least for me. some people claim it does everything but I keep finding major problems. Even when it writes something that works often I can't explain that in 2026 we should be using smart pointers (C++) or what ever the modern thing
  • criddell 10mo ago
    Same here. I’ve had limited success getting AIs to do very simple stuff. Every one I’ve tried invents APIs that don’t exist and eventually get stuck in a circle where it tells me to try A. When that doesn’t work, try B. No luck? Try C. Hmmm my apologies, try A. Lather, rinse, repeat.
    • simonw 10mo ago
      Are you using a coding agent running in auto-approve mode? If so then none of this matters, because it will run through that lather-rinse-repeat loop itself in less than a minute.
      • criddell 10mo ago
        No, I haven’t tried that yet. I don’t really want to turn on auto mode when it’s iterating on my credit card and it looks like it’s in an infinite loop… Is that a silly thing to be worried about? I work mostly in C++ (MFC applications on Windows) and assembly language (analyzing crash reports). For the C++ work, the AIs do all kinds of unsafe things like casting away constness or doing hacks to expose private class internals. What they give me is sometimes enough to get unstuck though which is nice. For crash reports (a disassembly around the crash site and a stack trace) they are pretty useless and that’s coming from someone who considers himself to be a total novice at assembly. (Looking to up my x64 / WinDbg game and any pointers to resources would be appreciated!) I do prototyping in Python and Claude is excellent at that.
        • enraged_camel 10mo ago
• BoredPositron 10mo ago
  We are 5 years in... it's fine to be sceptical. The model advancements are in the single digits now. It's not on us that they promised the world 3 years ago. It's fine and will be just fine for the next few years. A real breakthrough is at least another 5 years away and if it comes everything you do now will be obsolete. Nobody will need or care about the dude that Sloperatored Claude Code on release and that's the reality everyone who goes full AI evangelist needs to understand. You are just a stopgap. The knowledge you are accumulating now is just worthless transitional knowledge. There is no need for FOMO and there is nothing hard operating LLMs for coding and it will get easier by the day.
  • prodigycorp 10mo ago
    Where we're at is a lot better than we expected to be three years ago TBH.
  • baq 10mo ago
    I haven't been listening to any promises, I'm simply trying out the models as they get released. I agree with the article wholeheartedly - you can't pretend these tools are not worth learning anymore. It's irresponsible if you're a professional. Next breakthrough will happen in 2030 or it might happen next Tuesday; it might have already happened, it's just that the lab which did it is too scared to release it. It doesn't matter: until it happens, you should work with what you've got.
  • oncallthrow 10mo ago
    I would have wholeheartedly agreed with this comment one year ago. Now, not so much.
  • danielbln 10mo ago
    5 years ago we had GPT-3, not even instruction-following GPT yet, a mere completion model. ChatGPT release was late 2022 (3 years ago). True agentic systems with reliable tool calling in a loop, that came maybe a year ago, agentic coding harnesses less than a year ago. Model improvements may have flattened, the quality improvements due to engineering work around those models certainly have not. If we always wait for technology to calcify and settle before we interact with it, then that would be rather boring for some of us. Acquiring knowledge is not really that much of a heavy burden that it's an issue if it's outdated a year in . But that's maybe just a mindset thing.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• phtrivier 10mo ago
  How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking over manual coding ? Would we see an increase in the number of GitHub projects ? In the number of stars (given the ai is so good) ? In the number of start up ipos (surely if all your engineers are 1000x engineers thanks to Claude code, we'll have plenty of googles and Amazons to invest in) ? In the price of software (if I can just vibe code everything, than a 10$ fully compatible replacement for MS Windows is just a few months away, right ?) In the the numbers of app published in the stores ?
  • CuriouslyC 10mo ago
    Plot twist: the bottleneck when you have a development force multiplier is __MARKETING__. If you develop at 10X the rate, you still have to grind/growth marketing. Unmarketed products might as well not exist, even if they're fantastic. Github stars? That's 100% marketing. Shit that clears a low quality bar can rack up stars like crazy just by being well marketed. Number of startups? That's 100% marketing. Investors put money into products that have traction, or founders that look impressive, and both of those are mostly marketing. People actually are vibe coding stuff rather than using SaaS though, that one's for real. Your example is hyperbolic, but the Tailwind scenario is just one example of AI putting pressure on products.
    • falloutx 10mo ago
      You cant vibe code users or traction. If you make they will come is not a strategy for 2026. In fact, the amount of money needed for marketing will wipe out any savings from not having a Software dev.
      • CuriouslyC 10mo ago
        If you make they will come has never been a valid strategy. And marketing is fucking miserable now because of the proliferation low quality software people are trying to turn into SaaS. If you don't have a halo already, you need to be blessed or you're just going to suffer. Getting a good mention by someone like Theo or SimonW >> 1000 well written articles.
• galdauts 10mo ago
  I feel like the use of the term "anti-AI hype" is not really fully explored here. Even limiting myself to tech-related applications - I'm frankly sick of companies trying to shove half-baked "AI features" down my throat, and the enshittification of services that ensues. That has little to do with using LLMs as coding assistants, and yet I think it is still an essential part of the "anti-AI hype".
  • falloutx 10mo ago
    The dreaded summarize feature, its in places you wouldn't expect, and not to mention the whole lets record every meeting and then summarize it for leaders. Big Brother in work is back and its even more powerful.
• chrz 10mo ago
  > How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, because I see this as a continuation of what I tried to do all my life: democratizing code, systems, knowledge. LLMs are going to help us to write better software, faster, and will allow small teams to have a chance to compete with bigger companies. You might feel great, thats fine, but I dont. And software quality is going down, I wouldn't agree that LLMs will help write better software
  • epolanski 10mo ago
    > I wouldn't agree that LLMs will help write better software Your statement makes no sense. Even if you don't let LLMs author a single line of your code, they can still review it, find edge cases you didn't think about or suggest different approaches. The fact that AI allows lots of slop, does not negate its overall utility in good informed hands.
    • sesm 10mo ago
      The balance between 'find edge cases' and 'hallucinate non-existing cases and waste your time' may be negative. LLMs are also not free, they cost significant money even today, when they are subsidized by marketing budget.
      • epolanski 10mo ago
        Even an hallucinated non-existing case (which isn't the norm in my experience) is still food for thought.
        • Madmallard 10mo ago
          It was already shown repeatedly in GitHub repositories in the last year that authors are really unhappy with AI generated pull-requests and test cases.
          • epolanski 10mo ago
• adityaathalye 10mo ago
  Don't fall into the "Look ma, no hands" hype. Antirez + LLM + CFO = Billion Dollar Redis company, quite plausibly. /However/ ... As for the delta provided by an LLM to Antirez, outside of Redis (and outside of any problem space he is already intimately familiar with), an Apples to Apples comparison would be he trying this on an equally complex codebase he has no idea about. I'll bet... what Antirez can do with Redis and LLMs (certainly useful, huge Quality of Life improvement to Antirez), he cannot even begin to do with (say) Postgres. The only way to get there with (say) Postgres, would be to /know/ Postgres. And pretty much everyone, no matter how good, cannot get there with code-reading alone. With software at least, we need to develop a mental model of the thing by futzing about with the thing in deeply meaningful ways. And most of us day-job grunts are in the latter spot... working in some grimy legacy multi-hundred-thousand line code-mine, full of NPM vulns, schelpping code over the wall to QA (assuming there is even a QA), and basically developing against live customers --- "learn by shipping", as they say. I do think LLMs are wildly interesting technology, however they are poor utility for non-domain-experts. If organisations want to profit from the fully-loaded cost of LLM technology, they better also invest heavily in staff training and development.
  • roncesvalles 10mo ago
    Exactly. AI is minimally useful for coding something that you couldn't have been able to code yourself, given enough time, without explicitly investing time in generic learning not specific to that codebase or particular task. Although calling AI "just autocomplete" is almost a slur now, it really is just that in the sense that you need to A) have a decent mental picture of what you want, and, B) recognize a correct output when you see it. On a tangent, the inability to identify correct output is also why I don't recommend using LLMs to teach you anything serious. When we use a search engine to learn something, we know when we've stumbled upon a really good piece of pedagogy through various signals like information density, logical consistency, structuredness/clarity of thought, consensus, reviews, author's credentials etc. But with LLMs we lose these critical analysis signals.
    • teeeew 10mo ago
      Absolutely spot on. You are calling out the and subtle nuance that many don’t get…
• NitpickLawyer 10mo ago
  > Whatever you believe about what the Right Thing should be, you can't control it by refusing what is happening right now. Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career. Think about it. Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a five minutes test where you can just reinforce your own beliefs. This is the advice I've been giving my friends and coworkers as well for a while now. Forget the hype, just take time to test them from time to time. See where it's at. And "prepare" for what's to come, as best you can. Another thing to consider. If you casually look into it by just reading about it, be aware that almost everything you read in "mainstream" places has been wrong in 2025. The people covering this, writing about this, producing content on this have different goals in this era. They need hits, likes, shares and reach. They don't get that with accurate reporting. And, sadly, negativity sells. It is what it is. THe only way to get an accurate picture is to try them yourself. The earlier you do that, the better you'll be. And a note on signals: right now, a "positive" signal is more valuable for you than many "negative" ones. Read those and try to understand the what, if not the how. "I did this with cc" is much more valuable today than "x still doesn't do y reliably".
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • trinsic2 10mo ago
    > Whatever you believe about what the Right Thing should be, you can't control it by refusing what is happening right now. Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career. Think about it. Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a five minutes test where you can just reinforce your own beliefs. You can refuse to support it on the grounds that its being used to harm people. That might not do anything but its still important to be on the right side of humanity. I don't condemn the tech, but the tech depends on factors that are harming people and not supporting that part of it is an act of support for humanity.
• esperent 10mo ago
  > But I'm worried for the folks that will get fired. It is not clear what the dynamic at play will be: will companies try to have more people, and to build more? This is the crux. AI suddenly became good and society hasn't caught on yet. Programmers are a bit ahead of the curve here, being closer to the action of AI. But in a couple of years, if not already, all the other technical and office jobs will be equally affected. Translators, admin, marketing, scientists, writers of all sorts and on and on. Will we just produce more and retain a similar level of employment, or will AI be such a force multiplier that a significant number or even most of these jobs will be gone? Nobody knows yet. And yet, what I'm even more worried about for their society upending abilities, is robots. These are coming soon and they'll arrive with just as much suddeness and inertia as AI did. The robots will be as smart as the AI running them, so what happens when they're cheap and smart enough to replace humans in nearly all physical jobs? Nobody knows the answer to this. But in 5 years, or 10, we will find out.
  • falloutx 10mo ago
    In one of the scenarios programmers get replaced then the progress slows, thus saving jobs of writers, lawyers, marketing, scientists, artists. At this point I am okay with that scenario seeing how programmers have showed no solidarity while every other field has been rejecting AI. Lawyers have even started hiring junior lawyers back and Art industry has basically shoved AI into a bin of irrelevance.
    • esperent 10mo ago
      > Art industry I don't agree, unless by "art industry" what you actually mean is "art establishment". If we broaden it to mean "anywhere that money is paid, or used to be paid, to people for any kind of artistic endeavor" - even if we limit that to things related to drawing, painting, illustrating, graphic design, 3d design etc. - then AI is definitely replacing or augmenting a ton of human work. Just go on any Photoshop forum. It's all about AI now, just like everywhere else.
    • nl 10mo ago
      > Lawyers have even started hiring junior lawyers back I assure you that this isn't anything like the level before. Lawyering has changed forever.
• yard2010 10mo ago
  This is making me sad. The people that are going to lose their jobs will be literally weaponized against minorities by the crooked politicians that are doing their thing right now, it's going to be a disaster I can tell. I just wish I could go back in time. I don't want to live in this timeline anymore. I lost my passion job before anything of it even happened. On the paper.
  • falloutx 10mo ago
    We already may have hit the point where easier it is to make software, harder it is to sell (or make money from it). There is no way I can convince a user that my vibe coded version of Todolist is better than 100 other made this week
  • tim333 10mo ago
    Industries have come and gone for centuries and it doesn't always go horribly wrong.
• artemonster 10mo ago
  I see AI effect as exact opposite, a turbo version of "lisp curse".
• senko 10mo ago
  The anti-AI hype, in the context of software development, seems to focus on a few things: > AI code is slop, therefore you shouldn't use it You should learn how to responsibly use it as a tool, not a replacement for you. This can be done, people are doing it, people like Salvatore (antirez), Mitchell (of Terraform/Ghostty fame), Simon (swillison) and many others are publicly talking about it. > AI can't code XYZ It's not all-or-nothing. Use it where it works for you, don't use it where it doesn't. And btw, do check that you actually described the problem well. Slop-in, slop-out. Not sayin' this is always the case, but turns out it's the case surprisingly often. Just sayin' > AI will atrophy your skills, or prevent you from learning new ones, therefore you shouldn't use it Again, you should know where and how to use it. Don't tune out while doing coding. Don't just skim the generated code. Be curious, take your time. This is entirely up to you. > AI takes away the fun part (coding) and intensifies the boring (management) I love programming but TBH, for non-toy projects that need to go into production, at least three quarters are boring boilerplate. And making that part interesting is one of the worst things you can do in software development! That path lies resume-driven development, architecture astronautics, abusing design patterns du jour, and other sins that will make code maintenance on that thing a nightmare! You want boring, stable, simple. AI excels at that. Then you can focus on the small tiny bit that's fun and hand-craft that! Also, you can always code for fun. Many people with boring coding jobs code for fun in the evenings. AI changes nothing here (except possibly improving the day job drudgery). > AI is financially unsustainable, companies are losing money Perhaps, and we're probably in the bubble. Doesn't detract from the fact that these things exist, are here now, work. OpenAI and Anthropic can go out of business tomorrow, the few TB of weights will be easily reused by someone else. The tech will stay. > AI steals your open source code, therefore you shouldn't write open-source Well, use AI to write your closed-source code. You don't need to open source anything if you're worried someone (AI or human) will steal it. If you don't want to use something on moral grounds, that's a perfectly fine thing to do. Others may have different opinion on this. > AI will kill your open source business, therefore you shouldn't write open-source Open source is not a business model (I've been saying this for longer than median user of this site has been alive). AI doesn't change that. As @antirez points out, you can use AI or not, but don't go hiding under a rock and then being surprised in a few years when you come out and find the software development profession completely unrecognizable.
• torben-friis 10mo ago
  >Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn coding, and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. And now you can build more and better, if you find your way to use AI effectively. The fun is still there, untouched. I wonder if I’m the odd one out or if this is a common sentiment: I don’t give a shit about building, frankly. I like programming as a puzzle and the ability to understand a complex system. “Look at all the things I created in a weekend” sounds to me like “look at all the weight I moved by bringing a forklift to the gym!”. Even ignoring the part that there is barely a “you” in this success, there is not really any interest at all for me in the output itself. This point is completely orthogonal to the fact that we still need to get paid to live, and in that regard I'll do what pays the bills, but I’m surprised by the amount of programmers that are completely happy with doing away with the programming part.
  • falloutx 10mo ago
    Learning, solving puzzles and understanding something was a bigger desire for me than building another to-do list. In fact, most of my building effort has been used by corporations to make software worse for users.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    Interestingly, I read "I like programming as a puzzle and the ability to understand a complex system." and thought that you were about to argue in favor of AI-assisted programming! I enjoy those things about programming too, which is why I'm having so much fun using LLMs. They introduce new layers of complex system understanding and problem solving (at that AI meta-layer), and let me dig into and solve harder and more time-consuming problems than I was able to without them.
    • torben-friis 10mo ago
      >They introduce new layers of complex system understanding and problem solving (at that AI meta-layer), and let me dig into and solve harder and more time-consuming problems than I was able to without them. This is not my experience at all. My experience is that the moment I stop using them as google or search on steroids and let them generate code, I start losing the grip of what is being built. As in, when it’s time for a PR, I never feel 100% confident that I’m requesting a review on something solid. I can listen to that voice and sort of review myself before going public, but that usually takes as much time as writing myself and is way less fun, or I can just submit and be dishonest since then I’m dropping that effort into a teammate. In other words, I feel that the productivity gain only comes if you’re willing to remove yourself from the picture and let others deal with any consequence. I’m not.
• bakugo 10mo ago
  > LLMs are going to help us to write better software No, I really don't think they will. Software has only been getting worse, and LLMs are accelerating the rate at which incompetent developers can pump out low quality code they don't understand and can't possibly improve.
  • Trasmatta 10mo ago
    Exactly. Many of us have learned, after decades of experience, that more code and more features is not a net positive. Lots of additional code is a liability that your carefully accept given the value it provides.
• bob1029 10mo ago
  > Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a five minutes test where you can just reinforce your own beliefs. Find a way to multiply yourself, and if it does not work for you, try again every few months. I've been taking a proper whack at the tree every 6 months or so. This time it seems like it might actually fall over. Every prior attempt I could barely justify spending $10-20 in API credits before it was obvious I was wasting my time. I spent $80 on tokens last night and I'm still not convinced it won't work. Whether or not AI is morally acceptable is a debate I wish I had the luxury of engaging in. I don't think rejecting it would allow me to serve any good other than in my own mind. It's really easy to have certain views when you can afford to. Most of us don't have the privilege of rejecting the potential that this technology affords. We can complain about it but it won't change what our employers decide to do. Walk the game theory for 5 minutes. This is a game of musical chairs. We really wish it isn't. But it is. And we need to consider the implications of that. It might be better to join the "bad guys" if you actually want to help those around you. Perhaps even become the worst bad guy and beat the rest of them to a functional Death Star. Being unemployed is not a great position to be in if you wish to assist your allies. Big picture, you could fight AI downstream by capitalizing on it near term. No one is keeping score. You might be in your own head, but you are allowed to change that whenever you want.
  • falloutx 10mo ago
    Wouldn't a lot of us become unemployed anyway if there are 75% less jobs? I don't see how I can use AI better than other people. People who keep their jobs are also not in for a fun time when they will be responsible for 4x the surface. And if you are not in top 7 companies, your company might not fire you but get bankrupt in a couple of years because all the investment is hogged by the top7. This is more of a lose-lose situation.
  • akomtu 10mo ago
    > Big picture, you could fight AI downstream by capitalizing on it near term. Trying to beat a demon long term by making a contract with it short term?
• robot-wrangler 10mo ago
  Let's maybe avoid all the hype, whether it is for or against, and just have thoughtful and measured stances on things? Fairly high points for that on this piece, despite the title. It has the obligatory remark that manually writing code is pointless now but also the obligatory caveat that it depends on the kind of code you're writing.
• vmaurin 10mo ago
  > facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming forever Show me these "facts"
  • antirez 10mo ago
    If you can't see this by working with Claude Code for a few weeks, I don't want to go into bigger efforts than writing a blog post to convince you. It's not a mission, mine. I just want to communicate with the part of people that are open enough to challenge their ideas and are willing to touch with their hands what is happening. Also, if you tried and failed, it means that either for your domain AI is not good enough, or you are not able to extract the value. The fact is, this does not matter: a bigger percentage of programmers is using AI with success every day, and as it progresses this will happen more and in more diverse programming fields and tasks. If you disagree and are happy to avoid LLMs, well, it's ok as well.
    • oulipo2 10mo ago
      okay, but again: if you say in your blog that those are "facts", then... show us the facts? You can't just hand-wavily say "a bigger percentage of programmers is using AI with success every day" and not give a link to a study that shows it's true as a matter of fact, we know that a lot of companies have fired people by pretending that they are no longer needed in the age of AI... only to re-hire offshored people for much cheaper for now, there hasn't been a documented sudden increase in velocity / robustness for code, a few anecdotical cases sure I use it myself, and I admit it saves some time to develop some basic stuff and get a few ideas, but so far nothing revolutionary. So let's take it at face value: - a tech which helps slightly with some tasks (basically "in-painting code" once you defined the "border constraints" sufficiently well) - a tech which might cause massive disruption of people's livelihoods (and safety) if used incorrectly, which might FAR OUTWEIGH the small benefits and be a good enough reason for people to fight against AI - a tech which emits CO2, increases inequalities, depends on quasi slave-work of annotators in third-world countries, etc so you can talk all day long about not dismissing AI, but you should take it also with everything that comes with it
• embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part. For me, I initially got into programming because I wanted to ruin other people's websites, then I figured out I needed to know how to build websites first, then I found it more fun to create and share what I've done with others, and they tell me what they think of it. That's my "fire". But I've met so many people who doesn't care an iota about sharing what they built with others, it matters nothing to them. I guess the conclusion is, not all programmers program for the same reason, for some of us, LLMs helps a lot, and makes things even more fun. For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them. Hence we get this constant back and forth of "Can't believe others can work like this!" vs "I can't believe others aren't working like this!", but both sides seems to completely miss the other side.
  • frizlab 10mo ago
    > I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part. Exactly me.
    • amelius 10mo ago
      Same. However, for me the fun in programming was always a kind of trap that kept me from doing more challenging things. Now the fun is gone, maybe I can do more important work.
      • DrewADesign 10mo ago
        You might be surprised to find out how much of your motivation to do any of it at all was tied to your enjoyment, and that’s much more difficult to overcome than people realize.
• edg5000 10mo ago
  > state of the art LLMs are able to complete large subtasks or medium size projects alone, almost unassisted, given a good set of hints about what the end result should be No. I agree with the author, but it's hyperbolic of him to phrase it like this. If you have solid domain knowledge, you'll steer the model with detailed specs. It will carry those out competently and multiply your productivity. However, the quality of the output still reflects your state of knowledge. It just provides leverage. Given the best tractors, a good farmer will have much better yields than a shit one. Without good direction, even Opus 4.5 tends to create massive code repetion. Easy to avoid if you know what you are doing, albeit in a refactor pass.
  • artdigital 10mo ago
    Yes that’s how I see it too. It’s a productivity multiplier, but depends on what you put in. Sure Opus can work fully on its own by just telling it “add a button that does X”, but do that 20 times and the good turns into mush. Steer the model with detailed tech specs on the other hand, and the output becomes magical
  • falloutx 10mo ago
    If this only works for people with like 10+ years of domain experience, doesnt that make this an Anti-AI article? Whole vibe coding sells on the promise that it works and it works for every tom and their mom.
    • gherkinnn 10mo ago
      This conflates two things. One is LLMs writing code. Not everything and not for everyone. But they are useful for most of the code being written. It is useful. What it does not do (yet, if ever) is bridging the gap from "idea" to a working solution. This is precisely where all the low-code ideas of the past decades fell apart. Translating an idea in to formal rules is very, very hard. Think of all of the "just add a button there"-type comments we've all suffered.
      • Xunjin 10mo ago
• Ekaros 10mo ago
  I think best hope against AI is copy right. That is AI generated software has none. Everyone is free to steal and resell it. And those who generated have zero rights to complain or take legal action.
• Juliate 10mo ago
  > What is the social solution, then? Innovation can't be taken back after all. It definitely can. The innovation that was the open, social web of 20 years ago? still an option, but drowned between closed ad-fueled toxic gardens and drained by AI illegal copy bots. The innovation that was democracy? Purposely under attack in every single place it still exists today. Insulin at almost no cost (because it costs next to nothing to produce)? Out of the question for people that live under the regime of pharmaceutical corporations that are not reigned by government, by collective rules. So, a technology that has a dubious ROI over the energy and water and land consumed, incites illegal activities and suicides, and that is in the process of killing the consumer public IT market for the next 5 years if not more, because one unprofitable company without solid verifiable prospects managed to pass dubious orders with unproven money that lock memory components for unproven data centers... yes, it definitely can be taken back.
  • Philpax 10mo ago
    You cannot stop someone from running llama-server -m glm-4.7.gguf on their own hardware. That is the argument: even if all the AI companies go bust and the datacenters explode, the technology has been fundamentally proliferated and it is impossible to return to a world in which it does not exist.
    • Juliate 10mo ago
      Of course not. But that's only the raw tech. The tech will still be there. As much as blockchains, crypto, NFTs and such, whose bubbles have not yet burst (well, the NFT one did, it was fast). But (Gen)AI today is much less about the tech, and much more about the illegal actions (harvesting copyrighted works) that permit it to run and the disastrous impact it has on ... everything (resources, jobs, mistaken prospectives, distorted IT markets, culture, politics) because it is not (yet) regulated to the extent it should.
• imiric 10mo ago
  This is the first time I hear sentiments against "AI" hype be referred to as hype itself. Yes, there are people ignoring this technology altogether, possibly to their own detriment, but at the stage where we are now it is perfectly reasonable to want to avoid the actual hype. What I would really urge people to avoid doing is listening to what any tech influencer has to say, including antirez. I really don't care what famous developers think about this technology, and it doesn't influence my own experience of it. People should try out whatever they're comfortable with, and make up their own opinions, instead of listening what anyone else has to say about it. This applies to anything, of course, but it's particularly important for the technology bubble we're currently in. It's unfortunate that some voices are louder than others in this parasocial web we've built. Those with larger loudspeakers should be conscious of this fact, and moderate their output responsibly. It starts by not telling people what to do.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• mehdi1964 10mo ago
  [flagged]
• richardjennings 10mo ago
  SOTA LLMs are now quite good at typing out code that passes tests. If you are able to instruct the creation of sufficient tests and understand the code generated structurally, there is a significant multiplier in productivity. I have found LLMs to be hugely useful in understanding codebases more quickly. Granted it may be necessary to get 2nd opinions and fact check what is stated, but there is a big door now open to anyone to educate themselves. I think there are some negative consequences to this; perhaps a new form of burn out. With the force multiplier and assisted learning utility comes a substantial increase in opportunity cost.
• arthurroman 10mo ago
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• eeixlk 10mo ago
  If you dont call it AI and see it as a natural language search engine result merger it's a bit easier to understand. Like a search engine, it's clunky so you have to know how to use it to get any useful results. Sometimes it appears magical or clever but it's just analyzing billions of text patterns. You can use this search merger to generate text in various forms quickly, and request new generated text. But it doesn't have taste, comprehension, problem solving, vision, or wisdom. However it can steal your data and your work and include it in it's search engine.
• falloutx 10mo ago
  Where is this Anti-AI hype? We are seeing 100x videos of Claude Code & Vibe Coding and then may be we get 1 or 2 people saying "Maybe we should be cautious"
  • simonw 10mo ago
    I would count about two-thirds of the comments in this thread as anti-AI hype, and this thread is pretty mild in that regard compared to most other threads here about AI for code. And this is Hacker News, which you might expect to attract people who thrive on exploring the edges of weird new technology!
    • falloutx 10mo ago
      I mean most of us dont work in our own thing or open source, so making badly thought & designed features faster isn't really a dream. Software already has so much bloat and slop that this way of doing just scares us.
    • tuesdaynight 10mo ago
      I don't have decades of experience under my belt, but I feel like the reaction is happening mostly because it is the first time that developers are at the risk of being automated out of work. "Learn a new field" is easy to say when you are not the one that will need to do it. Now a lot of developers are afraid of having to follow the advice that they gave to a lot of workers. I don't believe that AI will put most of the working force out of jobs. That would be so different from what we had in history that I think the chances are minimal. However, they are not zero, and that is scary as fuck for a lot of people.
      • falloutx 10mo ago
        This is literally true, we have been automating other people out of their jobs without empathy for ages, so it makes sense at some point the knife would fall on us. Because of low solidarity we have shown with others and even our fellow programmers, I guess we deserve it. My real worry at this point is that the most destructive ones will continue and only the destructive programmers will be safe.
• theturtletalks 10mo ago
  LLMs are breaking open-source monetization. Group 1 is untouched since they were writing code for the sake of writing and they have the reward of that altruism. Group 2 are those that needed their projects to bring in some revenue so they can continue writing open-source. Group 3 are companies that used open-source as a way to get market share from proprietary companies, using it more in a capitalistic way. Overtime, I think groups 2 and 3 will leave open-source and group 1 will make up most of the open-source contributors. It is up to you to decide if projects like Redis would be built today with the monetary incentives gone.
  • antirez 10mo ago
    Please note that the majority of OSS efforts where already non monetized and deeply exploited. At least, what it is happening has the potential to change the model towards a more correct one. What you see with Tailwind and similar cases, it is not really an open source business model issue, it is a "low barrier to entry" business model issue, since with AI a lot of things can be done without efforts and without purchasing PRO products. And also documentation is less useful, but this is a general thing, not just related to OSS software. In general people that write OSS are, for the most part, not helped enough by the companies using their code to make money, by users, buy everybody else, basically.
    • theturtletalks 10mo ago
      Very true, most of open-source is group 1 and are deeply exploited already. What open-source monetization model do you see as a correct one?
• ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
  I generally have a lot of respect for this guy. He’s an excellent coder, and really cares about his craft. I can relate to him (except he’s been more successful than me, which is fine -he deserves it). Really, one of the first things he said, sums it up: > facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming forever. I have been using it in a very similar manner to how he describes his workflow, and it’s already greatly improved my velocity and quality. I also can relate to this comment: > I feel great to be part of that, because I see this as a continuation of what I tried to do all my life: democratizing code, systems, knowledge.
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• islma 10mo ago
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• metalman 10mo ago
  the end run around copyright, is TOS that are forced on users, through distribution chanels(platforms),service providors, and actual "patented" hardware, so money will continue to flow up, not sideways. Given that there are a very limited number of things that can actualy be done with computer/phones, and it becomes clear that "AI" can arrange those in any possible configuration, the rest is deciding if it will jive with the users, and noticing when it doesn't, which I believe that AI will be unable to disern from other AI slop, imitating actual useres
• sreekanth850 10mo ago
  People here generalise vibcoders into single category. I don’t write code line-by-line the traditional way, but I do understand architecture deeply. Recently I started using AI to write code. not by dumping random prompts and copy-pasting blindly, but inside VS Code, reviewing what it generates, understanding why it works, and knowing exactly where each feature lives and how it fits. I also work with a frontend developer (As i do backend only and not interested in building UI and css) to integrate things properly, and together we fix bugs and security issues. Every feature built with AI works flawlessly because it’s still being reviewed, tested, and owned by humans. If I have a good Idea, and use AI to code, without depending on a developer friction due to limited budget, why people think its Sin? Is the implication that if you don’t have VC money to hire a team of developers, you’re supposed to just lose? I saw the exact same sentiment when tools like Elementor started getting popular among business owners. Same arguments, same gatekeeping. The market didn’t care. It feels more like insecurity about losing an edge. And if the edge was I type code myself, that edge was always fragile. Edit: The biggest advantage is that you don’t lose anything in translation. There’s no gap between the idea in your head and what gets built. You don’t spend weeks explaining intent, edge cases, or what I really meant to a developer. You iterate 1:1 with the system and adjust immediately when something feels off.
• kiriakosv 10mo ago
  AI tools in their current form or another will definitely change software engineering, I personally think for the best However I can’t help but notice some things that look weird/amusing: - The exact time that many programmers were enlightened about the AI capabilities and the frequency of their posts. - The uniform language they use in these posts. Grandiose adjectives, standard phrases like ‘it seems to me’ - And more importantly the sense of urgency and FOMO they emit. This is particularly weird for two reasons. First is that if the past has shown something regarding technology is that open source always catches up. But this is not the case yet. Second, if the premise is that we re just the in beginning all these ceremonial flows will be obsolete. Do not get me wrong, as of today these are all valid ways to work with AI and in many domains they increase the productivity. But I really don’t get the sense of urgency.
  • scubadude 10mo ago
    > I really don’t get the sense of urgency Mind-boggling amount of investment needing a return or the promise of a return
  • Sateeshm 10mo ago
    > The exact time that many programmers were enlightened about the AI capabilities and the frequency of their posts. I attribute that to the holidays. Many people finally had the time to goof around with these tools. At least that's how it happened to me. It was an incredible experience. I implemented a few features quickly and in a much better way than I could otherwise. Realized how many tiny holes my app had and a few suboptimal patterns I was using. Made me worry about my career, initially, but after using for a while, I now see it as going up the chain of abstraction. Only thing I'm not doing is writing code by hand. Im still having to do everything else like thinking about architecture and the big picture, keeping it dry and maintainable, debugging, etc - but with a lot of help from LLMs. Sometimes it's 10x and sometimes you wasted sometime, you know, just like how using packages made us go up the chain.
• wasmainiac 10mo ago
  These personal blogs are starting to feel like Linkdin Lunatic posts, kinda similar. to the optimised floor sweeping blog, “I am excited to provide shareholder value, at minimum wage”
  • simonw 10mo ago
    What does it tell you that programmers with the credibility of antirez - and who do not have an AI product to sell you - are writing things like this even when they know a lot of people aren't going to like reading them?
    • falloutx 10mo ago
      People higher up the ladder aren't selling anything but they also have to not worry about losing jobs. We are worried that execs are going to see the advances and quickly clear the benches, might not be true but every programmer believing they have become a 10x programmer pushes us more into that reality.
    • wasmainiac 10mo ago
      Nothing at all, it just sounds like a desperate post on LinkedIn riding the slight glimmer of hope it will help them land their next position.
    • fabianholzer 10mo ago
      That is an argument to authority. There is a large enough segment of folks who like to be confirmed in either direction. Doesn't make the argument itself correct or incorrect. Time will tell though.
      • hu3 10mo ago
        No, this is an argument of credibility.
        • yeasku 10mo ago
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• oulipo2 10mo ago
  > Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. Said by someone who spent his career writing code, it lacks a bit of details... a more correct way to phrase it is: "if you're already an expert in good coding, now you can use these tools to skip most of code writing" LLMs today are mostly some kind of "fill-in-the-blanks automation". As a coder, you try to create constraints (define types for typechecking constraints, define tests for testing constraints, define the general ideas you want the LLM to code because you already know about the domain and how coding works), then you let the model "fill-in the blanks" and you regularly check that all tests pass, etc
• zkmon 10mo ago
  So, by "AI", you mean programming AI. Generalizing it as "AI" and "anti-AI" is adding great confusion to the already dizzying level of hype. At it's core, AI has capability to extract structure/meaning from unstructured content and vice-versa. Computing systems and other machines required inputs with limited context. So far, it was a human's job to prepare that structure and context and provide it to the machines. That structure can be called as "program" or "form data" or "a sequence of steps or lever operations or button presses". Now the machines got this AI wrapper or adapter that enables them to extract the context and structure from the natural human-formatted or messy content. But all that works only if the input has the required amount of information and inherent structure to it. Try giving a prompt with jumbled up sequence of words. So it's still the human jobs to provide that input to the machine.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• honeybadger1 10mo ago
  I've found awesome use cases for quick prototyping. It saves me days when I can just describe the final step and iterate on it backwards to perfection and showcase an idea.
• keyle 10mo ago
  > The fun is still there, untouched. Well that's a way to put it. But not everyone enjoy the art only for the results. I personally love learning, and by letting AI drive forward and me following, I don't learn. To learn is to be human. So saying the fun is untouched is one-sided. Not everyone is in it for the same reasons.
  • torlok 10mo ago
    I have no idea where the author is coming from with this. If I wanted to mainly tell others what to code, do code reviews, or "build", I'd be in a different role.
• elktown 10mo ago
  I wonder if being a literal AI sci-fi author, antirez acknowledges that there's possible bias and willingness to extrapolate here? That said, I respect his work immensely and I do put a lot of weight to his recommendations. But I'd really prefer the hype fog that's clouding signal [for me] to dissipate a bit - maybe economic realities will sort this out soon. There's also a short-termism aspect of AI generated code that's seemingly not addressed as much. Don't pee your pants in the winter to keep warm.
• on_the_train 10mo ago
  Another one of these sickening pieces. Framing opposition to an expensive tech that doesn't work as "anti". I tried letting the absolutely newest models write c++ today again. Gpt 5.1 and opus 4.5. single function with two or less input parameters, a nice return value, doing simple geometry with the glm library. Yes the code worked. But I took as long fixing the weird parts as it would have taken me myself. And I still don't trust the result, because reviewing is so much harder than writing. There's still no point. Resharper and clang-tidy still have more value than all LLMs. It's not just a hype, it's a bloody cult, right besides those nft and church of COVID people.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    Did you try telling the model to write the unit tests first, watch them fail, then write a function that passes them?
  • yicmoggIrl 10mo ago
    > reviewing is so much harder than writing This is what reams of the AI proponents fail to understand. "Amazing, I don't have to write code, 'only' review AI slop" is sitting backwards on the horse. Who the heck wants to do that?
  • darkwater 10mo ago
    Your comment sounds like John Glenn's quote "Get the girl to check the numbers… If she says they’re good, I’m ready to go." about Katherine Johnson to double check the calculations done by the first computers used by NASA. At that time in history, it was probably accurate and the safest thing to do, but we all know how computer evolved from that time and now we don't have human calculators anymore but rather human checking the correctness of the written code that will do the actual calculations. IMO the only rebuttal to this can be that LLMs are almost at their peak and there is not going to be any possible significant breakthrough or steady improvement in the next years, in which case they will never become "the new computers".
    • on_the_train 10mo ago
      But LLMs aren't advertised as some future thing. They're advertised as being almighty and replacing devs in great numbers. And that's simply not true. It's a fad like 3D movies
• expedition32 10mo ago
  There is too much money invested in AI. You can't trust anyone talking about it.
• lofaszvanitt 10mo ago
  People are afraid, because while AI seemingly gobbles up programmer jobs, on the economic side there are no guardrails visible or planned whatsoever.
• kruuuder 10mo ago
  What happens if the bubble bursts - can we still use all the powerful models to create all this code? Aren't all the agents effectively using venture capital today? Is this sustainable? If I can run an agent on my machine, with no remote backend required, the problem is solved. But right now, aren't all developers throwing themselves into agentic software development betting that these services will always be available to them at a relatively low cost?
  • simonw 10mo ago
    If the bubble bursts we club together to buy one of those big GPU servers (now available at rock bottom prices thanks to the bubble bursting) and run a shared instance of GLM-4.7 (the current best-at-coding Chinese open weight model) on it.
• dzonga 10mo ago
  antirez gave us reddit - but somehow I think the part him and other smart folks who talk about A.I so much is they forget about agency | self-sufficiency. If A.I writes everything for you - cool, you can produce faster ? but is it really true ? if you're renting capacity ? what if costs go up, now you can't rent anymore - but you can't code anymore, the documentation is no longer there - coz mcp etc assumption that everything will be done by agents then what ? what about the people that work on messy 'Information Systems' - things like redis - impressive but it's closed loop software just like compilers - some smart guy back in the 80s - wrote it's always a people problem -
  • otterley 10mo ago
    Redis, not Reddit. :)
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• anovikov 10mo ago
  I'm sure it will go in the worst way possible: demand for code will not expand at nearly the same rate in which coding productivity will increase, and vast majority of coders will become permanently jobless, the rest will become disposable cheap labor just due to overabundance of them. This is already happening. AI had an impact on simplest coding first, this is self-evident. So any impact it had, had to be on the quantity of software created, and only then on its quality and/or complexity. And mobile apps are/were a tedious job with a lot of scaffolding and a lot of "blanks to fill" to make them work and get accepted by stores. So first thing that had to skyrocket in numbers with the arrival of AI, had to be mobile apps. But the number of apps on Apple Store is essentially flat and rate of increase is barely distinguishable from the past years, +7% instead of +5%. Not even visible. Apparently the world doesn't need/can't make monetisable use of much more software than it already does. Demand wasn't quite satisfied say 5 years ago, but the gap wasn't huge. It is now covered many times over. Which means, most of us will probably never get another job/gig after the current one - and if it's over, it's over and not worth trying anymore - the scraps that are left of the market are not worth the effort.
• agoodusername63 10mo ago
  I never stop being amused that LLMs have made HN realize that many programmers are programmers for paychecks. Not for passion
  • antirez 10mo ago
    I like programming, and I do write code all the times. But when there is to do something productive, it is very hard to justify that for my ego or passion I don't leverage AI and go N times faster only because I'm used to enjoy a given process. I try to also enjoy the other process not related to writing code: ideas and design.
• threethirtytwo 10mo ago
  > the more isolated, and the more textually representable, the better: system programming is particularly apt I’ve written complete GUIs in 3D on the front end. This GUI was non traditional. It allows you to playback, pause speed up, slow down and rewind a gps track like a movie. There is real time color changing and drawing of the track as the playback occurs. Using mapbox to do this straight would be to slow. I told the AI to optimize it by going straight into shader extensions for mapbox to optimize GPU code. Make no mistake. LLMs are incredible for things that are non systems based that require interaction with 3D and GUIs.
  • antirez 10mo ago
    Yep, they work especially if you instruct them to add into your program ways for them to "see" what it is happening. And the more embedding models are getting better, the better results we will get too, from their ability to "see". For now Gemini 3 is the best at this, but is not the best at coding as an agent, so we will have to wait a bit.
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• bwfan123 10mo ago
  I am not sure why the OP is painting it as a "us-vs-them" - pro or anti-AI ? AI is a tool. Use it if it helps. I would draw an analogy here between building software and building a home. When building a home we have a user providing the requirements, the architect/structural engineer providing the blueprint to satisfy the reqs, the civil engineer overseeing the construction, and the mason laying the bricks. Some projects may have a project-manager coordinating these activities. Building software is similar in many aspects to building a structure. If developers think of themselves as a mason they are limiting their perspective. If AI can help lay the bricks use it ! If it can help with the blueprint or the design use it. It is a fantastic tool in the tool belt of the profession. I think of it as a power-tool and want to keep its batteries charged to use it at any time.
• yndoendo 10mo ago
  I want to know if any content has been made using AI or not. There really should be a label on the product to let the consumer know. This should be similar to Norway that requires disclosure of retouched images. No other way can I think of to help body image issues arising from pictorial people and how they never can being in real life.
• echelon 10mo ago
  I love Antirez. > However, this technology is far too important to be in the hands of a few companies. This is the most important assessment and we should all heed this warning with great care. If we think hyperscalers are bad, imagine what happens if they control and dictate the entire future. Our cellphones are prisons. We have no fundamental control, and we can't freely distribute software amongst ourselves. Everything flows through funnels of control and monitoring. The entire internet and all of technology could soon become the same. We need to bust this open now or face a future where we are truly serfs. I'm excited by AI and I love what it can do, but we are in a mortally precarious position.
  • throw1235435 10mo ago
    This is what will occur - the bad scenario that is. Labor and its knowledge distributes (hard to contain knowledge), capital centralises and compounds. Always been that way. With AI there will be a a tension between the two of course. The root question is: Will AI decentralise quicker than the disruption to this profession? I don't think so. I've noticed us techies don't really understand economics and game theory all that well - we just see awesome toy and want to play with it and want others to enjoy it too. We have worked to democratize computing for years (e.g. OSS) now to our detriment. No one in society long term respects people who do this in a capitalist system; they find them naive. I can now understand why other professions find us a little immature like kids playing with tech toys. I love solving problems with technology and love the field, but as I've gotten older I look back on a less technological life with nostalgia. Technology for all its benefit has disrupted the one thing humans do need and had for millions of years in our evolution - relative stability within their lifetimes. The mental health benefits to stability are massive and usually unmeasured. Technology, as evidenced by this thread, creates more and more anxiety about our future and our place within the community (e.g. social media, AI, and others). "Adaptability" isn't just a psychological trait; a wealthy person and secure person by definition is more adaptable too.
• ironman1478 10mo ago
  I'm not sure what to make of these technologies. I read about people doing all these things with them and it sounds impressive. Then when I use it, it feels like the tool produces junior level code unless I babysit it, then it really can produce what I want. If I have to do all this babysitting, is it really saving me anything other than typing the code? It hasn't felt like it yet and if anything it's scary because I need to always read the code to make sure it's valid, and reading code is harder than writing it.
  • casid 10mo ago
    I'm always puzzled by these claims. I usually know exactly what I want my code to look like. Writing a prompt instead and waiting for the result to return takes me right out of the flow. Sure, I can try to prompt and ask for larger junks, but then I have to review and understand the generated output first. If this makes people 10x faster, they must have worked really slow before.
  • epolanski 10mo ago
    Because using AI takes some practice: - you should document your best practices in a file and point it to the LLM (the standards are @claude or @agent markdown files - you should manage context (the larger it gets the weaker the output) - you should use good and clear prompts - you should generally make it generate a plan with the requirements (business logic changes focused) and then follow and review the implementation plan (I generally produce both in two different markdown files). - only then you let it code The last phase, isn't even the most important to be honest, you can do it manually. But I have found that forcing myself through the first two and having AI find information in the codebase, edge cases in the business logic, propose different solutions, evaluate the impact of the changes is a huge productivity multiplier. Very often I'm not worn out by the coding part, again, I can do it on my own, it's the finding information and connecting the dots the hard one. In that, it excels and I would struggle (mentally) to go back to jumping from file to file while keeping track of my findings in notes to figure out the wheres, whats and whys.
  • themk 10mo ago
    > and reading code is harder than writing it. This is the things thar gets me the most. Code review is _hard_. So hard that I'm convinced my colleagues don't do it and just slap "LGTM" on everything. We are trading "one writer, one reader" for "two readers", and it seems like a bad deal.
• golly_ned 10mo ago
  As long as I'm not reviewing PRs with thousands of lines net new that weren't even read by their PR submitter, I'm fine with anything. The software design I've seen from AI code agent using peers has been dreadful. I think for some who are excited about AI programming, they're happy they can build a lot more things. I think for others, they're excited they can build the same amount of things, but with a lot less thinking. The agent and their code reviewers can do the thinking for them.
• didip 10mo ago
  The paragraph that was started with this sentence: > However, this technology is far too important to be in the hands of a few companies. I wholeheartedly agree 1000%. Something needs to change this landscape in the US. Furthermore, the entire open source models being dominated by China is also problematic.
• 28ahsgT7 10mo ago
  It is somewhat amusing that the pro-LLM faction increasingly co-opts their opponents' arguments—now they are turning AI-hype into anti-AI hype. They did the same with Upton Sinclair's quote, which is now used against any worker who dares to hope for salary. There is not much creativity in the pro-LLM faction, which is guided by monetary interests and does not mind to burn its social capital in exchange for loss of credibility and money.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• dbacar 10mo ago
  There are different opinions on this: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding-degrades https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding-degrades
• insane_dreamer 10mo ago
  The reason I am "anti-AI" is not because I think LLMs being bad at what they do, nor because I'm afraid they'll take my job. I use CC to accelerate my own work (it's improved by leaps and bounds though I still find I have to keep it on a short leash because it doesn't always think things through enough). It's also a great research tool (search on steroids). It's excellent at summarizing long documents, editing and proofreading, etc. I use it for all those things. It's useful. The reason I am anti-AI is because I believe it poses a net-negative to society overall. Not because it is inherently bad, but because of the way it is being infused into society by large corps (and eventually governments). Yes, it makes me, and other developers, more productive. And it can more quickly solve certain problems that were time consuming or laborious to solve. And it might lead to new and greater scientific and technological advances. But those gains do not outweigh all of the negatives: concentration of power and capital into an increasingly small group, the eventual loss of untold millions of jobs (with, as of yet, not even a shred of indication of what might be replace them), the loss of skills in the next generations who are delegating much of their critical thinking (or thinking period), to ChatGPT; the loss of trust in society now that any believable video can be easily generated; the concentration of power in the the control of information if everyone is getting their info from LLMs instead of the open internet (and ultimately, potentially the death of the open internet); the explosion in energy consumption by data centers which exacerbates rather than mitigates global warming; and plenty more. AI might allow us to find better technological solutions to world hunger, poverty, mental health, water shortages, climate change, and war. But none of those problems are technological problems; technology only plays a small part. And the really important part is being negatively exacerbated by the "AI arms race". That's why I, who was my whole life a technological optimist, am no longer hopeful for the future. I wish I was.
  • yicmoggIrl 10mo ago
    This. The only thing AI will do, at the societal level, if it truly succeeds, is insanely amplify the power imbalance we already suffer under. Thinking that the benefits of AI will be "democratic" is staggeringly naïve. It's obvious that AI, if it succeeds, will be primarily used to make people, even as physical beings, redundant. From TFA: > the more people get fired, the more political pressure there will be to vote for those who will guarantee a certain degree of protection This is daydreaming. Just look at the US. "Political pressure" is not a thing. There will be war.
• xg15 10mo ago
  > However, this technology is far too important to be in the hands of a few companies. I worry less about the model access and more about the hardwire required to run those models (i.e. do inference). If a) the only way to compete in software development in the future is to outsource the entire implementation process to one of a few frontier models (Chinese, US or otherwise) and b) only a few companies worldwide have the GPU power to run inference with those models in a reasonable time then don't we already have a massive amount of centralization? That is also something I keep wondering with agentic coding - being able to realize your epic fantasy hobby project you've on and off been thinking about for the last years in a couple of afternoons is absolutely amazing. But if you do the same with work projects, how do you solve the data protection issues? Will we all now just hand our entire production codebases to OpenAI or Anthropic etc and hope their pinky promises hold? Or will there be a race for medium-sized companies to have their own GPU datacentets, not for production but solely for internal development and code generation?
• silexia 10mo ago
  AI has a significant risk of directly leading to the extinction of our species, according to leading AI researchers. We should be worried about a lot more than job losses.
• smohare 10mo ago
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• etamponi 10mo ago
  > Hours instead of weeks. And then goes on describing two things for which I bet almost anyone with enough knowledge of C and Redis could implement a POC in... Guess what? Hours. At this point I am literally speechless, if even Antirez falls for this "you get so quick!!!" hype. You get _some_ speed up _for things you could anyway implement_. You get past the "blank screen block" which prevents you from starting some project. These are great useful things that AI does for you! Shaving off _weeks_ of work? Let's come back in a couple of month when he'll have to rewrite everything that AI has written so well. Or, that code would just die away (which is another great use case for AI: throw away code). People still don't understand that writing code is a way to understand something? Clearly you don't need to write code for a domain you already understand, or that you literally created. What leaves me sad is that this time it is _Antirez_ that writes such things. I have to be honest: it makes me doubt of my position, and I'll constantly reevaluate it. But man. I hope it's just a hype post for an AI product he'll release tomorrow.
• mwkaufma 10mo ago
  "Nah uh I'm not falling for hype _you're_ falling for hype."
• nephihaha 10mo ago
  Universal Basic Income is not the panacea it's claimed to be. UBI gives government more control over individuals' finances, especially those without independent means. Poverty is also the result of unfair taxation, where poor people face onerous taxes while receiving less and less in return, and the wealthy avoid tax at every turn. Or that it is difficult for people to be self-employed due to red tape favouring big business. UBI does not address those issues. UBI also centralises control at the expense of local self-determination and community engagement.
  • fsflover 10mo ago
    Shallow dismissals are against HN Guidelines, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • deleted 10mo ago
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    • nephihaha 10mo ago
      The term "shallow" is entirely subjective here. I have edited the comment accordingly because of your reaction.
      • fsflover 10mo ago
        Thanks for expanding the comment. For downvoters, the original comment was "Universal Basic Income is not the panacea it's claimed to be."
  • harel 10mo ago
    I don't think UBI will be enough. All existing debt needs to be erased as well. Otherwise, UBI means nothing if it all goes to repay old debt. If UBI is less than my mortgage, bills and other loan repayments, what good is it?
    • nephihaha 10mo ago
• darepublic 10mo ago
  In my current work project I am consulting llm frequently as a type of coding search engine. I also use it to rubber duck my designs. Most of the coding was done myself though. But even that feels perhaps quaint and I feel like it may be wasting time
• remix2000 10mo ago
  Honestly, coding with a chatbot's "help" just slows me down. Also the progress in chatbot space is minimal (at least it feels like that from an end user perspective), essentially nonexistent since like 2024. I only use them cause all search engines are broken on purpose now. It's truly terrible times we live in, but not because the robots could replace us, rather because nontechnical managers are detached from reality as they always were and want us to believe that.
  • hollowturtle 10mo ago
    The worst blow for me was search engines, you're so right that are broken on purpose now, that's a total bummer. Also wondering how Google is not loosing money from non shown ads in search
    • remix2000 10mo ago
      It doesn't really feel like those companies care about money anymore, to me at least it feels like we're in the middle of an ongoing total economic collapse and their actions seem to concur. Why else would they be stockpiling assets, infrastructure and all the tangible stuff they avoided so far? May sound slightly conspiracy-ish, but honestly, it's somehow the theories pushed into mainstream that are laughable nowadays.
• burgerone 10mo ago
  There's this infinite war between the two opposing sides. "It's going to change programming forever" vs "Why not just use your brain". I much prefer option two for all the good reasons. Saying that AI is awesome doesn't actually adress all its issues.
  • jstummbillig 10mo ago
    What is infinite about that (or any) war? Things always change and "just do/use x" consistently, eventually, does not win.
  • epolanski 10mo ago
    There's no war, it's just that the internet pushes the more controversial narratives up. The overwhelming majority of users use and see the benefits of AI and at the same time are fully aware that you won't move software by copy pasting a jira task and lots of thinking is involved into planning and reviewing the changes.
    • Madmallard 10mo ago
      Lol there's definitely a war on hacker news There's vested interests posting 20 replies in a single thread that benefits them and flagging replies that don't There's literally 20-25% of dissenters comments in each of these posts being repeatedly flagged.
      • epolanski 10mo ago
        You're witch hunting. I haven't flagged or downvoted anybody and I have no vested interest in anything. Not sure what my cause should be and what would be my benefit. My profile contains my full name, you can search me, I'm a random freelancer, not somebody with any stakes in pushing AI.
    • tayo42 10mo ago
      Do you work in the software industry? Low effort stuff like that is happening everyday.
• lrvick 10mo ago
  As a security engineer that regularly architects and helps implement new defense tactics that no LLM has trained on, I choose not to use LLMs at all, like a cave man. Being differently trained and using different tools than almost everyone else I know in engineering my entire career has allowed me to find solutions and vulnerabilities others have missed time and time again. I exclusively use open source software I can always take apart, fully understand, and modify as I like. This inclination has served me well and is why I have the skillsets I do today. If everyone is doing things one way, I instinctively want to explore all the other ways to train my own brain to continue to be adversarial and with a stamina to do hard experiments by hand when no tools exist to automate them yet. Watching all my peers think more and more alike actually scares me, as they are all talking to the same LLMs. None for me, thanks. "But this magic proprietary tool makes my job so much easier!!" has never been a compelling argument for me.
  • Madmallard 10mo ago
    Yeah grinding the domain expertise is definitely the play if you have the resources to do so.
• stareatgoats 10mo ago
  Not even antirez can sway the skeptics here. People that have garnered too many upvotes in the countless comments about how worthless AI is compared to real programmers will need much more to leave their fortresses. But maybe we should cherish these people. Maybe it's among them we find the embryo to the resistance - people who held out when most of us were seduced - seduced into giving the machine all our knowledge, all our skills, all the secrets about us we were not even aware of ourselves - and setting it up to be orders of magnitude more intelligent than any of us, combined. And finally - just as mean, vindictive and selfish as most of the people in the training data on which it was trained. Maybe it's good to stay skeptical a bit longer.
• hollowturtle 10mo ago
  > How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, because I see this as a continuation of what I tried to do all my life: democratizing code, systems, knowledge. LLMs are going to help us to write better software, faster, and will allow small teams to have a chance to compete with bigger companies. Every now and then I post the same exact comment here on HN, where the heck are the products then? Or where is the better outcome? The faster software? Let alone small team competing with bigger companies? We are NOT anti AI we're exhausted to keep reading bs from ai astroturfers or wanna be ai tech influencers. It's so exhausting it's always your fault that you're not "using the tool properly", and you're going to be left behind. I'm not anti AI I just wish the bubble will pop so instead of fighting back bs from managers that "I read that on HN" I can go back coding with and without ai where applies to my needs
  • atomicnumber3 10mo ago
    This is how I feel too. Let me try to itemize it: how AI speeds me up: - no longer have to remember how to set up unit test boilerplate in each of the 6ish programming languages i commonly use - can often vaguely gesture at an existing pattern and have AI "copy-paste" it into new code. "do that read-through cache pattern like you see there and there but do it for this table and this proto msg type." - can quickly answer questions like "does anyone in the code seem to build this string manually instead of using the library/helper method for it" - can quickly generate code like "all I want is a gosh dang PKCS-formatted key, why is that so hard for this library" which the docs did not provide which is really cool. it absolutely speeds things up by 10-100x in some scenarios. a lot of the sucky parts of programming are being mired down in these kinds of messes. how AI slows me down: - have to explain to jr dev why, even though it has unit tests, the AI-generated bespoke mutex async cache is not going into our production codebase - have to explain to PM why I cannot let them vibe code new features into the hot path of our prod services when they are not on-call to be forced to clean it up when it explodes at 3am - have to explain to senior dev who should REALLY know better why you cannot _just_ ask someone to review a 2000 LOC PR - have to explain to CEO in tremendous itemized, evidenced detail why [big project in eye of sauron] did not go noticeably faster than it did 2 years ago even though the team was hand-picked to be full of people he knew would use AI as much as he wanted them to. - have to explain to CEO why I really wish he would stop playing with AI and bothering the crap out of the engineers and go back to actually doing whatever it is the CEO gets paid 10-100x what a software engineer salary to do. [actually still trying to figure this one out without getting fired.] I'm as interested in AI use as anyone can be, when I have to put up with sycophantic "believers" who really wish they could replace me entirely with the chatbot. Also, this shit is expensive and still being sold at a loss. I signed up for Amp and blew through my $10 of signup credit getting very little done. I'm certainly not paying my own money for that.
• silcoon 10mo ago
  I perfectly agree with antirez about the importance of AI and the benefit for coders. In the last month we saw a big jump and we all are in the middle of the biggest technological revolution since the internet. He summarised the benefits, but omitted the rest. Why we don't have to be anti-AI? Why in his opinion is just "HYPE"? I didn't find any answer in his post. He doesn't analyse the cons of AI and explain why some people might be anti-AI. He skipped the hard part and wrote a mild article that re-publish the narrative that is already getting spread on every social media. Edit for clarification: I don't consider anti-AI the people that think LLMs don't work, they are wrong. I consider anti-AI people that are worried how this technology will impact society in so many ways that are hard to predict, including the future of software engineering.
  • jstummbillig 10mo ago
    There is no hard part. The anti-AI position has simply become trite. The idea is that agentic coding does not work. Today, it does work.
    • Diti 10mo ago
      It only works for languages and frameworks that are already in the training data (duh). It still is mostly useless when you need to create something from scratch in an unstable language. That, and you can’t also get the amazing results if you’re poor or have bad internet.
      • darkhorse222 10mo ago
        Good thing almost all of programming falls into the former. Most of the economy runs on well defined languages. Billions and billions of dollars.
      • christophilus 10mo ago
        Not true. I built some tools in Hare, which almost certainly isn’t in the training data to any significant extent. It was more work than having it build Go or Rust, but it got it done. It had to curl the docs a fair bit.
• tsukurimashou 10mo ago
  Ah yes, AI is so good that they had to break search engines to force people into using them
• coldtea 10mo ago
  >Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn coding, and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. Nope. It was coding. Enjoying the process itself. If I wanted to hand out specs and review code (which is what an AI jockey does), I'd be having fucking project managers as role models, not coders...
• namesbc 10mo ago
  Vibe coders are so insistence that the rest of us adopt their shitting tooling because they need other people coding slop too to justify their lack of effort. If programmers keep up good coding practices then the vibe coders are the ones left behind
• gradus_ad 10mo ago
  It seems that as the tools available to developers have become more abstracted allowing them to do more with less, their ability to command higher salaries and prestige has only grown and grown. LLM's are just a continuation of this trend. The naive view considers only the small scale ease of completing a task in isolation and expects compensation to be proportional to it. But that's not how things work. Yes abstraction makes individual tasks easier to complete, but with the extra time available more can be done, and as more is done and can be done, new complexities emerge. And as an individual can do more, the importance of trust grows as well. This is why CEO's make disproportionately more than their employees, because while the complexity of their work may scale only linearly with their position, or not at all even beyond a certain point, the impact of their decisions grows exponentially. LLM's are just going to enhance the power and influence of software developers.
  • bitwize 10mo ago
    OK, so what do I hear about LLMs? Oh, it's just like having an intern. A fresh graduate. Now you're not building the thing yourself, you're giving directives and delegating the actual building of the thing. What does this sound like? The managerial class believes that all the value in a business comes from managerial work. LLMs are being hyped by the managerial class because they are turning software development into managerial work and eliminating "programmer" as a professional category. The key insight Milt Bryce had with PRIDE is that software is a product that can be manufactured just like any other product. The ideal software production workflow is that of a factory, and the ideal factory is staffed by no more than a man and a dog—in other words, fully automated. So the rules of business in your father's or grandfather's time prevail once again. It's up or out. Learn people skills, learn the business, and take on more responsibilities putting those skills to use and fewer responsibilities involving code. Or find yourself increasingly irrelevant.
    • simonw 10mo ago
      The great thing about working with LLMs is that you don't need people skills, even though managing them is a loose imitation of that. You don't have to consider the feelings of your coding agent, or their specific taste, or what challenges would best help them advance in their skills or career. You tell them to do something, and if they do it wrong you tell them what to fix, and you can keep on hammering away at them until you get the right result. If they go too far off the tracks you reboot them with a clean slate and set them on the task again in a different direction.
• zhyder 10mo ago
  Sounds like antirez, simonw, et al are still advocating reviewing the code output of these agents for now. But presumably soon (within months?) the agents will be good enough such that line-by-line review will no longer be necessary, or humanly possible as we crank the agents up to 11. But then how will we review each PR enough to have confidence in it? How will we understand the overall codebase too after it gets much bigger? Are there any better tools here other than just asking LLMs to summarize code, or flag risky code... any good "code reader" tools (like code editors but focused on this reading task)?
  • rhubarbtree 10mo ago
    We will review fully until they reach superhuman perfection.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• glouwbug 10mo ago
  AI works for Antirez because he's already a master of his domain
• Cold_Miserable 10mo ago
  Its not hype. There's no such thing as AI. Matrix multiplication isn't intelligence.
• lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
  UBI will never happen because the people in power done want it. Who is going to control AI? The people in power obviously. The will buy all of the computers so running models locally will no longer be feasible. In case it hasn’t been obvious that this is already happening. It will only get worse. They will not let themselves be taxed. But who will buy the things the people in power produce if nobody has a job? This is how civilization collapses.
• trinsic2 10mo ago
  If it wasn't for companies gate keeping, buying up all the compute, putting an huge load on our infrastructure, people and government using it to surveil its people I would be more supportive of it. But right now, you got to be insane to be supporting this technology. Its literally being used to do more harm than good. I don't see any end to this. I cannot and will not support a surveillance state in the name of progress.
  • deepsquirrelnet 10mo ago
    I don’t think “supporting” a technology or not has the same effect as supporting a political position or lack thereof. You can be pro-AI and pro regulation of AI. You’re right, there’s no end of things that are legal (except by making those things illegal).
    • trinsic2 10mo ago
      > You can be pro-AI and pro regulation of AI. Not in this climate. The laws are being circumvented by criminals. Everything is different now. You can tell yourself all you want that its ok to support a technology that is being used to enslave us, but its not going to change the outcome, we are still being harmed by people that have control over the technology. The best thing to do right now is to stop supporting the tech where its being used by corporations that are in the business of harming the people by there actions and inaction.
      • deepsquirrelnet 10mo ago
        Not that I disagree with you, but the dangerous part is rogue government. No amount of anti-AI will make up for a government not working for the good of its people.
        • trinsic2 10mo ago
          By not using the tech within the context of the deployments by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft (and Anthropic?), where it places the most harm on people, and letting people know why, it will wake people up to the harm corporations and government are causing. AI tech, in the hands of criminals is exactly the place where the dissent should start and voicing support against it is the place we can gain an edge of how the tech is being used as a vehicle to drive the harms. Its as good of a place as any to start.
• aussieguy1234 10mo ago
  AI is going to put a hold on the development of new programming languages for sure, since they won't be in the training set. Great news if you know the current generation of languages, you won't need to learn a new one for quite some time.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    I think it may play out in the opposite direction. If you're developing a new programming language today, one of the assets you need to prepare is a short (~10,000 token or less) LLM-friendly guide to your language, plus a bunch of examples that coding agents can search through and crib from. Done well, I expect this could accelerate the adoption of your new language - as users can start prompting their coding agents to build with it before they've even finished reading the tutorial themselves. Your disadvantage will be that LLMs won't recommend your language when people ask "what could I build this in", but people discovered new languages via word-of-month before LLMs came along and I expect that to continue, especially if your language has something genuinely new and interesting to offer.
  • nl 10mo ago
    This is wrong and I don't know why people think it is true. LLMs understand language Grammar files really well. A new language is easy for them (you can tell this by giving them a JSON schema and seeing how well they do) What they don't always have is good taste with what preexisting libraries work together well. But this isn't a problem for new languages.
• neilv 10mo ago
  > How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, That's fine if he feels that way, but he can only speak for himself, not for all the copyright holders of the other code that was "ingested" to power LLMs. If you want to see how most creators who care about their work and actually own it (unlike most software), look at many book authors and illustrators. Many of whom have a burning hatred for AI bros not only stealing their work, but also then using it to destroy the livelihoods of their field. A lot of the techbros who do care about their work aren't feeling as wronged or threatened, because we're trying to pivot to get a piece of the pie, from all the exploitation and pillaging of many fields.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    I expect book authors and artists to have very different opinions on this than programmers, because there isn't really a book/art equivalent of deliberately sharing open source libraries for other people to integrate into their projects. The closest is probably music sampling, which has had a very robust money-based licensing scheme built around it for many years.
    • neilv 10mo ago
      I agree that this is another factor, and I'd like to get into some nuance of it... If we go back to the RMS school of code sharing, which influenced much of contemporary open source, they're very big on licensing to control how the code is shared. This was actually a break from some of the earlier thinking by some programmers (not all), that code is implicitly public domain, or should be. RMS said, yes, sharing is good, but we need rules to keep the sharing happening. Once "open source" was coined (by ESR, et al.) they were also big on licensing, including RMS's licenses, but most of the reasons were more about commercial needs. Since then, people participate in open source for a variety of reasons, many of them commercial-adjacent. But I suspect most people don't think much about the hard-earned licenses that helped create the current environment, in which this wealth of loose sharing and collaborating is happening. We're only starting to see the effects when some AI companies ignore the long tradition of licenses that built open source. Writers and illustrators, on the other hand, as you say, don't have that tradition and institution. (There's also things like the sometimes tolerated gray area of fanfic using others' characters and situations, but AFAIK not official and organized like open source.) And so maybe the essence of what's happening is more readily obvious to writers and illustrators, than it is to programmers.
• danzero 10mo ago
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• prima-facie 10mo ago
  Programming is essentially automation. You tell the machine what to do character by character, and if you get it right, the machine will be able to correctly interpret your intention, transform it into a lower level code, and then execute it. AI is also automation but the instructions are given in a higher level language. You still have to know how to automate it. You need to instruct the machine in sufficient detail, and if done correctly the machine will once again be able to interpret your intention, transform it to a lower level code, and execute it for you.
  • Madmallard 10mo ago
    "sufficient detail, and if done correctly" -> the machine will once again be able to interpret your intention ... This does not actually follow from the way LLMs work.
• daxfohl 10mo ago
  The last 20 years has seen a brain drain from other engineering and science into software. My guess is we'll see that finally start to reverse. Which, I think is great! How much value can yet another CRUD app possibly add to the world anymore anyway?
  • GreenWatermelon 10mo ago
    > value can yet another CRUD app possibly add Possibly significant e.g connecting multiple governmental agencies so citizens can finish their paperwork in days instead of weeks, schedule appointments instead of waiting from 8am untill 2pm to have you matters settled, etc... Of course, there isn't much shareholder value on this, so perhaps when Software Engineering becomes a modest profession like many others, improvements to society might start happening. The industry as it currently stands is significantly antisocial.
• asdefghyk 10mo ago
  About AI writing Code, fixing bugs, and other programmer tasks. What's missing is (captured) the test of the changed software to verify the fixes solved the problem and no other problems where introduced .... Then a analysis of the original software changes. An analysis of the test results, test cases, test evidence to ensure it is appropriate and adequate.
• __0x01 10mo ago
  Often when I look closely at the output of LLM generated code, I see repetition, redundant logic and deeply hidden bugs. Notwithstanding the above, to my understanding LLM services are currently being sold below cost. If all of the above is true, at some point the degredation of quality in codebases that use these tools will be too expensive to ignore.
• braden-lk 10mo ago
  AI tools are indeed are a revolution of software engineering. That said, it's easy to be a fearless advocate for revolutionary tech when, no matter what happens, you are already set for life.
• akkad33 10mo ago
  There's no skill in using AI. I spent 3 hours trying to build something like a table visualiser that creates a visualization of SQL schema relationship. I wrote simple prompts, tailored them using LLMs and fed them back into another LLM. Went on about 2 hours iterating on outputs until it looked like what I want. Result? It produces an output. The outputs worked well for most part but the results were variable. The arrows would sometimes not be in place. Sometimes you get 100 instead of 1. It was slow. And what I did learn from this that I didn't already know? Zero! On the other hand if I'd tried to figure out myself how to do it, I would have built something not only deterministic and faster , but I'd have gained some new experience and skills along with it of solving a problem.
  • CityOfThrowaway 10mo ago
    You say that there's no skill in using AI, and then go on to explain how you used AI in an unskilled way to produce something that neither worked correctly nor taught you anything. It strikes me that if you developed your skill set around using AI more effectively, you could have both developed a deep understanding and gotten what you wanted, and done it in less time and at higher quality than you could have done solo. That said, the fact that you can use AI in an unskilled way to produce something kinda cool... is itself kinda cool! It means there's an on-ramp to using AI! People with no skills can get started, same day, and make stuff. And over time, can learn to make even better stuff! That's pretty cool to me.
    • akkad33 10mo ago
      That's not my point. My point is it's unreliable at best. > strikes me that if you developed your skill set around using AI more effectively, you could have both developed a deep understanding and gotten what you wanted, and done it in less time and at higher quality than you could have done solo. Why is this a given? I don't think there's a secret incantation that could have gotten better results. It's an inherent limitations of the system. If you have resources for me to learn I'm open to discover
• totallykvothe 10mo ago
  I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important details are subpar about the AI solution, and many times fundamental architectural issues cripple any attempt at prompting my way out of it, even though I've been quite involved step-by-step through the whole prototyping phase. I just have to conclude 1 of 2 things: 1) I'm not good at prompting, even though I am one of the earliest AI in coding adopters I know, and have been consistent for years. So I find this hard to accept. 2) Other people are just less picky than I am, or they have a less thorough review culture that lets subpar code slide more often. I'm not sure what else I can take from the situation. For context, I work on a 15 year old Java Spring + React (with some old pages still in Thymeleaf) web application. There are many sub-services, two separate databases,and this application needs to also 2-way interface with customer hardware. So, not a simple project, but still. I can't imagine it's way more complicated than most enterprise/legacy projects...
  • aperrien 10mo ago
    Have you tried asking one of your peers who claims to get good results to run a test with you? Where you both try to create the same project, and share your results?
    • totallykvothe 10mo ago
      I and one or two others are _the_ AI use experts at my org, and I was by far the earliest adopter here. So I don't really have anyone else with significantly different experiences than me that I could ask.
      • deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
  • sublinear 10mo ago
• maxkfranz 10mo ago
  This is a great article, and it's very much aligned with my experiences. I hope AI leads to a Cambrian explosion of software people running their own businesses, given the force multiplier it affords. On the other hand, the jaded part of me feels that AI may lead to a consolidation into a very small set of monopolies. We'll see.
• gogasca 10mo ago
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• drakeballew 10mo ago
  The impact that the advanced ML models we are calling AI is underhyped.
• agentultra 10mo ago
  This essay starts with a weak premise, not facts. There is enough evidence to support claims that AI is a black hole where money gets evaporated. It’s great that you can delegate some tasks to it now and not have to write all of the code yourself. There is some evidence showing that it doesn’t benefit junior developers nearly as much. If you didn’t generate the specification test that demonstrates the concurrency issue you were trying to solve in Redis but you read the code it generated and understood it then you didn’t need to learn anything. How is a junior developer who has never solved such problems supposed to learn so they can do the same thing? But worse, UBI and such are the solutions of libertarian oligarchs that dream of a world without people, according to Doctorow and I think he’s right. It seems like the author also wants this? He doesn’t seem to know what will happen to the jobless but we should vote in some one who will start a government program to take care of them. How long until the author is replaced as well? Lastly… who’s “hyping” anti-AI and what do they gain from making false claims? I think the real problem for programming is when these companies all collapse and take the rest of the economy down with them… are there going to be enough programmers left to maintain everything? Or will we be sifting though the mountains of tech debt never to see the light of day again?
• kazinator 10mo ago
  I converted Linenoise to wide characters years ago. https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/linenoise/linenoise.c https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/linenoise/linenoise.c
• FpUser 10mo ago
  >"I believe we should vote for governments that recognize what is happening, and are willing to support those who will remain jobless" You will not find such a government. They're here for a different purpose
• nevster 10mo ago
  Here's how AI coding has helped me : to beat procrastination. Often while trying to fall asleep, I'll be thinking something like "I need my app to do such and such". The next day, instead of forcing myself to start coding, I can literally say to Intelij Junie (using Claude), exactly that: "I need my app to do such and such". I'm often pleasantly surprised by the outcome. And if there's anything that needs to be tweaked, I'm now in the mode of critiquing and editing.
• steviedotboston 10mo ago
  For me one of the real benefits has been no longer feeling "stuck" on tricky problems and losing momentum. I can work with an LLM to generate a solution to something that would previously cause me confusion, which would lead to distraction, which would cause loss of productivity, etc.
• habosa 10mo ago
  Everyone on both sides of this argument seems like they won’t be satisfied until everyone comes to their side. The maximalists want us to submit to the AI godhead. The doomers want us to go back to writing assembly longhand on paper. I’m starting to think of AI use more like a dietary choice. Most people are omnivores. Some people are vegans. Others are maxing protein. All of them can coexist in society and while they might annoy each other if the topic comes up, for the most part it’s a personal choice.
• tayo42 10mo ago
  I've been wondering lately if the career move is to get into SRE/Ops/Platform type work. Imo its to hard for companies to get infra into a place where text can be an interface. IaC is mostly an aspiration beyond a certain scale ime, which is close enough to interacting with infra through text.
• obirunda 10mo ago
  The claim that users who don't adopt AI now will pay for it later or some other notion is a contradiction of their position. People who are bullish on AI should support this view wholesale. Opus 4.5 is easier to use than GPT 3.5. It can actually code a full toy project one shot where you couldn't dream of it before. Opus 4.5 isn't perfect, so people have a lot of things they do for a competitive advantage. Though anything you think you're building with all the prompt alchemy and .md rules or whatever will be useless and futile on Opus 10, every "really good practice" is instantly absorbed by labs so when something great is in the wild everyone eventually benefits by the base .md or system prompts. So even if you feel like you have a competitive advantage right now, it will evaporate by either the labs improving their tools or become generally unnecessary in future versions of the models. The goal of the labs is to continue these leaps will get even bigger with every generation. Unless you secretly believe that some portion of the craft will be left unexplored by the labs or the things that are still relatively borked now will not be worked on or fixed later is a silly notion to me. Future versions will be easier to prompt and the tools will do more of the heavy lifting of following up and re-rolling misinterpretations. I argue that a user sleeping through all of this is likely to use a future version better than someone who is obsessing with all their assumptions on how to coerce these models to work right now, current version hyper users will likely bring unnecessary baggage imo. For now, even with Opus 4.5 the time horizon for delivering a full-stack project is not significantly different than before, it's still limited by how much you can push it. I'd argue that someone without understanding of how things work is unlikely to succeed in getting production-grade outcomes from these current versions. The point is, if you choose to learn more and get better in understanding and building things that work (with AI or otherwise) you'll be just fine to use the versions that have fully or mostly automated the entire process. Nobody will be left behind, only those who stop building altogether.
• bitwize 10mo ago
  Using AI is part of the job now. Whether you like it or not, it behooves you as a professional to become proficient with anything that enhances your productivity, including LLMs.
• dmitrijbelikov 10mo ago
  AI doesn't do anything fundamentally new; you search for information the same way you used to through Google. The difference is that when you Googled, you understand that responsibility for the end result lies with you. Now, "users" shift responsibility to the "machine," even though they're essentially writing the program's configuration in their own language. Once you take responsibility for what your LLM writes, you'll no longer be so eager to pursue mythical "productivity."
  • consp 10mo ago
    It absolves from responsibility because "the tool was wrong". No wonder it is being hyped.
• staticshock 10mo ago
  Efficient markets route around bottlenecks. Technological revolutions accelerate the speed at which that re-routing happens. In software, we, the developers, have increasingly been a bottleneck. The world needs WAY more software than we can economically provide, and at long last a technology has arrived that will help route around us for the benefit of humanity. Here's an excellent Casey Handmer quote from a recent Dwarkesh episode: > One way to think about the industrial revolutions is [...] what you're doing is you're finding some way of bypassing a constraint or bypassing a bottleneck. The bottleneck prior to what we call the Industrial Revolution was metabolism. How much oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for their peasant overlord or whatever? Nowadays we would giggle to think that the amount of food we produce is meaningful in the context of the economic power of a particular country. Because 99% of the energy that we consume routes around our guts, through the gas tanks of our cars and through our aircraft and in our grids and stuff like that. > Right now, the AI revolution is about routing around cognitive constraints, that in some ways writing, the printing press, computers, the Internet have already allowed us to do to some extent. A credit card is a good example of something that routes around a cognitive constraint of building a network of trust. It's a centralized trust. It's a great episode, I recommend it: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/casey-handmer https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/casey-handmer
  • smt88 10mo ago
    > In software, we, the developers, have increasingly been a bottleneck. The world needs WAY more software than we can economically provide, and at long last a technology has arrived that will help route around us for the benefit of humanity. Everything you wrote here is directly contradicted by casual observation of reality. Developers aren't a bottleneck. If they were, we wouldn't be in a historic period of layoffs. And before you say that AI is causing the layoffs -- it's not. They started before AI was widely used for production, and they're also being done at companies that aren't heavily using AI anyway. They're a result of massive over-hiring during periods of low interest rates. Beyond that, who is demanding software developers? The things that make our lives better (like digital forms at the doctor's office) aren't complex software. The majority of the demand is from enshittification companies making our lives worse with ads and surveillance. No one is demanding developers, but certainly individual humans aren't demanding them.
• daxfohl 10mo ago
  The central equation is still marginal ROI. Will adding an engineer provide positive higher marginal ROI than some other investment? If so, hire; if not, fire. With the scale and size of the software industry about to explode even higher, one measly engineer can still drive some feature that's worth millions of dollars. AI will just allow us to also release features that are worth only thousands of dollars.
• zephyrthenoble 10mo ago
  It was weird to read this. I know antirez is on HN, so it's strange to say this, but here goes... I always looked up to antirez. Redis was really taking off after I graduated and I was impressed by the whole system and the person behind it. I was impressed to see them walk away to do something different after being so successful. I was impressed to read their blog about tackling difficult problems and how they solved them. I'm not a 10x programmer. I don't chase MVPs or shipping features. I like when my manager isn't paying attention and I can dig into a problem and just try things out. Our database queries have issues? Maybe I can write my own AST by parsing just part of the code. Things like that. I love BUILDING, not SHIPPING. I learn and grow when I code. Maybe my job will require me to vibe code everything some day just to keep up with the juniors, but in my free time I will use AI only enough to help speed up my typing. Every vibe coded app I've made has been unmaintainable spaghetti and it takes the joy out of it. What's the point of that? To bring it all together, I guess some part of me was disappointed to see a person that I considered a really good programmer, seem to indicate that they didn't care about doing the actual programming? > Writing code is no longer needed for the most part > As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. This is the mentality of the big companies pushing AI. Write more code faster. Make more things faster. Get paid the same, understand less, get woken up in the middle of the night when your brittle AI code breaks. Maybe that's why antirez is so prolific and I'm not. Sometimes I wish I was a computer scientist, instead of a programmer...
  • cookiengineer 10mo ago
    > To bring it all together, I guess some part of me was disappointed to see a person that I considered a really good programmer, seem to indicate that they didn't care about doing the actual programming? My take on this is that we as a society are now on the verge of transitioning towards programming as an art form. And the methodologies of art vs non art programming are vastly different. Take clothes, for example. Manufacturing is vastly optimized for throughput, but its art form is heavily optimized for design and customization. Maybe that is what all this is about now with programming, too? I too would think of myself as someone who likes to code for the sake of explorative understanding and optimization. I'm pretty bad at the last 10%, like _reeeally_ bad actually. But I am aware that the methodology of programming is changing. And currently I believe that design and customization might in parts also change, because a lot of LLM- / slop-coded successful projects were optimizing for something like text-in-the-loop where they started with a terminal CLI and made it a real design later, because the LLM agent was able to parse and understand CLI / TTY characters. Maybe this is what it's actually about. Maybe we need to optimize things for text now so that LLMs can help us more in these topics? I'm thinking lately a lot about scene graphs and event graphs and how to make them serializable so that I can be more efficient in generating UIs. Sorry for babbling, maybe these are just thoughts I'm gonna regret in the future.
• p0w3n3d 10mo ago
  > How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, because I see this as a continuation of what I tried to do all my life: democratizing code, systems, knowledge. I don't see it as democratic or democratising. TBH the knowledge is stored in three giga companies that used sometimes almost non-lawful (if not lawful?) methods to gain it, scraping it off the gpl projects etc. And now they are selling it to us without giving the models away. The cost IS understandable because the horrendously expensive vector cards do not come for free, but there is only one country the knowledge is gathered in so this might as well fade away one day when an orange present says so (gimme all the monies or else..)
  • krautburglar 10mo ago
    "democratizing" as in "I steal everybody's shit, make most content creators go bankrupt, then put it all in an LLM behind a paywall." Privatization of all human knowledge--past, present, & future. They own both parties, so it's not like anyone is going to vote their way out of this one--unless one considers guillotines a form of voting.
    • MonkeyClub 10mo ago
      Yeah I'm also with GP saying >> I don't see it as democratic or democratising. TBH the knowledge is stored in three giga companies It can appear democratic while access is allowed, but if it can be revoked at any moment for any reason (it is private companies, after all, that own the AI playgrounds), then the illusion will shatter. What is more, excessive reliance on AI creates skill deficit rather than skill surplus, and promotes dependence on AI. Wizards that are nothing without their magic wands, in a way. This may not stand out today, but give it half or one decade, when the next generation won't have a pre-AI skillet to fall back to, and the seams will become all too apparent.
      • p0w3n3d 10mo ago
        I already notice that my brains tends to resist thinking on hard things, defaulting to gpt-ing or perplex-ing things. Similar feeling I had when I bought a car with parking sensors - I almost immediately lost skills of parking my older car which doesn't have those. I had to re-learn it.
• freakynit 10mo ago
  Aggregated and summarized comments: https://hn-discussions.top/navigating-anti-ai-hype/ https://hn-discussions.top/navigating-anti-ai-hype/
• svara 10mo ago
  > many times fundamental architectural issues cripple any attempt at prompting my way out of it, even though I've been quite involved step-by-step through the whole prototyping phase. This doesn't make sense to me. Surely if you were "quite involved step-by-step through the whole prototyping phase" you would have been able to prevent architectural mistakes being made? What does your process really look like? I don't "vibe code" in the sense that I have it build entire apps without looking at the code; I prompt it to write maybe about the 100-200 lines of code I need next after thinking about what they should look like. I don't see how you get architectural issues creeping in if you do it that way.
• shevy-java 10mo ago
  Reads like AI slop. This is also quite annoying: quality appears to go downwards constantly. I am not saying that the oldschool blogs were all great in quality, but now I look at an article to see signs of AI generated text and if I see it - or think I see it - I become more critical automatically. Even without that, it seems the quality of writing has gotten worse. I remember that people years ago complained that handwriting got worse (I always got awful handwriting though, way before using computers already); but now it seems that it also affected the brain. The seem to be some disconnect on what is thought, and what is written down.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    If you think antirez wrote that with AI then your AI detection insincts are way off. It reads like someone with (good) English as a second language. LLMs don't write like that.
    • hexbin010 10mo ago
      It wouldn't be a bad thing though would it? Because AI is in fact amazing.
      • simonw 10mo ago
        I don't like reading undisclosed AI writing. It feels disrespectful of my time.
        • hexbin010 10mo ago
          Would you be offended about undisclosed AI code? And is 100% of your blog 0% LLM (or disclosed as LLM)? This isn't LLM output for example?: > The wild thing is that all three of these projects weren’t even a priority for me—they were side quests, representing pure curiosity that I could outsource to Claude Code and solve in the background while I was occupied with something else.
          • 10mo ago
• graovic 10mo ago
  One thing related to programming jobs and AI: my opinion is that AI will create far more jobs than we’ve ever had. Right now, there’s a limit to how widely software is adopted, largely based on software quality and cost. AI will improve software quality (for example, you can add a ton of automated tests even if you don’t use AI to develop features) and reduce the cost of building software. That will lead to better software—and software we didn’t build in the past because it was too complex, or so niche that we weren’t sure we could make enough profit to justify the development costs. It will say also change many other industries, but I think generally for the better: more ways to create new things, more variations, and more customization for specific purposes.
• Fokamul 10mo ago
  I support AI vibe coding idiots everywhere I go. Please, use more VIBE coding guys. And no, my work as redteam IT sec. is completely unrelated :D
  • hu3 10mo ago
    AI will become/is already much better than most devs in detecting security flaws in code. So my prediction is that any software worth scanning by redteams will become more secure. Not less.
• stack_framer 10mo ago
  I want AI that I can command with the least possible effort, in the simplest terms, and it flawlessly does exactly what I said. I want AI that responds instantaneously, and in a manner perfectly suited to my particular learning style. I want AI so elegant in its form and function that I completely take it for granted. What I'm getting instead is something clunky, slow, and flawed. So excuse me while I remain firmly in the anti-AI crowd.
• PeterStuer 10mo ago
  "but the open models, especially the ones produced in China, continue to compete (even if they are behind) with frontier models of closed labs" You will still need hardware to run those open models, and that avenue is far easier to contain and close than stopping code distribution. Expect the war on private/personal compute to ramp up even more significantly than ot already has.
• krupan 10mo ago
  "It does not matter if AI companies will not be able to get their money back and the stock market will crash. All that is irrelevant, in the long run." Seriously? If these were open source tools that anyone could run on their home PC that statement would make sense, but that's not what we are talking about here. LLMs are tools that cost massive amounts of money to operate, apparently. The tool goes away if the money goes away. Fossil fuels revolutionized the world, but only because the cost benefit made sense (at least in the relative short-term).
  • Bender 10mo ago
    Adding to this, if AI goes away we are left with a generation of people that do not understand the code that AI wrote and older generations that eventually retire out. This is nearly on par with the fictional Dune's destruction of the thinking machines and they have to essentially build religious groups to continue functioning as a society and create guilds to replace the functions of the thinking machines.
• softwaredoug 10mo ago
  If you’re getting started, in say Claude, some pointers that helped me Stay in plan mode most of the time. It will produce a step by step set of instructions - more context - for the LLM to execute the change. It’s the best place to exert detailed control over what will happen. Claude lets you edit it in a vim window. Think about testing strategy carefully. Connecting the feedback back into the LLM is what makes a lot of the magic happen. But it requires thought or the LLM might cheat or you get a suboptimal result. Then with these two you spend your time thinking in terms of product correctness - good tests - and implementation plan - deciding if the LLM has a sane grasp of the problem and will create a sane result. You’re at a higher level of abstraction, still caring about details, but rarely finicky up to your elbows in line by line code. If you can get good at these you’re well on your way.
  • antirez 10mo ago
    Good points. Also: Force it to have clear metrics / observability on what it is doing. For instance the other day I wanted Claude to modify a Commodore 64 emulator, and I started saying it to implement an observability framework where as the emulator run, it can connect to a socket and ask for registers, read/write memory areas, check the custom chips status, set breakpoints, ... As you can guess, after this the work is of a different kind.
    • softwaredoug 10mo ago
      Thank you - I have coded since 4th grade, and your post made me less depressed about my career. Maybe even a tad hopeful.
• Bengalilol 10mo ago
  Tangential. I make a clear distinction between corporate AI and open source AI. I think we may be at a turning point where we can build great solutions without giving in to corporations.
• alkonaut 10mo ago
  I don't think _software_ is very interesting in the whole AI debate. It's perhaps interesting from a jobs perspective or an economical perspective. But the whole "anti AI" thing is much deeper than that. My main objections to AI is the evaporation of truth, and of art. We now have top chart hits which are soulless AI songs. It's perhaps a testament to the fact that some of these genres where this happens a lot, were already trending towards industrially produced songs with little soul in them (you know what genres these are, and it's hilarious that one of them). But most concerning to me is the idea that we'll never trust our eyes with what's true starting now. We can't trust that someone who calls us is human, or that a photo or recording is of a real event. This was always true in some sense, but it required a ton of effort to pull off at least. Now it's going to be trivial. And for every photo depicting an actual event, there will be a thousand depicting non-events. What does that do to the most important thing we have as a society: the "shared truth"? The decay of traditional media already put a big dent in this - with catastrophic results. Ai will make it 10x worse.
• nottorp 10mo ago
  So the "AI" hypers are now inventing an anti AI hype? They ran out of believable arguments or never had any to begin with? As it was said on a thread here, LLMs are search engines. The rest is religion.
• CatsOnHats 10mo ago
  The company i work for is spending the equivalent of the yearly salary of a dozen engineers, worth of tokens per month. It recently surpassed our monthly cloud spend bill. We have people who are running the same tasl 10 times in parallel and having one LLm write a prompt for another LLm to execute then sitting on their phone for an hour while they let the AI's battle it out. For tasks that should take 3 minutes. Then having another coding agent make a PR, update JIRA tickets, etc. Frankly it blows my mind that so many developers have so little actual understanding of cost associated with AI.
  • strange_quark 10mo ago
    > Frankly it blows my mind that so many developers have so little actual understanding of cost associated with AI. I’ve seen all the same bullshit as you. We have a claude slash command to add one of 4 labels to a PR. We have people using AI to move their JIRA tickets across the swim lanes. People kick off codex tasks to rename a variable. But I’ve literally heard execs at my place of work cheering this behavior on say the actual concern is why isn’t everyone doing this and if you aren’t spending enough, then maybe you aren’t being a forward thinker.
• antirez 10mo ago
  Thanks for reading / commenting this post. Initially it seemed like I received a bunch of very negative comments, now I read most of the thread, and there are very good points, articulated with sensibility. Thank you. I wanted to provide some more context that is not part of the blog post. Since somebody may believe I don't enjoy / love the act of writing code. 1. I care a lot about programming, I love creating something from scratch, line by line. But: at this point, I want to do programming in a way that makes me special, compared to machines. When the LLM hits a limit, and I write a function in a way it can't compete, that is good. 2. If I write a very small program that is like a small piece of poetry, this is good human expression. I'll keep doing this as well. 3. But, if I need to develop a feature, and I have a clear design idea, and I can do it in 2 hours instead of 2 weeks, how to justify to myself that, just for what I love, I will use a lot more time? That would be too much of ego-centric POV, I believe. 4. For me too this is painful, as a transition, but I need to adapt. Fortunately I also enjoyed a lot the design / ideas process, so I can focus on that. And write code myself when needed. 5. The reason why I wrote this piece is because I believe there are still a lot of people that are unprepared for the fact we are going to be kinda of obsolete in what defined us, as a profession: the ability to write code. A complicated ability requiring a number of skills at the same time, language skills, algorithms, problem decomposition. Since this is painful, and I believe we are headed in a certain direction, I want to tell the other folks in programming to accept reality. It will be easier, this way.
  • gspr 10mo ago
    I still really, really, really struggle to see how humans are going to maintain and validate the programs written by LLMs if we no longer know (intimately) how to program. Any thoughts?
    • JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
      > how humans are going to maintain and validate the programs written by LLMs if we no longer know (intimately) how to program Short answer: we wouldn’t be able to. Slightly-less short answer: unlikely to happen. Most programmers today can’t explain the physics of computation. That’s fine. Someone else can. And if nobody can, someone else can work backwards to it.
• goodpoint 10mo ago
  Don't fall into the AI hype.
• Nekorosu 10mo ago
  The article talks about something I’ve never seen before: anti-AI hype in software development. It feels like a programmer writing from inside a bubble.
• mrkeen 10mo ago
  I'm living the dream right now: -------- Let me check for a Directory.Build.props file instead, as it might contain the package versions: well are you doing it? I'll check for the Directory.Build.props file to see if it contains the package versions: Let me know when you're done Let me check for the Directory.Build.props file to see if it contains the package versions: Are you currently doing anything? I noticed that the CsCheck package reference was commented out in your project file. Here's what I've done so far: Uncommented the CsCheck package reference in your __________.Tests.Core.csproj file. Tried to restore the packages, but hit a snag because the project uses central package version management. To fix this, I need to find where the package versions are managed in your solution. Could you help me locate the Directory.Packages.props or Directory.Build.props file in your solution root? This is where the package versions are typically defined in .NET projects with central package management. Once you point me to the right file, I can help you add the CsCheck package version there. it's in Directory.Packages.props I'll help you find and update the Directory.Packages.props file. Let's locate it first. You have already located it: it's Directory.Packages.prop in the solution root, like you said. Let me check the contents of the Directory.Packages.props file to see the current package versions: CsCheck is already in Directory.Packages.prop I've restored the packages, and the command completed successfully. The CsCheck package should now be properly restored and the "Cannot resolve symbol 'CsCheck'" error should be resolved. Let me know if you still see the error in your IDE. If you do, try these steps: Close and reopen the solution Rebuild the solution If the error persists, let me know and we can try additional troubleshooting steps. --------
• josefrichter 10mo ago
  The "AI stealing jobs" is just a new-age Luddism. Yes, of course it will be painful for many, but at larger scale, even those who lose the jobs should benefit overall. "your ability to create a mental representation of the problem to communicate to the LLM" – this is the tipping point imho. So far, you need to be good at this. That's why senior jobs are not affected yet. The question is for how long. We are probably just months away from the time when LLMs (or other form of AI) will be better at creating better "mental representation", better abstractions and better solutions, than most humans in most cases, including those in senior positions. And that will spill over to other non-dev jobs too.
  • contagiousflow 10mo ago
    > even those who lose the jobs should benefit overall Do you have a further explanation on this?
• unhba 10mo ago
  There is a real aspect of confession in articles like this one - I mean in the religious sense. They come across to me as attempts to justify decisions or actions in the face of overwhelming internal contradictions where the intended audience is just the author’s own conscience. I don’t at all buy the explicit argument that “if we don’t act now - not just by adopting AI, but BY VOTING!! - then all is lost”. We already know about voting; how is the URGENT mass adoption - even with decentralisation - by software developers of llms going to drive social change or alleviate political crisis? Especially given this is a technology about which the author is so obviously profoundly conflicted? Why the hand-wringing and vacillation? Does it really matter in the long run if sceptics take their time in evaluating these tools and even end up rejecting them? Why really do we need to be convinced or turned away from the anti ai hype? There is additionally some kind of implicit historical recourse to the Industrial Revolution and the revolutionary politics it is associated to, where software developers, cast as the cottage industry weavers etc. are seen as walking blindly into their mass replacement by machines, with the implication that those machines will be able to be managed by de-skilled labour whose role will be simply to ensure their smooth and safe running. I think it is important to try and see things in this way but also there is a lot lacking from the analogy.
• flexagoon 10mo ago
  Why did nobody comment about how a giant wall of thin monospace text is basically unreadable? I tried to read this but it was too hard. Am I the only one who has this issue?
• v3xro 10mo ago
  What hype? I have and will continue to be anti-BigAI from the very beginning. Until the mechanism is no longer that of a probabilistic model, the data gathering that of massive copyright infringment and the runtime that of a "let us burn more fossil fuels to power as many transistors as we can" I will continue to avoid it without any regrets about missed "productivity" or whatever.
• rasengan0 10mo ago
  I like my shiny local gewgaw as much as the next person https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/ but I find it curious that the many will always pay for the few https://youtu.be/y12yZ7bQizk?si=Mbgg-F7IP8HJXJPz https://youtu.be/y12yZ7bQizk?si=Mbgg-F7IP8HJXJPz and at what cost ? https://youtu.be/-sNKfRq1oKg?si=6m8pVM9tvawohUbm https://youtu.be/-sNKfRq1oKg?si=6m8pVM9tvawohUbm Why not just mechanical turk the codebase? Lotsa jobs even with LLM augmentation at current state. Where is the long term thinking of utility vs cost? Until AI can solve its own energy generation issues, the hype is gross. Thankfully I'll be long dead (hopefully) before a local AQI > 500 is considered the new normal common good trade for high fidelity personalized deep fake pr0n or the cure for cancer at US healthcare billable rates.
• yunohn 10mo ago
  From the OPs comment section: > Sociologist Judy Wajcman wrote about the concept of how tech is speeding up tasks precisely like this article describes, however she observed that it has never quite manifested as more free time for the laborer. Every time I read blogs or tweets or posts like this, this point becomes more and more apparent. The authors are constantly explaining how they were busy with all their work, without time to implement the less important or side-project like things. The point of the post is often that now they can invest whatever free time they had into doing so, thus doing more work than they did before. I have literally never read such a post where the author explains how they have automated away their job and are now working less than before they started using AI. I think this is a great point to ponder as we continue on this path of overworking and labor value destruction, and not the naive benevolent socialism that the authors all assume will occur magically.
• cowboy7q 10mo ago
  [dead]
• ramon156 10mo ago
  This is through the lens of a programmer (and novel writer), but how should artists adapt to the AI hype? Should they be prompting ideas? Should they generate mock-ups? I don't see a world where digital art benefits from AI as much as programmers do, and I feel for that field.
• vinhnx 10mo ago
  Random thought: What if "AI-assisted programming" becomes "human-assisted programming" instead? We human programmers no longer play the main role in producing code, and we become the "Copilot"?
• chicob 10mo ago
  "Facts are facts"... Well, yes. But an opinion on what is, indeed, a fact and not hype, is still an opinion. Even flat-earthers can state that "facts are facts".
• bambax 10mo ago
  Mostly agree with the article; but the problem is not just about people getting fired, it's about the people not getting hired. How will we create experts in the future without newbies today?
• stephenr 10mo ago
  Guy who says he wrote a book about, has a YouTube channel about, and works for a company obsessed with AI says it's not all just slop. Full story at 11.
• baalimago 10mo ago
  We used to lay the bricks, now we design the pyramids.
• antfarm 10mo ago
  I was against AI-assisted coding until I started a pet iOS project and used Claude (Code) Desktop to have someone to discuss my architecture and design decisions with. At first, I only accepted code snippets that I copy/pasted myself, but with Claude Code`s use of git worktrees I now more often trust Claude to edit my code. I review every single line and keep the increments small. I also commit often. Wouldn't want to go back to coding alone.
• keybored 10mo ago
  I wish influencer programmers[1] cared a quarter as much about social revolution as they cared about tech revolutions. Will it disrupt all people in tech? Will the benefits go to the top? Then what about an appropriate social response? No. In response to that we have “I hope” and “I wrote a novel .... about Basic Income”[2]. Programmers are simply accepting whatever the owner class does to them [3] and calling it Technological Determinism, even if just indirectly. > But, I would not respect myself and my intelligence if my idea of software and society would impair my vision: facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming forever. Token gestures: > What is the social soltion, then? Innovation can't be taken back after all. I believe we should vote for governments that recognize what is happening, and are willing to support those who will remain jobless. Innovation can't be taken back (see: technological determinism; tech people are powerless to affect anything) so we should... vote for good governments. That are willing to support those who remain jobless.[0] Keyword “willing”. Take away people's political leverage to strike. Now they may have no wealth. What are they to do? What is their political influence? The non-answer is to hope that the government will be WILLING to support their existence. > And, the more people get fired, the more political pressure there will be to vote for those who will guarantee a certain degree of protection. The more people get fired the less people with political leverage. The realpolitic trend would be the opposite of what is written here. > But I also look forward to the good AI could bring: new progress in science, that could help lower the suffering of the human condition, Every progress made in science can be artificially restricted. See foodstuff. We could apparently distribute enough to feed the world but that doesn't make as much money as throwing a lot of it away. Progress for any given individual can be non existent unless it is evenly distributed. > which is not always happy. At least the article looks completely organic in terms off writing Genre: I Have Anecdotes About AI And If You Don't See What I'm Seeing You Are Misguided.[4 ] [1] Not a vocation. Simply the obvervation that the famous and respected programmers will have more weight outside their niche simply because of who they are. [2] Basic Income hails from the right libertarian tradition. Leave the rich alone, give the commoner enough crumbs to survive. Later it was romanticized as a way for former programmers to go to their evergreen pastures of endless sideprjects. [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46526137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46526137 [4] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ [0] Let's vote and hope that Italy doesn't get a fascist prime minister next time.
• g947o 10mo ago
  Why is this article getting so many upvotes? It follows the same pattern -- I was able to use [AI codong agent] to achieve [task], [task] and [task] within [time]. It would not be possible to do that without it. [My thoughts about this] Which is the same as dozens if not hundreds of similar articles already posted here, and the comments in the discussion don't explore any new perspectives either. I honestly don't understand why people still write and discuss these articles. While I understand the need for personal expression, nothing you possibly say is new.
  • PunchyHamster 10mo ago
    I'm doubting [My thoughts about this] is actually author's, why write blog manually, automate that too
    • simonw 10mo ago
      He didn't use an LLM to write this.
  • joegibbs 10mo ago
    There are a lot of people who still say that coding agents don't work at all, it's all a NFT-style fad or scam pushed mainly by bad-faith hucksters looking to get a quick buck, etc, so it's refreshing to read something arguing otherwise - and this is antirez who created Redis, so someone who can speak from experience.
• butterNaN 10mo ago
  > I believe we should vote for governments that recognize what is happening, and are willing to support those who will remain jobless. And, the more people get fired, the more political pressure there will be to vote for those who will guarantee a certain degree of protection. I am sorry, but this is incredibly naïve. Governments don't work that way. It reflects a lack of social awareness. "People getting fired" in 2026 is not the same as it was even 10 years ago. The society has changed, losing a job today is demonstrably more dangerous. This is akin to saying "Sure, thousands of houses will burn down, but the more houses burn down, the more political pressure there will be". Why do we have to wait for the houses to burn down?
• dizlexic 10mo ago
  The piece I think people are missing is for years the biggest bottle neck for development has been time. These services have just ripped apart the time barrier, and the industry is still trying to wrap their head around that. To me the next obvious barrier will be size (context) barrier, and I can easily see a place for a human in that process. Sure, anyone can prompt an agent build a codebase, but as those code bases grow / evolve It's hard for me to believe a non-specialized person will be able to manage those projects. edit: I had another thought after posting this. To all the smaller company devs just building and maintaining internal tools. Users always want more features. The difference is now you'll be able to deliver them. The biggest disruption I'm seeing is in estimation. It's a skill developed with experience, and it just went poof
  • camdenreslink 10mo ago
    The biggest bottleneck to development has always been what is the right thing to work on, and how should that be accomplished via code.
• mayhemducks 10mo ago
  This is content that the LLMs will, probably already have, suck up and incorporate into their corpus. Saying that it doesn't matter if the stock market crashes because in the long run, the technology will create more economic value to make up for it certainly reveals the age and/or financial position of the author! When the market crashes, some people will not be able to retire, and will become a financial burden to their families. Why is this okay? The market is a tool that has been used to socialize losses. For people who still have a lot of life left to live, the chances of recovery are much higher. For others, it's pretty terrifying. Yes, advancements in technology often lead to significant economic gains, and we should therefore pursue them. But to say that we should pursue them regardless of the risks is shortsighted and irresponsible.
  • antirez 10mo ago
    You misunderstood my stock market remarks. I don't care since anyway the technology has a value that is not connected to the economy nor the stock market. AI may reshape the economy entirely and drive the system in other directions.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    "It does not matter if AI companies will not be able to get their money back and the stock market will crash. All that is irrelevant, in the long run. [...] Programming changed forever, anyway." That's not saying that it's OK for the market to crash. It's saying that whether the market crashes or not won't change the fact that "Programming changed forever, anyway" - so don't use "this is a bubble and will all crash soon" as an excuse to not learn how to use these new tools.
    • mayhemducks 10mo ago
      Don't mistake my comment for an excuse not to use the technology. Saying that the externalities of developing AI don't matter in the long run legitimizes the hyperbole that fuels irrational investment. Not to mention the profound lack of acknowledgment of privilege.
• mark_l_watson 10mo ago
  I agree so strongly with Antirez. For me (just a personal take!) the main benefit of AI is helping me improve myself via: better understanding technology that I am currently studying; a springboard for fleshing out new ideas; as an AI coding assistant. For deploying LLM-based applications I have a strong bias for starting with smaller models, looking for a good fit for cost/performance/environmental impact vs. what I need for a specific engineering task. Pardon the plug, but I have a work in progress book "Winning Big with Small AI" that can be read online at https://leanpub.com/read/small-ai https://leanpub.com/read/small-ai
• hk1337 10mo ago
  I use it a lot of scaffolding and when there’s a lot of bulk creation or editing to do. A lot of the busy work that normally would take awhile to do but doesn’t really require deep knowledge.
• fatgladiator17 10mo ago
  as a junior developer, i am nervous. what used to be earlier given to junior devs is now being crunched by LLMs, how do i future proof myself?
• Rooster61 10mo ago
  The question that I haven't seen answered yet is whether or not we will reach a sort of "peak vibe coding" phase. What I mean by that is, right now, LLM's are somewhat decent at writing workable code. That code, however, needs babysitting to keep from going off the rails. And that code is sourced from training, which has been gleaned from the billions of lines of code written by hackers everywhere and pushed to source control. We currently have engineers competent enough to use an LLM, review the code written, and fix the places where the LLM writes poor code. We also still have engineers pushing novel code themselves. That means we are on the up-slope. Right now, nascent hackers are learning perhaps the old ways, but also are for sure paying attention to and using vibe coding. That creates a negative feedback loop. As greybeards age out of programming, so to does the knowledge foundation that allowed LLM training to take place in the first place, and more importantly, that trained the next generation of hackers. AI is going to increasingly begin consuming AI code, and I haven't seen solid evidence yet that it is capable (at least currently) of putting truly novel ideas into code. There will be an inflection point where AI's are consuming their own output more than that from competent hackers, and that's when things will go downhill unless there is a significant breakthrough in actual reasoning in AI.
  • DamnInteresting 10mo ago
    This has been my suspicion since LLMs began eating the Internet. Whether it's code or writing, now that LLMs are consuming their own output, the Habsburg Jaw[1] is going to quickly become evident. It is very difficult--sometimes impossible--to know whether a given chunk of input is wholly or partially generated by an LLM. Nevertheless, filtering input may become a critical task. That expense will be passed to the consumer, and LLM prices will necessarily rise as their quality diminishes. It could become a death spiral. If so, I, for one, will be relieved. I'm tired of LLMs trying to take over the enjoyable parts of writing and coding, and leaving the menial tasks to us humans. [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/distinctive-habsburg-jaw-was-likely-result-royal-familys-inbreeding-180973688/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/distinctive-habsbu...
    • simonw 10mo ago
      Nothing I've seen from the AI labs appears to indicate that they are worried about model collapse in the slightest. That makes sense to me, because if their models start getting worse because there's slop in the training data they can detect that and take steps to fix it. Their entire research pipeline is about finding what makes models that score better! Why would they keep going with a technique that scored worse?
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• tntxtnt 10mo ago
  yEAH you write code easier, big MS and NVIDADDY get the trillion bag, everyone else pay 10x the price for RAM, GPU, soon to own nothing and pay subscriptions for everything lets fucking gooo
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• momojo 10mo ago
  This doesn't match my own experience. I dream of the day the stuff I don't find interesting can get automated but again and again I find myself having to do things by hand. I wonder if this is similar to Chess and Go getting 'solved'. Hard problem spaces that only the biggest brains could tackle. Maybe it turns out creating highly performant, distributed systems with a plethora of unittests is a cakewalk for LLMs, while trying to make a 'simple web app' for a niche microscopy application is like trying to drive around San Francisco.
• classified 10mo ago
  Yes, please do fall into the anti-AI hype.
• dizlexic 10mo ago
  I really want to know other's opinion on this, but the critique that Ai pushes spaghetti / barely maintainable code doesn't carry a lot of weight because that's all I've ever seen in production anywhere. If I can spin up in a week what used to take me 6 months and it kind of works. That's absolutely insane. I really wish we could all step back and acknowledge that. Instead, I only hear people talking about how bad the code is. Honest question, so what? If I can monetize a bad product in a miniscule fraction of the time it used to take. Then optimize it while funded, what's the issue? I get this may upset purists but for product companies it's always been about the MVP. Make it work Make it pretty Make it work well
• rbits 10mo ago
  > Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn coding, and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. And now you can build more and better, if you find your way to use AI effectively. The fun is still there, untouched. "Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn painting, and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire inside you, when you painted till night to see your finished artwork? It was creating. And now you can create more and better, if you find your way to use AI effectively. The fun is still there, untouched."