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I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 19

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of something incredible. That's not to say there aren't downsides (WOPR almost killed everyone after all), but we're definitely in a golden age of computing.

massysett 9mo ago
We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary. Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.
- terminalbraid 9mo ago
  > Now it's always available. And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)
  - 0x696C6961 9mo ago
    Sure, but it's easy to check if it's incorrect and try again.
    - terminalbraid 9mo ago
      Forgive me if "just dig your way out of the hole" doesn't sound appealing.
      - shepherdjerred 9mo ago
        Surely you, a programmer, can imagine a way to automate this process
        terminalbraid 9mo ago
        No, I actually haven't made, nor desire to make, a way to automate "thinking about, researching, and solving a problem".
      - 0x696C6961 9mo ago
        You're free to use whatever tools you like.
        chasd00 9mo ago
        > You're free to use whatever tools you like. this is important, i feel like a lot of people are falling in to the "stop liking what i don't like" way of thinking. Further, there's a million different ways to apply an AI helper in software development. You can adjust your workflow in whatever way works best for you. ..or leave it as is.
        wtetzner 9mo ago
        You're right, though I think a lot of the push back is due to the way companies are pushing AI usage onto employees. Not that complaining on HN will help anything...
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
    - Jensson 9mo ago
      When you use it to lookup a single word, yeah, but people here use it to lookup thousand words at once and then can't check it all.
      - 0x696C6961 9mo ago
        That doesn't make the tool bad.
  - dgacmu 9mo ago
    It is! But you can then verify it via a correct, conventional forward dictionary. The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy to check correctness...
    - terminalbraid 9mo ago
      Right. Except the dictionary analogy only goes so far and we reach the true problem.
      - 0x696C6961 9mo ago
        It's not an analogy.
    - 9rx 9mo ago
      Words are something made up to express whatever the speaker/author intends them to, so there is really no such thing as correct or incorrect there. A dictionary can hint at the probability of someone else understanding a word absent of other context, which makes for a useful tool, but that is something quite different to establishing correctness. As for things that can actually be incorrect, that has always been impossible, but we accept the human consensus to be a close enough approximation. With that, verifying 'correctness' to the degree that is possible is actually quite easy through validating it across many different LLMs trained on the human consensus. They will not all hallucinate identically. If convergence is found, then you have also found the human consensus. That doesn't prove correctness — we have never had a way to do that — but it is equivalent to how we have always dealt with establishing what we believe is correct.
      - margalabargala 9mo ago
        Your first paragraph, while perhaps philosophically true to a solipsist, is not actually useful in the world we live in.
        9rx 9mo ago
        It is a fundamental property of the universe. Whether or not it is useful is immaterial. Humans are unable to read minds. They can only make up words and use them as they intend. There is no other way. Despite your insistence, I think you will find that the human consensus is that it useful. The human consensus is especially biased in this case, I will grant you that, but it seems few humans wish they were bears in the forest. Our ability to so effectively communicate in such a messy, imperfect environment is what has enabled us to be unlike all the other animals. It might not sound like it should work on paper, but in the real world it does.
  - NeutralCrane 9mo ago
    Is it? I’ve seen AI hallucinations, but they seem to be increasingly rare these days. Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone could put anything on there, and therefore it was unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail. 20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may have its shortcomings, and yet it is still the most impressive, useful advancement in human knowledge transfer in a generation.
    - advael 9mo ago
      I think robust crowdsourcing is probably the biggest capital-A Advancement in humanity's capabilities that came out of the internet, and there's a huge disparity in results that comes from how that capability is structured and used. Wikipedia designed protocols, laws, and institutions that leverage crowdsourcing to be the most reliable de facto aggregator of human knowledge. Social media designed protocols, laws, and institutions to rot people's brains, surveil their every move, and enable mass-disinformation to take over the public imagination on a regular basis. I think LLMs as a technology are pretty cool, much like crowdsourcing is. We finally have pretty good automatic natural language processing that scales to large corpora. That's big. Also, I think the state of the software industry that is mostly driving the development, deployment, and ownership of this technology is mostly doing uninspired and shitty things with it. I have some hope that better orgs and distributed communities will accomplish some cool and maybe even monumental things with them over time, but right now the field is bleak, not because the technology isn't impressive (although somehow despite how impressive it is it's still being oversold) but because silicon valley is full of rotten institutions with broken incentives, the same ones that brought us social media and subscriptions to software. My hope for the new world a technology will bring about will never rest with corporate aristocracy, but with the more thoughtful institutions and the distributed open source communities that actually build good shit for humanity, time and time again
  - joquarky 9mo ago
    Your comment does not align with my experience. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.
    - autoexec 9mo ago
      > Garbage in, garbage out still applies. Which is why we shouldn't be surprised when AI, trained on the collective wisdom of facebook posts and youtube comments, keeping lying to us.
- astrashe2 9mo ago
  This is a great description of how I use Claude.
- wizzwizz4 9mo ago
  The "reverse dictionary" is called a "thesaurus". Wikipedia quotes Peter Mark Roget (1852): > ...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed Digital reverse dictionaries / thesauri like https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ can take natural language input, and afaict are strictly better at this task than LLMs. (I didn't know these tools existed when I wrote the rest of this comment.) I briefly investigated LLMs for this purpose, back when I didn't know how to use a thesaurus; but I find thesauruses a lot more useful. (Actually, I'm usually too lazy to crack out a proper thesaurus, so I spend 5 seconds poking around Wiktionary first: that's usually Good Enough™ to find me an answer, when I find an answer I can trust it, and I get the answer faster than waiting for an LLM to finish generating a response.) There's definitely room to improve upon the traditional "big book of synonyms with double-indirect pointers" thesaurus, but LLMs are an extremely crude solution that I don't think actually is an improvement.
  - dgacmu 9mo ago
    Really? "What's a word that means admitting a large number of uses?" That seems hard to find in a thesaurus without either versatile or multifarious as a starting point (but those are the end points).
    - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
      I plugged "admitting a large number of uses" into OneLook Thesaurus (https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/?s=admitting%20a%20large%20number%20of%20uses https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/?s=admitting%20a%20large%2...), and it returned: > Best match is versatile which usually means: Capable of many different uses with "multi-purpose", "adaptable", "flexible" and "multi-use" as the runner-up candidates. --- Like you, I had no idea that tools like OneLook Thesaurus existed (despite how easy it would be to make one), so here's my attempt to look this up manually. "Admitting a large number of uses" -> manually abbreviated to "very useful" -> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useful https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useful -> dead end. Give up, use a thesaurus. https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/another-word-for/very_useful.html https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/another-word-for/very_usef..., sense 2 "Usable in multiple ways", lists: > useful multipurpose versatile flexible multifunction adaptable all-around all-purpose all-round multiuse multifaceted extremely useful one-size-fits-all universal protean general general-purpose […] Taking advantage of the fact my passive vocabulary is greater than my active vocabulary: no, no, yes. (I've spuriously rejected "multipurpose" – a decent synonym of "versatile [tool]" – but that doesn't matter.) I'm pretty sure WordHippo is machine-generated from some corpus, and a lot of these words don't mean "very useful", but they're good at playing the SEO game, and I'm lazy. Once we have versatile, we can put that into an actual thesaurus: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/versatile https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/versatile. But none of those really have the same sense as "versatile" in the context I'm thinking of (except perhaps "adaptable"), so if I were writing something, I'd go with "versatile". Total time taken: 15 seconds. And I'm confident that the answer is correct. By the way, I'm not finding "multifarious" anywhere. It's not a word I'm familiar with, but that doesn't actually seem to be a proper synonym (according to Wiktionary, at least: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:heterogeneous https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:heterogeneous). There are certainly contexts where you could use this word in place of "versatile" (e.g. "versatile skill-set" → "multifarious skill-set"), but I criticise WordHippo for far less dubious synonym suggestions.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- cess11 9mo ago
  "The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was" Did you have trouble with this part?
  - xeromal 9mo ago
    This seems like a hostile question.
    - cess11 9mo ago
      Yeah, sure, it can be perceived like that. The message I'm responding to shows a blatant disregard for millenia of scriptural knowledge traditions. It's a 'I have a pocket calculator, why should I study math' kind of attitude, presenting itself in a celebratory manner. To me it is reminiscent of liberalist history, the idea that history is a constant progression from animalistic barbarism to civilisation, and nothing but the latest thing is of any value. Instead of jumping to conclusions and showing my loathing for this particular tradition I decided to try and get more information about where they're coming from.
      - massysett 9mo ago
        If I have a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions, so did Noah Webster when he compiled a dictionary. So did Carl Linnaeus when he classified species. So did the Human Genome Project. I have a pocket calculator, yet I know how to do long division. I use LLMs to learn and to enhance my work. A dictionary is a shortcut to learning what a word means without consulting an entire written corpus, as the dictionary editors have already done this. Is my use of a dictionary a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions? I don’t think so at all. Rather, it exemplifies how human knowledge advances: we build on the work of our predecessors and contemporaries rather than reinvent the wheel every time. LLM use is an example of this.
        cess11 9mo ago
        You're avoiding my question. Since you're comparing yourself to Noah Webster, do you have some examples of your achievements?
- 9rx 9mo ago
  > Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. There was another way: Make one up. That is what the people you read from/talked to did before relaying it to you.
  - vaylian 9mo ago
    If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use. Otherwise the word will not hold its own meaning. For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary.
    - 9rx 9mo ago
      > If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use. That depends on your goals. If you are writing in your private journal, or a comment on HN, it doesn't matter one bit. If you want to find commonality with other people it is significantly more efficient, but still not required. It is not like one is born understanding words. They are not passed down from the heavens. They are an invention. When I say 'sloopydoopidydoo' you might not know what I intend by it right away, but the path to figuring it out is a solved problem. Even young children can handle it. > For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary. Let's put it to the test: I added enums to the programming language I am working on. Tell me, with your dictionary in hand, what do I mean by that? Here's the thing: According to the dictionary, an enum is something like Go's iota or C's enum. But many people will tell you that Go doesn't have enums — that an enum is what others might recognize as a tagged union. That kind of language evolution happens all the time. So, what do I mean? Am I using the dictionary definition, or the community definition that is quickly gaining favour and will no doubt be added to the dictionary as soon as someone has a chance to update it? Both uses have been widely established in my opinion. In fact, the Swift programming language's documentation even acknowledges both uses and then goes on to explain what it means by "enum" to remove any confusion. I look forward to seeing if you captured my intent.
Levitating 9mo ago
> golden age of computing I feel like we've reached the worst age of computing. Where our platforms are controlled by power hungry megacorporations and our software is over-engineered garbage. The same company that develops our browsers and our web standards is also actively destroying the internet with AI scrapers. Hobbyists lost the internet to companies and all software got worse for it. Our most popular desktop operating system doesn't even have an easy way to package and update software for it.
- sosomoxie 9mo ago
  Dystopian cyberpunk was always part of the fantasy. Yes, scale has enabled terrible things. There are more alternatives than ever though. People are still making C64 games today, cheap chips are everywhere. Documentation is abundant... When you layer in AI, it takes away labor costs, meaning that you don't need to make economically viable things, you can make fun things. I have at least a dozen projects going now that I would have never had time or energy for. Any itch, no matter how geeky and idiosyncratic, is getting scratched by AI.
  - pocksuppet 9mo ago
    They're possible, but they're not exactly relevant, and you couldn't do something like that on newer hardware. It's like playing a guitar from a museum because the world just forgot how to make guitars. Pretty dystopian.
- AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
  It’s never been easier for you to make a competitor So what is stopping you other than yourself?
  - tock 9mo ago
    Billions of dollars?
    - AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
Same. I was born in 84 and have been doing software since 97 it’s never been easier, better or more accessible time to make literally anything - by far. Also if you prefer to code by hand literally nobody is stopping you AND even that is easier. Cause if you wanted to code for console games you literally couldn’t in the 90s without 100k specialized dev machine. It’s not even close. This “I’m a victim because my software engineering hobby isn’t profitable anymore” take is honestly baffling.
- zeroonetwothree 9mo ago
  I'm not going to code by hand if it's 4x slower than having Claude do it. Yes, I can do that, but it just feels bad. The analogy I like is it's like driving vs. walking. We were healthier when we walked everywhere, but it's very hard to quit driving and go back even if it's going to be better for you.
  - AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
    I walk all the time During the summer I’ll walk 30-50 miles a week However I’m not going to walk to work ever and I’m damn sir not going to walk in the rain or snow unless if I can avoid it
  - NeutralCrane 9mo ago
    I actually like the analogy but for the opposite reason. Cars have become the most efficient way to travel for most industrial purposes. And yet enormous numbers of people still walk, run, ride bikes, or even horses, often for reasons entirely separate from financial gain.
  - pojzon 9mo ago
    Coding will take 4 times less time, but review will take almost the same amount of time if not more if the solution does not worl out of the box or has unforseen corner cases. LLMs were trained on public code libraries and unfortunately most pf that OSS code is garbage. There are ofcourse raisins there, but those are far in between. Top it off with hallucinations and suddenly you spend more time debugging messy AI code when you could write the same in a fraction of that time. The easier the task, the better job LLMs do, the harder the task the worse results you get. Source: working with those tools daily. Using your analogy: - by car it will be 30km uphill, coz of how the road is built - walking it will be 1km straight line
crawshaw 9mo ago
Glad to see this already expressed here because I wholly agree. Programming has not brought me this much joy in decades. What a wonderful time to be alive.
- socalgal2 9mo ago
  I wish I could have you sit by my side for a week or two and pair program what I'm working on because most for the time I'm not getting great results.
  - chkaloon 9mo ago
    Depends on the project. For web based functionality it seems great, because of all the prior work that is out there. For more obscure things like Obsidian Note extentions or Home Assistant help it's more hit and miss
  - crawshaw 9mo ago
    You in SF? My schedule is a bit busy since we launched but I could find an hour in the city.
uejfiweun 9mo ago
I agree with you with the caveat that all the "ease of building" benefits, for me, could potentially be dwarfed by job losses and pay decreases. If SWE really becomes obsolete, or even if the number of roles decrease a lot and/or the pay decreases a lot (or even fails to increase with inflation), I am suddenly in the unenviable position of not being financially secure and being stuck in my 30s with an increasingly useless degree. A life disaster, in other words. In that scenario the unhappiness of worrying about money and retraining far outweighs the happiness I get from being able to build stuff really fast. Fundamentally this is the only point I really have on the 'anti-AI' side, but it's a really important one.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
jmclnx 9mo ago
I retired a few years ago, so I have no idea what AI programming is. But I mourned when CRT came out, I had just started programming. But I quickly learned CRTs were far better, I mourned when we moved to GUIs, I never liked the move and still do not like dealing with GUIs, but I got used to it. Went through all kinds of programming methods, too many to remember, but those were easy to ignore and workaround. I view this new AI thing in a similar way. I expect it will blow over and a new bright shiny programming methodology will become a thing to stress over. In the long run, I doubt anything will really change.
- apitman 9mo ago
  OT but I see your account was created in 2015, so I'm assuming very late in your career. Curious what brought you to HN at that time and not before?
  - jmclnx 9mo ago
    I did not know it existed before 2015 :)
- querez 9mo ago
  I think you're underestimating what AI can do in the coding space. It is an extreme paradigm shift. It's not like "we wrote C, but now we switch to C++, so now we think in objects and templates". It's closer to the shift from assembly to a higher level language. Your goal is still the same. But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main concern is suddenly automated away. If you never tried Claude Code, give it s try. It's very easy to get I to. And you'll soon see how powerful it is.
  - imiric 9mo ago
    > But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main concern is suddenly automated away. It's remarkable that people who think like this don't have the foresight to see that this technology is not a higher level of abstraction, but a replacement of human intellect. You may be working with it today, but whatever you're doing will eventually be done better by the same technology. This is just a transition period. Assuming, of course, that the people producing these tools can actually deliver what they're selling, which is very much uncertain. It doesn't change their end goal, however. Nor the fact that working with this new "abstraction" is the most mind numbing activity a person can do.
apitman 9mo ago
In some ways, I'd say we're in a software dark age. In 40 years, we'll still have C, bash, grep, and Mario ROMs, but practically none of the software written today will still be around. That's by design. SaaS is a rent seeking business model. But I think it also applies to most code written in JS, Python, C#, Go, Rust, etc. There are too many dependencies. There's no way you'll be able to take a repo from 2026 and spin it up in 2050 without major work. One question is how will AI factor in to this. Will it completely remove the problem? Will local models be capable of finding or fixing every dependency in your 20yo project? Or will they exacerbate things by writing terrible code with black hole dependency trees? We're gonna find out.
- ctmnt 9mo ago
  I’m not sure Go belongs on that list. Otherwise I hear what you’re saying.
  - apitman 9mo ago
    A large percentage of the code I've written the last 10 years is Go. I think it does somewhat better than the others in some areas, such as relative simplicity and having a robust stdlib, but a lot of this is false security. The simplicity is surface level. The runtime and GC are very complex. And the stdlib being robust means that if you ever have to implement a compiler from scratch, you have to implement all of std. All in all I think the end result will be the same. I don't think any of my Go code will survive long term.
    - hnlmorg 9mo ago
      I’ve got 8 year old Go code that still compiles fine on the latest Go compiler. Go has its warts but backwards compatibility isn’t one of them. The language is almost as durable as Perl.
      - shimman 9mo ago
        8 years is not that long, if it can still compile in say 20 years then sure but 8 years in this industry isn't that long at all (unless you're into self flagellation by working on the web).
croes 9mo ago
> We're on the precipice of something incredible. Total dependence on a service?
- kaffekaka 9mo ago
  Yes this is the issue. We truly have something incredible now. Something that could benefit all of humanity. Unfortunately it comes at $200/month from Sam Altman & co.
  - puchatek 9mo ago
    If that was the final price, no strings attached and perfect, reliable privacy then I might consider it. Maybe not for the current iteration but for what will be on offer in a year or two. But as it stands right now, the most useful LLMs are hosted by companies that are legally obligated to hand over your data if the US gov. had decided that it wants it. It's unacceptable.
    - lovich 9mo ago
      That 200/month price isn’t sustainable either. Eventually they’re going to have to jack that up substantially.
    - wtetzner 9mo ago
      > legally obligated to hand over your data if the US gov. had decided that it wants it Not to mention they could just sell it to the highest bidder, or simply use it to produce competition and put you out of business. Especially if you're using their service to do the development...
  - account42 8mo ago
    It's one issue, but it's not the only issue.
- hafley66 9mo ago
  prefrontal cortex as a service
plagiarist 9mo ago
I didn't imagine I would be sending all my source code directly to a corporation for access to an irritatingly chipper personality that is confidently incorrect the way these things are. There have been wild technological developments but we've lost privacy and autonomy across basically all devices (excepting the people who deliberately choose to forego the most capable devices, and even then there are firmware blobs). We've got the facial recognition and tracking so many sci-fi dystopias have warned us to avoid. I'm having an easier time accomplishing more difficult technological tasks. But I lament what we have come to. I don't think we are in the Star Trek future and I imagined doing more drugs in a Neuromancer future. It's like a Snow Crash / 1984 corporate government collab out here, it kinda sucks.
IhateAI 9mo ago
[flagged]
- sosomoxie 9mo ago
  I'm actually extremely good at programming. My point is I love computers and computing. You can use technology to achieve amazing things (even having fun). Now I can do much more of that than when I was limited to what I can personally code. In the end, it's what computers can do that's amazing, beautiful, terrifying... That thrill and to be on the bleeding edge is always what I was after.
  - IhateAI 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tines 9mo ago
      Thank you. I don't understand how people don't see that this is the universe's most perfect gift to corporations, and what a disaster it is for labor. There won't be a middle class. Future generations will be intellectual invalids. Baffling to see people celebrating.
      - samiv 9mo ago
        They are the useful idiots buying into the hype thinking they by some magic they get to keep their jobs and their incomes. This things is going to erase careers and render skills sets and knowledge cultivated over decades worthless. Anyone can promt the same fucking shit now and call it a day.
      - blibble 9mo ago
        it is a very, very strange thing to witness even if you can be a prompt engineer (or whatever it's called this week) today well, with the feedback you're providing: you're training it to do that too you are LITERALLY training the newly hired outsourced personnel to do your job but this time you won't be able to get a job anywhere else, because your fellow class traitors are doing exactly the same thing at every other company in the world
HendrikHensen 9mo ago
Good for you. But there are already so, so many posts and threads celebrating all of this. Everyone is different. Some of us enjoy the activity of programming by hand. This thread is for those us, to mourn.
- nradov 9mo ago
  You're still allowed to program by hand. Even in assembly language if you like.
  - fupaskys 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - anilgulecha 9mo ago
    Imo, it's allowed theoretically, as a hobby, but not really as a practice. This is what the blog is about.
    - nradov 9mo ago
      There are literally still programmers who make their living writing assembly code by hand for embedded systems.
  - wtetzner 9mo ago
    > You're still allowed to program by hand. In fact, you'll probably be more productive in the long term.
  - kristofferR 9mo ago
    People are allowed to mourn the music styles of previous decades even though the same music genres are still being created, not just popular the same way they used to be.
- toddmorrow 9mo ago
  I have an llm riding shotgun and I still very much program by hand. it's not one extreme or the other. whatever I copy from the llm has to be redone line by line anyways. I understand all of my code because I touch every line of it
_zagj 9mo ago
> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We could easily approach a state of affairs where most of what you see online is AI and almost every "person" you interact with is fake. It's hard to see how someone who supposedly remembers computing in the 80s, when the power of USENET and BBSs to facilitate long-distance, or even international, communication and foster personal relationships (often IRL) was enthralling, not thinking we've lost something.
- icedchai 9mo ago
  I grew up on 80's and 90's BBSes. The transition from BBSes to Usenet and the early Internet was a magical period, a time I still look back upon fondly and will never forget. Some of my best friends IRL today were people I first met "online" in those days... but I haven't met anyone new in a longggg time. Yeah, I'm also much older, but the environment is also very different. The community aspect is long gone.
- munksbeer 9mo ago
  I'm from the early 90s era. I know exactly what you're saying. I entered the internet on muds, irc and usenet. There were just far fewer people online in those communities in those days, and in my country, it was mostly only us university students. But, those days disappeared a long time ago. Probably at least 20-30 years ago.
  - Gud 9mo ago
    IRC is still around, that old internet is still there. You just have to get off the commercial crap and you’ll find it.
- chasd00 9mo ago
  even in the 90s there was the phrase "the Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the teen girls are FBI agents". It was always the case you never really knew who/what you were dealing with on the Internet.
  - 8mo ago
hnlmorg 9mo ago
The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully documented systems. Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did. And software that’s open and can be modified. Instead what we have is: - AI which are little black boxes and beyond our ability to fully reason. - perpetual subscription services for the same software we used to “own”. - hardware that is completely undocumented to all but a small few who are granted an NDA before hand - operating systems that are trying harder and harder to prevent us from running any software they haven’t approved because “security” - and distributed systems become centralised, such as GitHub, CloudFlare, AWS, and so on and so forth. The only thing special about right now is that we have added yet another abstraction on top of an already overly complex software stack to allow us to use natural language as pseudocode. And that is a version special breakthrough, but it’s not enough by itself to overlook all the other problems with modern computing.
- HoldOnAMinute 9mo ago
  Have you tried using GenAI to write documentation? You can literally point it to a folder and say, analyze everything in this folder and write a document about it. And it will do it. It's more thorough than anything a human could do, especially in the time frame we're talking about. If GenAI could only write documentation it would still be a game changer.
  - orwin 9mo ago
    But it write mostly useless documentation Which take time to read and decipher. And worse, if you are using it for public documentation, sometimes it hallucinate endpoints (i don't want to say too much here, but it happened recently to a quite used B2B SaaS).
    - throwup238 9mo ago
      Loop it. Use another agent (from a different company helps) to review the code and documentation and call out any inconsistencies. I run a bunch of jobs weekly to review docs for inconsistencies and write a plan to fix. It still needs humans in the loop if the agents don’t converge after a few turns, but it’s largely automatic (I baby sat it for a few months validating each change).
jauntywundrkind 9mo ago
I really am very thankful for @simonw posting a TikTok from Chris Ashworth, a Baltimore theater software developer, who recently picked up LLM's for building a voxel display software controller. And who was just blown away. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/a-programming-tool-for-the-arts/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/a-programming-tool-for... Simon doesn't touch on my favorite part of Chris's video though, which is Chris citing his friend Jesse Kriss. This stuck out at me so hard, and is so close to what you are talking about: > The interesting thing about this is that it's not taking away something that was human and making it a robot. We've been forced to talk to computers in computer language. And this is turning that around. I don't see (as you say) a personality. But I do see the ability to talk. The esoteria is still here underneath, but computer programmers having this lock on the thing that has eaten the world, being the only machine whisperers around, is over. That depth of knowledge is still there and not going away! But notably too, the LLM will help you wade in, help those not of the esoteric personhood of programmers to dive in & explore.
busterarm 9mo ago
We definitely have lost something. I got into computers because they're deterministic. Way less complicated than people. Now the determinism is gone and computers are gaining the worst qualities of people. My only sanctuary in life is slipping away from me. And I have to hear people tell me I'm wrong who aren't even sympathetic to how this affects me.
- Gud 9mo ago
  But no one is forcing you to use this software?
  - yoyohello13 9mo ago
    If you want to keep your job you absolutely need to use these tools.
  - exitplanetary 8mo ago
    Well, they do, as a part of a daily job. But fun was removed from the corporate programming long ago, so AI hurts not so much.
    - busterarm 8mo ago
      It hurts when your management abdicates things that are normally their responsibility and tell you to just ask the AI what to do. Or when that's what they would have done anyway.
- toddmorrow 9mo ago
  LLMs have irritated me with bad solutions but they've never hurt my feelings. I can't say that about a single person I know. They're better people than people lol
renegade-otter 9mo ago
Nothing meaningful happened in almost 20 years. After the iPhone, what happened that truly changed our lives? The dumpster fire of social media? Background Netflix TV? In fact, I remember when I could actually shop on Amazon or browse for restaurants on Yelp while trusting the reviews. None of that is possible today. We have been going through a decade of enshitification.
hintymad 9mo ago
One thing that I realized was that a lot of our so-called "craft" is converged "know-how". Take the recent news that Anthropic used Claude Code to write a C compiler for example, writing compiler is hard (and fun) for us humans because we indeed need to spend years understanding deeply the compiler theory and learning every minute detail of implementation. That kind of learning is not easily transferrable. Most students tried the compiler class and then never learned enough, only a handful few every year continued to grow into true compiler engineers. Yet to our AI models, it does not matter much. They already learned the well-established patterns of compiler writing from the excellent open-source implementations, and now they can churn out millions of code easily. If not perfect, they will get better in the future. So, in a sense our "craft" no longer matters, but what really happens is that the repetitive know-how has become commoditized. We still need people to do creative work, but what is not clear is how many such people we will need. After all, at least in short term, most people build their career by perfecting procedural work because transferring the know-how and the underlying whys is very expensive to human. For the long term, though, I'm optimistic that engineers just get an amazing tool and will use it create more opportunities that demand more people.
- blibble 9mo ago
  writing a C compiler is a 1st year undergrad project C was explicitly designed to make it simple to write a compiler
  - hintymad 9mo ago
    Which university offers compiler for freshmen? Can you provide a link to the course?
  - MajesticHobo2 9mo ago
    Third or fourth, maybe, not first.
  - icedchai 9mo ago
    These are toy compilers missing many edge cases. You’ll be lucky if they support anything other than integer types, nevermind complex pointer-to-pointer-to-struct-with-pointers type definitions. They certainly won’t support GNU extensions. They won’t compile any serious open source project, nevermind the Linux kernel.
fupaskys 9mo ago
[dead]
paganel 9mo ago
> We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality The difference is that the computer only talks back to you as code because you’re paying its owners, with you not being part of the owners. I find it really baffling that people put up with this. What will you do when Alphabet or Altman will demand 10 times the money out of you fir the privilege of their computer talking to you in programming code?
- _aavaa_ 9mo ago
  Use one of the open models that are also getting better and easier to run every year?
  - paganel 9mo ago
    Which are those open ones? And how are they going to get their billions of dollars worth of investment back? Even Google Maps used to be virtually free until it wasn’t, at a fraction of the investment cost.
    - _aavaa_ 9mo ago
      For starters: Qwen, GLM, Kimi, Llama. How they run their business is none of my business. I can download the weights right now and use them as I see fit under the open source license terms. Google Maps was never a self contained binary you could download. But even now it remains free to use.
      - paganel 9mo ago
        I’m only familiar with Llama, but as far as I understood it’s in no way at the same level as Claude or Gemini, so in fact you’d still be a lot less productive compared to those using those products directly. That’s the thing, us as programmers are supposed to be creators/makers, not mere consumers/users, but I do agree that that has been changing as of late.
        9mo ago
coldtea 9mo ago
I started programming 40 years ago as well. The magic for me was never that "you could talk to your computer and it had a personality". That was the layman version of computing, something shown to the masses in movies like War Games and popular media, one that we mocked. I also lived through the FOSS peak. The current proprietary / black-box / energy lock in would be seen as the stuff of nightmares.
layer8 9mo ago
> I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. Maybe they made us feel magic, but actual magic is the opposite of what I want computers to be. The “magic” for me was that computers were completely scrutable and reason-able, and that you could leverage your reasoning abilities to create interesting things with them, because they were (after some learning effort) scrutable. True magic, on the other hand, is inscrutable, it’s a thing that escapes explanation, that can’t be reasoned about. LLMs are more like that latter magic, and that’s not what I seek in computers. > We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I always preferred the Star-Trek-style ship computers that didn’t exhibit personality, that were just neutral and matter-of-fact. Computers with personality tend to be exhausting and annoying. Please let me turn it off. Computers with personality can be entertaining characters in a story, but that doesn’t mean I want them around me as the tools I have to use.
- cat_plus_plus 9mo ago
  I have no idea what everyone is talking about. LLMs are based on relatively simple math, inference is much easier to learn and customize than say Android APIs. Once you do you can apply familiar programming style logic to messy concepts like language and images. Give you model a JSON schema like "warp_factor": Integer if you don't want chatter, that's way better than Star Trek computer could do. Or have it write you a simple domain specific library on top of Android API that you can then program from memory like old style BASIC rather than having to run to stack overflow for evwery new task.
  - layer8 9mo ago
    You can’t reason about inference (or training) of LLMs on the semantic level. You can’t predict the output of an LLM for a specific input other than by running it. If you want the output to be different in a specific way, you can’t reason with precision that a particular modification of the input, or of the weights, will achieve the desired change (and only that change) in the output. Instead, it’s like a slot machine that you just have to try running again. The fact that LLMs are based on a network of simple matrix multiplications doesn’t change that. That’s like saying that the human brain is based on simple physical field equations, and therefore its behavior is easy to understand.
maplethorpe 9mo ago
> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. I agree!. One criticism I've heard is that half my colleagues don't write their own words anymore. They use ChatGPT to do it for them. Does this mean we've "lost" something? On the contrary! Those people probably would have spoken far fewer words into existence in the pre-AI era. But AI has enabled them to put pages and pages of text out into the world each week: posts and articles where there were previously none. How can anyone say that's something we've lost? That's something we've gained! It's not only the golden era of code. It's the golden era of content.
- phatfish 9mo ago
  Quality is better than quantity.
- testdelacc1 9mo ago
  We have more words than ever. Nice. But all the words sound more like each other than ever. It’s not just blah, it’s blah. And why should I bother reading what someone else “writes”? I can generate the same text myself for free.
- layer8 9mo ago
  I hope this is sarcasm. :)
- yoyohello13 9mo ago
  > But AI has enabled them to put pages and pages of text out into the world each week: posts and articles where there were previously none. Are you for real? Quantity is not equal to Quality. I'll be sure to dump a pile of trash in your living room. There wasn't much there before, but now there is lots of stuff. Better right?
  - maplethorpe 8mo ago
    I'm finding it hard to reconcile HN's love of AI generated code with HN's dislike of AI generated content. Why is the code good but the content bad?
nullbio 9mo ago
We're on the precipice of something very disgusting. A massive power imbalance where a single company or two swallows the Earth's economy, due to a lack of competition, distribution and right of access laws. The wildest part is that these greedy companies, one of them in particular, are continuously framed in a positive light. This same company that has partnered with Palantir. AI should be a public good, not something gatekept by greedy capitalists with an ego complex.
ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
I tend to feel this way (also 40-year coder). It's because of the way that I use the tools, and I have the luxury of being a craftsman, as opposed to a "TSA agent." But then, I don't get paid to do this stuff, anymore. In fact, I deliberately avoid putting myself into positions, where money changes hands for my craft. I know how fortunate I am, to be in this position, so I don't say it to aggravate folks that aren't.
RunSet 9mo ago
> I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect I also can't believe it's actually happening. ;)
- account42 8mo ago
  It has been interesting (and not in a good way) how willing people are to anthropomorphize these megacorporation-controlled machines just because the interface is natural language now.
nine_k 9mo ago
The invention of Mr Jacquard ushered in a sartorial golden age, when complex fabrics are easy to produce cheaply, at the expense of a few hours spent on punching a deck of cards. But the craft of making tapestries by hand definitely went into demise. This is the situation which the post is mourning. Frankly, I have my doubts about the utter efficiency of LLMs writing code unattended; it will take quite some time before whatever comes after the current crop learns to do that efficiently and reliably. (Check out how many years went between first image generation demos and today's SOTA.) But the vector is obvious: humans would have to speak a higher-level language to computers, and hand-coding Typescript is going to be as niche in 10 years as today is hand-coding assembly. This adds some kinds of fun, but also removes some other kinds of fun. There's a reason why people often pick something like PICO-8 to write games for fun, rather than something like Unreal Engine. So software development becomes harder because the developer has to work on more and more complex things, faster, and with fewer chances to study the moving parts to a comfortable depth.
deleted 9mo ago
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adamredwoods 9mo ago
Computers did feel like magic... until I read code, think about it, understood it, and could control it. I feel we're stepping away from that, and moving to a place of less control, less thinking. I liked programming, it was fun, and I understood it. Now it's gone.
- autoexec 9mo ago
  It's not gone, it's just being increasingly discouraged. You don't have to "vibe code" or spend paragraphs trying to talk a chatbot into doing something that you can do yourself with a few lines of code. You'll be fine. It's the people who could have been the next few generations of programmers who will suffer the most.
hgs3 9mo ago
> We're on the precipice of something incredible. Only if our socioeconomic model changes.
autoexec 9mo ago
> we're definitely in a golden age of computing. Certainly not. Computers are still magic, but much of that magic is now controlled and being restricted by someone other than you. Today most people's only computer is a cell phone, which is heavily locked down and designed for media consumption and to collect and give away every scrap of their personal/private data. Most people's desktop computers aren't much better. They are continuously used by others against the interests of the people who paid for them, sometimes explicitly keeping them from doing things they want or limiting what they can install. People are increasingly ignorant of how computers work in ways that were never possible when you had to understand them to use them. SoCs mean that users, and even the operating system they use, aren't fully aware of what the devices are doing. People have lost control of the computers they paid for and their own data. They now have to beg a small number of companies for anything they want (including their own data on the cloud). We're heading toward a future where you'll need a submit to a retinal scan just to view a website. Computing today is more adversarial, restricted, opaque, centralized, controlled, and monitored than it has been in a very long time. "My computer talks to me" is not making up for that.
- manmal 9mo ago
  Models you can run on your own (expensive) computer are just a year behind the SOTA. Linux exists. Why are you so pessimistic?
  - Dumblydorr 9mo ago
    Typical HN comment. They’re so in the weeds of edge case 1% concerns they can’t see the golden age around them. Most people living through golden ages might not know it. Many workers in Industrial Revolution saw a decline in relative wages. Many in the Roman Empire were enslaved or impoverished. That doesn’t mean history doesn’t see these as golden ages, where golden age is defined loosely as a broad period of enhanced prosperity and productivity for a group of people. For all its downsides, pointed out amply above, the golden age of computing started 100 years ago and hasn’t ceased yet.
    - 8mo ago
ChicagoDave 9mo ago
This is exactly where I am with GenAI. After forty years: blocks of code, repository patterns, factory patterns, threading issues, documentation, one page executive summaries… I can now direct these things and it’s glorious.
biztos 8mo ago
Back in the 80s it felt like Eliza had a “personality.”
BobbyTables2 8mo ago
I miss the simplicity of older hardware. The original NES controller only contains a single shift register - no other active components. Today, a wireless thing will have more code than one would want to ever read, much less comprehend. Even a high level diagram of the hardware components involved is quite complex. Sure, we gained convenience, but at great cost.
nialv7 8mo ago
> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. you won't feel you've lost something if you've never had it. sorry.
latexr 8mo ago
> We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. We literally are not, and we’d do well to stop using such hyperbole. The 1980s fantasy was of speaking to a machine which you could trust to be correct with a high degree of confidence. No one was wishing they could talk to a wet sock that’ll confidently give you falsehoods and when confronted (even if they were right) will bow down and always respond with “you’re absolutely right”.
m463 8mo ago
They used to call it the Personal Computer, and I think that name encompassed the "magic" I felt in the 80's. But computing is increasingly not-for-you. Your phone will do what apple allows you to do. Your online activity is tracked and used to form a profile of your actions and behaviors. And the checks and balances - if any - are weak and compromised because of the commercial or government interest that want things that way. the simplest example might be computer games. In the 80's it was private. In 2026 it is routinely a psychological cash register and a surveillance system. I really like that linux with all its imperfections seems to counteract a lot of this.
JohnMakin 8mo ago
Perhaps, if you will, try to empathize with people who are not approaching the end of their careers, and are mid-career - too late to pivot to anything new, but in danger of being swept away, and you'll understand a bit more the perspective of the blog post.
- pellenys 8mo ago
  Absolutely. I never thought I’d have to retrain, and I’m still uncertain if I will have to because I’m not really sure where software development will be in the next few years. It was quite an epiphany to run my first agent on a code base and be simultaneously excited at the implications for productivity, and numb at the realisation that the work it was saving was the work I enjoyed and the expertise I was being paid for. There are only so many roles for developers to write the prompts and review the output, and it does feel a bit like prodding a machine and waiting for it to go ding.

massysett 9mo ago

We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary. Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.

terminalbraid 9mo ago
> Now it's always available. And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)
- 0x696C6961 9mo ago
  Sure, but it's easy to check if it's incorrect and try again.
  - terminalbraid 9mo ago
    Forgive me if "just dig your way out of the hole" doesn't sound appealing.
    - shepherdjerred 9mo ago
      Surely you, a programmer, can imagine a way to automate this process
      - terminalbraid 9mo ago
        No, I actually haven't made, nor desire to make, a way to automate "thinking about, researching, and solving a problem".
    - 0x696C6961 9mo ago
      You're free to use whatever tools you like.
      - chasd00 9mo ago
        > You're free to use whatever tools you like. this is important, i feel like a lot of people are falling in to the "stop liking what i don't like" way of thinking. Further, there's a million different ways to apply an AI helper in software development. You can adjust your workflow in whatever way works best for you. ..or leave it as is.
        wtetzner 9mo ago
        You're right, though I think a lot of the push back is due to the way companies are pushing AI usage onto employees. Not that complaining on HN will help anything...
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  - Jensson 9mo ago
    When you use it to lookup a single word, yeah, but people here use it to lookup thousand words at once and then can't check it all.
    - 0x696C6961 9mo ago
      That doesn't make the tool bad.
- dgacmu 9mo ago
  It is! But you can then verify it via a correct, conventional forward dictionary. The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy to check correctness...
  - terminalbraid 9mo ago
    Right. Except the dictionary analogy only goes so far and we reach the true problem.
    - 0x696C6961 9mo ago
      It's not an analogy.
  - 9rx 9mo ago
    Words are something made up to express whatever the speaker/author intends them to, so there is really no such thing as correct or incorrect there. A dictionary can hint at the probability of someone else understanding a word absent of other context, which makes for a useful tool, but that is something quite different to establishing correctness. As for things that can actually be incorrect, that has always been impossible, but we accept the human consensus to be a close enough approximation. With that, verifying 'correctness' to the degree that is possible is actually quite easy through validating it across many different LLMs trained on the human consensus. They will not all hallucinate identically. If convergence is found, then you have also found the human consensus. That doesn't prove correctness — we have never had a way to do that — but it is equivalent to how we have always dealt with establishing what we believe is correct.
    - margalabargala 9mo ago
      Your first paragraph, while perhaps philosophically true to a solipsist, is not actually useful in the world we live in.
      - 9rx 9mo ago
        It is a fundamental property of the universe. Whether or not it is useful is immaterial. Humans are unable to read minds. They can only make up words and use them as they intend. There is no other way. Despite your insistence, I think you will find that the human consensus is that it useful. The human consensus is especially biased in this case, I will grant you that, but it seems few humans wish they were bears in the forest. Our ability to so effectively communicate in such a messy, imperfect environment is what has enabled us to be unlike all the other animals. It might not sound like it should work on paper, but in the real world it does.
- NeutralCrane 9mo ago
  Is it? I’ve seen AI hallucinations, but they seem to be increasingly rare these days. Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone could put anything on there, and therefore it was unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail. 20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may have its shortcomings, and yet it is still the most impressive, useful advancement in human knowledge transfer in a generation.
  - advael 9mo ago
    I think robust crowdsourcing is probably the biggest capital-A Advancement in humanity's capabilities that came out of the internet, and there's a huge disparity in results that comes from how that capability is structured and used. Wikipedia designed protocols, laws, and institutions that leverage crowdsourcing to be the most reliable de facto aggregator of human knowledge. Social media designed protocols, laws, and institutions to rot people's brains, surveil their every move, and enable mass-disinformation to take over the public imagination on a regular basis. I think LLMs as a technology are pretty cool, much like crowdsourcing is. We finally have pretty good automatic natural language processing that scales to large corpora. That's big. Also, I think the state of the software industry that is mostly driving the development, deployment, and ownership of this technology is mostly doing uninspired and shitty things with it. I have some hope that better orgs and distributed communities will accomplish some cool and maybe even monumental things with them over time, but right now the field is bleak, not because the technology isn't impressive (although somehow despite how impressive it is it's still being oversold) but because silicon valley is full of rotten institutions with broken incentives, the same ones that brought us social media and subscriptions to software. My hope for the new world a technology will bring about will never rest with corporate aristocracy, but with the more thoughtful institutions and the distributed open source communities that actually build good shit for humanity, time and time again
- joquarky 9mo ago
  Your comment does not align with my experience. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.
  - autoexec 9mo ago
    > Garbage in, garbage out still applies. Which is why we shouldn't be surprised when AI, trained on the collective wisdom of facebook posts and youtube comments, keeping lying to us.
astrashe2 9mo ago
This is a great description of how I use Claude.
wizzwizz4 9mo ago
The "reverse dictionary" is called a "thesaurus". Wikipedia quotes Peter Mark Roget (1852): > ...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed Digital reverse dictionaries / thesauri like https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ can take natural language input, and afaict are strictly better at this task than LLMs. (I didn't know these tools existed when I wrote the rest of this comment.) I briefly investigated LLMs for this purpose, back when I didn't know how to use a thesaurus; but I find thesauruses a lot more useful. (Actually, I'm usually too lazy to crack out a proper thesaurus, so I spend 5 seconds poking around Wiktionary first: that's usually Good Enough™ to find me an answer, when I find an answer I can trust it, and I get the answer faster than waiting for an LLM to finish generating a response.) There's definitely room to improve upon the traditional "big book of synonyms with double-indirect pointers" thesaurus, but LLMs are an extremely crude solution that I don't think actually is an improvement.
- dgacmu 9mo ago
  Really? "What's a word that means admitting a large number of uses?" That seems hard to find in a thesaurus without either versatile or multifarious as a starting point (but those are the end points).
  - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
    I plugged "admitting a large number of uses" into OneLook Thesaurus (https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/?s=admitting%20a%20large%20number%20of%20uses https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/?s=admitting%20a%20large%2...), and it returned: > Best match is versatile which usually means: Capable of many different uses with "multi-purpose", "adaptable", "flexible" and "multi-use" as the runner-up candidates. --- Like you, I had no idea that tools like OneLook Thesaurus existed (despite how easy it would be to make one), so here's my attempt to look this up manually. "Admitting a large number of uses" -> manually abbreviated to "very useful" -> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useful https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useful -> dead end. Give up, use a thesaurus. https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/another-word-for/very_useful.html https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/another-word-for/very_usef..., sense 2 "Usable in multiple ways", lists: > useful multipurpose versatile flexible multifunction adaptable all-around all-purpose all-round multiuse multifaceted extremely useful one-size-fits-all universal protean general general-purpose […] Taking advantage of the fact my passive vocabulary is greater than my active vocabulary: no, no, yes. (I've spuriously rejected "multipurpose" – a decent synonym of "versatile [tool]" – but that doesn't matter.) I'm pretty sure WordHippo is machine-generated from some corpus, and a lot of these words don't mean "very useful", but they're good at playing the SEO game, and I'm lazy. Once we have versatile, we can put that into an actual thesaurus: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/versatile https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/versatile. But none of those really have the same sense as "versatile" in the context I'm thinking of (except perhaps "adaptable"), so if I were writing something, I'd go with "versatile". Total time taken: 15 seconds. And I'm confident that the answer is correct. By the way, I'm not finding "multifarious" anywhere. It's not a word I'm familiar with, but that doesn't actually seem to be a proper synonym (according to Wiktionary, at least: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:heterogeneous https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:heterogeneous). There are certainly contexts where you could use this word in place of "versatile" (e.g. "versatile skill-set" → "multifarious skill-set"), but I criticise WordHippo for far less dubious synonym suggestions.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
cess11 9mo ago
"The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was" Did you have trouble with this part?
- xeromal 9mo ago
  This seems like a hostile question.
  - cess11 9mo ago
    Yeah, sure, it can be perceived like that. The message I'm responding to shows a blatant disregard for millenia of scriptural knowledge traditions. It's a 'I have a pocket calculator, why should I study math' kind of attitude, presenting itself in a celebratory manner. To me it is reminiscent of liberalist history, the idea that history is a constant progression from animalistic barbarism to civilisation, and nothing but the latest thing is of any value. Instead of jumping to conclusions and showing my loathing for this particular tradition I decided to try and get more information about where they're coming from.
    - massysett 9mo ago
      If I have a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions, so did Noah Webster when he compiled a dictionary. So did Carl Linnaeus when he classified species. So did the Human Genome Project. I have a pocket calculator, yet I know how to do long division. I use LLMs to learn and to enhance my work. A dictionary is a shortcut to learning what a word means without consulting an entire written corpus, as the dictionary editors have already done this. Is my use of a dictionary a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions? I don’t think so at all. Rather, it exemplifies how human knowledge advances: we build on the work of our predecessors and contemporaries rather than reinvent the wheel every time. LLM use is an example of this.
      - cess11 9mo ago
        You're avoiding my question. Since you're comparing yourself to Noah Webster, do you have some examples of your achievements?
9rx 9mo ago
> Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. There was another way: Make one up. That is what the people you read from/talked to did before relaying it to you.
- vaylian 9mo ago
  If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use. Otherwise the word will not hold its own meaning. For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary.
  - 9rx 9mo ago
    > If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use. That depends on your goals. If you are writing in your private journal, or a comment on HN, it doesn't matter one bit. If you want to find commonality with other people it is significantly more efficient, but still not required. It is not like one is born understanding words. They are not passed down from the heavens. They are an invention. When I say 'sloopydoopidydoo' you might not know what I intend by it right away, but the path to figuring it out is a solved problem. Even young children can handle it. > For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary. Let's put it to the test: I added enums to the programming language I am working on. Tell me, with your dictionary in hand, what do I mean by that? Here's the thing: According to the dictionary, an enum is something like Go's iota or C's enum. But many people will tell you that Go doesn't have enums — that an enum is what others might recognize as a tagged union. That kind of language evolution happens all the time. So, what do I mean? Am I using the dictionary definition, or the community definition that is quickly gaining favour and will no doubt be added to the dictionary as soon as someone has a chance to update it? Both uses have been widely established in my opinion. In fact, the Swift programming language's documentation even acknowledges both uses and then goes on to explain what it means by "enum" to remove any confusion. I look forward to seeing if you captured my intent.

Levitating 9mo ago

> golden age of computing I feel like we've reached the worst age of computing. Where our platforms are controlled by power hungry megacorporations and our software is over-engineered garbage. The same company that develops our browsers and our web standards is also actively destroying the internet with AI scrapers. Hobbyists lost the internet to companies and all software got worse for it. Our most popular desktop operating system doesn't even have an easy way to package and update software for it.

sosomoxie 9mo ago
Dystopian cyberpunk was always part of the fantasy. Yes, scale has enabled terrible things. There are more alternatives than ever though. People are still making C64 games today, cheap chips are everywhere. Documentation is abundant... When you layer in AI, it takes away labor costs, meaning that you don't need to make economically viable things, you can make fun things. I have at least a dozen projects going now that I would have never had time or energy for. Any itch, no matter how geeky and idiosyncratic, is getting scratched by AI.
- pocksuppet 9mo ago
  They're possible, but they're not exactly relevant, and you couldn't do something like that on newer hardware. It's like playing a guitar from a museum because the world just forgot how to make guitars. Pretty dystopian.
AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
It’s never been easier for you to make a competitor So what is stopping you other than yourself?
- tock 9mo ago
  Billions of dollars?
  - AnthonyMouse 9mo ago

AndrewKemendo 9mo ago

Same. I was born in 84 and have been doing software since 97 it’s never been easier, better or more accessible time to make literally anything - by far. Also if you prefer to code by hand literally nobody is stopping you AND even that is easier. Cause if you wanted to code for console games you literally couldn’t in the 90s without 100k specialized dev machine. It’s not even close. This “I’m a victim because my software engineering hobby isn’t profitable anymore” take is honestly baffling.

zeroonetwothree 9mo ago
I'm not going to code by hand if it's 4x slower than having Claude do it. Yes, I can do that, but it just feels bad. The analogy I like is it's like driving vs. walking. We were healthier when we walked everywhere, but it's very hard to quit driving and go back even if it's going to be better for you.
- AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
  I walk all the time During the summer I’ll walk 30-50 miles a week However I’m not going to walk to work ever and I’m damn sir not going to walk in the rain or snow unless if I can avoid it
- NeutralCrane 9mo ago
  I actually like the analogy but for the opposite reason. Cars have become the most efficient way to travel for most industrial purposes. And yet enormous numbers of people still walk, run, ride bikes, or even horses, often for reasons entirely separate from financial gain.
- pojzon 9mo ago
  Coding will take 4 times less time, but review will take almost the same amount of time if not more if the solution does not worl out of the box or has unforseen corner cases. LLMs were trained on public code libraries and unfortunately most pf that OSS code is garbage. There are ofcourse raisins there, but those are far in between. Top it off with hallucinations and suddenly you spend more time debugging messy AI code when you could write the same in a fraction of that time. The easier the task, the better job LLMs do, the harder the task the worse results you get. Source: working with those tools daily. Using your analogy: - by car it will be 30km uphill, coz of how the road is built - walking it will be 1km straight line

crawshaw 9mo ago

Glad to see this already expressed here because I wholly agree. Programming has not brought me this much joy in decades. What a wonderful time to be alive.

socalgal2 9mo ago
I wish I could have you sit by my side for a week or two and pair program what I'm working on because most for the time I'm not getting great results.
- chkaloon 9mo ago
  Depends on the project. For web based functionality it seems great, because of all the prior work that is out there. For more obscure things like Obsidian Note extentions or Home Assistant help it's more hit and miss
- crawshaw 9mo ago
  You in SF? My schedule is a bit busy since we launched but I could find an hour in the city.

uejfiweun 9mo ago

I agree with you with the caveat that all the "ease of building" benefits, for me, could potentially be dwarfed by job losses and pay decreases. If SWE really becomes obsolete, or even if the number of roles decrease a lot and/or the pay decreases a lot (or even fails to increase with inflation), I am suddenly in the unenviable position of not being financially secure and being stuck in my 30s with an increasingly useless degree. A life disaster, in other words. In that scenario the unhappiness of worrying about money and retraining far outweighs the happiness I get from being able to build stuff really fast. Fundamentally this is the only point I really have on the 'anti-AI' side, but it's a really important one.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

jmclnx 9mo ago

I retired a few years ago, so I have no idea what AI programming is. But I mourned when CRT came out, I had just started programming. But I quickly learned CRTs were far better, I mourned when we moved to GUIs, I never liked the move and still do not like dealing with GUIs, but I got used to it. Went through all kinds of programming methods, too many to remember, but those were easy to ignore and workaround. I view this new AI thing in a similar way. I expect it will blow over and a new bright shiny programming methodology will become a thing to stress over. In the long run, I doubt anything will really change.

apitman 9mo ago
OT but I see your account was created in 2015, so I'm assuming very late in your career. Curious what brought you to HN at that time and not before?
- jmclnx 9mo ago
  I did not know it existed before 2015 :)
querez 9mo ago
I think you're underestimating what AI can do in the coding space. It is an extreme paradigm shift. It's not like "we wrote C, but now we switch to C++, so now we think in objects and templates". It's closer to the shift from assembly to a higher level language. Your goal is still the same. But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main concern is suddenly automated away. If you never tried Claude Code, give it s try. It's very easy to get I to. And you'll soon see how powerful it is.
- imiric 9mo ago
  > But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main concern is suddenly automated away. It's remarkable that people who think like this don't have the foresight to see that this technology is not a higher level of abstraction, but a replacement of human intellect. You may be working with it today, but whatever you're doing will eventually be done better by the same technology. This is just a transition period. Assuming, of course, that the people producing these tools can actually deliver what they're selling, which is very much uncertain. It doesn't change their end goal, however. Nor the fact that working with this new "abstraction" is the most mind numbing activity a person can do.

apitman 9mo ago

In some ways, I'd say we're in a software dark age. In 40 years, we'll still have C, bash, grep, and Mario ROMs, but practically none of the software written today will still be around. That's by design. SaaS is a rent seeking business model. But I think it also applies to most code written in JS, Python, C#, Go, Rust, etc. There are too many dependencies. There's no way you'll be able to take a repo from 2026 and spin it up in 2050 without major work. One question is how will AI factor in to this. Will it completely remove the problem? Will local models be capable of finding or fixing every dependency in your 20yo project? Or will they exacerbate things by writing terrible code with black hole dependency trees? We're gonna find out.

ctmnt 9mo ago
I’m not sure Go belongs on that list. Otherwise I hear what you’re saying.
- apitman 9mo ago
  A large percentage of the code I've written the last 10 years is Go. I think it does somewhat better than the others in some areas, such as relative simplicity and having a robust stdlib, but a lot of this is false security. The simplicity is surface level. The runtime and GC are very complex. And the stdlib being robust means that if you ever have to implement a compiler from scratch, you have to implement all of std. All in all I think the end result will be the same. I don't think any of my Go code will survive long term.
  - hnlmorg 9mo ago
    I’ve got 8 year old Go code that still compiles fine on the latest Go compiler. Go has its warts but backwards compatibility isn’t one of them. The language is almost as durable as Perl.
    - shimman 9mo ago
      8 years is not that long, if it can still compile in say 20 years then sure but 8 years in this industry isn't that long at all (unless you're into self flagellation by working on the web).

croes 9mo ago

> We're on the precipice of something incredible. Total dependence on a service?

kaffekaka 9mo ago
Yes this is the issue. We truly have something incredible now. Something that could benefit all of humanity. Unfortunately it comes at $200/month from Sam Altman & co.
- puchatek 9mo ago
  If that was the final price, no strings attached and perfect, reliable privacy then I might consider it. Maybe not for the current iteration but for what will be on offer in a year or two. But as it stands right now, the most useful LLMs are hosted by companies that are legally obligated to hand over your data if the US gov. had decided that it wants it. It's unacceptable.
  - lovich 9mo ago
    That 200/month price isn’t sustainable either. Eventually they’re going to have to jack that up substantially.
  - wtetzner 9mo ago
    > legally obligated to hand over your data if the US gov. had decided that it wants it Not to mention they could just sell it to the highest bidder, or simply use it to produce competition and put you out of business. Especially if you're using their service to do the development...
- account42 8mo ago
  It's one issue, but it's not the only issue.
hafley66 9mo ago
prefrontal cortex as a service

plagiarist 9mo ago

I didn't imagine I would be sending all my source code directly to a corporation for access to an irritatingly chipper personality that is confidently incorrect the way these things are. There have been wild technological developments but we've lost privacy and autonomy across basically all devices (excepting the people who deliberately choose to forego the most capable devices, and even then there are firmware blobs). We've got the facial recognition and tracking so many sci-fi dystopias have warned us to avoid. I'm having an easier time accomplishing more difficult technological tasks. But I lament what we have come to. I don't think we are in the Star Trek future and I imagined doing more drugs in a Neuromancer future. It's like a Snow Crash / 1984 corporate government collab out here, it kinda sucks.

IhateAI 9mo ago

[flagged]

sosomoxie 9mo ago
I'm actually extremely good at programming. My point is I love computers and computing. You can use technology to achieve amazing things (even having fun). Now I can do much more of that than when I was limited to what I can personally code. In the end, it's what computers can do that's amazing, beautiful, terrifying... That thrill and to be on the bleeding edge is always what I was after.
- IhateAI 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tines 9mo ago
    Thank you. I don't understand how people don't see that this is the universe's most perfect gift to corporations, and what a disaster it is for labor. There won't be a middle class. Future generations will be intellectual invalids. Baffling to see people celebrating.
    - samiv 9mo ago
      They are the useful idiots buying into the hype thinking they by some magic they get to keep their jobs and their incomes. This things is going to erase careers and render skills sets and knowledge cultivated over decades worthless. Anyone can promt the same fucking shit now and call it a day.
    - blibble 9mo ago
      it is a very, very strange thing to witness even if you can be a prompt engineer (or whatever it's called this week) today well, with the feedback you're providing: you're training it to do that too you are LITERALLY training the newly hired outsourced personnel to do your job but this time you won't be able to get a job anywhere else, because your fellow class traitors are doing exactly the same thing at every other company in the world

HendrikHensen 9mo ago

Good for you. But there are already so, so many posts and threads celebrating all of this. Everyone is different. Some of us enjoy the activity of programming by hand. This thread is for those us, to mourn.

nradov 9mo ago
You're still allowed to program by hand. Even in assembly language if you like.
- fupaskys 9mo ago
  [dead]
- anilgulecha 9mo ago
  Imo, it's allowed theoretically, as a hobby, but not really as a practice. This is what the blog is about.
  - nradov 9mo ago
    There are literally still programmers who make their living writing assembly code by hand for embedded systems.
- wtetzner 9mo ago
  > You're still allowed to program by hand. In fact, you'll probably be more productive in the long term.
- kristofferR 9mo ago
  People are allowed to mourn the music styles of previous decades even though the same music genres are still being created, not just popular the same way they used to be.
toddmorrow 9mo ago
I have an llm riding shotgun and I still very much program by hand. it's not one extreme or the other. whatever I copy from the llm has to be redone line by line anyways. I understand all of my code because I touch every line of it

_zagj 9mo ago

> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We could easily approach a state of affairs where most of what you see online is AI and almost every "person" you interact with is fake. It's hard to see how someone who supposedly remembers computing in the 80s, when the power of USENET and BBSs to facilitate long-distance, or even international, communication and foster personal relationships (often IRL) was enthralling, not thinking we've lost something.

icedchai 9mo ago
I grew up on 80's and 90's BBSes. The transition from BBSes to Usenet and the early Internet was a magical period, a time I still look back upon fondly and will never forget. Some of my best friends IRL today were people I first met "online" in those days... but I haven't met anyone new in a longggg time. Yeah, I'm also much older, but the environment is also very different. The community aspect is long gone.
munksbeer 9mo ago
I'm from the early 90s era. I know exactly what you're saying. I entered the internet on muds, irc and usenet. There were just far fewer people online in those communities in those days, and in my country, it was mostly only us university students. But, those days disappeared a long time ago. Probably at least 20-30 years ago.
- Gud 9mo ago
  IRC is still around, that old internet is still there. You just have to get off the commercial crap and you’ll find it.
chasd00 9mo ago
even in the 90s there was the phrase "the Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the teen girls are FBI agents". It was always the case you never really knew who/what you were dealing with on the Internet.
- 8mo ago

hnlmorg 9mo ago

The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully documented systems. Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did. And software that’s open and can be modified. Instead what we have is: - AI which are little black boxes and beyond our ability to fully reason. - perpetual subscription services for the same software we used to “own”. - hardware that is completely undocumented to all but a small few who are granted an NDA before hand - operating systems that are trying harder and harder to prevent us from running any software they haven’t approved because “security” - and distributed systems become centralised, such as GitHub, CloudFlare, AWS, and so on and so forth. The only thing special about right now is that we have added yet another abstraction on top of an already overly complex software stack to allow us to use natural language as pseudocode. And that is a version special breakthrough, but it’s not enough by itself to overlook all the other problems with modern computing.

HoldOnAMinute 9mo ago
Have you tried using GenAI to write documentation? You can literally point it to a folder and say, analyze everything in this folder and write a document about it. And it will do it. It's more thorough than anything a human could do, especially in the time frame we're talking about. If GenAI could only write documentation it would still be a game changer.
- orwin 9mo ago
  But it write mostly useless documentation Which take time to read and decipher. And worse, if you are using it for public documentation, sometimes it hallucinate endpoints (i don't want to say too much here, but it happened recently to a quite used B2B SaaS).
  - throwup238 9mo ago
    Loop it. Use another agent (from a different company helps) to review the code and documentation and call out any inconsistencies. I run a bunch of jobs weekly to review docs for inconsistencies and write a plan to fix. It still needs humans in the loop if the agents don’t converge after a few turns, but it’s largely automatic (I baby sat it for a few months validating each change).

jauntywundrkind 9mo ago

I really am very thankful for @simonw posting a TikTok from Chris Ashworth, a Baltimore theater software developer, who recently picked up LLM's for building a voxel display software controller. And who was just blown away. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/a-programming-tool-for-the-arts/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/a-programming-tool-for... Simon doesn't touch on my favorite part of Chris's video though, which is Chris citing his friend Jesse Kriss. This stuck out at me so hard, and is so close to what you are talking about: > The interesting thing about this is that it's not taking away something that was human and making it a robot. We've been forced to talk to computers in computer language. And this is turning that around. I don't see (as you say) a personality. But I do see the ability to talk. The esoteria is still here underneath, but computer programmers having this lock on the thing that has eaten the world, being the only machine whisperers around, is over. That depth of knowledge is still there and not going away! But notably too, the LLM will help you wade in, help those not of the esoteric personhood of programmers to dive in & explore.

busterarm 9mo ago

We definitely have lost something. I got into computers because they're deterministic. Way less complicated than people. Now the determinism is gone and computers are gaining the worst qualities of people. My only sanctuary in life is slipping away from me. And I have to hear people tell me I'm wrong who aren't even sympathetic to how this affects me.

Gud 9mo ago
But no one is forcing you to use this software?
- yoyohello13 9mo ago
  If you want to keep your job you absolutely need to use these tools.
- exitplanetary 8mo ago
  Well, they do, as a part of a daily job. But fun was removed from the corporate programming long ago, so AI hurts not so much.
  - busterarm 8mo ago
    It hurts when your management abdicates things that are normally their responsibility and tell you to just ask the AI what to do. Or when that's what they would have done anyway.
toddmorrow 9mo ago
LLMs have irritated me with bad solutions but they've never hurt my feelings. I can't say that about a single person I know. They're better people than people lol

renegade-otter 9mo ago

Nothing meaningful happened in almost 20 years. After the iPhone, what happened that truly changed our lives? The dumpster fire of social media? Background Netflix TV? In fact, I remember when I could actually shop on Amazon or browse for restaurants on Yelp while trusting the reviews. None of that is possible today. We have been going through a decade of enshitification.

hintymad 9mo ago

One thing that I realized was that a lot of our so-called "craft" is converged "know-how". Take the recent news that Anthropic used Claude Code to write a C compiler for example, writing compiler is hard (and fun) for us humans because we indeed need to spend years understanding deeply the compiler theory and learning every minute detail of implementation. That kind of learning is not easily transferrable. Most students tried the compiler class and then never learned enough, only a handful few every year continued to grow into true compiler engineers. Yet to our AI models, it does not matter much. They already learned the well-established patterns of compiler writing from the excellent open-source implementations, and now they can churn out millions of code easily. If not perfect, they will get better in the future. So, in a sense our "craft" no longer matters, but what really happens is that the repetitive know-how has become commoditized. We still need people to do creative work, but what is not clear is how many such people we will need. After all, at least in short term, most people build their career by perfecting procedural work because transferring the know-how and the underlying whys is very expensive to human. For the long term, though, I'm optimistic that engineers just get an amazing tool and will use it create more opportunities that demand more people.

blibble 9mo ago
writing a C compiler is a 1st year undergrad project C was explicitly designed to make it simple to write a compiler
- hintymad 9mo ago
  Which university offers compiler for freshmen? Can you provide a link to the course?
- MajesticHobo2 9mo ago
  Third or fourth, maybe, not first.
- icedchai 9mo ago
  These are toy compilers missing many edge cases. You’ll be lucky if they support anything other than integer types, nevermind complex pointer-to-pointer-to-struct-with-pointers type definitions. They certainly won’t support GNU extensions. They won’t compile any serious open source project, nevermind the Linux kernel.

fupaskys 9mo ago

[dead]

paganel 9mo ago

> We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality The difference is that the computer only talks back to you as code because you’re paying its owners, with you not being part of the owners. I find it really baffling that people put up with this. What will you do when Alphabet or Altman will demand 10 times the money out of you fir the privilege of their computer talking to you in programming code?

_aavaa_ 9mo ago
Use one of the open models that are also getting better and easier to run every year?
- paganel 9mo ago
  Which are those open ones? And how are they going to get their billions of dollars worth of investment back? Even Google Maps used to be virtually free until it wasn’t, at a fraction of the investment cost.
  - _aavaa_ 9mo ago
    For starters: Qwen, GLM, Kimi, Llama. How they run their business is none of my business. I can download the weights right now and use them as I see fit under the open source license terms. Google Maps was never a self contained binary you could download. But even now it remains free to use.
    - paganel 9mo ago
      I’m only familiar with Llama, but as far as I understood it’s in no way at the same level as Claude or Gemini, so in fact you’d still be a lot less productive compared to those using those products directly. That’s the thing, us as programmers are supposed to be creators/makers, not mere consumers/users, but I do agree that that has been changing as of late.
      - 9mo ago

coldtea 9mo ago

I started programming 40 years ago as well. The magic for me was never that "you could talk to your computer and it had a personality". That was the layman version of computing, something shown to the masses in movies like War Games and popular media, one that we mocked. I also lived through the FOSS peak. The current proprietary / black-box / energy lock in would be seen as the stuff of nightmares.

layer8 9mo ago

> I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. Maybe they made us feel magic, but actual magic is the opposite of what I want computers to be. The “magic” for me was that computers were completely scrutable and reason-able, and that you could leverage your reasoning abilities to create interesting things with them, because they were (after some learning effort) scrutable. True magic, on the other hand, is inscrutable, it’s a thing that escapes explanation, that can’t be reasoned about. LLMs are more like that latter magic, and that’s not what I seek in computers. > We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I always preferred the Star-Trek-style ship computers that didn’t exhibit personality, that were just neutral and matter-of-fact. Computers with personality tend to be exhausting and annoying. Please let me turn it off. Computers with personality can be entertaining characters in a story, but that doesn’t mean I want them around me as the tools I have to use.

cat_plus_plus 9mo ago
I have no idea what everyone is talking about. LLMs are based on relatively simple math, inference is much easier to learn and customize than say Android APIs. Once you do you can apply familiar programming style logic to messy concepts like language and images. Give you model a JSON schema like "warp_factor": Integer if you don't want chatter, that's way better than Star Trek computer could do. Or have it write you a simple domain specific library on top of Android API that you can then program from memory like old style BASIC rather than having to run to stack overflow for evwery new task.
- layer8 9mo ago
  You can’t reason about inference (or training) of LLMs on the semantic level. You can’t predict the output of an LLM for a specific input other than by running it. If you want the output to be different in a specific way, you can’t reason with precision that a particular modification of the input, or of the weights, will achieve the desired change (and only that change) in the output. Instead, it’s like a slot machine that you just have to try running again. The fact that LLMs are based on a network of simple matrix multiplications doesn’t change that. That’s like saying that the human brain is based on simple physical field equations, and therefore its behavior is easy to understand.

maplethorpe 9mo ago

> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. I agree!. One criticism I've heard is that half my colleagues don't write their own words anymore. They use ChatGPT to do it for them. Does this mean we've "lost" something? On the contrary! Those people probably would have spoken far fewer words into existence in the pre-AI era. But AI has enabled them to put pages and pages of text out into the world each week: posts and articles where there were previously none. How can anyone say that's something we've lost? That's something we've gained! It's not only the golden era of code. It's the golden era of content.

phatfish 9mo ago
Quality is better than quantity.
testdelacc1 9mo ago
We have more words than ever. Nice. But all the words sound more like each other than ever. It’s not just blah, it’s blah. And why should I bother reading what someone else “writes”? I can generate the same text myself for free.
layer8 9mo ago
I hope this is sarcasm. :)
yoyohello13 9mo ago
> But AI has enabled them to put pages and pages of text out into the world each week: posts and articles where there were previously none. Are you for real? Quantity is not equal to Quality. I'll be sure to dump a pile of trash in your living room. There wasn't much there before, but now there is lots of stuff. Better right?
- maplethorpe 8mo ago
  I'm finding it hard to reconcile HN's love of AI generated code with HN's dislike of AI generated content. Why is the code good but the content bad?

nullbio 9mo ago

We're on the precipice of something very disgusting. A massive power imbalance where a single company or two swallows the Earth's economy, due to a lack of competition, distribution and right of access laws. The wildest part is that these greedy companies, one of them in particular, are continuously framed in a positive light. This same company that has partnered with Palantir. AI should be a public good, not something gatekept by greedy capitalists with an ego complex.

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago

I tend to feel this way (also 40-year coder). It's because of the way that I use the tools, and I have the luxury of being a craftsman, as opposed to a "TSA agent." But then, I don't get paid to do this stuff, anymore. In fact, I deliberately avoid putting myself into positions, where money changes hands for my craft. I know how fortunate I am, to be in this position, so I don't say it to aggravate folks that aren't.

RunSet 9mo ago

> I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect I also can't believe it's actually happening. ;)

account42 8mo ago
It has been interesting (and not in a good way) how willing people are to anthropomorphize these megacorporation-controlled machines just because the interface is natural language now.

nine_k 9mo ago

The invention of Mr Jacquard ushered in a sartorial golden age, when complex fabrics are easy to produce cheaply, at the expense of a few hours spent on punching a deck of cards. But the craft of making tapestries by hand definitely went into demise. This is the situation which the post is mourning. Frankly, I have my doubts about the utter efficiency of LLMs writing code unattended; it will take quite some time before whatever comes after the current crop learns to do that efficiently and reliably. (Check out how many years went between first image generation demos and today's SOTA.) But the vector is obvious: humans would have to speak a higher-level language to computers, and hand-coding Typescript is going to be as niche in 10 years as today is hand-coding assembly. This adds some kinds of fun, but also removes some other kinds of fun. There's a reason why people often pick something like PICO-8 to write games for fun, rather than something like Unreal Engine. So software development becomes harder because the developer has to work on more and more complex things, faster, and with fewer chances to study the moving parts to a comfortable depth.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

adamredwoods 9mo ago

Computers did feel like magic... until I read code, think about it, understood it, and could control it. I feel we're stepping away from that, and moving to a place of less control, less thinking. I liked programming, it was fun, and I understood it. Now it's gone.

autoexec 9mo ago
It's not gone, it's just being increasingly discouraged. You don't have to "vibe code" or spend paragraphs trying to talk a chatbot into doing something that you can do yourself with a few lines of code. You'll be fine. It's the people who could have been the next few generations of programmers who will suffer the most.

hgs3 9mo ago

> We're on the precipice of something incredible. Only if our socioeconomic model changes.

autoexec 9mo ago

> we're definitely in a golden age of computing. Certainly not. Computers are still magic, but much of that magic is now controlled and being restricted by someone other than you. Today most people's only computer is a cell phone, which is heavily locked down and designed for media consumption and to collect and give away every scrap of their personal/private data. Most people's desktop computers aren't much better. They are continuously used by others against the interests of the people who paid for them, sometimes explicitly keeping them from doing things they want or limiting what they can install. People are increasingly ignorant of how computers work in ways that were never possible when you had to understand them to use them. SoCs mean that users, and even the operating system they use, aren't fully aware of what the devices are doing. People have lost control of the computers they paid for and their own data. They now have to beg a small number of companies for anything they want (including their own data on the cloud). We're heading toward a future where you'll need a submit to a retinal scan just to view a website. Computing today is more adversarial, restricted, opaque, centralized, controlled, and monitored than it has been in a very long time. "My computer talks to me" is not making up for that.

manmal 9mo ago
Models you can run on your own (expensive) computer are just a year behind the SOTA. Linux exists. Why are you so pessimistic?
- Dumblydorr 9mo ago
  Typical HN comment. They’re so in the weeds of edge case 1% concerns they can’t see the golden age around them. Most people living through golden ages might not know it. Many workers in Industrial Revolution saw a decline in relative wages. Many in the Roman Empire were enslaved or impoverished. That doesn’t mean history doesn’t see these as golden ages, where golden age is defined loosely as a broad period of enhanced prosperity and productivity for a group of people. For all its downsides, pointed out amply above, the golden age of computing started 100 years ago and hasn’t ceased yet.
  - 8mo ago

ChicagoDave 9mo ago

This is exactly where I am with GenAI. After forty years: blocks of code, repository patterns, factory patterns, threading issues, documentation, one page executive summaries… I can now direct these things and it’s glorious.

biztos 8mo ago

Back in the 80s it felt like Eliza had a “personality.”

BobbyTables2 8mo ago

I miss the simplicity of older hardware. The original NES controller only contains a single shift register - no other active components. Today, a wireless thing will have more code than one would want to ever read, much less comprehend. Even a high level diagram of the hardware components involved is quite complex. Sure, we gained convenience, but at great cost.

nialv7 8mo ago

> I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. you won't feel you've lost something if you've never had it. sorry.

latexr 8mo ago

> We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. We literally are not, and we’d do well to stop using such hyperbole. The 1980s fantasy was of speaking to a machine which you could trust to be correct with a high degree of confidence. No one was wishing they could talk to a wet sock that’ll confidently give you falsehoods and when confronted (even if they were right) will bow down and always respond with “you’re absolutely right”.

m463 8mo ago

They used to call it the Personal Computer, and I think that name encompassed the "magic" I felt in the 80's. But computing is increasingly not-for-you. Your phone will do what apple allows you to do. Your online activity is tracked and used to form a profile of your actions and behaviors. And the checks and balances - if any - are weak and compromised because of the commercial or government interest that want things that way. the simplest example might be computer games. In the 80's it was private. In 2026 it is routinely a psychological cash register and a surveillance system. I really like that linux with all its imperfections seems to counteract a lot of this.

JohnMakin 8mo ago

Perhaps, if you will, try to empathize with people who are not approaching the end of their careers, and are mid-career - too late to pivot to anything new, but in danger of being swept away, and you'll understand a bit more the perspective of the blog post.

pellenys 8mo ago
Absolutely. I never thought I’d have to retrain, and I’m still uncertain if I will have to because I’m not really sure where software development will be in the next few years. It was quite an epiphany to run my first agent on a code base and be simultaneously excited at the implications for productivity, and numb at the realisation that the work it was saving was the work I enjoyed and the expertise I was being paid for. There are only so many roles for developers to write the prompts and review the output, and it does feel a bit like prodding a machine and waiting for it to go ding.