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What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted libraries or frameworks. That’s become way less common now that everyone is building a layer up the stack.

What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted libraries or frameworks. That’s become way less common now that everyone is building a layer up the stack. I fear we’ll be stuck in a permanent state of using Tailwind and React and all the LLM-favored libraries as they were frozen in time at the beginning of 2025. Then again, that’ll be the agent’s problem, not mine… All that said, it’s extremely exciting. I’ve been in tech, in one way or another, for 25 years. This is the most energizing (and simultaneously exhausting) atmosphere I’ve ever felt. The 2006-2011 years of early Facebook, Uber, etc. were exciting but nothing like this. The future is developing faster than we can process it.

kehvyn 7mo ago
If it helps, I've mostly been using AI to implement things in the craziest languages I can justify. I write Typescript and SQL by day, my last two personal projects were Rust and Perl. I do worry that I'm not learning them as deeply, but I am learning them and without AI as an accelerant I probably wouldn't be trying them at all.
mattgreenrocks 7mo ago
Perhaps we're in an AI summer and a tech winter. Winter is always the time when people hole up, dream, and work on whatever big thing is next. We're about due for some new computing abstractions to shake things up I think. Those won't be conceived by LLMs, though they may aid in implementing them.
- zer00eyz 7mo ago
  We have 2 decades of abstraction. The stacks of turtles that we use to run everything are starting to show their bloat. The other day someone was lamenting dealign with an onslaught of bot traffic, and having to deal with blocking it. Maybe we need to get back to good old fashioned engineering and optimization. There was a thread on here the other day about PC gamer recommending RSS readers and having a 36gb webpage ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47480507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47480507 )
  - tom_ 7mo ago
    ~36 MB. (though it sounds like if you left it for long enough, you'd get 36 GB of ads downloaded eventually)
jakelsaunders94 7mo ago
> What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted libraries or frameworks. Saame. I wonder if the use of AI will lead to less invention and adoption of new ideas in favour of ideas with lots of training data.
zeroonetwothree 7mo ago
Maybe it's like how we're all still using languages from pre-2010? Python, JS, Java, C++, Go, Rust (most of those are 20th century). Once you move a layer up the stack it takes some extraordinary situation to upend the status quo.
- kode-targz 7mo ago
  because there isn't really that much to change that high up the stack. It's all the same. True innovation happens at the low levels of programming and hardware.
nicbou 7mo ago
That's interesting because the atmosphere feels the opposite of that. I was so excited by tech back then, so optimistic. Now I see it as a threat. People around me are worried about their future more than they are excited about the technology. I think we've seen what the enthusiasm leads to, once these companies establish dominance. We even coined a word for it: enshittification.
tdeck 7mo ago
> I fear we’ll be stuck in a permanent state of using Tailwind and React and all the LLM-favored libraries as they were frozen in time at the beginning of 2025. Would it be such a bad thing if the "right way" to build a JavaScript frontend didn't change so much every year?
- naikrovek 7mo ago
  let me take the comment you replied to and follow through a bit. would it be such a bad thing if we moved away from JavaScript entirely? If we commit to AI, that seems exceedingly unlikely to happen. I mean do we really think that JavaScript is the best way to do this? I don't. I've been in IT and software development for 30 years. I thought I would see things progress, but I have not. Same operating systems, same browsers more or less still running JavaScript, same network stack, same everything. an immense amount of work to slowly evolve things that weren't designed to evolve for 30 years. Thirty Years. We all know that things around us are flawed and that there are better ways, but we do nothing about it. How many people are looking at new paradigms, new ways to do something? Three? Four? I bet it's within that order of magnitude. Come on. I'm disappointed in everyone in this industry, including myself. Look at Plan 9. It was different. It was flawed, but it tried to fix things, at least. It tried to do some sharp corners in Unix differently, and for the time I think it was good. At least they made an attempt. Linux took a few lessons from it, but I don't think anyone else did. Not really. I'm mad. We have let ourselves down, we have let ourselves stagnate and simply spin wheels because using what's here is easier than designing something new and sharing it. Influential people don't look at new things often enough. People new to the field and young people don't understand what my complaint is about really, because this is all brand new, to them. They didn't witness the stagnation. I did. I am disappointed and I don't really know what to do about it.
  - tdeck 7mo ago
    As someone who is interested in computer history and those roads not travelled, I can understand the sentiment. Another way to think of it is that innovation is happening at higher levels of the stack, and I'm not sure whether that's a bad thing. We also haven't tried much beyond UDP and TCP in those decades, other attempts at QoS networking and the like have failed. But UDP and TCP are still working out more or less and the ability to have a standard lets us focus on other things.

kehvyn 7mo ago

If it helps, I've mostly been using AI to implement things in the craziest languages I can justify. I write Typescript and SQL by day, my last two personal projects were Rust and Perl. I do worry that I'm not learning them as deeply, but I am learning them and without AI as an accelerant I probably wouldn't be trying them at all.

mattgreenrocks 7mo ago

Perhaps we're in an AI summer and a tech winter. Winter is always the time when people hole up, dream, and work on whatever big thing is next. We're about due for some new computing abstractions to shake things up I think. Those won't be conceived by LLMs, though they may aid in implementing them.

zer00eyz 7mo ago
We have 2 decades of abstraction. The stacks of turtles that we use to run everything are starting to show their bloat. The other day someone was lamenting dealign with an onslaught of bot traffic, and having to deal with blocking it. Maybe we need to get back to good old fashioned engineering and optimization. There was a thread on here the other day about PC gamer recommending RSS readers and having a 36gb webpage ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47480507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47480507 )
- tom_ 7mo ago
  ~36 MB. (though it sounds like if you left it for long enough, you'd get 36 GB of ads downloaded eventually)

jakelsaunders94 7mo ago

> What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted libraries or frameworks. Saame. I wonder if the use of AI will lead to less invention and adoption of new ideas in favour of ideas with lots of training data.

zeroonetwothree 7mo ago

Maybe it's like how we're all still using languages from pre-2010? Python, JS, Java, C++, Go, Rust (most of those are 20th century). Once you move a layer up the stack it takes some extraordinary situation to upend the status quo.

kode-targz 7mo ago
because there isn't really that much to change that high up the stack. It's all the same. True innovation happens at the low levels of programming and hardware.

nicbou 7mo ago

That's interesting because the atmosphere feels the opposite of that. I was so excited by tech back then, so optimistic. Now I see it as a threat. People around me are worried about their future more than they are excited about the technology. I think we've seen what the enthusiasm leads to, once these companies establish dominance. We even coined a word for it: enshittification.

tdeck 7mo ago

> I fear we’ll be stuck in a permanent state of using Tailwind and React and all the LLM-favored libraries as they were frozen in time at the beginning of 2025. Would it be such a bad thing if the "right way" to build a JavaScript frontend didn't change so much every year?

naikrovek 7mo ago
let me take the comment you replied to and follow through a bit. would it be such a bad thing if we moved away from JavaScript entirely? If we commit to AI, that seems exceedingly unlikely to happen. I mean do we really think that JavaScript is the best way to do this? I don't. I've been in IT and software development for 30 years. I thought I would see things progress, but I have not. Same operating systems, same browsers more or less still running JavaScript, same network stack, same everything. an immense amount of work to slowly evolve things that weren't designed to evolve for 30 years. Thirty Years. We all know that things around us are flawed and that there are better ways, but we do nothing about it. How many people are looking at new paradigms, new ways to do something? Three? Four? I bet it's within that order of magnitude. Come on. I'm disappointed in everyone in this industry, including myself. Look at Plan 9. It was different. It was flawed, but it tried to fix things, at least. It tried to do some sharp corners in Unix differently, and for the time I think it was good. At least they made an attempt. Linux took a few lessons from it, but I don't think anyone else did. Not really. I'm mad. We have let ourselves down, we have let ourselves stagnate and simply spin wheels because using what's here is easier than designing something new and sharing it. Influential people don't look at new things often enough. People new to the field and young people don't understand what my complaint is about really, because this is all brand new, to them. They didn't witness the stagnation. I did. I am disappointed and I don't really know what to do about it.
- tdeck 7mo ago
  As someone who is interested in computer history and those roads not travelled, I can understand the sentiment. Another way to think of it is that innovation is happening at higher levels of the stack, and I'm not sure whether that's a bad thing. We also haven't tried much beyond UDP and TCP in those decades, other attempts at QoS networking and the like have failed. But UDP and TCP are still working out more or less and the ability to have a standard lets us focus on other things.