9 ms·

HN is a big community that has always had a mix of people who value newness as a feature vs those who prioritize simplicity and reliability. Unless you're recog

by rurp 6mo ago

HN is a big community that has always had a mix of people who value newness as a feature vs those who prioritize simplicity and reliability. Unless you're recognizing the exact same names taking these contradictory opinions it's probably different groups of people for the most part. It seems like every LLM thread for the past couple years is full of posts saying that the latest hot AI tool/approach has made them unbelievably more productive, followed by others saying they found that same thing underwhelming.

echelon 6mo ago
> I get it. LLMs are cool technology. I don't think many of you have legitimately tried Claude Code, or maybe you're holding it wrong. I'm getting 10x the work done. I'm operating at all layers of the stack with a speed and rapidity I've never had before. And before anyone accuses me of being some "vibe coder", I've built five nines active-active money rails that move billions of dollars a day at 50kqps+, amongst lots of other hard hitting platform engineering work. Serious senior engineering for over a decade. This isn't just a "cool technology". We've exited the punch card phase. And that is hard or impossible to come back from. If you're not seeing these same successes, I legitimately think you're using it wrong. I honestly don't like subscription services, hyperscaler concentration of power, or the fact I can't run Opus locally. But it doesn't matter - the tool exists in the shape it does, and I have to consume it in the way that it's presented. I hope for a different offering that is more democratic and open, but right now the market hasn't provided that. It's as if you got access to fiber or broadband and were asked to go back to ISDN/dial up.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  > and I have to consume it in the way that it's presented I'm just curious, why do you "have to"? Don't get me wrong, I'm making the same choice myself too, realizing a bunch of global drawbacks because of my local/personal preference, but I won't claim I have to, it's a choice I'm making because I'm lazy.
  - echelon 6mo ago
    My job title is "provide value". I'm given a tool that lets me 10x "provide value". My personal preferences and tastes literally do not matter.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      As a professional you have a choice in how you produce whatever it is you produce. Sure, you can go for the simplest, most expensive and "easiest" way of doing things, or you can do other things, depending on your perspective and requirements. None of this is set in stone, some people make choices based on personal preferences, and that matters as much to them as your choices matter to you.
  - wongarsu 6mo ago
    What are the reasonable options besides a Claude Code subscription (or an equivalent from Codex or Copilot)? I could pay API prices for the same models, but aside from paying much more for the same result that doesn't seem helpful I could pay a 4-5 figure sum for hardware to run a far inferior open model I could pay a six figure sum for hardware to run an open model that's only a couple months behind in capability (or a 4-5 figure sum to run the same model at a snail's pace) I could pay API costs to semi-trustworthy inference provider to run one of those open models None of those seem like great alternatives. If I want cutting-edge coding performance then a subscription is the most reasonable option Note that this applies mostly to coding. For many other tasks local models or paid inference on open models is very reasonable. But for coding that last bit of performance matters
    - prabal97 6mo ago
      I use my OAI subscription on my Claude Code. I get the benefit of the Claude Code interface with the intelligence of OAI models. https://prabal.ca/posts/claude-code-chatgpt-subscription/ https://prabal.ca/posts/claude-code-chatgpt-subscription/
- blurbleblurble 6mo ago
  > fact I can't run Opus locally Yet
- epistasis 6mo ago
  I'm still reviewing all the code that's created, and asking for modifications, and basically using LLMs as a 2000 wpm typist, and seeing similar productivity gains. Especially in new frameworks! Everything is test driven development, super clean and super fast. The challenge now is how to plan architectures and codebases to get really big and really scale, without AI slop creating hidden tech debt. Foundations of the code must be very solid, and the architecture from the start has to be right. But even redoing the architecture becomes so much faster now...
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- ericmcer 6mo ago
  I mean at this point can we just conclude that there are a group of engineers who claim to have incredible success with it and a group that claim it is unreliable and cannot be trusted to do complex tasks. I struggle to believe that a ton of seemingly intelligent software engineers are too dumb to figure out how to use Claude code to get reliable results, it seems much more likely to me that it can do well at isolated tasks or new projects but fails when pointed at large complex code bases because it just... is a token predictor lol. But yeah spinning up a green fields project in an extensively solved area (ledgers) is going to be something an AI shines at. It isn't like we don't use this stuff also, I ask Cursor to do things 20x a day and it does something I don't like 50% of the time. Even things like pasting an error message it struggles with. How do I reconcile my actual daily experience with hype messages I see online?
  - hombre_fatal 6mo ago
    I suspect many people here have tried it, but they expected it to one-shot any prompt, and when it didn't, it confirmed what they wanted to be true and they responded with "hah, see?" and then washed their hands of it. So it's not that they're too stupid. There are various motivations for this: clinging on to familiarity, resistance to what feels like yet another tool, anti-AI koolaid, earnestly underwhelmed but don't understand how much better it can be, reacting to what they perceive to be incessant cheerleading, etc. It's kind of like anti-Javascript posts on HN 10+ years ago. These people weren't too stupid to understand how you could steelman Node.js, they just weren't curious enough to ask, and maybe it turned out they hadn't even used Javascript since "DHTML" was a term except to do $(".box").toggle(). I wish there were more curiosity on HN.
    - ericmcer 6mo ago
      So what do I do differently then? Hypothetically, you have a simple slice out of bounds error because a function is getting an empty string so it does something like: `""[5]`. Opus will add a bunch of length & nil checks to "fix" this, but the actual issue is the string should never be empty. The nil checks are just papering over a deeper issue, like you probably need a schema level check for minimum string length. At that point do you just tell it like "no delete all that, the string should never be empty" and let it figure that out, or do I basically need to pseudo code "add a check for empty strings to this file on line 145", or do I just YOLO and know the issue is gone now so it is no longer my problem? My bigger point is how does an LLM know that this seemingly small problem is indicative of some larger failure, like lets say this string is a `user.username` which means users can set their name to empty which means an entire migration is probably necessary. All the AI is going to do is smoosh the error messages and kick the can.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- nerptastic 6mo ago
  Man I really thought this was satire. It’s phenomenal that you can gain 10x benefits at all layers of the stack, you must have a very small development team or work alone. I just don’t see how I could export 10x the work and have it properly validated by peers at this point in time. I may be able to generate code 10-20x faster, but there are nuances that only a human can reason about in my particular sector.
  - deely3 6mo ago
    It's simpler actually: author trying to make a business developing AI product.
    - AlexeyBelov 6mo ago
      Yes, and he's shilling in almost every thread. This is tiring.
  - hsuduebc2 6mo ago
    I noticed that too. At start. It vaguely reminded me of the famous Navy SEAL copypasta.
    - seanw444 6mo ago
      What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch?
      - hsuduebc2 6mo ago
        I see some confusion from your downvotes. Sean cited the start of "navy seal copypasta" The Navy Seal copypasta is a internet meme consisting of an absurdly over the top tough guy threat, posted to mock someone who is acting somehow aggressive, insecure, or self important online, usually after a minor argument. Here it's full text: >What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.
- britzkopf 6mo ago
  > And before anyone accuses me of being some "vibe coder", I've built five nines active-active money rails that move billions of dollars a day at 50kqps+, amongst lots of other hard hitting platform engineering work. Serious senior engineering for over a decade You sound like a pro wrestler. I'd like to know what "hard-hitting" engineering work is. Hydraulic hammers?
  - dmoy 6mo ago
    I mean five nines is legitimately difficult to accomplish for a lot of problem spaces. It's also like.... difficult to honestly and accurately measure. And account for whether or not you're getting lucky based on your underlying dependencies (servers, etc) not crashing as much as advertised, or if it's actually five nines. Or whether you've run it for a month and gotten <30s of measure downtime and declared victory, vs run it for three years with copious software updates. I always assume most people claiming five nines are just not measuring it correctly, or have not exercised the full set of things that will go wrong over a long enough period of time (dc failures, network partitions, config errors, bad network switches that drop only UDP traffic on certain ports, erroneous ACL changes, bad software updates, etc etc) Maybe they did it all correct though, in which case, yea, seems hard hitting to me.
    - sutib 6mo ago
      5 nines is at best a temporary achievement, given enough time.
- dandellion 6mo ago
  You must be using it wrong, because I'm getting 100x the work done and currently at 1.5 million MRR with this SAAS I vibe coded over the weekend. After I solved entrepreneurship I decided to retire and I now spend my days reading HN, posting on topics about AI.
  - darth_aardvark 6mo ago
    You're still manually posting? All of my HN posting, trolling, shitposting and spamming is taken care of by a fleet of bots I vibecoded in the last 5 minutes.
    - slowmovintarget 6mo ago
      You gest, but I know people who've done this. "I gotta be present." Me: Reenacting the Malcolm Reynolds too many responses meme.
- ipaddr 6mo ago
  I'm getting 1,000x improvement building notepad applications with 6 9s. No one is faster. Need some help selling these notepad apps, do you have a prompt for that?
  - RaftPeople 6mo ago
    I don't want to sound like I'm trying to one-up you, but I've basically vibe coded the entire internet. I'm surprised nobody thought of it before me but basically the LLM's are trained on the internet and I just had it spit back out everything. It's running in parallel so I can validate it, which of course I'm using LLM's to do that. Once it's ready I will put it on the market, but get this, my internet will be cheaper than the current internet. I'll probably just make it one cheaper, like if the current internet costs, for example, 7, I'll make my internet cost 6.
- xantronix 6mo ago
  Mind if I use this as a copypasta for the future? This checks off every point people bring on LinkedIn and elsewhere. In all seriousness though, writing code, or even sitting down and properly architecting things, have never been bottlenecks for me. It has either been artificial deadlines preventing me from writing proper unit tests, or the requirement for code review from people on my team who don't even work on the same codebase as I do on a daily basis. I have often stated and stand by the assertion that I develop at the speed of my own understanding, and I think that is a good virtue to carry forth that I think will stand the test of time and bring about the best organisational outcomes. It's just a matter of finding the right place that values this approach. Edit for context: My team is an ops team that needed a couple developers; I was picked to implement some internal tooling. The deadlines I was given for the initial development are tied directly to my performance evaluation. My boss has only ever been a manager for almost two years. He has only ever had development headcount for less than a year. He has never been on a development team himself. The man does not take breaks and micromanages at every opportunity he gets. He is paranoid for his job, thinking he is going to be imminently replaced by our (cheaper) EU counterparts. His management style and verbal admonitions reflect this; he frequently projects these insecurities onto others, using unnecessarily accusatory speech. I am not the only developer on my team who has had such interactions with him. I have screenshots of conversations with him that I felt necessary to present to a therapist. This degree of time pressure is entirely unprecedented in my 20 year career. Yes, this is a dysfunctional environment.
  - mikebenfield 6mo ago
    > artificial deadlines preventing me from writing proper unit tests, or the requirement for code review from people on my team who don't even work on the same codebase as I do on a daily basis I have never experienced this, and it sounds remarkably dysfunctional to me.
    - lijok 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      - 6mo ago
- dwaltrip 6mo ago
  It’d be cool to see your process in depth. You should record some of your sessions :) I mostly believe you. I have seen hints of what you are talking about. But often times I feel like I’m on the right track but I’m actually just spinning when wheels and the AI is just happily going along with it. Or I’m getting too deep on something and I’m caught up in the loop, becoming ungrounded from the reality of the code and the specific problem. If I notice that and am not too tired, I can reel it back in and re-ground things. Take a step back and make sure we are on reasonable path. But I’m realizing it can be surprisingly difficult to catch that loop early sometimes. At least for me. I’ve also done some pretty awesome shit with it that either would have never happened or taken far longer without AI — easily 5x-10x in many cases. It’s all quite fascinating. Much to learn. This idea is forming for me that developing good “AI discipline” is incredibly important. P.s. sometimes I also get this weird feeling of “AI exhaustion”. Where the thought of sending another prompt feels quite painful. The last week I’ve felt that a lot. P.p.s. And then of course this doesn’t even touch on maintaining code quality over time. The “after” part when the LLM implements something. There are lots of good patterns and approaches for handling this, but it’s a distinct phase of the process with lots of complexities and nuances. And it’s oh-so-temping to skip or postpone. More so if the AI output is larger — exactly when you need it most.
- surgical_fire 6mo ago
  I read this as satire. I still think it is.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  I use Claude Code a lot, but I don't understand these "I'm doing 10X the work" comments. I spend a lot of time reviewing any code that comes out of Claude Code. Even using Opus 4.6 with max effort there is almost always something that needs to be changed, often dramatically. I can see how people go down the path of thinking "Wow, this code compiles and passes my tests! Ship it!" and start handing trust over to Opus, but I've already seen what this turns into 6 months down the road: Projects get mired down in so much complexity and LLM spaghetti that the codebase becomes fragile. Everyone is sidetracked restructuring messy code from the past, then fighting bugs that appear in the change. I can believe some of the more recent studies showing LLMs can accelerate work by circa 20% (1.2X) because that's on the same order of magnitude that I and others are seeing with careful use. When someone comes out and claims 10X more output, I simply cannot believe they're doing careful engineering work instead of just shipping the output after a cursory glance.
  - tracker1 6mo ago
    I find that it's relative to the amount of planning time you spend... I feel like I've gotten around 5x the output while using Claude Code w/ Opus over what I will get done myself... That said, I'm probably spending about 3x as much time planning as I would when just straight coding for/by myself. And that's generally the difference. I can use the agent to scaffold a lot of test/demo frameworks around the pieces I'm working on pretty cleanly and have the agent fill in. I still spend a lot of time validating the tests and the code being completed though. The errors I tend to get from the agent are roughly similar to what I might see from a developer/team that works remotely... you still need to verify. The difference is the turn around seems to be minutes over days. You're also able to observe over simply review... When I see a bad path, I can usually abort/cancel, revert back to the last commit and try again with more planning.
  - Pay08 6mo ago
    That's part of why I don't get AI for directly writing code at all. If I am going to be reviewing anything that comes out of it (and I will) then I might as well just write it myself. It's easier and faster, although it does also make it easier to fall victim to blind spots.
- skydhash 6mo ago
  > If you're not seeing these same successes, I legitimately think you're using it wrong. What is “using it right”? You wrote claims, but explain nothing about your process. Anything not reproducible is either luck or lie.
- xantronix 6mo ago
  I reread your comment and I think you might be sincere. To address this point: > If you're not seeing these same successes, I legitimately think you're using it wrong. I'm not sure how you could say that, considering I'm not using it at all. I don't want to, and I don't plan to. If that becomes an issue, I'm exiting this industry because I simply don't fucking care any longer. I am fine living the rest of my life and dying happy and sore being an automotive technician.

by rurp 6mo ago

echelon 6mo ago

> I get it. LLMs are cool technology. I don't think many of you have legitimately tried Claude Code, or maybe you're holding it wrong. I'm getting 10x the work done. I'm operating at all layers of the stack with a speed and rapidity I've never had before. And before anyone accuses me of being some "vibe coder", I've built five nines active-active money rails that move billions of dollars a day at 50kqps+, amongst lots of other hard hitting platform engineering work. Serious senior engineering for over a decade. This isn't just a "cool technology". We've exited the punch card phase. And that is hard or impossible to come back from. If you're not seeing these same successes, I legitimately think you're using it wrong. I honestly don't like subscription services, hyperscaler concentration of power, or the fact I can't run Opus locally. But it doesn't matter - the tool exists in the shape it does, and I have to consume it in the way that it's presented. I hope for a different offering that is more democratic and open, but right now the market hasn't provided that. It's as if you got access to fiber or broadband and were asked to go back to ISDN/dial up.

embedding-shape 6mo ago
> and I have to consume it in the way that it's presented I'm just curious, why do you "have to"? Don't get me wrong, I'm making the same choice myself too, realizing a bunch of global drawbacks because of my local/personal preference, but I won't claim I have to, it's a choice I'm making because I'm lazy.
- echelon 6mo ago
  My job title is "provide value". I'm given a tool that lets me 10x "provide value". My personal preferences and tastes literally do not matter.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    As a professional you have a choice in how you produce whatever it is you produce. Sure, you can go for the simplest, most expensive and "easiest" way of doing things, or you can do other things, depending on your perspective and requirements. None of this is set in stone, some people make choices based on personal preferences, and that matters as much to them as your choices matter to you.
- wongarsu 6mo ago
  What are the reasonable options besides a Claude Code subscription (or an equivalent from Codex or Copilot)? I could pay API prices for the same models, but aside from paying much more for the same result that doesn't seem helpful I could pay a 4-5 figure sum for hardware to run a far inferior open model I could pay a six figure sum for hardware to run an open model that's only a couple months behind in capability (or a 4-5 figure sum to run the same model at a snail's pace) I could pay API costs to semi-trustworthy inference provider to run one of those open models None of those seem like great alternatives. If I want cutting-edge coding performance then a subscription is the most reasonable option Note that this applies mostly to coding. For many other tasks local models or paid inference on open models is very reasonable. But for coding that last bit of performance matters
  - prabal97 6mo ago
    I use my OAI subscription on my Claude Code. I get the benefit of the Claude Code interface with the intelligence of OAI models. https://prabal.ca/posts/claude-code-chatgpt-subscription/ https://prabal.ca/posts/claude-code-chatgpt-subscription/
blurbleblurble 6mo ago
> fact I can't run Opus locally Yet
epistasis 6mo ago
I'm still reviewing all the code that's created, and asking for modifications, and basically using LLMs as a 2000 wpm typist, and seeing similar productivity gains. Especially in new frameworks! Everything is test driven development, super clean and super fast. The challenge now is how to plan architectures and codebases to get really big and really scale, without AI slop creating hidden tech debt. Foundations of the code must be very solid, and the architecture from the start has to be right. But even redoing the architecture becomes so much faster now...
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ericmcer 6mo ago
I mean at this point can we just conclude that there are a group of engineers who claim to have incredible success with it and a group that claim it is unreliable and cannot be trusted to do complex tasks. I struggle to believe that a ton of seemingly intelligent software engineers are too dumb to figure out how to use Claude code to get reliable results, it seems much more likely to me that it can do well at isolated tasks or new projects but fails when pointed at large complex code bases because it just... is a token predictor lol. But yeah spinning up a green fields project in an extensively solved area (ledgers) is going to be something an AI shines at. It isn't like we don't use this stuff also, I ask Cursor to do things 20x a day and it does something I don't like 50% of the time. Even things like pasting an error message it struggles with. How do I reconcile my actual daily experience with hype messages I see online?
- hombre_fatal 6mo ago
  I suspect many people here have tried it, but they expected it to one-shot any prompt, and when it didn't, it confirmed what they wanted to be true and they responded with "hah, see?" and then washed their hands of it. So it's not that they're too stupid. There are various motivations for this: clinging on to familiarity, resistance to what feels like yet another tool, anti-AI koolaid, earnestly underwhelmed but don't understand how much better it can be, reacting to what they perceive to be incessant cheerleading, etc. It's kind of like anti-Javascript posts on HN 10+ years ago. These people weren't too stupid to understand how you could steelman Node.js, they just weren't curious enough to ask, and maybe it turned out they hadn't even used Javascript since "DHTML" was a term except to do $(".box").toggle(). I wish there were more curiosity on HN.
  - ericmcer 6mo ago
    So what do I do differently then? Hypothetically, you have a simple slice out of bounds error because a function is getting an empty string so it does something like: `""[5]`. Opus will add a bunch of length & nil checks to "fix" this, but the actual issue is the string should never be empty. The nil checks are just papering over a deeper issue, like you probably need a schema level check for minimum string length. At that point do you just tell it like "no delete all that, the string should never be empty" and let it figure that out, or do I basically need to pseudo code "add a check for empty strings to this file on line 145", or do I just YOLO and know the issue is gone now so it is no longer my problem? My bigger point is how does an LLM know that this seemingly small problem is indicative of some larger failure, like lets say this string is a `user.username` which means users can set their name to empty which means an entire migration is probably necessary. All the AI is going to do is smoosh the error messages and kick the can.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
nerptastic 6mo ago
Man I really thought this was satire. It’s phenomenal that you can gain 10x benefits at all layers of the stack, you must have a very small development team or work alone. I just don’t see how I could export 10x the work and have it properly validated by peers at this point in time. I may be able to generate code 10-20x faster, but there are nuances that only a human can reason about in my particular sector.
- deely3 6mo ago
  It's simpler actually: author trying to make a business developing AI product.
  - AlexeyBelov 6mo ago
    Yes, and he's shilling in almost every thread. This is tiring.
- hsuduebc2 6mo ago
  I noticed that too. At start. It vaguely reminded me of the famous Navy SEAL copypasta.
  - seanw444 6mo ago
    What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch?
    - hsuduebc2 6mo ago
      I see some confusion from your downvotes. Sean cited the start of "navy seal copypasta" The Navy Seal copypasta is a internet meme consisting of an absurdly over the top tough guy threat, posted to mock someone who is acting somehow aggressive, insecure, or self important online, usually after a minor argument. Here it's full text: >What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.
britzkopf 6mo ago
> And before anyone accuses me of being some "vibe coder", I've built five nines active-active money rails that move billions of dollars a day at 50kqps+, amongst lots of other hard hitting platform engineering work. Serious senior engineering for over a decade You sound like a pro wrestler. I'd like to know what "hard-hitting" engineering work is. Hydraulic hammers?
- dmoy 6mo ago
  I mean five nines is legitimately difficult to accomplish for a lot of problem spaces. It's also like.... difficult to honestly and accurately measure. And account for whether or not you're getting lucky based on your underlying dependencies (servers, etc) not crashing as much as advertised, or if it's actually five nines. Or whether you've run it for a month and gotten <30s of measure downtime and declared victory, vs run it for three years with copious software updates. I always assume most people claiming five nines are just not measuring it correctly, or have not exercised the full set of things that will go wrong over a long enough period of time (dc failures, network partitions, config errors, bad network switches that drop only UDP traffic on certain ports, erroneous ACL changes, bad software updates, etc etc) Maybe they did it all correct though, in which case, yea, seems hard hitting to me.
  - sutib 6mo ago
    5 nines is at best a temporary achievement, given enough time.
dandellion 6mo ago
You must be using it wrong, because I'm getting 100x the work done and currently at 1.5 million MRR with this SAAS I vibe coded over the weekend. After I solved entrepreneurship I decided to retire and I now spend my days reading HN, posting on topics about AI.
- darth_aardvark 6mo ago
  You're still manually posting? All of my HN posting, trolling, shitposting and spamming is taken care of by a fleet of bots I vibecoded in the last 5 minutes.
  - slowmovintarget 6mo ago
    You gest, but I know people who've done this. "I gotta be present." Me: Reenacting the Malcolm Reynolds too many responses meme.
ipaddr 6mo ago
I'm getting 1,000x improvement building notepad applications with 6 9s. No one is faster. Need some help selling these notepad apps, do you have a prompt for that?
- RaftPeople 6mo ago
  I don't want to sound like I'm trying to one-up you, but I've basically vibe coded the entire internet. I'm surprised nobody thought of it before me but basically the LLM's are trained on the internet and I just had it spit back out everything. It's running in parallel so I can validate it, which of course I'm using LLM's to do that. Once it's ready I will put it on the market, but get this, my internet will be cheaper than the current internet. I'll probably just make it one cheaper, like if the current internet costs, for example, 7, I'll make my internet cost 6.
xantronix 6mo ago
Mind if I use this as a copypasta for the future? This checks off every point people bring on LinkedIn and elsewhere. In all seriousness though, writing code, or even sitting down and properly architecting things, have never been bottlenecks for me. It has either been artificial deadlines preventing me from writing proper unit tests, or the requirement for code review from people on my team who don't even work on the same codebase as I do on a daily basis. I have often stated and stand by the assertion that I develop at the speed of my own understanding, and I think that is a good virtue to carry forth that I think will stand the test of time and bring about the best organisational outcomes. It's just a matter of finding the right place that values this approach. Edit for context: My team is an ops team that needed a couple developers; I was picked to implement some internal tooling. The deadlines I was given for the initial development are tied directly to my performance evaluation. My boss has only ever been a manager for almost two years. He has only ever had development headcount for less than a year. He has never been on a development team himself. The man does not take breaks and micromanages at every opportunity he gets. He is paranoid for his job, thinking he is going to be imminently replaced by our (cheaper) EU counterparts. His management style and verbal admonitions reflect this; he frequently projects these insecurities onto others, using unnecessarily accusatory speech. I am not the only developer on my team who has had such interactions with him. I have screenshots of conversations with him that I felt necessary to present to a therapist. This degree of time pressure is entirely unprecedented in my 20 year career. Yes, this is a dysfunctional environment.
- mikebenfield 6mo ago
  > artificial deadlines preventing me from writing proper unit tests, or the requirement for code review from people on my team who don't even work on the same codebase as I do on a daily basis I have never experienced this, and it sounds remarkably dysfunctional to me.
  - lijok 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - 6mo ago
dwaltrip 6mo ago
It’d be cool to see your process in depth. You should record some of your sessions :) I mostly believe you. I have seen hints of what you are talking about. But often times I feel like I’m on the right track but I’m actually just spinning when wheels and the AI is just happily going along with it. Or I’m getting too deep on something and I’m caught up in the loop, becoming ungrounded from the reality of the code and the specific problem. If I notice that and am not too tired, I can reel it back in and re-ground things. Take a step back and make sure we are on reasonable path. But I’m realizing it can be surprisingly difficult to catch that loop early sometimes. At least for me. I’ve also done some pretty awesome shit with it that either would have never happened or taken far longer without AI — easily 5x-10x in many cases. It’s all quite fascinating. Much to learn. This idea is forming for me that developing good “AI discipline” is incredibly important. P.s. sometimes I also get this weird feeling of “AI exhaustion”. Where the thought of sending another prompt feels quite painful. The last week I’ve felt that a lot. P.p.s. And then of course this doesn’t even touch on maintaining code quality over time. The “after” part when the LLM implements something. There are lots of good patterns and approaches for handling this, but it’s a distinct phase of the process with lots of complexities and nuances. And it’s oh-so-temping to skip or postpone. More so if the AI output is larger — exactly when you need it most.
surgical_fire 6mo ago
I read this as satire. I still think it is.
Aurornis 6mo ago
I use Claude Code a lot, but I don't understand these "I'm doing 10X the work" comments. I spend a lot of time reviewing any code that comes out of Claude Code. Even using Opus 4.6 with max effort there is almost always something that needs to be changed, often dramatically. I can see how people go down the path of thinking "Wow, this code compiles and passes my tests! Ship it!" and start handing trust over to Opus, but I've already seen what this turns into 6 months down the road: Projects get mired down in so much complexity and LLM spaghetti that the codebase becomes fragile. Everyone is sidetracked restructuring messy code from the past, then fighting bugs that appear in the change. I can believe some of the more recent studies showing LLMs can accelerate work by circa 20% (1.2X) because that's on the same order of magnitude that I and others are seeing with careful use. When someone comes out and claims 10X more output, I simply cannot believe they're doing careful engineering work instead of just shipping the output after a cursory glance.
- tracker1 6mo ago
  I find that it's relative to the amount of planning time you spend... I feel like I've gotten around 5x the output while using Claude Code w/ Opus over what I will get done myself... That said, I'm probably spending about 3x as much time planning as I would when just straight coding for/by myself. And that's generally the difference. I can use the agent to scaffold a lot of test/demo frameworks around the pieces I'm working on pretty cleanly and have the agent fill in. I still spend a lot of time validating the tests and the code being completed though. The errors I tend to get from the agent are roughly similar to what I might see from a developer/team that works remotely... you still need to verify. The difference is the turn around seems to be minutes over days. You're also able to observe over simply review... When I see a bad path, I can usually abort/cancel, revert back to the last commit and try again with more planning.
- Pay08 6mo ago
  That's part of why I don't get AI for directly writing code at all. If I am going to be reviewing anything that comes out of it (and I will) then I might as well just write it myself. It's easier and faster, although it does also make it easier to fall victim to blind spots.
skydhash 6mo ago
> If you're not seeing these same successes, I legitimately think you're using it wrong. What is “using it right”? You wrote claims, but explain nothing about your process. Anything not reproducible is either luck or lie.
xantronix 6mo ago
I reread your comment and I think you might be sincere. To address this point: > If you're not seeing these same successes, I legitimately think you're using it wrong. I'm not sure how you could say that, considering I'm not using it at all. I don't want to, and I don't plan to. If that becomes an issue, I'm exiting this industry because I simply don't fucking care any longer. I am fine living the rest of my life and dying happy and sore being an automotive technician.