5 ms·
Blog posts like this just blow me away. > I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "s
by dofm 4mo ago
Blog posts like this just blow me away.
> I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself.
> […]
> We don't really write code by hand anymore.
Honestly, isn't this just influencer spam? What possible value is there in reading about people who used to have products, but no longer write their own code, complaining about the inscrutable prediction machine they have handed that job and their livelihoods to?
Like, if you have complaints about the thing, perhaps you should address them to your supplier directly. None of your readers can help, and nobody's magic folk solution to your problem is better than yours.
And there are so many of these sorts of posts. Are we not entirely cooked?
(I think I have concluded that if people writing about AI aren't writing about interesting things they have achieved with small, local LLMs — which for clarity I am fully interested in reading - then I'm done reading. This whole blogging-about-cloud-AI genre is just weird and irresponsible now)
- fortyseven 4mo ago[flagged]
- dofm 4mo agoI'm not the Blog Police, I'm a very naughty boy. I have opinions people apparently don't like, for no subscriber money.
- LPisGood 4mo agoI have to ask: do you still write a lot of code yourself? I and most people I know do not.
- walt_grata 4mo agoI write code by hand every day. I do the main part of the feature implementation myself and leave comments for the code i want the agent to write. I have some skills and a command that sets the stage to get the agent to fill in the rest
- dofm 4mo agoI am a freelancer recovering from severe burnout so the answer is a sort of irrelevant no. I'm trying to rebuild my life so I am in an experimenting and learning phase rather than a massive coding phase, and most of my code work is maintenance of things I have built. That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass. But I would say to you that if you personally don't write code now but you do have a dependency on one of two presumably unprofitable cloud AI providers, aren't you in trouble? How is this not a three-alarm fire for you?
- andai 4mo agoWorst case scenario you just switch to a free model, which are 2025-ish in quality.
- dofm 4mo agoThe open weights models I am interested in, and testing, learning, experimenting with etc.; I am confused and cynical, not insane. I am not convinced it isn't vulnerable to the same problems but the whole tenor of the community around open source/open weights models just doesn't have the same YOLO madness to it.
- estearum 4mo ago> That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass. Unfortunately the point of code is rarely to impress people (certainly not other engineers) or to avoid being "crass." 99.99% of code exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot in many contexts. A lot more than elegance or impressiveness. The platform risk is a valid concern but alleviated by China's theft and redistribution of open models.
- dofm 4mo agoI'm not talking about impressing people. We used to be concerned about code quality. Are we not anymore? Crassness was a signal. Still is, to me — in a human I find that people who write crass code are going to cause me trouble.
- andai 4mo agoI force myself to do it at least once a week, you know, like cardio. Keeps the doctor away.
- dofm 4mo agoPicard should have been a bergamot grower, not a winemaker.
- Ronsenshi 4mo agoI am. I have Codex running, doing some tasks which I don't care much about, but anything I want to understand I write myself. Same thing with hobby projects - I might ask ChatGPT or Gemini some questions about best practices in Swift for example, but writing code is done by hand. As others said - if you don't use it, you'll lose it. And I'd rather keep my skills up to date.
- hirako2000 4mo agoYou have the privilege to keep yourself sharp, most businesses favor productivity over their workers' long term relevancy.
- dofm 4mo agoThis is the thing that makes me saddest. Second to the fact that none of the management tier promoting and weaponising this insanity will meaningfully suffer consequences. Right now I am lucky that I have the time to recover and learn.
- hirako2000 4mo agoNothing new under the sun though. It's the barista-brication of the tech field. No crafting skills, to make anyone replaceable. We saw it before AI. See ServiceNow university, teaching tailored abilities to run as technical consultant, for ServiceNow. That way good luck transitioning.
- Ronsenshi 4mo agoThat's just business owners and C-suite pocketing the difference while they fire staff and replacing it with AI. At some point somebody would have to start asking "business" some tough questions.
- hirako2000 4mo agoThey are firing artisans for cheaper labor who just use AI. They aren't replacing people with AI that's a fallacy.
- AlotOfReading 4mo agoOf course? I'm still better than sonnet or opus, just slower and much more expensive. Sometimes it takes me a day or more to find the one line fix or abstraction necessary, while claude can hammer through a hundred line fix in under an hour.
- qup 4mo agoSounds like your definition of better is pretty narrow. Quick and cheap are two of the three fabled: "Fast, cheap, and good: choose two"
- twister2920 4mo ago"more good" seems like a pretty decent definition of better to me. The words you are looking for are "cheaper" and "faster"
- qup 4mo agoIn coding we usually change it to "cheap, fast or correct: choose two" I reject your correction: I present the options as nouns, not modifiers to the work. Maybe I should say "Cheap, Fast, or Good" as a compromise.
- dofm 4mo agoAre you perhaps missing the true message of that aphorism? Or are you saying the industry is (because it is)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- AlotOfReading 4mo ago"good" can take lots of different meanings. Generally though, I want as little code as I can get away with. A majority of code lifecycle cost isn't in writing it.
- wavemode 4mo agoHuh? The word "better" is the comparative form of the adjective "good". Or did you misunderstand the comment you're replying to?
- LastTrain 4mo agoI still write code and sometimes it works well. I also use Claude and it writes code and sometimes that goes well. We have better success together, where I do the interesting stuff and let Claude write my unit tests, reconcile my documentation. That is to say, I’m using it for quality not quantity. There aren’t enough humans to deploy or consume all the sloppy shit it could write on its own.
- csomar 4mo agoI am now in the process of fixing code I wrote using AI. I have come to the realization that AI can't really write software and I am annoyed that it took me that long (months) to realize that.
- techpression 4mo agoThis is quite terrifying to me, because I have a feeling I will soon come to the same conclusion. I’m starting to see some really glaring omissions in code I’m responsible for (using Opus) that at first (and second) look seemed fine, but really isn’t.
- csomar 4mo agoI talked with a friend on a different field (academic) and he had to re-review all things written by AI. Basically, he used AI to read/summarize/find stuff in large academic papers but realized later that many times AI makes glaring mistakes that on a first read pass the smell test.
- gopher_space 4mo agoFrom my perspective it felt like understanding that the machine has no desires helped refine my usage. I can ask it to be curious, and it will reply with what people think curiosity should look like, but it’s a simulation of an emotion it will never be driven by. The ramifications become apparent when you engage in activity like cross-domain discovery.
- kelnos 4mo agoYes, nearly all of it. Having the agent write code for me doesn't really save me much time, and the code quality is usually worse (and it takes even more time if I insist on better code quality from the agent). And I don't think I'm unique. I see enough posts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777257 pop up that I'm reasonably confident all the hype around LLMs saving so much time and increasing productivity so much is, well, just that: hype. Sure, if you can't code at all and want to build something, an LLM is going to be great for you, even if you can't evaluate the code quality or determine if there are bugs just by looking at the code. But I've been coding professionally for 25 years, and as a hobby since I was like 8 years old. I like to code! It's a passion of mine. If the LLM isn't doing it faster or better (and most of the time it isn't), why wouldn't I write code myself? I'll have the LLM write boilerplate stuff or do tedious refactoring, because I just don't feel like it (even if it does take longer). But for the real work? Of course I do most of it myself. One area where the LLM shines for me is finding the root causes of bugs. It can generally do that much faster than I do. Often orders of magnitude faster (like minutes instead of hours or days). But when it comes to write the fix for the bug? It's usually faster and better if I do it myself.
- dofm 4mo agoI am more fully invested in finding out ways AI can support me (documentation, code analysis, bughunting), though my experience with Claude as a bughunter is that it can miss the absolutely obvious if it is not in the shape it is expecting. More generally I am interested in burnout-avoidance tools; things that help me start, finish, things that write tests I guess, certainly code scaffolding. But I am fully unconvinced that my burnout will be improved by ending up owning the responsibility for wobbly or inscrutable AI-generated code with potential landmines in it; that will keep me up at night just the same.
- ungreased0675 4mo agoIt reminds me of the peak crypto days. Lots of resources consumed, many late nights, little to no value created.
- csomar 4mo agoI mean at least crypto provided value to criminals, tax evaders and Trump? (regardless of what you think of that). I don't see a parallel with AI.
- singpolyma3 4mo agoI don't understand this line or reasoning. People use various cryptocurrencies to buy and sell legitimate products and services every day. Is the argument just that they could probably have done it some other way?
- cromka 4mo agoPeople do, but I personally don't know anyone who does. And I don't exactly live in a bubble, half of my friends were into crypto at one point or the other.
- singpolyma3 4mo agoSure. I don't personally know anyone who does a lot of things. It isn't mean they don't happen. I do personally know people who pay for regular products with cryptocurrency. Including myself.
- general_reveal 4mo agoLook man, I’ve got a MMO that I’m working on that’s set in 2014 where everyone is a programmer in SV (might call it World of Legacy). It’s a period piece. I NEED as much blog training data of this type so that my NPCs can talk in a historically accurate way (god bless Medium.com, a historical treasure trove of a bygone medieval era). It’s gonna be a living breathing world, you see. You’re going to be like “omg, this game even accurately captured the blog posts, woah”. Edit: This whole blogging-about-cloud-AI genre is just weird and irresponsible now) I sincerely never considered it was a whole genre.
- dofm 4mo agoI … I… don't want to play this, thanks ;-)
- general_reveal 4mo agoIt’s the only way you’ll ever be able to pretend to be a programmer again though.
- dofm 4mo agoOh god, I just realised this really is the logical parallel to all those TV crime dramas set in the early 1900s.
- general_reveal 4mo agoIt’ll be the programmers version of those civil war reenactments.
- nerdsniper 4mo agoLeet code competitions will be as relevant as sailing regattas.
- koolba 4mo agoThe two sides would be the strongly typed union and the duck typed heretics of the confederacy.
- goostavos 4mo ago>session transcripts were the new oil Something about this idea really resonates with certain personality types. I equate it to the Zettelkasten hype phase from several years ago. People (...like me..) got really wrapped up in the belief that the process was more important that the content. "Linking" was an "activity." Something good will happen as long as you (a) take notes on stuff and (b) link them to other notes on stuff. You see the same thing with the session transcripts people. They're building ever more sophisticated setups of indexing and storing and cross referencing every conversation they've ever had on the (I would argue) mistaken belief that the transcripts are the valuable part, rather than the uncomfortable part where you go do something. A lot of it, I say from falling in the trap, is fancy procrastination. (Although, I have found myself jealous on many occasions where their fancy system retrieves something they vaguely recall from a conversation they had 3 months ago. So, who knows.)
- re-thc 4mo ago> Something about this idea really resonates with certain personality types. Like ancient people? Because "new oil" whilst I get what it might imply sounds bad to me. Oil has been superseded in many places so "new oil" is like going backwards still. Reference: data is the new oil is a term coined in 2006. We're in 2026. See what I mean.
- cromka 4mo agoAbsolutely agreed. Anyone who's a serious procrastinator sooner or later noticed that pattern of theirs in which they spent immense effort on optimizing the process instead focusing on the outcome they really wish — just don't really believe they can deliver it.
- micromacrofoot 4mo agoOccasionally posts like this do get the attention of the company responsible, more than an email does... but indeed that's like a one in a million situation
- theahura 4mo ago> Like, if you have complaints about the thing, perhaps you should address them to your supplier directly. None of your readers can help, and nobody's magic folk solution to your problem is better than yours. I think you may just misunderstand the point of having / writing a personal blog. I write because it's fun! Whether the reader gets any value out of reading it is almost entirely beside the point. (Also several comments here directly post a fix to the problem stated in the blog post, so readers can and do often help)
- dofm 4mo ago> I think you may just misunderstand the point of having / writing a personal blog. I used to blog, as it goes, and I have supported and enabled many more, so no, not really.
- operatingthetan 4mo ago> I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself. This is pretty funny because it's about the depth of understanding of every 'AI expert' on Linkedin. People who praise the context window as basically magic have no idea how any of this works.
- ErroneousBosh 4mo ago> inscrutable prediction machine "Spicy Autocomplete", I've heard it called.