5 ms·

Stop generating, start thinking

161 points by frizlab 8mo ago

logicprog 8mo ago
"It’s very unsettling, then, to find myself feeling like I’m in danger of being left behind - like I’m missing something. As much as I don’t like it, so many people have started going so hard on LLM-generated code in a way that I just can’t wrap my head around. ... ’ve been using Copilot - and more recently Claude - as a sort of “spicy autocomplete” and occasional debugging assistant for some time, but any time I try to get it to do anything remotely clever, it completely shits the bed. Don’t get me wrong, I know that a large part of this is me holding it wrong, but I find it hard to justify the value of investing so much of my time perfecting the art of asking a machine to write what I could do perfectly well in less time than it takes to hone the prompt. You’ve got to give it enough context - but not too much or it gets overloaded. You’re supposed to craft lengthy prompts that massage the AI assistant’s apparently fragile ego by telling it “you are an expert in distributed systems” as if it were an insecure, mediocre software developer. Or I could just write the damn code in less time than all of this takes to get working." Well there's your problem. Nobody does roll-based prompts anymore, and the entire point of coding agents is that they search your code base, do internet searches, and do web fetches, as well as launch sub agents and use todo lists, to fill and adjust their context exactly as needed themselves, without you having to do it manually. It's funny reading people planatively saying, "I just don't get how people could possibly be getting used out of these things. I don't understand it." And then they immediately reveal that it's not the baffling mystery or existential question there pretending it is for the purpose of this essay — the reason they don't understand it is that they literally don't understand the tech itself lol
- skzizjj 8mo ago
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- martin-t 8mo ago
  This just shows that the models (not AI, statistical models of text used without consent) are not that smart, it's the tooling around them which allows using these models as a heuristic for brute force search of the solution space. Just last week, I prompted (not asked, it is not sentient) Claude to generate (not tell me or find out or any other anthropomorphization) whether I need to call Dispose on objects passed to me from 2 different libraries for industrial cameras. Being industrial, most people using them typically don't post their code publicly, which means the models have poor statistical coverage around these topics. The LLM generated a response which triggered the tooling around it to perform dozens of internet searches and based on my initial prompt, the search results and lots of intermediate tokens ("thinking"), generated a reply which said that yes, I need to call Dispose in both cases. It was phrased authoritatively and confidently. So I tried it, one library segfaulted, the other returned an exception on a later call. I performed my own internet search (a single one) and immediately found documentation from one of the libraries clearly stating I don't need to call Dispose. The other library being much more poorly documented didn't mention this explicitly but had examples which didn't call Dispose. I am sure if I used LLMs "properly" "agentically", then they would have triggered the tooling around them to build and execute the code, gotten the same results as me much faster, then equally authoritatively and confidently stated that I don't need to call Dispose. This is not thinking. It's a form of automation but not thinking and not intelligence.
  - Isamu 8mo ago
    >brute force search of the solution space “Brute force” is mostly what makes it all work, and what is most disappointing to me currently. Including the brute force necessary to train an LLM, the vast quantity of text necessary to approach almost human quality, the massive scale of data centers necessary to deploy these models, etc. I am hoping this is a transitional period, where LLMs could be used to create better models that are more finesse and less brute force.
    - martin-t 8mo ago
      To be honest, these models being bad is what gives me some hope we can figure out how to approach a potential future AI as a society before it arrives. Because right now everything in the west is structured around rich people owning things they have not built while people who did the actual work with their hands and their minds are left in the dust. For a brief period of time (a couple decades), tech was a path for anyone from any background to get at least enough to not struggle. Not become truly rich as for that you need to own real estate or companies but having all your reasonable material needs taken care of and being able to save up for retirement (or in countries without free education, to pay for kids' college). And that might be coming to an end, with people who benefited from this opportunity cheering it on.
      - logicprog 8mo ago
        I make $1500/mo, working part time for a friend being vastly underpaid for technical work and part time as a meat packer in the back of a supermarket, because I had to drop out of university a year before finishing due to a disability and loss of financial resources, and thanks to being trans, disabled, and a dropout, as well as the job market that's fucked up due to AI and all the other reasons for layoffs, so I can't get a tech job, despite having been programming since I was seven and being very good at it. I don't think it's really fair to talk about "people who benefited from this opportunity cheering it on" in the comments on one of my posts. I'm an agentic AI coding enthusiast because I find it fascinating, it allows me to focus more on what I like most about programming (software architecture, systems thinking, etc), and the decreased cognitive load and increased productivity allows me to continue to do interesting projects in the time and energy I have left after my jobs and disability take.
- raincole 8mo ago
  Yeah, remind me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929505 > I have a source file of a few hundred lines implementing an algorithm that no LLM I've tried (and I've tried them all) is able to replicate, or even suggest, when prompted with the problem. Even with many follow up prompts and hints. People making this kind of claim will never post the question and prompts they tried. Because if they did, everyone will know it's just they don't know how to prompt.
  - ares623 8mo ago
    At what point will the proper way to prompt just be "built-in"? Why aren't they built-in already if the "proper way to prompt" is so well understood?
  - logicprog 8mo ago
    Eh, I think that one is fair. LLMs aren't great at super novel solutions
- ares623 8mo ago
  So I guess you could say, they're "holding it wrong"?
  - logicprog 8mo ago
    Yeah, so?
- bitwize 8mo ago
  (Valley Girl voice) Role-based prompts are like, so September 2025. Everybody is just using agents now. You don't get to sit with us at the cool kids' table until you learn how to prompt, loser.
  - logicprog 8mo ago
    Mocking me (a woman, as it happens) with a sexist stereotype and a strawman of my argument doesn't make me wrong. All that extra work is now very much unnecessary, and it's the extra work they are complaining about, so, they are complaining about a problem that no longer exists, thanks to intentionally not learning as things develop. This isn't an argument about fashion or the "cool kids table."
Quothling 8mo ago
Maybe I don't understand it correctly but to me this reads like the author isn't actually using AI agents. I don't talk or write prompts anymore. I write tasks and I let a couple of AI agent complete those tasks. Exactly how I'd distribute tasks to a human. The AI code is of variating quality and they certainly aren't great at computer science (at least not yet), but it's not like they write worse code than some actual humans would. I like to say that you don't need computer science to write software, until you do. The thing is that a lot of software in the organisations I've worked in, doesn't actually need computer science. I've seen horrible javascript code on the back-end live a full lifecycle of 5+ years without needing much maintainence, if any, and be fine. It could've probably have been more efficient, but compute is so cheap that it never really mattered. Of course I've also seen inefficient software or errors cost us a lot of money when our solar plants didn't output what they were supposed to. I'd let AI's write one of those things any day. Hell I did recently. We had an old javascript service which was doing something with the hubspot API. I say something because I didn't ever really find out what it was. Basically hubspot sunset the v1 of their API, and before the issue arrived at my table my colleagues had figured out that was the issue. I didn't really have the time to fix this, so when I saw how much of a mess the javascript code was and realized it would take me a few hours to figure out what it even did... well... I told my AI agent running on our company framework to fix it. It did so in 5-10 minutes with a single correction needed. It improved the javascript quite a bit while doing it, typing everything. I barely even got out of my flow to make it happen. So far it's run without any issues for a month. I was frankly completely unnecessary in this process. The only reason it was me who fired up the AI is because the people who sent me the task haven't yet adopted AI agents. That being said... AI's are a major security risk that needs to be handled accordingly.
heliumtera 8mo ago
Programmers for some reason love to be told what do to. First thing in the morning they look out for someone else to tell them how to do, how to test, how to validate. Why don't do it yourself, like you want to do it, when you could just fallback to mediocrity and instead do like everybody else does? Why think when you can be told what to do? Why have intercourse with your wife when instead you can let someone else do? This is the typical llm user mentality
thunky 8mo ago
This text color and background is unreadable.
- potatoman22 8mo ago
  What theme did you use? I really like the "garden" theme
  - thunky 8mo ago
    I didn't see the theme button, thanks. Turns out the dark mode in Brave (mobile) makes the garden theme font almost the same color as the background. I tried it on default Chrome and it looked better. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th themes are easy to read with Brave but the others are not.
awesome_dude 8mo ago
There's a couple of news stories doing the rounds at the moment which point to the fact that AI isn't "there yet" 1. Microsoft's announcement of cutting their copilot products sales targets[0] 2. Moltbook's security issues[1] after being "vibe coded" into life Leaving the undeniable conclusion to be - the vast majority (seriously) distrusts AI much more than we're led to believe, and with good reason. Thinking (as a SWE) is still very much the most important skill in SWE, and relying on AI has limitations. For me, AI is a great tool for helping me to discover ideas I had not previously thought of, and it's helpful for boilerplate, but it still requires me to understand what's being suggested, and, even, push back with my ideas. [0] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/microsoft-slashes-ai-sales-growth-targets-as-customers-resist-unproven-agents/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/microsoft-slashes-ai-sale... [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/moltbook-social-media-site-ai-agents-had-big-security-hole-cyber-firm-wiz-says-2026-02-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/moltbook-social-med...
- copilot_king 8mo ago
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- henry_bone 8mo ago
  "Thinking (as a SWE) is still very much the most important skill in SWE, and relying on AI has limitations." I'd go further and say the thinking is humanity's fur and claws and teeth. It's our strong muscles. It's the only thing that has kept us alive in a natural world that would have us extinct long, long ago. But now we're building machine with the very purpose of thinking, or at least of producing the results of thinking. And we use it. Boy, do we use it. We use it to think of birthday presents (it's the thought that counts) and greeting card messages. We use it for education coursework (against the rules, but still). We use it, as programmers, to come up with solutions and to find bugs. If AI (of any stripe, LLM or some later invention) represents an existential threat, it is not because it will rise up and destroy us. Its threat lies solely in the fact that it is in our nature to take the path of least resistance. AI is the ultimate such path, and it does weaken our minds. My challenge to anyone who thinks it's harmless: use it for a while. Figure out what it's good at and lean on it. Then, after some months, or years, drop it and try working on your own like in the before times. I would bet that one will discover that significant amounts of fluency will be lost.
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acjohnson55 8mo ago
I read this and thought, "are we using the same software?" For me, I have turned the corner where I barely hand-edit anything. Most of the tasks I take on are nearly one-shot successful, simply pointing Claude Code at a ticket URL. I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface of what's possible. I'm not saying this is perfect or unproblematic. Far from it. But I do think that shops that invest in this way of working are going to vastly outproduce ones that don't. LLMs are the first technology where everyone literally has a different experience. There are so many degrees of freedom in how you prompt. I actually believe that people's expectations and biases tend to correlate with the outcomes they experience. People who approach it with optimism will be more likely to problem-solve the speed bumps that pop up. And the speed bumps are often things that can mostly be addressed systemically, with tooling and configuration.
- deleted 8mo ago
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- woeirua 8mo ago
  This person is not using Claude Code or Cursor. They refuse to use the tools and have convinced themselves that they are right. Sadly, they won't recognize how wrong they were until they are unemployable.
  - Spivak 8mo ago
    If Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway. Using the tools won't save any of our jobs. I say this as someone who does use the tools, they're fine. I have yet to ever have an "it's perfect, no notes" result. If the bar is code that technically works along the happy path then fine, but that's the floor of what I'm willing to put forth or accept in a PR.
    - acjohnson55 8mo ago
      > If Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway. Using the tools won't save any of our jobs. There is absolutely reason for concern, but it's not inevitable. For the foreseeable future, I don't think we can simply Ralph Wiggum-loop real business problems. A lot of human oversight and tuning is required. Also, I haven't seen anything to suggest that AI is good at strategic business decisionmaking. I do think it dramatically changes the job of a software developer, though. We will be more like developers of software assembly lines and strategists. Every company I have ever worked for has had a deep backlog of tasks and ideas we realistically were never going to get to. These tools put a lot of those tasks in play. > I have yet to ever have an "it's perfect, no notes" result. It frequently gets close for me, but usually some follow-up is needed. The ones that are closest to pure one-shot are bug fixes where replication can be captured in a regression test.
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rubyfan 8mo ago
>* I find it hard to justify the value of investing so much of my time perfecting the art of asking a machine to write what I could do perfectly well in less time than it takes to hone the prompt.* This sums up my interactions with LLMs
- wiredpancake 8mo ago
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- anupamchugh 8mo ago
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blackqueeriroh 8mo ago
Every one of these posts and most of the comments on them could be written by an LLM. Nobody says anything new. Nobody has any original thoughts. People make incredibly broad statements and make fundamental attribution errors. In fact, most LLMs would do a better job than most commenters on HN.
- MrVandemar 8mo ago
  You're absolutely right!
- ares623 8mo ago
  And in that moment, blackqueeriroh was enlightened. Come, let us transcend this plane and go "touch grass".
- satisfice 8mo ago
  You aren’t reading carefully, are you?
bsoles 8mo ago
Outsourcing their thinking is going to be the stupidest thing humans ever did and we won't even be smart enough to understand that this is the case.
- whaleidk 8mo ago
  Thought we learned this lesson with attention span/ADHD-mimicking symptoms from phone addiction but apparently not!
- 627467 8mo ago
  But humans have evolved to socialize thinking, haven't we? What is representative democracy if not that? One reason - the main reason? - we live in groups with different roles and skills is to rely on others to think for us.
  - jpetso 8mo ago
    > But humans have evolved to socialize thinking, haven't we? An overwhelmingly large number of people keep saying that socialism is bad, individualism is where it's at. I trust they're right.
woeirua 8mo ago
The best part about this whole debate is that we don't have to wait years and years for one side to be proven definitively right. We will know beyond a shadow of a doubt which side is right by this time next year. If agentic coding has not progressed any further by then, we will know. On the other hand, if coding agents are 4x better than they are today, then there will be a deluge of software online, the number of software engineers that are unemployed will have skyrocketed up and HN will be swamped by perma-doomers.
- MrVandemar 8mo ago
  Maybe we will know, but meanwhile thousands of developers are a long down way the rabbit-hole signposted "the psychology of prior investment".
- awesome_dude 8mo ago
  Wait - why are we waiting (another) year? ChatGPT has been out for 3 years (Nov 2022) Claude almost 3 years (March 2023) Gemini 1 and a bit years (2024) There hasn't been an avalanche of new software online - if anything things have slowed
  - woeirua 8mo ago
    Did you miss the chart from FT that shows the number of iOS apps and GH commits taking off late last year? It’s happening.
    - csomar 8mo ago
      Yes, the Garbogization[1] of the Internet is happening at full steam. 1: Garbage filling a place.
    - awesome_dude 8mo ago
      I'm not sure if you are being serious, but Number of commits don’t tell anything about the value and quality of those commits. Please don’t measure yourself with this poor metric. — Jaana Dogan ヤナドガン (@rakyll) February 26, 2019 Number of IOS apps isn't much of a metric either to be honest, but sure we can pretend that that's a result of the AI revolution...
gkcnlr 8mo ago
As long as AI (genAI, LLMs, whatever you call it describe the current tech) is perceived not as a "bicycle of the mind" and a tool to utilize 'your' skills to a next phase but as a commodity to be exploited by giant corporations whose existence is based on maximizing profits regardless of virtue or dignity (a basic set of ethics to, for example, not to burn books after you scan it feed your LLM like Anthropic), it is really hard to justify the current state of AI. Once you understand the sole winner in this hype is the one who'll be brutally scraping every bit of data, whether it's real-time or static and then refining it to give it back to you without your involvement in the process (a.k.a, learning) you'll come to understand that the current AI by nature is hugely unfavorable to mental progression...
- red75prime 8mo ago
  > not to burn books after you scan it Shouldn't we blame copyright laws for that?
  - jdub 8mo ago
    How would copyright law possibly compel the burning of books?
    - red75prime 8mo ago
      IANAL, I can only cite court decision: "And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies."
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      You don't have to burn the book, but then you can't scan it, either. In some places there's an exception to copyright law for format shifting if you destroy the original. If you don't destroy the original, then you made a copy and that's not allowed.
pickleRick243 8mo ago
> I think it’s important to highlight at this stage that I am not, in fact, “anti-LLM”. I’m anti-the branding of it as “artificial intelligence”, because it’s not intelligent. It’s a form of machine learning. It's a bit weird to be against the use of the phrase "artificial intelligence" and not "machine learning". Is it possible to learn without intelligence? Methinks the author is a bit triggered by the term "intelligence" at a base primal level ("machines can't think!"). > “Generative AI” is just a very good Markov chain that people expect far too much from. The author of this post doesn't know the basics of how LLMs work. The whole reason LLMs work so well is that they are extremely stateful and not memoryless, the key property of Markov processes.
charcircuit 8mo ago
>You’re supposed to craft lengthy prompts that massage the AI assistant’s apparently fragile ego by telling it “you are an expert in distributed systems” This isn't GPT-3 anymore. We have added fine tuning and other post training techniques to make this unnecessary.
casey2 8mo ago
I can't help but draw parrallels to the systems programmers who would scoff at people getting excited over css and javascript features. "Just write the code yourself! There is nothing new here! Just think!" The point of programming is to automate reasoning. Don't become a reactionary just cause your skills got got. The market is never wrong, even if there is a correction in 20 years we'll see nvidia with 10T market cap. Like every other correction (at&t, NTT)
- whaleidk 8mo ago
  Ah yes, slightly abstracted mathematical concepts compiling down to mathematical logic is totally the same as trying to unpredictably guess which mathematical concepts your massive, complex, non-mathematical natural language might possibly be referring to
localghost3000 8mo ago
Nice name you got there localghost ;p The POV of the author I understand quite well because it was mine. Its really only in the last 6 months or so that my perspective has changed. The author still sounds like they are in the "black box that I toss wishes into and is dumb as fuck" phase. It also sounds like they are resistant to learning how to make the most of it which is a shame. If you take the time to learn the techniques that make this stuff tick you'll be amazed at what it can do. I mean maybe I am a total idiot and this stuff will get good enough that I am no longer necessary. Right now though? I see it as an augmentation. An amplification of me and what I am capable of.
hibikir 8mo ago
Highlighting this as a good thing is just... not great > Code you did not write is code you do not understand > You cannot maintain code you do not understand We need no AI for this one: If I could only maintain code I wrote, I'd have to work alone. Whether I am reviewing code written by AI or by a human is irrelevant here. The rest of the comments on the human we know having more trust is in itself a smell on your development process: This is how we get cliques, and people considering repos hostile, because there's clear differences in behavior for well known contributors, who are just as capable of writing something bad as anyone else. If there's anything I have seen in code review processes, regardless of where I've worked for the last couple of decades, is that visual inspections rarely get us anywhere, and no organization is willing to dedicate the time to double check anything. Bugs that happily go through inspection come in too even when the organization commits to extreme programming: Full time TDD and full pairing. There is a question on how fast we can merge code in a project safely, regardless of the identity of the author of the PRs. A systematic approach to credible, reliable development. But the answer here has very little to do with what the article's author is saying, and has nothing to do with whether a contribution was made by an AI, a human, or a golden retriever with access to a keyboard and a lot of hope.
- shayief 8mo ago
  > If I could only maintain code I wrote, I'd have to work alone. I don't think that "Code you did not write is code you do not understand" implies that the only way to understand code is to write it. I can read code, run it, debug it and figure out how it works. It's true that all of that is possible with AI generated code. But the thing is, is it worth for me spending time understanding that PR, when I can make the change or launch my own agent to prompt it myself? At least with my own prompt I know exactly what I want it to be.
  - xeyownt 8mo ago
    Exactly. If the only effort of coding was in the writing, we would have much more code, applications, etc. The real effort of coding is understanding it, reviewing it, improving it, making it work, and work well and durably. All of this requires thinking.
s20n 8mo ago
> I’ve been using Copilot - and more recently Claude - as a sort of “spicy autocomplete” and occasional debugging assistant for some time, but any time I try to get it to do anything remotely clever, it completely shits the bed. This seems like a really disingenuous statement. If claude can write an entire C compiler that is able to compile the linux kernel, I think it has already surpassed an unimaginable threshold for "cleverness"
- xigoi 8mo ago
  You mean the one that can’t compile hello world?
jauntywundrkind 8mo ago
"Hammock driven development"'s force multiplying projected to increase steadily on, as the coding becomes less the pressure point.
pcoch6 8mo ago
I hardly write code anymore myself and am a heavy user of Claude Code. One of the things I’m struggling to come to terms with is the “don’t commit code that you don’t understand” thing. This makes sense, however it’s a thorn in my side that if I’m honest I’ve not been able to come up with a compelling answer to yet. I agree with the sentiment. But in practice it only works for folks who have become domain experts. My pain point is this - it’s fine to only review if you have put in the work by writing lots of code over their careers. But, what’s the game plan in 10 years if we’re all reviewing code? I know you learn from reviewing, but there’s no doubt that humans learn from writing code, failing, and rewriting. So…this leaves me in a weird place. Do we move passively into a future where we don’t truely deeply understand the code anymore because we don’t write it? Where we leave it up to the AI to handle the lower level details and we implicitly trust it so we can focus on delivering value further up the chain? What happens to developers in 10-20 years? I don’t know but I’m not so convinced that we’re going to be able to review AI code so well when we’ve lost the skill to write it ourselves.
pregnenolone 8mo ago
I’ve reached a point where I stop reading whenever I see a post that mentions “one-shot.” It's becoming increasingly obvious that many platforms are riddled with bots or incompetent individuals trying to convince others that AI are some kind of silver bullet.

161 points by frizlab 8mo ago

"It’s very unsettling, then, to find myself feeling like I’m in danger of being left behind - like I’m missing something. As much as I don’t like it, so many people have started going so hard on LLM-generated code in a way that I just can’t wrap my head around. ... ’ve been using Copilot - and more recently Claude - as a sort of “spicy autocomplete” and occasional debugging assistant for some time, but any time I try to get it to do anything remotely clever, it completely shits the bed. Don’t get me wrong, I know that a large part of this is me holding it wrong, but I find it hard to justify the value of investing so much of my time perfecting the art of asking a machine to write what I could do perfectly well in less time than it takes to hone the prompt. You’ve got to give it enough context - but not too much or it gets overloaded. You’re supposed to craft lengthy prompts that massage the AI assistant’s apparently fragile ego by telling it “you are an expert in distributed systems” as if it were an insecure, mediocre software developer. Or I could just write the damn code in less time than all of this takes to get working." Well there's your problem. Nobody does roll-based prompts anymore, and the entire point of coding agents is that they search your code base, do internet searches, and do web fetches, as well as launch sub agents and use todo lists, to fill and adjust their context exactly as needed themselves, without you having to do it manually. It's funny reading people planatively saying, "I just don't get how people could possibly be getting used out of these things. I don't understand it." And then they immediately reveal that it's not the baffling mystery or existential question there pretending it is for the purpose of this essay — the reason they don't understand it is that they literally don't understand the tech itself lol

skzizjj 8mo ago
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martin-t 8mo ago
This just shows that the models (not AI, statistical models of text used without consent) are not that smart, it's the tooling around them which allows using these models as a heuristic for brute force search of the solution space. Just last week, I prompted (not asked, it is not sentient) Claude to generate (not tell me or find out or any other anthropomorphization) whether I need to call Dispose on objects passed to me from 2 different libraries for industrial cameras. Being industrial, most people using them typically don't post their code publicly, which means the models have poor statistical coverage around these topics. The LLM generated a response which triggered the tooling around it to perform dozens of internet searches and based on my initial prompt, the search results and lots of intermediate tokens ("thinking"), generated a reply which said that yes, I need to call Dispose in both cases. It was phrased authoritatively and confidently. So I tried it, one library segfaulted, the other returned an exception on a later call. I performed my own internet search (a single one) and immediately found documentation from one of the libraries clearly stating I don't need to call Dispose. The other library being much more poorly documented didn't mention this explicitly but had examples which didn't call Dispose. I am sure if I used LLMs "properly" "agentically", then they would have triggered the tooling around them to build and execute the code, gotten the same results as me much faster, then equally authoritatively and confidently stated that I don't need to call Dispose. This is not thinking. It's a form of automation but not thinking and not intelligence.
- Isamu 8mo ago
  >brute force search of the solution space “Brute force” is mostly what makes it all work, and what is most disappointing to me currently. Including the brute force necessary to train an LLM, the vast quantity of text necessary to approach almost human quality, the massive scale of data centers necessary to deploy these models, etc. I am hoping this is a transitional period, where LLMs could be used to create better models that are more finesse and less brute force.
  - martin-t 8mo ago
    To be honest, these models being bad is what gives me some hope we can figure out how to approach a potential future AI as a society before it arrives. Because right now everything in the west is structured around rich people owning things they have not built while people who did the actual work with their hands and their minds are left in the dust. For a brief period of time (a couple decades), tech was a path for anyone from any background to get at least enough to not struggle. Not become truly rich as for that you need to own real estate or companies but having all your reasonable material needs taken care of and being able to save up for retirement (or in countries without free education, to pay for kids' college). And that might be coming to an end, with people who benefited from this opportunity cheering it on.
    - logicprog 8mo ago
      I make $1500/mo, working part time for a friend being vastly underpaid for technical work and part time as a meat packer in the back of a supermarket, because I had to drop out of university a year before finishing due to a disability and loss of financial resources, and thanks to being trans, disabled, and a dropout, as well as the job market that's fucked up due to AI and all the other reasons for layoffs, so I can't get a tech job, despite having been programming since I was seven and being very good at it. I don't think it's really fair to talk about "people who benefited from this opportunity cheering it on" in the comments on one of my posts. I'm an agentic AI coding enthusiast because I find it fascinating, it allows me to focus more on what I like most about programming (software architecture, systems thinking, etc), and the decreased cognitive load and increased productivity allows me to continue to do interesting projects in the time and energy I have left after my jobs and disability take.
raincole 8mo ago
Yeah, remind me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929505 > I have a source file of a few hundred lines implementing an algorithm that no LLM I've tried (and I've tried them all) is able to replicate, or even suggest, when prompted with the problem. Even with many follow up prompts and hints. People making this kind of claim will never post the question and prompts they tried. Because if they did, everyone will know it's just they don't know how to prompt.
- ares623 8mo ago
  At what point will the proper way to prompt just be "built-in"? Why aren't they built-in already if the "proper way to prompt" is so well understood?
- logicprog 8mo ago
  Eh, I think that one is fair. LLMs aren't great at super novel solutions
ares623 8mo ago
So I guess you could say, they're "holding it wrong"?
- logicprog 8mo ago
  Yeah, so?
bitwize 8mo ago
(Valley Girl voice) Role-based prompts are like, so September 2025. Everybody is just using agents now. You don't get to sit with us at the cool kids' table until you learn how to prompt, loser.
- logicprog 8mo ago
  Mocking me (a woman, as it happens) with a sexist stereotype and a strawman of my argument doesn't make me wrong. All that extra work is now very much unnecessary, and it's the extra work they are complaining about, so, they are complaining about a problem that no longer exists, thanks to intentionally not learning as things develop. This isn't an argument about fashion or the "cool kids table."

Quothling 8mo ago

Maybe I don't understand it correctly but to me this reads like the author isn't actually using AI agents. I don't talk or write prompts anymore. I write tasks and I let a couple of AI agent complete those tasks. Exactly how I'd distribute tasks to a human. The AI code is of variating quality and they certainly aren't great at computer science (at least not yet), but it's not like they write worse code than some actual humans would. I like to say that you don't need computer science to write software, until you do. The thing is that a lot of software in the organisations I've worked in, doesn't actually need computer science. I've seen horrible javascript code on the back-end live a full lifecycle of 5+ years without needing much maintainence, if any, and be fine. It could've probably have been more efficient, but compute is so cheap that it never really mattered. Of course I've also seen inefficient software or errors cost us a lot of money when our solar plants didn't output what they were supposed to. I'd let AI's write one of those things any day. Hell I did recently. We had an old javascript service which was doing something with the hubspot API. I say something because I didn't ever really find out what it was. Basically hubspot sunset the v1 of their API, and before the issue arrived at my table my colleagues had figured out that was the issue. I didn't really have the time to fix this, so when I saw how much of a mess the javascript code was and realized it would take me a few hours to figure out what it even did... well... I told my AI agent running on our company framework to fix it. It did so in 5-10 minutes with a single correction needed. It improved the javascript quite a bit while doing it, typing everything. I barely even got out of my flow to make it happen. So far it's run without any issues for a month. I was frankly completely unnecessary in this process. The only reason it was me who fired up the AI is because the people who sent me the task haven't yet adopted AI agents. That being said... AI's are a major security risk that needs to be handled accordingly.

heliumtera 8mo ago

Programmers for some reason love to be told what do to. First thing in the morning they look out for someone else to tell them how to do, how to test, how to validate. Why don't do it yourself, like you want to do it, when you could just fallback to mediocrity and instead do like everybody else does? Why think when you can be told what to do? Why have intercourse with your wife when instead you can let someone else do? This is the typical llm user mentality

thunky 8mo ago

This text color and background is unreadable.

potatoman22 8mo ago
What theme did you use? I really like the "garden" theme
- thunky 8mo ago
  I didn't see the theme button, thanks. Turns out the dark mode in Brave (mobile) makes the garden theme font almost the same color as the background. I tried it on default Chrome and it looked better. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th themes are easy to read with Brave but the others are not.

awesome_dude 8mo ago

There's a couple of news stories doing the rounds at the moment which point to the fact that AI isn't "there yet" 1. Microsoft's announcement of cutting their copilot products sales targets[0] 2. Moltbook's security issues[1] after being "vibe coded" into life Leaving the undeniable conclusion to be - the vast majority (seriously) distrusts AI much more than we're led to believe, and with good reason. Thinking (as a SWE) is still very much the most important skill in SWE, and relying on AI has limitations. For me, AI is a great tool for helping me to discover ideas I had not previously thought of, and it's helpful for boilerplate, but it still requires me to understand what's being suggested, and, even, push back with my ideas. [0] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/microsoft-slashes-ai-sales-growth-targets-as-customers-resist-unproven-agents/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/microsoft-slashes-ai-sale... [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/moltbook-social-media-site-ai-agents-had-big-security-hole-cyber-firm-wiz-says-2026-02-02/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/moltbook-social-med...

copilot_king 8mo ago
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henry_bone 8mo ago
"Thinking (as a SWE) is still very much the most important skill in SWE, and relying on AI has limitations." I'd go further and say the thinking is humanity's fur and claws and teeth. It's our strong muscles. It's the only thing that has kept us alive in a natural world that would have us extinct long, long ago. But now we're building machine with the very purpose of thinking, or at least of producing the results of thinking. And we use it. Boy, do we use it. We use it to think of birthday presents (it's the thought that counts) and greeting card messages. We use it for education coursework (against the rules, but still). We use it, as programmers, to come up with solutions and to find bugs. If AI (of any stripe, LLM or some later invention) represents an existential threat, it is not because it will rise up and destroy us. Its threat lies solely in the fact that it is in our nature to take the path of least resistance. AI is the ultimate such path, and it does weaken our minds. My challenge to anyone who thinks it's harmless: use it for a while. Figure out what it's good at and lean on it. Then, after some months, or years, drop it and try working on your own like in the before times. I would bet that one will discover that significant amounts of fluency will be lost.

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acjohnson55 8mo ago

I read this and thought, "are we using the same software?" For me, I have turned the corner where I barely hand-edit anything. Most of the tasks I take on are nearly one-shot successful, simply pointing Claude Code at a ticket URL. I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface of what's possible. I'm not saying this is perfect or unproblematic. Far from it. But I do think that shops that invest in this way of working are going to vastly outproduce ones that don't. LLMs are the first technology where everyone literally has a different experience. There are so many degrees of freedom in how you prompt. I actually believe that people's expectations and biases tend to correlate with the outcomes they experience. People who approach it with optimism will be more likely to problem-solve the speed bumps that pop up. And the speed bumps are often things that can mostly be addressed systemically, with tooling and configuration.

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woeirua 8mo ago
This person is not using Claude Code or Cursor. They refuse to use the tools and have convinced themselves that they are right. Sadly, they won't recognize how wrong they were until they are unemployable.
- Spivak 8mo ago
  If Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway. Using the tools won't save any of our jobs. I say this as someone who does use the tools, they're fine. I have yet to ever have an "it's perfect, no notes" result. If the bar is code that technically works along the happy path then fine, but that's the floor of what I'm willing to put forth or accept in a PR.
  - acjohnson55 8mo ago
    > If Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway. Using the tools won't save any of our jobs. There is absolutely reason for concern, but it's not inevitable. For the foreseeable future, I don't think we can simply Ralph Wiggum-loop real business problems. A lot of human oversight and tuning is required. Also, I haven't seen anything to suggest that AI is good at strategic business decisionmaking. I do think it dramatically changes the job of a software developer, though. We will be more like developers of software assembly lines and strategists. Every company I have ever worked for has had a deep backlog of tasks and ideas we realistically were never going to get to. These tools put a lot of those tasks in play. > I have yet to ever have an "it's perfect, no notes" result. It frequently gets close for me, but usually some follow-up is needed. The ones that are closest to pure one-shot are bug fixes where replication can be captured in a regression test.

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rubyfan 8mo ago

>* I find it hard to justify the value of investing so much of my time perfecting the art of asking a machine to write what I could do perfectly well in less time than it takes to hone the prompt.* This sums up my interactions with LLMs

wiredpancake 8mo ago
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anupamchugh 8mo ago
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blackqueeriroh 8mo ago

Every one of these posts and most of the comments on them could be written by an LLM. Nobody says anything new. Nobody has any original thoughts. People make incredibly broad statements and make fundamental attribution errors. In fact, most LLMs would do a better job than most commenters on HN.

MrVandemar 8mo ago
You're absolutely right!
ares623 8mo ago
And in that moment, blackqueeriroh was enlightened. Come, let us transcend this plane and go "touch grass".
satisfice 8mo ago
You aren’t reading carefully, are you?

bsoles 8mo ago

Outsourcing their thinking is going to be the stupidest thing humans ever did and we won't even be smart enough to understand that this is the case.

whaleidk 8mo ago
Thought we learned this lesson with attention span/ADHD-mimicking symptoms from phone addiction but apparently not!
627467 8mo ago
But humans have evolved to socialize thinking, haven't we? What is representative democracy if not that? One reason - the main reason? - we live in groups with different roles and skills is to rely on others to think for us.
- jpetso 8mo ago
  > But humans have evolved to socialize thinking, haven't we? An overwhelmingly large number of people keep saying that socialism is bad, individualism is where it's at. I trust they're right.

woeirua 8mo ago

The best part about this whole debate is that we don't have to wait years and years for one side to be proven definitively right. We will know beyond a shadow of a doubt which side is right by this time next year. If agentic coding has not progressed any further by then, we will know. On the other hand, if coding agents are 4x better than they are today, then there will be a deluge of software online, the number of software engineers that are unemployed will have skyrocketed up and HN will be swamped by perma-doomers.

MrVandemar 8mo ago
Maybe we will know, but meanwhile thousands of developers are a long down way the rabbit-hole signposted "the psychology of prior investment".
awesome_dude 8mo ago
Wait - why are we waiting (another) year? ChatGPT has been out for 3 years (Nov 2022) Claude almost 3 years (March 2023) Gemini 1 and a bit years (2024) There hasn't been an avalanche of new software online - if anything things have slowed
- woeirua 8mo ago
  Did you miss the chart from FT that shows the number of iOS apps and GH commits taking off late last year? It’s happening.
  - csomar 8mo ago
    Yes, the Garbogization[1] of the Internet is happening at full steam. 1: Garbage filling a place.
  - awesome_dude 8mo ago
    I'm not sure if you are being serious, but Number of commits don’t tell anything about the value and quality of those commits. Please don’t measure yourself with this poor metric. — Jaana Dogan ヤナドガン (@rakyll) February 26, 2019 Number of IOS apps isn't much of a metric either to be honest, but sure we can pretend that that's a result of the AI revolution...

gkcnlr 8mo ago

As long as AI (genAI, LLMs, whatever you call it describe the current tech) is perceived not as a "bicycle of the mind" and a tool to utilize 'your' skills to a next phase but as a commodity to be exploited by giant corporations whose existence is based on maximizing profits regardless of virtue or dignity (a basic set of ethics to, for example, not to burn books after you scan it feed your LLM like Anthropic), it is really hard to justify the current state of AI. Once you understand the sole winner in this hype is the one who'll be brutally scraping every bit of data, whether it's real-time or static and then refining it to give it back to you without your involvement in the process (a.k.a, learning) you'll come to understand that the current AI by nature is hugely unfavorable to mental progression...

red75prime 8mo ago
> not to burn books after you scan it Shouldn't we blame copyright laws for that?
- jdub 8mo ago
  How would copyright law possibly compel the burning of books?
  - red75prime 8mo ago
    IANAL, I can only cite court decision: "And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies."
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    You don't have to burn the book, but then you can't scan it, either. In some places there's an exception to copyright law for format shifting if you destroy the original. If you don't destroy the original, then you made a copy and that's not allowed.

pickleRick243 8mo ago

> I think it’s important to highlight at this stage that I am not, in fact, “anti-LLM”. I’m anti-the branding of it as “artificial intelligence”, because it’s not intelligent. It’s a form of machine learning. It's a bit weird to be against the use of the phrase "artificial intelligence" and not "machine learning". Is it possible to learn without intelligence? Methinks the author is a bit triggered by the term "intelligence" at a base primal level ("machines can't think!"). > “Generative AI” is just a very good Markov chain that people expect far too much from. The author of this post doesn't know the basics of how LLMs work. The whole reason LLMs work so well is that they are extremely stateful and not memoryless, the key property of Markov processes.

charcircuit 8mo ago

>You’re supposed to craft lengthy prompts that massage the AI assistant’s apparently fragile ego by telling it “you are an expert in distributed systems” This isn't GPT-3 anymore. We have added fine tuning and other post training techniques to make this unnecessary.

casey2 8mo ago

I can't help but draw parrallels to the systems programmers who would scoff at people getting excited over css and javascript features. "Just write the code yourself! There is nothing new here! Just think!" The point of programming is to automate reasoning. Don't become a reactionary just cause your skills got got. The market is never wrong, even if there is a correction in 20 years we'll see nvidia with 10T market cap. Like every other correction (at&t, NTT)

whaleidk 8mo ago
Ah yes, slightly abstracted mathematical concepts compiling down to mathematical logic is totally the same as trying to unpredictably guess which mathematical concepts your massive, complex, non-mathematical natural language might possibly be referring to

localghost3000 8mo ago

Nice name you got there localghost ;p The POV of the author I understand quite well because it was mine. Its really only in the last 6 months or so that my perspective has changed. The author still sounds like they are in the "black box that I toss wishes into and is dumb as fuck" phase. It also sounds like they are resistant to learning how to make the most of it which is a shame. If you take the time to learn the techniques that make this stuff tick you'll be amazed at what it can do. I mean maybe I am a total idiot and this stuff will get good enough that I am no longer necessary. Right now though? I see it as an augmentation. An amplification of me and what I am capable of.

hibikir 8mo ago

Highlighting this as a good thing is just... not great > Code you did not write is code you do not understand > You cannot maintain code you do not understand We need no AI for this one: If I could only maintain code I wrote, I'd have to work alone. Whether I am reviewing code written by AI or by a human is irrelevant here. The rest of the comments on the human we know having more trust is in itself a smell on your development process: This is how we get cliques, and people considering repos hostile, because there's clear differences in behavior for well known contributors, who are just as capable of writing something bad as anyone else. If there's anything I have seen in code review processes, regardless of where I've worked for the last couple of decades, is that visual inspections rarely get us anywhere, and no organization is willing to dedicate the time to double check anything. Bugs that happily go through inspection come in too even when the organization commits to extreme programming: Full time TDD and full pairing. There is a question on how fast we can merge code in a project safely, regardless of the identity of the author of the PRs. A systematic approach to credible, reliable development. But the answer here has very little to do with what the article's author is saying, and has nothing to do with whether a contribution was made by an AI, a human, or a golden retriever with access to a keyboard and a lot of hope.

shayief 8mo ago
> If I could only maintain code I wrote, I'd have to work alone. I don't think that "Code you did not write is code you do not understand" implies that the only way to understand code is to write it. I can read code, run it, debug it and figure out how it works. It's true that all of that is possible with AI generated code. But the thing is, is it worth for me spending time understanding that PR, when I can make the change or launch my own agent to prompt it myself? At least with my own prompt I know exactly what I want it to be.
- xeyownt 8mo ago
  Exactly. If the only effort of coding was in the writing, we would have much more code, applications, etc. The real effort of coding is understanding it, reviewing it, improving it, making it work, and work well and durably. All of this requires thinking.

s20n 8mo ago

> I’ve been using Copilot - and more recently Claude - as a sort of “spicy autocomplete” and occasional debugging assistant for some time, but any time I try to get it to do anything remotely clever, it completely shits the bed. This seems like a really disingenuous statement. If claude can write an entire C compiler that is able to compile the linux kernel, I think it has already surpassed an unimaginable threshold for "cleverness"

xigoi 8mo ago
You mean the one that can’t compile hello world?

jauntywundrkind 8mo ago

"Hammock driven development"'s force multiplying projected to increase steadily on, as the coding becomes less the pressure point.

pcoch6 8mo ago

I hardly write code anymore myself and am a heavy user of Claude Code. One of the things I’m struggling to come to terms with is the “don’t commit code that you don’t understand” thing. This makes sense, however it’s a thorn in my side that if I’m honest I’ve not been able to come up with a compelling answer to yet. I agree with the sentiment. But in practice it only works for folks who have become domain experts. My pain point is this - it’s fine to only review if you have put in the work by writing lots of code over their careers. But, what’s the game plan in 10 years if we’re all reviewing code? I know you learn from reviewing, but there’s no doubt that humans learn from writing code, failing, and rewriting. So…this leaves me in a weird place. Do we move passively into a future where we don’t truely deeply understand the code anymore because we don’t write it? Where we leave it up to the AI to handle the lower level details and we implicitly trust it so we can focus on delivering value further up the chain? What happens to developers in 10-20 years? I don’t know but I’m not so convinced that we’re going to be able to review AI code so well when we’ve lost the skill to write it ourselves.

pregnenolone 8mo ago

I’ve reached a point where I stop reading whenever I see a post that mentions “one-shot.” It's becoming increasingly obvious that many platforms are riddled with bots or incompetent individuals trying to convince others that AI are some kind of silver bullet.