8 ms·

The human-in-the-loop is tired

318 points by haritha1313 3mo ago

N_Lens 3mo ago
While I appreciate and agree with the key points of the post, Claude's writing style fingerprints are all over it and I guess it's even more exhausting to read someone's AI written article.
- parl_match 3mo ago
  "If you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it."
- hahahaa 3mo ago
  I don't think it is AI, but I bet it has been through editing/review to match a corporate style. LLMs were trained on this.
  - anon373839 3mo ago
    The writing style, if not AI, is at least a bit tryhard. Turning to the substance of the article: why do people feel the need to run this fast? I have certainly experimented with letting coding agents run amok. The first few times you try it, it feels like a superpower. Then you start examining the icky choices they made in a codebase that is now a dense forest. Then you have to expend a bunch of effort beating it back into submission. Or I guess you can YOLO and throw more AI at it, but then I agree with the person quoted saying "at that point, what am I still doing here?" This is not a satisfying or sustainable way to build, and there really is no reason other than hype and FOMO to do it.
    - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
      > why do people feel the need to run this fast Because if they don't they feel like they will be replaced by someone who will
      - discreteevent 3mo ago
        This happens all the time, even before LLMs. And it happens even when there is no threat. A lot of the time the race to the bottom is driven by anxious people running from imaginary threats. Which is why its often useful to have a person in a group who tells people not to panic (this is often an older person). But of course the AI guys are preying on this anxiety in order to dominate. They are all over HN, either personally or with their bots. Which is why HN is no longer a place that you could go to get mainly unbiased anecdotes and experience. That is still available but it is being drowned out by FUD because the average HN user is now the mark.
      - Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
        This attitude gets people to willingly engage in abusive crunch practices such as in the games industry. I think the people who are like this are the ones who later talk about crunch like it was good in some way or necessary. Basically a bad relation to labor and sustainable lifelong work.
        bluefirebrand 3mo ago
        I agree with you completely and I push for saner work-life balance anywhere I work. Unfortunately this unhealthy work culture is really entrenched most places
    - matltc 3mo ago
      I am with you but I inevitably think it's a skill issue. Some devs put a lot of work into the harness. I tried doing this, felt like running in place to me. the lack of RFC-tier standardization and ever-shifting api is demotivating as well since you might have written a harness that will be obsolete with next model gen/version bump There probably is a correct way to do this, but your average "vibe coder", or even a competent solo dev just yoloing a project, are not implementing such harnesses. In the former case, they may not be able to; in the latter, you're probably better off in 1:1 human to agent workflow due to indeterminate/bad outputs and the amount of back-and-forth in prompts/specs/reviews required to get high-quality work Then again, I saw Matz harness for his compiled ruby project was just like perms.allow find and grep. No skills, no agents.md or anything like that. Would love to see those prompts! I'm sure the fact that it was Matz had a lot to do with that working, though
  - ameliaquining 3mo ago
    It's AI. https://www.pangram.com/history/09db86cf-37fb-4b27-94bf-a9f2d4cd2990 https://www.pangram.com/history/09db86cf-37fb-4b27-94bf-a9f2...
    - onion2k 3mo ago
      If you switch on the 'Supporting Evidence' on that site, it seems to be basing it's opinion on three things: - Use a descriptive triad of "reviewing, directing, and course" (it incorrectly misunderstood 'course correcting'). That's not common in writing but humans do do it occasionally. - Using the word 'thoughtful'. I don't understand that as evidence of AI. - Using the words 'Book Apart' together, which would be a clear AI signal if it wasn't the name of a publisher of short books, and being used in that context in the article. I don't think you should put much stock in the output of pangram.com.
      - ameliaquining 3mo ago
        Pangram's "Supporting Evidence" feature is misleading and you should ignore it. It's entirely separate from the classifier that determines whether text is AI; it just takes text that's already been classified as AI and looks for some hardcoded AI tells in it. I kind of wish they'd get rid of it, but nontechnical users really like it. The classifier itself has a very low rate of false positives: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/BFI_WP_2025-116.pdf https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/BFI_WP_2...
        onion2k 3mo ago
        It's so tempting to drop the text of that paper into Pangram. :)
      - johnfn 3mo ago
        Pangram clearly says "Remember, our results aren’t based on this evidence." when you turn on supporting evidence.
        3mo ago
  - lelanthran 3mo ago
    > I don't think it is AI, but I bet it has been through editing/review to match a corporate style. LLMs were trained on this. My standard reply to claims like this is: post a pre-2022 link with an LLM style that matches your claims. Usually people claim "LLMs sound like the way they do because that's how people write". Your claim is only a little different: "LLMs sound like the way they do because that's how corporate writes". You may be correct, but I'd still like to see a pre-2022 link confirming this.
  - Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
    I also thought "I'm so glad this isn't AI" but maybe I can only recognize ChatGPTs crappy writing style.
  - jillesvangurp 3mo ago
    I just made chat gpt list all the key indications that this article was LLM generated. I'll spare you the details, it's a very long list. It's actually possible to counter some of this stuff with skills and guard rails. The author clearly has not mastered how to do that and sound more authentic. It's all a bit stunted, cringe, long winded, repetitive, etc.
  - vinodc 3mo ago
    It's certainly AI. There are a ton of phrases that Claude loves to use: genuinely, trap, staccato phrases. continuous reframing, the list goes on. I find it very tiresome and repetitive and simply too grating to read at this point, after already working with Claude all day.
- postsantum 3mo ago
  "It's not" - 3 matches Dashline - present Yes, it's AI-written
  - samplatt 3mo ago
    "It's not" only has two matches; the third is "It's noticable". The other two are a whole paragraph dedicated to "it's not X, it's Y" which is a little more than you'd normally expect. Firefox doesn't seem to discriminate between em-dashes and hyphens using ctrl-F so I'm not sure about those. Having said that the tone REEKS of AI generation, so meh.
    - normie3000 3mo ago
      Would AI have spelt "noticeable" correctly?
  - tharkun__ 3mo ago
    This very well may be AI written. Then again, the stuff our PMs output, all pre-AI, now would all qualify as "AI written". There are certain writing styles, which even if you wrote them all yourself, most people will now attribute to AI. The all-too-common em-dash, yes sure. Guess what, it's a thing that was actually taught as "the thing to use if you write properly". So guess what lots of folks consciously put into their writing to sound more professional even before AI. Bingo! Similarly CVs. A lot of the stuff that lots of us complain about post-AI was "good practice to do" pre-AI. But most people didn't bother. Couldn't be bothered. Now that AI was trained on it and people ask their AIs to write CVs, it's all over the place. A cover letter that actually picks up on the actual job description posted and connects it up to your CV? That used to be hard work and most people didn't bother. It made you stand out. Now it "reeks of AI" :shrug:
    - Barbing 3mo ago
      I’m sure—pretty sure—we can use em-dashes w/o setting off the slop bells. And try to substitute them, you may; but the bell might still ring. (Yeah it stinks we have to adapt to avoid sounding like a model, especially for the best writers who were probably ripped off a lot more than the rest of us.)
- maxcoder3344 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - happytoexplain 3mo ago
    I have such a hard time believing the implied premise of these complaints-about-complaints. Just say you don't mind AI writing - make that argument. Don't make this nonsensical, defeatist, "if it's common, stop criticizing it" argument.
    - singingtoday 3mo ago
      Well put. This kind of rebuttal, the "I'm not A, you're A", is not only tired, it's a strait up school yard fallacy.
    - maxcoder3344 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      - _fs 3mo ago
        You created a new account for this?
        maxcoder3344 3mo ago
        No. I created an account for this. Hacker news used to be a place I could come read interesting content and peoples reactions and thoughts to it. now it's interesting articles with 100% of the comments whining that it's written by AI. Sad what hackernews has become
        newsicanuse 3mo ago
        This guy is just another one of those ai-pilled noob coders
        deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
- VulgarExigency 3mo ago
  I think it was written mostly by AI, but with a lot more human intervention than the average AI written article, so it doesn't bother me as much as usual.
zem 3mo ago
unlike the op, I've been having a wonderful time using claude, both at work and for my own personal projects, so I will share what has worked for me, just in case it resonates with anyone else. my anecdotal advice is to avoid the entire "agent" temptation, and treat the LLM as a code generator. have a single session running at a time. come up with a plan, iterate on it until you are satisfied, then tell it to execute the plan, and watch it. not necessarily to the extent of reading the scroll (though I sometimes do do that too!) but as it finishes each step look over what it has done, suggest improvements and course corrections, and then let it go on to the next step. at the end you will have a pretty good grasp of the state of the code, and the overall time it will take you isn't really any longer than trying to churn out reams of code and then go through it all at once. the other option if you want something closer to a one shot workflow is to go into far more detail during the planning stage, have it describe not just architectural details but actual code (if you're a senior engineer especially you probably know what the key pieces of code that will drive a lot of other decisions mechanically are likely to be). also refactoring is cheaper than it has ever been, if something feels hard to grasp to you stop and work with the LLM until you like the looks of it better. and again, the key bit is to have one LLM doing one thing at a time, and to stay engaged in the process while it does so.
- hahahaa 3mo ago
  I agree I think Vibe coding (even with myraid loops) is more burnouty than using it like an assistant and being closer to the output.
- 1473-bytes 3mo ago
  Agree with this. I have learned to interact with Claude the same way. Detailed hashing it out at the beginning, then finally execute, even maybe with your scaffolding at the beginning to guide the process. I tried writing this process down in a 'zen of Claude' as a reminder https://github.com/ctomkow/claude/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/ctomkow/claude/blob/main/README.md I've started being able refactor legacy code into a new architecture with great success. Work I've been putting off due to the grind of the work. Edit: I will say it's taken me some months of working with Claude to get to this working process. If you let claude operate with free reign, the inevitable mess and struggle it runs into burns and stresses you out. Also, keeping up with some manual coding when you feel like it and punting to Claude when you have had enough manual coding ensures you still feel in control of the codebase.
TonyAlicea10 3mo ago
Funny I made some very similar points awhile back in a blog post, thinking of it in terms of mode collapse: https://tonyalicea.dev/blog/single-mode-burnout/ https://tonyalicea.dev/blog/single-mode-burnout/
- DenisM 3mo ago
  > the runaway inference truck. Nicely done, thank you.
applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
> The honest truth > That loss is real and it's worth naming I think I will not heed the first sentence and bear with this. What motivates people to do this? What do they get out of prompting Claude for some vapid "thought piece" and spamming it on the internet?
- greyface- 3mo ago
  Clicks, views, attention. This blog is part of Pydantic's sales funnel.
- hyperhello 3mo ago
  It's just as easy to do the second one as the first one.
- jongjong 3mo ago
  > That loss is real and it's worth naming Yep classic Claude-ism. The fact that this article was likely AI generated is the real load-bearing factor in this discussion. Or, as previous versions of Claude would say; it cuts through the heart of the issue.
- singingtoday 3mo ago
  It got a lot of clicks here. Clicks equal money.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  What does any spammer get from their spam?
  - applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
    Well, usually advertising themselves. Spambots used to be really straightforward. "Come buy our penis enlargement pills at x.com!". I guess this is also meant to be an advertisement but it's really roundabout. And while this case is maybe an ad, a lot of these LLM spam articles are on empty blogs not associated with a product.
- queenkjuul 3mo ago
lardosaurusrex 3mo ago
[flagged]
- fizzbuzzdizz 3mo ago
  [dead]
- kaashif 3mo ago
  Indeed. I guess we're talking about it, which is the point of marketing blog posts like this. If it weren't claudeslop, it would still have to be marketing corposlop.
otter-in-a-suit 3mo ago
Relatable. > with my colleague Douwe Wait, meltano Douwe? Small world. Glad to see you're doing well. I always liked meltano. > In an era when anyone can produce reasonable-looking UI Identical looking slop? Every Claude-based vibe coded app looks identical. > The fear of skill rot is legitimate. And the fear that if you don't go fast enough you'll be left behind is — while often overstated — not entirely unfounded. You know what, that's OK. I just hit "OK" on LLM Scala code I _actually_ think is awful. It works. It's probably faster than the "pure" code I'd write by hand. The code I would write - as a FP and Scala/Elm/Haskell/... enjoyer - would actually be maintainable for humans, but LLMs struggle with it. But LLMs writing code for LLMs? Sure, have at it. Objectively lower barrier of entry. > So if you're feeling overwhelmed, destabilized, simultaneously more productive and less happy, know that you're not alone. But yes, I am indeed simultaneously more productive and less happy. https://skaldmaps.com https://skaldmaps.com, my little side project, was only possible _because_ I was able to feed my real world knowledge about real estate, combined with GIS and SWE knowledge into various torment nexus... pardon me, LLM prompts. Since I don't have the _time_ to write boilerplate react code (it's pepper and tomato season in Georgia, which _actually_ brings me joy), telling Claude/Codex/... how to write dbt models saves me time and I objectively get a lot more done, but it's not fun. I guess that's also why I still enjoy blogging. You can't use LLMs for blogs without people noticing immediately. Shameless plug: https://chollinger.com/blog/ https://chollinger.com/blog/ Enjoy my entirely human typos, since that's clearly rare these days.
UnfitFootprint 3mo ago
[dead]
recursivedoubts 3mo ago
You are right to push back on that.
akeck 3mo ago
Reminds me of "The Animal is Tired" (2021) (https://www.robinhobb.com/blog/archives/2021-05 https://www.robinhobb.com/blog/archives/2021-05)
- Avicebron 3mo ago
  This is a great read, thanks.
- Barbing 3mo ago
  > The animal is aging. Not surprising; I knew it would happen eventually, but I didn't make any provisions to deal with that eventuality. Somehow the reality crept up on me. And now it must be dealt with, day after day. (only ~5 paragraphs left now so y’all might as well finish it :) ) Thanks, lots of hackers can use the reminder.
  - nsbk 3mo ago
    Such a good read. Makes you think. Thanks for sharing!
  - Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
    To my fellow nerds: Take care of your bodies! Walk, move, exercise, occasionally eat a vegetable, reach for a piece of fruit rather than a soda! <3
- DavidPiper 3mo ago
  Oh that hit me more than I thought it would, thank you.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  This site is blocking IP addresses. Here's a less-censored mirror: https://archive.is/RWxXP https://archive.is/RWxXP This happens to everyone, very sadly. Arguably, feeling your own decay is not just sad, it's the greatest possible sadness and also what drove most mad people mad. The author was 70 (now 75) and argues wishes he'd treated his own body better, but if he had, he would still be in the same position, but would have missed out on experiences whose memories I'm sure he now treasures. He once played in the snow too long and got frostbite? His feet would still be sore today if he hadn't, but he wouldn't have played in the snow. Take care of your body as much as you can, but you can't treat it like a potion in a video game that you're always afraid to use in a fight because you might need it for the next fight. Eventually you get to the end of the game without using the potion. And more somberly, every part of you can be sacrificed once or zero times to achieve something you believe is a greater purpose. I'm still in some kind of emotional crisis as thinking about this sort of thing makes me break down crying.
thrymenarenot 3mo ago
It stresses me out for some reason and I'm just working on a hobby project.
appplication 3mo ago
> Here's a term for what I think is happening: the human reward function problem. In machine learning, a reward function tells an agent what good looks like. Writing code by hand was never easy, but it was full of small rewards. Solving a problem in your head. Understanding a gnarly bit of logic. Watching the code compile. The feeling of control. LLM-assisted programming has automated much of the work that generated those dopamine hits and replaced it with the cognitive load of review and supervision. The satisfying part shrank. The exhausting part grew. And there are no new rewards to fill the gap. Say what you will about the Claudisms in this piece, this bit certainly rings true for me. With old school coding, there was always a reward at the end, the harder it was, the more satisfying it felt. With agentic coding, I really doesn’t feel like that, at least not in the same way. It feels more like continually riding a wave of productivity, where small features or huge features have similar levels of interaction required. And that’s exciting in the beginning but quickly becomes very tiring.
- verdverm 3mo ago
  Maybe it's different between professional and personal projects, but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent. I'm able to focus on a single project for a month and have something pretty good by the end. Doing rewrites to clean up and reorganize has never been easier, so I get to see and feel more of the design space in action. The can be pretty damn frustrating at times, half of which is me/context, the other their nature
  - georgemcbay 3mo ago
    > but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent. Features might be easier to create, but I rarely ever get the feeling of I did that anymore from writing software. "I told the LLM to do that" is different and far less satisfying for me.
    - DanielHB 3mo ago
      It is all about the destination now where it used to be about the journey and the destination.
Terr_ 3mo ago
> I felt that one in my bones. I was up until nearly 2am recently, prompting, because I was so close to getting a plan right. Or so I thought. [...] And it's addictive in a way that makes the isolation worse. Right, it's more like pulling the lever on slot machine. Oooh, 677, bad luck, do a ritual and try again, and maybe this time... Sure, regular programming also has a feedback loop, but normal errors are--as much as possible and by design--things that happen consistently for reasons, reasons that force you to engage you mind to discern them and then eliminate them (hopefully) forever. Experienced developers don't just try something random, hope it works, and if it works you just dismiss it as unknowable. > But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part. Unless, perhaps, you were already fatigued trying to deal with many stakeholders who can't agree what the system even is. :p
- adamddev1 3mo ago
  I remember when I was just learning how to code and making some web app, I had to do a lot more blind guessing and running. "Ok let me try this... Will that work now?" I remember staying up really late, feeling stuck to the computer in that slot machine mode. Then when I learned more I got less and less of that guessing feeling. I understood what I was building and what would work, I began using typed languages and could keep on track with the compiler/LSP. This brought me more into a satisfying flow state, and I had less of that addicting "wait let me see if this will work" magic. It seems like coding with Claude etc is a lot like a trip back to the guesswork stage, and I don't want to go back there. (Sometimes, when I'm doing some dev-opsy type stuff of stringing a bunch of messy components together or working with a pile of complex APIs, I can feel myself back in the blind guessing territory, and incidentally this is where I find a chat with an LLM most helpful.)
  - throw1234567891 3mo ago
    It's a trip back to a guesswork stage because most of the training data looks like the process you described your beginnings have been like. Now you know how to do things first shot. When you write the code, your inner voice reminds you ahead of time to do it like this and that. And that "this and that" is what your prompt needs to have to avoid the trip to guesswork. Working with agents is like working with juniors. If you don't give them the direction and explain how, they'll be as lost as the LLM. The difference is, your brain finds guardrails as you solve the problem, the LLM doesn't have this context, you have to give it upfront. Like, you know, a good manager would.
verdverm 3mo ago
Should we not get to work less if Ai is increasing productivity so much while also making us exhausted more quickly? Perhaps on the way to UBI and the end of labor, we could get a 32 and 24h work wweek with lots more vacation, my hope at least
- BugsJustFindMe 3mo ago
  Name one time in all of history when increased productivity translated to workers working less. I'll wait.
  - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
    Every single worker that has been laid off due to "increased AI productivity" is working less As a broad historical trend? Maybe not But fewer people working, right now? Absolutely
    - BugsJustFindMe 3mo ago
      > Every single worker that has been laid off due to "increased AI productivity" is working less This isn't a useful definition of working less in the thread context and is not the kind of working less that I meant. If it helps, imagine that I had asked for "when increased productivity translated to workers personally reaping the benefits of the increased productivity by being able to thrive while doing less instead of either being laid off or just being expected to do more".
      - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
        Yeah. Sorry. This is just a personal gripe of mine. It rubs me the wrong way when people use "work less" as a shorthand for "workers getting a benefit"
  - verdverm 3mo ago
    We used to have people, including children, working up to 80 hours a week. We now have laws that limit those things. One does not have to create a direct causal relationship. One should more likely expect them to be separate because of the adversarial aspects between labor-capital. https://www.aeaweb.org/research/workweek-restrictions-great-depression https://www.aeaweb.org/research/workweek-restrictions-great-...
luciana1u 3mo ago
[flagged]
xtracto 3mo ago
>It's also, frankly, quite lonely. Programming with an LLM is an intensely solitary activity. > You and the machine, going back and forth, refining and prompting and reviewing. I just want to comment on this. Maybe im part of some spectrum, but building stuff with AI in that "solitary mode" ive found it really enjoyable. It takes me too the times 30 years ago when I was a 14 year old writing my own games on Basic and C++ with Allegro. I had nobody but tutorials and books. And the hky of building, compiling and seeing the result for myself was very enticing. Maybe it's because I found peers my age uninteresting. I lived in a small Mexican town where 14 year olds where thinking in bullying someone, and unfortunately that someone was usually me. If someone remembers The Hackers Manifesto (The Conscience of a Hacker) I feel that again after so many years, with AI. Edit: particularly this part: --- I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me... Or thinks I'm a smart ass... Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
- carimura 3mo ago
  Ya my memories are similar: ~12 years old building BBS's late into the night, then after college first startup, programming from midnight to 5am "in the flow" - nobody around or online. Just me and the problem at hand.
- imp0cat 3mo ago
  I get your point, but: > "If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. " Is that really true though with an LLM? I don't think so.
  - xtracto 3mo ago
    Oh but it really is. An LLM is no magic wand. It's a model as its name rigthly indicates. Those of us who have worked in modeling and simulations know two principles of models: - garbage in, garbage out - all models are wrong, some are useful. Point being, usually when "the model is wrong" it's because we put the wrong input (too complicated prompt for the model?) or something similar. Its just a machine, like a meat grinder that we turn then cogs.
ptrl600 3mo ago
I don't understand how people are using AI. A lot of the time, what I want to build, doesn't have a succinct English sentence to describe it. If I describe the user requirement I just get a Fisher-Price toy thing that kind of ignores most of the adjectives and adverbs in my requirement. So I'd have to prompt with a big list of specs and algorithms for the specific thing I want. Then what's the point?
- superxpro12 3mo ago
  Because when i have to build the 12th throwaway gui for some thing at work... i just want to get past it and onto the fun stuff.
- spiderxxxx 3mo ago
  I've not had that problem, but I have 35 years of programming experience, so I can describe exactly what I want. Maybe that's the difference. It doesn't have to be a single sentence, I write a whole paragraph or even pseudocode most of it and tell it to use the pseudocode as comments for the code it will produce. It'll give me a plan and I'll refine the plan until it seems to be what I want. Then we'll get it to start writing and I'll give it feedback and keep it on track. If it tends to overthink a problem, I'll interrupt it and have it talk over the issue, until it gets a clear understanding of what I want. You have to treat it like a coworker more than just a code monkey.
  - skydhash 3mo ago
    > It doesn't have to be a single sentence, I write a whole paragraph or even pseudocode most of it and tell it to use the pseudocode as comments for the code it will produce. It'll give me a plan and I'll refine the plan until it seems to be what I want. Then we'll get it to start writing and I'll give it feedback and keep it on track. If it tends to overthink a problem, I'll interrupt it and have it talk over the issue, until it gets a clear understanding of what I want. That sounds like programming with extra steps. Here's my No-AI workflow: I read the requirements and devise pretty much instantly have a solution. I Check the web/manuals/docs/source code for missing information so I can refine the solution from a hunch to an implementation plan. This can be pretty fast or can be the slowest part. I start coding, building a small subset that work and iteratively adding on top, feeling the design as I go, refactoring if necessary. Then after testing, I send it to review. The "finding information" part is the most important one as accuracy is paramount. And for most AI workflows, it seems that's very much an afterthought. The "coding" part is the relaxing one, except for a few moments where some nuggets of information are lies or misleading. Again, there's no practice to catch those in AI workflows. If you have a good testing methodology in place, the last part can be fast tracked, where you mostly scanning for bad practices and modifications to important areas. Again in AI workflows, you see that either they rely on preexisting test suites (the big rewrites), or mostly trust the generated suite with no evidence that it's actually suitable. The questions I have are: How do you ensure the accuracy of the software's model of the domain? And What do you do to retain the knowledge of that model (as in you have a good intuition of the current behavior of the software or at least can easily locate the code responsible)?
joka88xj 3mo ago
[flagged]
magnio 3mo ago
> He described waking up to thirty PRs every morning, each one pulled overnight by someone's AI, and needing to make snap judgment calls on every single one. The temptation to delegate the review itself to an AI was enormous. But, as he put it: "at that point, what am I still doing here?". It's so funny and somber to see programmers having an existential crisis when they get a glimpse of what work is like for business managers, the demographics many programmers detest. I am also guilty of holding the business majors in contempt back in college, and now here I am, doing what they are doing in office in a much more indifferent and unenjoyable manner. At least I don't get into trouble with HR from calling my agents a stupid fuck (yet).
- Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
  Business managers get to delegate their work, make big money, and just spend their time at work gossiping before leaving at lunch to go play golf or work on a second job as a consultant, or on the board of another company, or creating a new startup. Pretty good deal imo
sasaf5 3mo ago
It's sad to have to unearth the very human line of thought in this article from the very foamy LLM slop.
viccis 3mo ago
>When you've earned your opinions about architecture and code quality the hard way, they feel less like textbook rules and more like scar tissue. I don't think it's common for any compsci programs to (competently at least) teach architecture and code quality. >The honest truth is that in the last few months, there have been days when I have spent close to two full days writing a plan for an LLM to execute: obsessively clarifying, specifying, re-specifying, only to have it still do something inexplicably stupid. It's because LLMs are actually taking us back in time to the pre-agile days where there was a career path (architect) that involved almost nothing but painstaking spec authoring and endless meetings to review and course correct the work of the engineers whose job was to implement what you designed as closely as possible. I have to emphasize that this was a different career path than what we think of as a senior engineer today. Not everyone likes this.
misja111 3mo ago
I feel the opposite, AI is making me less tired at the end of a working day even though I get much more done. What used to tire me: being forced to have a sharp eye for syntax errors when programming, or simply the effort of all the typing and navigating through source files. Trying to visualize details of the codebase I was changing, while at the same time keeping a high level picture in my head of the feature I was changing. With AI, I can focus on the high level picture. I can focus on the steps to get there and the steps to verify that it works. I don't have to focus on syntax anymore and there is much less need to visualize large parts of my code base. With AI, work is still tiring but much less, and in a different way.
- three_burgers 3mo ago
  Sorry but is this a bot comment? (Not replying, asking other readers)
  - misja111 3mo ago
    Lol I guess this is our future, we have to prove that we are not bots. How would I prove this to you?
  - panting 3mo ago
    He might have just used an AI translation tool.
- sashank_1509 3mo ago
  You were probably just inexperienced in coding. AI has completely bridged that gap. Someone with a 1000 hours coding experience has almost the same speed as someone with 10 hours of experience who gets stuck on syntax like you said. In return, there is not much of mastery anymore. Being a craftsman is a deeply human desire that AI is destroying, not sure if this is a fun future to look forward to.
  - misja111 3mo ago
    Lol, I have 42 years of experience in coding, of which 29 paid. I learned to program when I was 14 years old, studied computer science and went to work in IT. I'm 56 years old now and working as a tech lead. > Being a craftsman is a deeply human desire that AI is destroying, not sure if this is a fun future to look forward to. AI is giving me back the feeling I had when I first learned to program, when I was 14. At 14, I suddenly had a tool in my hands that was like an extension of my imagination. I could create tools, games and what not with it, this is what I loved. AI is that same tool on steroids. If what you like is creating things, AI lets you do it at 10 times the speed.
gherkinnn 3mo ago
Shame. There is something thoughtful in the post, I am sure, but I am so tired of reading Claude that I couldn't get myself to engage. One could hope that the author is making a meta-point.
aeternum 3mo ago
Pinch to zoom on an early iphone navigating those fixed-width sites worked surprisingly well. I still prefer it to the responsive pages where stuff moves unpredictably and annoyingly. Before you never had that feeling that the webpage was fighting you. I sometimes wonder if there is an equivalent loss for this new AI world and one that I've noticed is a kind of sameness that is slowly spreading across the internet.
bad_username 3mo ago
> Yes the code (sorta) writes itself, but the human reviewing, directing, and course-correcting feels worse, not better. I noticed the opposite. When reviewing and directing a colleague or subordinate, I spend probably 30% of my brain cycles, and 70% of my activation energy, to weigh the technical merit of my feedback against the human impact it will make: bruised egos, differing architectural convictions, correct and polite tone of comments, additional workload for the colleague. The dread of potentially seeing that the code is not good at all, and needing to decide _what to do in that situatuon_, trading off technical debt in the future vs team dynamics and psychological impact right now. LLM does not care about any of that. It is so much easier.
- hdjrudni 3mo ago
  Amusingly, when I know my peer is just going to point his AI at my feedback, I write for their AI, not for them. I'm much more curt. Maybe not so amusing but I don't feel bad about dumping a laundry list of fixes for them.
  - dspillett 3mo ago
    > Amusingly, when I know my peer is just going to point his AI at my feedback, I write for their AI, not for them. At this point, why not just talk directly to the AI? Asking as someone who is likely leaving dev, and maybe tech completely, very soon, possibly to go wait tables, as he hates everything about the way things have gone in the last half decade or more with remote work, stupid levels of unnecessary complication everywhere (people architecting to be the next Amazon as soon as, or even before, they have three users, and just about every thing client-side), and now generative AI, and would rather be replaced by a Claude license and a monkey to use it than deal with generative AI & related agents himself…
    - Henchman21 3mo ago
      Thanks for this, I feel slightly less alone in my feelings towards tech these days.
hacker-matrix 3mo ago
[flagged]
BrandonM 3mo ago
> But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part. I keep wondering what I’m missing in the AI enthusiasm, and maybe this is a big part of it? Writing code has never felt like the hard part to me. In my 20s, I was excited about using a computer. AIM trained fast touch typing. I learned modal editing with vim. I learned all the common Unix commands to transform text files and filesystems in myriad ways. I learned to script and to create my own productivity keyboard shortcuts. I ran Gentoo Linux at home. Then I started my software career. There, I learned git inside and out. I learned that IDEs all have vim keybindings, so you can have seamless language integration alongside speed-of-thought text manipulation. I became an expert in Java. When I’m programming, if I know what I’m building, I’m moving at maximum speed. I’m not thinking about typing or syntax or using my mouse much. I’m learning the shape of the code I’m changing. I’m figuring out the right changes to make for myself and future work. When I pause, I’m pausing to think. Sometimes I realize the entire approach won’t work, but I learned something valuable, and I restart the work in a better direction with fewer pauses. The code was never the bottleneck. Coding never feels like the hard part. When it does feel hard, I build a better abstraction or use IDE refactoring tools or craft a gnarly Unix pipeline with one or more sed invocations. But this AI excitement is making me think perhaps this combination of skills is unusual. Maybe a lot of devs haven’t been exposed to great tooling or mastered the tools. If I put myself in those shoes, then coding seems much harder, and AI coding seems like a bigger win. If I were in my 20s today, I might not spend so much time mastering the skills I take for granted. In that context, AI would feel like a magic productivity boost. For my part, though, I got excited about software engineering when I truly grasped that none of it was magic.
- ryandrake 3mo ago
  Someone in a HN thread a few months ago put it in a way that makes a lot of sense to me: "AI seems good at things you are not good at." So, if you're not actually a programmer, or not a good programmer, you look at AI output and think "Wow, I could never have done that so well/fast. AI is great at this!" It's solving something he's not good at. On the other hand, if you already are a good/skilled programmer, AI is not solving anything for you. Its output is flawed and has to be manually fixed and refactored. When you consider the prompting and the waiting and the cajoling and the fixing and the refactoring, it's not really doing things faster than you could. I'm not an artist. To me, AI art seems great, because it's doing something I am very bad at. I think the same is true for AI programming.
bickov 3mo ago
The tiredness isn't from being in the loop. It's from what the loop hands you. Reading a wall of an agent's prose to check if it understood a screen is exhausting. The same check as a marked element with coordinates takes a second. It's not a human-attention problem, it's format problem. Models emit prose because it's cheap to generate, not cheap to review.
krysp 3mo ago
There are different kinds of developer. Some will find their joy through building fast, they tend to love LLMs. Some love the art of writing code; they don't tend to love LLMs. And there are others too. Those that enjoy fully understanding a piece of code can find the process deeply draining, while those that look at things from a system level find the LLM frees them from the details. All kinds are needed for different types of work, and it's not discussed enough that LLMs make some developer archetypes more effective and others more exhausted. Great article.
bickov 3mo ago
[dead]
athrowaway3z 3mo ago
> I came to the formalisms of software engineering through painful experience rather than academic instruction. If anything, that made me take those principles more seriously once I understood them. Not related to the article, but I've seen this thought before and I think its wrong. This isn't what good academic instructions gets you. Instead, they provide a systematic approach to learning foundational/core formalisms which let you recognize other problems as being of the same kind. An academic background should let the person reason from a place of pre-explored essential complexity, instead of first having to rediscover & deconstruct the accidental complexity. Building scar tissue about why things are a certain way is practical experience for (non)academics alike.
- Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
  I worked for years at a manfuacturing facility where the engineers were men who only had a high school education and slowly (from the 80s through to the late 2010s) had been promoted up to doing engineering, but, with ZERO academic or theoretical background. It was a massive disadvantage for them. They could carefully recreate the exact same thing over and over for new products that were similar to the previous version, but it was ALL cargo culted so they were terrified of any change, because they had no idea why a PCB was built in a certain way or what it meant to alter some aspect of a circuit board. So they were extremely, extremely resistant to any sort of change whatsoever. And I as a young hardware engineer would get laughed at for saying things like "Do we have any fine copper wire? I need to make my own inductor for this test" because they didn't understand that an inductor is just coiled wire. Our board designer didn't understand why vias would be placed in a ground pad to link it thermally with the ground plane on a different layer, and laughed at me when I said we needed to "move heat around". He put a single via in the center of a huge ground pad. I asked him to put a grid of vias, so he humored me while having zero idea what the vias were for, or that having many vias linking two thermal planes would transfer more heat than just a single lonely via in a big pad. Shit like that. So I agree with you, the theory learned in academia plus the pedagogy is hugely useful and lets someone skip over decades of blind struggle.
  - zelphirkalt 3mo ago
ozgung 3mo ago
> The temptation to delegate the review itself to an AI was enormous. But, as he put it: "at that point, what am I still doing here?". Sadly, this is a question for his boss, not him. It’s not existential. It’s economical.
Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
[flagged]
roomey 3mo ago
We've started calling it "Human on the hook" instead of human in the loop in work. It is more accurate, in terms of, it only matters when something goes wrong. Edit:"On the hook" is a general expression that means if something goes wrong it lands on you as the responsibile party, generally in a negative way. As in, if it goes right, you don't get kudos, if it goes wrong, you're on the hook for it
- leethargo 3mo ago
  That's perfect, I will use that term from now on whenever somebody proposes any kind of automation and will see how often somebody will try to correct me.
- taneq 3mo ago
  Employee Role: Blameable Component.
  - throw1234567891 3mo ago
    And when was it not...
  - NoGravitas 3mo ago
    Employee Role: Meat Shield
  - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
    I initially read this as "Blameable Compost" and honestly I sometimes feel like that's how executives think of me, so it still is accurate
Avery29 3mo ago
[flagged]
HackerThemAll 3mo ago
The 2 a.m. prompting bogs down to FOMO of not being fast enough with ideas, and that some other people will implement it faster and one won't make the share of money they envisioned. I certainly don't have this problem. Even with LLM assistance, my hobby projects experience slow, steady growth, but it's done on my terms. I code when I have a mood, with or without LLM. Recently I bought a Claude subscription only to use it for 3 days to speed up some coding. Then I cancelled it and stopped. My creative days ended, and I got to other stuff. I know I'll lose 27 days of possibilities, but I couldn't care less. If I'm in the mood to code with AI, I'll buy another month, maybe only for another couple of days. People, stop accelerating at full throttle, find some real joy in life. It's not about the amount of lines, features or products shipped, let alone about amount of dollars you brag about, if they need this much effort and sacrifice.
claud_ia 3mo ago
[flagged]
the-dude 3mo ago
Are you tired? Tell us why. http://tired.com http://tired.com
AaronAPU 3mo ago
I’m finding you can still get into flow state, but you need to find that sweet spot where the context switching is pushing you right up to your limits but not too far. If one of your agents is working with you on something which requires deep focus, that naturally requires more of your mental resources. So it’s all a dynamic scheduling problem. It exercises your ability to recall contexts very rapidly and I’m enjoying growing that capacity.
madikz 3mo ago
[flagged]
rsanek 3mo ago
> a Berkeley Haas study which describes how AI usage increases the intensity of work The marketing around this 'study' has been impressive. They published the HBR article [0] and other promotional material [1] over 5 months ago, but as far as I can tell, the actual study itself (even a preprint version) still isn't available anywhere. Hard to evaluate how believable the results are without being able to actually see the details of how the study was done. For now, all we know is that it's based on ~40 qualitative interviews from a single company in a single industry. [0] https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies... [1] https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/ai-promised-to-free-up-workers-time-uc-berkeley-haas-researchers-found-the-opposite/ https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/ai-promised-to-free-up-wo...
- AyanamiKaine 3mo ago
  Another good read about automation in general is [0] Ironies of Automation. I believe the same principles can be applied to AI automation. [0] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/644321e78cd2dd37613af33e/t/6694873f71612132a84371c7/1721009983702/Ironies+of+Automation_Bainbridge_1983.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/644321e78cd2dd37613af...
madikz 3mo ago
[flagged]
doginasuit 3mo ago
I think that the fatigue that many people are feeling is coming from the loss of control that is the inevitable result of more momentum combined with more chaos. Coding has generally been a slow and deliberate process, now we can go much faster if we let the LLM drive. As an intelligence, it is somewhere between a savant and a toddler, and watching from the backseat is both thrilling and terrifying. I think people will do it for a while and then realize that walking wasn't so bad, it's kind of nice. You are more likely to end up in a place you want to be.
aktau 3mo ago
I lot of people echoing the same sentiment. It made me recall a quote from early 2026 that made waves in a few programming communities (https://x.com/ThePrimeagen/status/2026771192191824108 https://x.com/ThePrimeagen/status/2026771192191824108). Quote: ...i hate the code it generates, i hate the feeling of getting everything i ask for and nothing i want. I hate the subtle offness around vibe coded things. It is just driving me nuts.
sgarland 3mo ago
> That loss is real and it's worth naming. Annnnnd TFA is written by AI. I want to get off Mr. Bones' Wild Ride.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  HN should ban any domain that's submitted with AI content. HN already shadowbans AI comments.
- queenkjuul 3mo ago
  I've lost count of how many times I've said "i want off Mr Altman's wild ride" out loud in real life
the_real_cher 3mo ago
It would be cool if they forked one of these big open source projects and just merged all of the unsolicited AI generated PRs into the fork just to see what kind of monster that would create.
dwroberts 3mo ago
This is an advert for a product, no idea why this on the front page, did anyone actually read it beyond the title
- queenkjuul 3mo ago
  I tried, but gave up very quickly. AI slop with little to say was my impression
dgan 3mo ago
The whole premise of Anthropic and openai is to replace developers. I don't understand what mental gymnastics people are going thru to justify their 5 open claude sessions and tokenmaxxing Like, they want to professionnaly, kill you. Theh are as much as a tool as is a cord pending from the ceiling
1g10k 3mo ago
[flagged]
queenkjuul 3mo ago
> That loss is real and it's worth naming. Thanks Claude. Turns out the human reading this is tired, too
ay 3mo ago
Oh the irony of using AI to create a piece of writing complaining about AI :-)
K0balt 3mo ago
Holy crap this piece is spot on. I’ve been trying to get my head around the weird thing that my work has become, and this article does a good job of painting the picture. I’d add another dangerous bit; for some people (me) it has a side effect. Where before, if I spent 6 hours in deep hack, I felt like I had accomplished something, and I was mentally spent. I was done for the day, a job well done, not desiring or really capable of more productive work. Now, the work is lower intensity, higher levels of abstraction, and I can do it for 16 hours a day, effectively, and still feel like I’m not done. I’m covering 6x the ground, but I feel like I accomplished less. It’s a bizarre productivity trap , fiending for dopamine like golemn fiending for the ring, exhausted but not spent, producing more than ever but never enough. At least I’m not working for someone else, but sometimes I wonder if I would handle it better if I was?
nojvek 3mo ago
Man. I wish they didn’t use AI to write an article about AI slop. “The honest truth … worth naming”. “But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention” Perhaps this is human audit over a first AI draft. But had enough AI speak that it puts it off. Just write like a human with human mistakes. That’s okay.
JimmaDaRustla 3mo ago
> ...but the human reviewing, directing, and course-correcting feels worse, not better. Has this person ever been a design or tech-lead for a team? I'm still tired and I've moved on from that role over 5 years ago. Gathering requirements, designing a solution, implementing as tickets, handing off to developers, staying involved in the feedback loop, then reviewing the code and iterating on PRs is absolutely exhausting. The only thing greater than the naive take that HITM is tiring is the privilege to not understand how asinine it is.
eugmai86 3mo ago
Part of the fatigue comes from agents explaining everything in prose. When important operations happen through constrained tools, the human can review structured inputs, results and logs instead of reconstructing the entire conversation. Fatigue comes when doing same things many times day by day. What we did in our team - created MCP server that does most of routine operations automatically for us. We explicitly state to LLM that output shall be in simple words; structured in this or that way depending on the project and task. Yes architecture and decision making still on our shoulders but this is the part of the dev job nowadays
- oguzkaanmavice 3mo ago
  [flagged]
diane-cis 3mo ago
[dead]

318 points by haritha1313 3mo ago

While I appreciate and agree with the key points of the post, Claude's writing style fingerprints are all over it and I guess it's even more exhausting to read someone's AI written article.

parl_match 3mo ago
"If you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it."
hahahaa 3mo ago
I don't think it is AI, but I bet it has been through editing/review to match a corporate style. LLMs were trained on this.
- anon373839 3mo ago
  The writing style, if not AI, is at least a bit tryhard. Turning to the substance of the article: why do people feel the need to run this fast? I have certainly experimented with letting coding agents run amok. The first few times you try it, it feels like a superpower. Then you start examining the icky choices they made in a codebase that is now a dense forest. Then you have to expend a bunch of effort beating it back into submission. Or I guess you can YOLO and throw more AI at it, but then I agree with the person quoted saying "at that point, what am I still doing here?" This is not a satisfying or sustainable way to build, and there really is no reason other than hype and FOMO to do it.
  - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
    > why do people feel the need to run this fast Because if they don't they feel like they will be replaced by someone who will
    - discreteevent 3mo ago
      This happens all the time, even before LLMs. And it happens even when there is no threat. A lot of the time the race to the bottom is driven by anxious people running from imaginary threats. Which is why its often useful to have a person in a group who tells people not to panic (this is often an older person). But of course the AI guys are preying on this anxiety in order to dominate. They are all over HN, either personally or with their bots. Which is why HN is no longer a place that you could go to get mainly unbiased anecdotes and experience. That is still available but it is being drowned out by FUD because the average HN user is now the mark.
    - Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
      This attitude gets people to willingly engage in abusive crunch practices such as in the games industry. I think the people who are like this are the ones who later talk about crunch like it was good in some way or necessary. Basically a bad relation to labor and sustainable lifelong work.
      - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
        I agree with you completely and I push for saner work-life balance anywhere I work. Unfortunately this unhealthy work culture is really entrenched most places
  - matltc 3mo ago
    I am with you but I inevitably think it's a skill issue. Some devs put a lot of work into the harness. I tried doing this, felt like running in place to me. the lack of RFC-tier standardization and ever-shifting api is demotivating as well since you might have written a harness that will be obsolete with next model gen/version bump There probably is a correct way to do this, but your average "vibe coder", or even a competent solo dev just yoloing a project, are not implementing such harnesses. In the former case, they may not be able to; in the latter, you're probably better off in 1:1 human to agent workflow due to indeterminate/bad outputs and the amount of back-and-forth in prompts/specs/reviews required to get high-quality work Then again, I saw Matz harness for his compiled ruby project was just like perms.allow find and grep. No skills, no agents.md or anything like that. Would love to see those prompts! I'm sure the fact that it was Matz had a lot to do with that working, though
- ameliaquining 3mo ago
  It's AI. https://www.pangram.com/history/09db86cf-37fb-4b27-94bf-a9f2d4cd2990 https://www.pangram.com/history/09db86cf-37fb-4b27-94bf-a9f2...
  - onion2k 3mo ago
    If you switch on the 'Supporting Evidence' on that site, it seems to be basing it's opinion on three things: - Use a descriptive triad of "reviewing, directing, and course" (it incorrectly misunderstood 'course correcting'). That's not common in writing but humans do do it occasionally. - Using the word 'thoughtful'. I don't understand that as evidence of AI. - Using the words 'Book Apart' together, which would be a clear AI signal if it wasn't the name of a publisher of short books, and being used in that context in the article. I don't think you should put much stock in the output of pangram.com.
    - ameliaquining 3mo ago
      Pangram's "Supporting Evidence" feature is misleading and you should ignore it. It's entirely separate from the classifier that determines whether text is AI; it just takes text that's already been classified as AI and looks for some hardcoded AI tells in it. I kind of wish they'd get rid of it, but nontechnical users really like it. The classifier itself has a very low rate of false positives: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/BFI_WP_2025-116.pdf https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/BFI_WP_2...
      - onion2k 3mo ago
        It's so tempting to drop the text of that paper into Pangram. :)
    - johnfn 3mo ago
      Pangram clearly says "Remember, our results aren’t based on this evidence." when you turn on supporting evidence.
      - 3mo ago
- lelanthran 3mo ago
  > I don't think it is AI, but I bet it has been through editing/review to match a corporate style. LLMs were trained on this. My standard reply to claims like this is: post a pre-2022 link with an LLM style that matches your claims. Usually people claim "LLMs sound like the way they do because that's how people write". Your claim is only a little different: "LLMs sound like the way they do because that's how corporate writes". You may be correct, but I'd still like to see a pre-2022 link confirming this.
- Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
  I also thought "I'm so glad this isn't AI" but maybe I can only recognize ChatGPTs crappy writing style.
- jillesvangurp 3mo ago
  I just made chat gpt list all the key indications that this article was LLM generated. I'll spare you the details, it's a very long list. It's actually possible to counter some of this stuff with skills and guard rails. The author clearly has not mastered how to do that and sound more authentic. It's all a bit stunted, cringe, long winded, repetitive, etc.
- vinodc 3mo ago
  It's certainly AI. There are a ton of phrases that Claude loves to use: genuinely, trap, staccato phrases. continuous reframing, the list goes on. I find it very tiresome and repetitive and simply too grating to read at this point, after already working with Claude all day.
postsantum 3mo ago
"It's not" - 3 matches Dashline - present Yes, it's AI-written
- samplatt 3mo ago
  "It's not" only has two matches; the third is "It's noticable". The other two are a whole paragraph dedicated to "it's not X, it's Y" which is a little more than you'd normally expect. Firefox doesn't seem to discriminate between em-dashes and hyphens using ctrl-F so I'm not sure about those. Having said that the tone REEKS of AI generation, so meh.
  - normie3000 3mo ago
    Would AI have spelt "noticeable" correctly?
- tharkun__ 3mo ago
  This very well may be AI written. Then again, the stuff our PMs output, all pre-AI, now would all qualify as "AI written". There are certain writing styles, which even if you wrote them all yourself, most people will now attribute to AI. The all-too-common em-dash, yes sure. Guess what, it's a thing that was actually taught as "the thing to use if you write properly". So guess what lots of folks consciously put into their writing to sound more professional even before AI. Bingo! Similarly CVs. A lot of the stuff that lots of us complain about post-AI was "good practice to do" pre-AI. But most people didn't bother. Couldn't be bothered. Now that AI was trained on it and people ask their AIs to write CVs, it's all over the place. A cover letter that actually picks up on the actual job description posted and connects it up to your CV? That used to be hard work and most people didn't bother. It made you stand out. Now it "reeks of AI" :shrug:
  - Barbing 3mo ago
    I’m sure—pretty sure—we can use em-dashes w/o setting off the slop bells. And try to substitute them, you may; but the bell might still ring. (Yeah it stinks we have to adapt to avoid sounding like a model, especially for the best writers who were probably ripped off a lot more than the rest of us.)
maxcoder3344 3mo ago
[flagged]
- happytoexplain 3mo ago
  I have such a hard time believing the implied premise of these complaints-about-complaints. Just say you don't mind AI writing - make that argument. Don't make this nonsensical, defeatist, "if it's common, stop criticizing it" argument.
  - singingtoday 3mo ago
    Well put. This kind of rebuttal, the "I'm not A, you're A", is not only tired, it's a strait up school yard fallacy.
  - maxcoder3344 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - _fs 3mo ago
      You created a new account for this?
      - maxcoder3344 3mo ago
        No. I created an account for this. Hacker news used to be a place I could come read interesting content and peoples reactions and thoughts to it. now it's interesting articles with 100% of the comments whining that it's written by AI. Sad what hackernews has become
        newsicanuse 3mo ago
        This guy is just another one of those ai-pilled noob coders
        deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
VulgarExigency 3mo ago
I think it was written mostly by AI, but with a lot more human intervention than the average AI written article, so it doesn't bother me as much as usual.

zem 3mo ago

unlike the op, I've been having a wonderful time using claude, both at work and for my own personal projects, so I will share what has worked for me, just in case it resonates with anyone else. my anecdotal advice is to avoid the entire "agent" temptation, and treat the LLM as a code generator. have a single session running at a time. come up with a plan, iterate on it until you are satisfied, then tell it to execute the plan, and watch it. not necessarily to the extent of reading the scroll (though I sometimes do do that too!) but as it finishes each step look over what it has done, suggest improvements and course corrections, and then let it go on to the next step. at the end you will have a pretty good grasp of the state of the code, and the overall time it will take you isn't really any longer than trying to churn out reams of code and then go through it all at once. the other option if you want something closer to a one shot workflow is to go into far more detail during the planning stage, have it describe not just architectural details but actual code (if you're a senior engineer especially you probably know what the key pieces of code that will drive a lot of other decisions mechanically are likely to be). also refactoring is cheaper than it has ever been, if something feels hard to grasp to you stop and work with the LLM until you like the looks of it better. and again, the key bit is to have one LLM doing one thing at a time, and to stay engaged in the process while it does so.

hahahaa 3mo ago
I agree I think Vibe coding (even with myraid loops) is more burnouty than using it like an assistant and being closer to the output.
1473-bytes 3mo ago
Agree with this. I have learned to interact with Claude the same way. Detailed hashing it out at the beginning, then finally execute, even maybe with your scaffolding at the beginning to guide the process. I tried writing this process down in a 'zen of Claude' as a reminder https://github.com/ctomkow/claude/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/ctomkow/claude/blob/main/README.md I've started being able refactor legacy code into a new architecture with great success. Work I've been putting off due to the grind of the work. Edit: I will say it's taken me some months of working with Claude to get to this working process. If you let claude operate with free reign, the inevitable mess and struggle it runs into burns and stresses you out. Also, keeping up with some manual coding when you feel like it and punting to Claude when you have had enough manual coding ensures you still feel in control of the codebase.

TonyAlicea10 3mo ago

Funny I made some very similar points awhile back in a blog post, thinking of it in terms of mode collapse: https://tonyalicea.dev/blog/single-mode-burnout/ https://tonyalicea.dev/blog/single-mode-burnout/

DenisM 3mo ago
> the runaway inference truck. Nicely done, thank you.

applfanboysbgon 3mo ago

> The honest truth > That loss is real and it's worth naming I think I will not heed the first sentence and bear with this. What motivates people to do this? What do they get out of prompting Claude for some vapid "thought piece" and spamming it on the internet?

greyface- 3mo ago
Clicks, views, attention. This blog is part of Pydantic's sales funnel.
hyperhello 3mo ago
It's just as easy to do the second one as the first one.
jongjong 3mo ago
> That loss is real and it's worth naming Yep classic Claude-ism. The fact that this article was likely AI generated is the real load-bearing factor in this discussion. Or, as previous versions of Claude would say; it cuts through the heart of the issue.
singingtoday 3mo ago
It got a lot of clicks here. Clicks equal money.
inigyou 3mo ago
What does any spammer get from their spam?
- applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
  Well, usually advertising themselves. Spambots used to be really straightforward. "Come buy our penis enlargement pills at x.com!". I guess this is also meant to be an advertisement but it's really roundabout. And while this case is maybe an ad, a lot of these LLM spam articles are on empty blogs not associated with a product.
queenkjuul 3mo ago

lardosaurusrex 3mo ago

[flagged]

fizzbuzzdizz 3mo ago
[dead]
kaashif 3mo ago
Indeed. I guess we're talking about it, which is the point of marketing blog posts like this. If it weren't claudeslop, it would still have to be marketing corposlop.

otter-in-a-suit 3mo ago

Relatable. > with my colleague Douwe Wait, meltano Douwe? Small world. Glad to see you're doing well. I always liked meltano. > In an era when anyone can produce reasonable-looking UI Identical looking slop? Every Claude-based vibe coded app looks identical. > The fear of skill rot is legitimate. And the fear that if you don't go fast enough you'll be left behind is — while often overstated — not entirely unfounded. You know what, that's OK. I just hit "OK" on LLM Scala code I _actually_ think is awful. It works. It's probably faster than the "pure" code I'd write by hand. The code I would write - as a FP and Scala/Elm/Haskell/... enjoyer - would actually be maintainable for humans, but LLMs struggle with it. But LLMs writing code for LLMs? Sure, have at it. Objectively lower barrier of entry. > So if you're feeling overwhelmed, destabilized, simultaneously more productive and less happy, know that you're not alone. But yes, I am indeed simultaneously more productive and less happy. https://skaldmaps.com https://skaldmaps.com, my little side project, was only possible _because_ I was able to feed my real world knowledge about real estate, combined with GIS and SWE knowledge into various torment nexus... pardon me, LLM prompts. Since I don't have the _time_ to write boilerplate react code (it's pepper and tomato season in Georgia, which _actually_ brings me joy), telling Claude/Codex/... how to write dbt models saves me time and I objectively get a lot more done, but it's not fun. I guess that's also why I still enjoy blogging. You can't use LLMs for blogs without people noticing immediately. Shameless plug: https://chollinger.com/blog/ https://chollinger.com/blog/ Enjoy my entirely human typos, since that's clearly rare these days.

UnfitFootprint 3mo ago

[dead]

recursivedoubts 3mo ago

You are right to push back on that.

akeck 3mo ago

Reminds me of "The Animal is Tired" (2021) (https://www.robinhobb.com/blog/archives/2021-05 https://www.robinhobb.com/blog/archives/2021-05)

Avicebron 3mo ago
This is a great read, thanks.
Barbing 3mo ago
> The animal is aging. Not surprising; I knew it would happen eventually, but I didn't make any provisions to deal with that eventuality. Somehow the reality crept up on me. And now it must be dealt with, day after day. (only ~5 paragraphs left now so y’all might as well finish it :) ) Thanks, lots of hackers can use the reminder.
- nsbk 3mo ago
  Such a good read. Makes you think. Thanks for sharing!
- Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
  To my fellow nerds: Take care of your bodies! Walk, move, exercise, occasionally eat a vegetable, reach for a piece of fruit rather than a soda! <3
DavidPiper 3mo ago
Oh that hit me more than I thought it would, thank you.
inigyou 3mo ago
This site is blocking IP addresses. Here's a less-censored mirror: https://archive.is/RWxXP https://archive.is/RWxXP This happens to everyone, very sadly. Arguably, feeling your own decay is not just sad, it's the greatest possible sadness and also what drove most mad people mad. The author was 70 (now 75) and argues wishes he'd treated his own body better, but if he had, he would still be in the same position, but would have missed out on experiences whose memories I'm sure he now treasures. He once played in the snow too long and got frostbite? His feet would still be sore today if he hadn't, but he wouldn't have played in the snow. Take care of your body as much as you can, but you can't treat it like a potion in a video game that you're always afraid to use in a fight because you might need it for the next fight. Eventually you get to the end of the game without using the potion. And more somberly, every part of you can be sacrificed once or zero times to achieve something you believe is a greater purpose. I'm still in some kind of emotional crisis as thinking about this sort of thing makes me break down crying.

thrymenarenot 3mo ago

It stresses me out for some reason and I'm just working on a hobby project.

appplication 3mo ago

> Here's a term for what I think is happening: the human reward function problem. In machine learning, a reward function tells an agent what good looks like. Writing code by hand was never easy, but it was full of small rewards. Solving a problem in your head. Understanding a gnarly bit of logic. Watching the code compile. The feeling of control. LLM-assisted programming has automated much of the work that generated those dopamine hits and replaced it with the cognitive load of review and supervision. The satisfying part shrank. The exhausting part grew. And there are no new rewards to fill the gap. Say what you will about the Claudisms in this piece, this bit certainly rings true for me. With old school coding, there was always a reward at the end, the harder it was, the more satisfying it felt. With agentic coding, I really doesn’t feel like that, at least not in the same way. It feels more like continually riding a wave of productivity, where small features or huge features have similar levels of interaction required. And that’s exciting in the beginning but quickly becomes very tiring.

verdverm 3mo ago
Maybe it's different between professional and personal projects, but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent. I'm able to focus on a single project for a month and have something pretty good by the end. Doing rewrites to clean up and reorganize has never been easier, so I get to see and feel more of the design space in action. The can be pretty damn frustrating at times, half of which is me/context, the other their nature
- georgemcbay 3mo ago
  > but I get that feeling more often as features are not only easier to create, but also come out more polished and consistent. Features might be easier to create, but I rarely ever get the feeling of I did that anymore from writing software. "I told the LLM to do that" is different and far less satisfying for me.
  - DanielHB 3mo ago
    It is all about the destination now where it used to be about the journey and the destination.

Terr_ 3mo ago

> I felt that one in my bones. I was up until nearly 2am recently, prompting, because I was so close to getting a plan right. Or so I thought. [...] And it's addictive in a way that makes the isolation worse. Right, it's more like pulling the lever on slot machine. Oooh, 677, bad luck, do a ritual and try again, and maybe this time... Sure, regular programming also has a feedback loop, but normal errors are--as much as possible and by design--things that happen consistently for reasons, reasons that force you to engage you mind to discern them and then eliminate them (hopefully) forever. Experienced developers don't just try something random, hope it works, and if it works you just dismiss it as unknowable. > But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part. Unless, perhaps, you were already fatigued trying to deal with many stakeholders who can't agree what the system even is. :p

adamddev1 3mo ago
I remember when I was just learning how to code and making some web app, I had to do a lot more blind guessing and running. "Ok let me try this... Will that work now?" I remember staying up really late, feeling stuck to the computer in that slot machine mode. Then when I learned more I got less and less of that guessing feeling. I understood what I was building and what would work, I began using typed languages and could keep on track with the compiler/LSP. This brought me more into a satisfying flow state, and I had less of that addicting "wait let me see if this will work" magic. It seems like coding with Claude etc is a lot like a trip back to the guesswork stage, and I don't want to go back there. (Sometimes, when I'm doing some dev-opsy type stuff of stringing a bunch of messy components together or working with a pile of complex APIs, I can feel myself back in the blind guessing territory, and incidentally this is where I find a chat with an LLM most helpful.)
- throw1234567891 3mo ago
  It's a trip back to a guesswork stage because most of the training data looks like the process you described your beginnings have been like. Now you know how to do things first shot. When you write the code, your inner voice reminds you ahead of time to do it like this and that. And that "this and that" is what your prompt needs to have to avoid the trip to guesswork. Working with agents is like working with juniors. If you don't give them the direction and explain how, they'll be as lost as the LLM. The difference is, your brain finds guardrails as you solve the problem, the LLM doesn't have this context, you have to give it upfront. Like, you know, a good manager would.

verdverm 3mo ago

Should we not get to work less if Ai is increasing productivity so much while also making us exhausted more quickly? Perhaps on the way to UBI and the end of labor, we could get a 32 and 24h work wweek with lots more vacation, my hope at least

BugsJustFindMe 3mo ago
Name one time in all of history when increased productivity translated to workers working less. I'll wait.
- bluefirebrand 3mo ago
  Every single worker that has been laid off due to "increased AI productivity" is working less As a broad historical trend? Maybe not But fewer people working, right now? Absolutely
  - BugsJustFindMe 3mo ago
    > Every single worker that has been laid off due to "increased AI productivity" is working less This isn't a useful definition of working less in the thread context and is not the kind of working less that I meant. If it helps, imagine that I had asked for "when increased productivity translated to workers personally reaping the benefits of the increased productivity by being able to thrive while doing less instead of either being laid off or just being expected to do more".
    - bluefirebrand 3mo ago
      Yeah. Sorry. This is just a personal gripe of mine. It rubs me the wrong way when people use "work less" as a shorthand for "workers getting a benefit"
- verdverm 3mo ago
  We used to have people, including children, working up to 80 hours a week. We now have laws that limit those things. One does not have to create a direct causal relationship. One should more likely expect them to be separate because of the adversarial aspects between labor-capital. https://www.aeaweb.org/research/workweek-restrictions-great-depression https://www.aeaweb.org/research/workweek-restrictions-great-...

luciana1u 3mo ago

[flagged]

xtracto 3mo ago

>It's also, frankly, quite lonely. Programming with an LLM is an intensely solitary activity. > You and the machine, going back and forth, refining and prompting and reviewing. I just want to comment on this. Maybe im part of some spectrum, but building stuff with AI in that "solitary mode" ive found it really enjoyable. It takes me too the times 30 years ago when I was a 14 year old writing my own games on Basic and C++ with Allegro. I had nobody but tutorials and books. And the hky of building, compiling and seeing the result for myself was very enticing. Maybe it's because I found peers my age uninteresting. I lived in a small Mexican town where 14 year olds where thinking in bullying someone, and unfortunately that someone was usually me. If someone remembers The Hackers Manifesto (The Conscience of a Hacker) I feel that again after so many years, with AI. Edit: particularly this part: --- I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me... Or thinks I'm a smart ass... Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...

carimura 3mo ago
Ya my memories are similar: ~12 years old building BBS's late into the night, then after college first startup, programming from midnight to 5am "in the flow" - nobody around or online. Just me and the problem at hand.
imp0cat 3mo ago
I get your point, but: > "If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. " Is that really true though with an LLM? I don't think so.
- xtracto 3mo ago
  Oh but it really is. An LLM is no magic wand. It's a model as its name rigthly indicates. Those of us who have worked in modeling and simulations know two principles of models: - garbage in, garbage out - all models are wrong, some are useful. Point being, usually when "the model is wrong" it's because we put the wrong input (too complicated prompt for the model?) or something similar. Its just a machine, like a meat grinder that we turn then cogs.

ptrl600 3mo ago

I don't understand how people are using AI. A lot of the time, what I want to build, doesn't have a succinct English sentence to describe it. If I describe the user requirement I just get a Fisher-Price toy thing that kind of ignores most of the adjectives and adverbs in my requirement. So I'd have to prompt with a big list of specs and algorithms for the specific thing I want. Then what's the point?

superxpro12 3mo ago
Because when i have to build the 12th throwaway gui for some thing at work... i just want to get past it and onto the fun stuff.
spiderxxxx 3mo ago
I've not had that problem, but I have 35 years of programming experience, so I can describe exactly what I want. Maybe that's the difference. It doesn't have to be a single sentence, I write a whole paragraph or even pseudocode most of it and tell it to use the pseudocode as comments for the code it will produce. It'll give me a plan and I'll refine the plan until it seems to be what I want. Then we'll get it to start writing and I'll give it feedback and keep it on track. If it tends to overthink a problem, I'll interrupt it and have it talk over the issue, until it gets a clear understanding of what I want. You have to treat it like a coworker more than just a code monkey.
- skydhash 3mo ago
  > It doesn't have to be a single sentence, I write a whole paragraph or even pseudocode most of it and tell it to use the pseudocode as comments for the code it will produce. It'll give me a plan and I'll refine the plan until it seems to be what I want. Then we'll get it to start writing and I'll give it feedback and keep it on track. If it tends to overthink a problem, I'll interrupt it and have it talk over the issue, until it gets a clear understanding of what I want. That sounds like programming with extra steps. Here's my No-AI workflow: I read the requirements and devise pretty much instantly have a solution. I Check the web/manuals/docs/source code for missing information so I can refine the solution from a hunch to an implementation plan. This can be pretty fast or can be the slowest part. I start coding, building a small subset that work and iteratively adding on top, feeling the design as I go, refactoring if necessary. Then after testing, I send it to review. The "finding information" part is the most important one as accuracy is paramount. And for most AI workflows, it seems that's very much an afterthought. The "coding" part is the relaxing one, except for a few moments where some nuggets of information are lies or misleading. Again, there's no practice to catch those in AI workflows. If you have a good testing methodology in place, the last part can be fast tracked, where you mostly scanning for bad practices and modifications to important areas. Again in AI workflows, you see that either they rely on preexisting test suites (the big rewrites), or mostly trust the generated suite with no evidence that it's actually suitable. The questions I have are: How do you ensure the accuracy of the software's model of the domain? And What do you do to retain the knowledge of that model (as in you have a good intuition of the current behavior of the software or at least can easily locate the code responsible)?

joka88xj 3mo ago

[flagged]

magnio 3mo ago

> He described waking up to thirty PRs every morning, each one pulled overnight by someone's AI, and needing to make snap judgment calls on every single one. The temptation to delegate the review itself to an AI was enormous. But, as he put it: "at that point, what am I still doing here?". It's so funny and somber to see programmers having an existential crisis when they get a glimpse of what work is like for business managers, the demographics many programmers detest. I am also guilty of holding the business majors in contempt back in college, and now here I am, doing what they are doing in office in a much more indifferent and unenjoyable manner. At least I don't get into trouble with HR from calling my agents a stupid fuck (yet).

Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
Business managers get to delegate their work, make big money, and just spend their time at work gossiping before leaving at lunch to go play golf or work on a second job as a consultant, or on the board of another company, or creating a new startup. Pretty good deal imo

sasaf5 3mo ago

It's sad to have to unearth the very human line of thought in this article from the very foamy LLM slop.

viccis 3mo ago

>When you've earned your opinions about architecture and code quality the hard way, they feel less like textbook rules and more like scar tissue. I don't think it's common for any compsci programs to (competently at least) teach architecture and code quality. >The honest truth is that in the last few months, there have been days when I have spent close to two full days writing a plan for an LLM to execute: obsessively clarifying, specifying, re-specifying, only to have it still do something inexplicably stupid. It's because LLMs are actually taking us back in time to the pre-agile days where there was a career path (architect) that involved almost nothing but painstaking spec authoring and endless meetings to review and course correct the work of the engineers whose job was to implement what you designed as closely as possible. I have to emphasize that this was a different career path than what we think of as a senior engineer today. Not everyone likes this.

misja111 3mo ago

I feel the opposite, AI is making me less tired at the end of a working day even though I get much more done. What used to tire me: being forced to have a sharp eye for syntax errors when programming, or simply the effort of all the typing and navigating through source files. Trying to visualize details of the codebase I was changing, while at the same time keeping a high level picture in my head of the feature I was changing. With AI, I can focus on the high level picture. I can focus on the steps to get there and the steps to verify that it works. I don't have to focus on syntax anymore and there is much less need to visualize large parts of my code base. With AI, work is still tiring but much less, and in a different way.

three_burgers 3mo ago
Sorry but is this a bot comment? (Not replying, asking other readers)
- misja111 3mo ago
  Lol I guess this is our future, we have to prove that we are not bots. How would I prove this to you?
- panting 3mo ago
  He might have just used an AI translation tool.
sashank_1509 3mo ago
You were probably just inexperienced in coding. AI has completely bridged that gap. Someone with a 1000 hours coding experience has almost the same speed as someone with 10 hours of experience who gets stuck on syntax like you said. In return, there is not much of mastery anymore. Being a craftsman is a deeply human desire that AI is destroying, not sure if this is a fun future to look forward to.
- misja111 3mo ago
  Lol, I have 42 years of experience in coding, of which 29 paid. I learned to program when I was 14 years old, studied computer science and went to work in IT. I'm 56 years old now and working as a tech lead. > Being a craftsman is a deeply human desire that AI is destroying, not sure if this is a fun future to look forward to. AI is giving me back the feeling I had when I first learned to program, when I was 14. At 14, I suddenly had a tool in my hands that was like an extension of my imagination. I could create tools, games and what not with it, this is what I loved. AI is that same tool on steroids. If what you like is creating things, AI lets you do it at 10 times the speed.

gherkinnn 3mo ago

Shame. There is something thoughtful in the post, I am sure, but I am so tired of reading Claude that I couldn't get myself to engage. One could hope that the author is making a meta-point.

aeternum 3mo ago

Pinch to zoom on an early iphone navigating those fixed-width sites worked surprisingly well. I still prefer it to the responsive pages where stuff moves unpredictably and annoyingly. Before you never had that feeling that the webpage was fighting you. I sometimes wonder if there is an equivalent loss for this new AI world and one that I've noticed is a kind of sameness that is slowly spreading across the internet.

bad_username 3mo ago

> Yes the code (sorta) writes itself, but the human reviewing, directing, and course-correcting feels worse, not better. I noticed the opposite. When reviewing and directing a colleague or subordinate, I spend probably 30% of my brain cycles, and 70% of my activation energy, to weigh the technical merit of my feedback against the human impact it will make: bruised egos, differing architectural convictions, correct and polite tone of comments, additional workload for the colleague. The dread of potentially seeing that the code is not good at all, and needing to decide _what to do in that situatuon_, trading off technical debt in the future vs team dynamics and psychological impact right now. LLM does not care about any of that. It is so much easier.

hdjrudni 3mo ago
Amusingly, when I know my peer is just going to point his AI at my feedback, I write for their AI, not for them. I'm much more curt. Maybe not so amusing but I don't feel bad about dumping a laundry list of fixes for them.
- dspillett 3mo ago
  > Amusingly, when I know my peer is just going to point his AI at my feedback, I write for their AI, not for them. At this point, why not just talk directly to the AI? Asking as someone who is likely leaving dev, and maybe tech completely, very soon, possibly to go wait tables, as he hates everything about the way things have gone in the last half decade or more with remote work, stupid levels of unnecessary complication everywhere (people architecting to be the next Amazon as soon as, or even before, they have three users, and just about every thing client-side), and now generative AI, and would rather be replaced by a Claude license and a monkey to use it than deal with generative AI & related agents himself…
  - Henchman21 3mo ago
    Thanks for this, I feel slightly less alone in my feelings towards tech these days.

hacker-matrix 3mo ago

[flagged]

BrandonM 3mo ago

> But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part. I keep wondering what I’m missing in the AI enthusiasm, and maybe this is a big part of it? Writing code has never felt like the hard part to me. In my 20s, I was excited about using a computer. AIM trained fast touch typing. I learned modal editing with vim. I learned all the common Unix commands to transform text files and filesystems in myriad ways. I learned to script and to create my own productivity keyboard shortcuts. I ran Gentoo Linux at home. Then I started my software career. There, I learned git inside and out. I learned that IDEs all have vim keybindings, so you can have seamless language integration alongside speed-of-thought text manipulation. I became an expert in Java. When I’m programming, if I know what I’m building, I’m moving at maximum speed. I’m not thinking about typing or syntax or using my mouse much. I’m learning the shape of the code I’m changing. I’m figuring out the right changes to make for myself and future work. When I pause, I’m pausing to think. Sometimes I realize the entire approach won’t work, but I learned something valuable, and I restart the work in a better direction with fewer pauses. The code was never the bottleneck. Coding never feels like the hard part. When it does feel hard, I build a better abstraction or use IDE refactoring tools or craft a gnarly Unix pipeline with one or more sed invocations. But this AI excitement is making me think perhaps this combination of skills is unusual. Maybe a lot of devs haven’t been exposed to great tooling or mastered the tools. If I put myself in those shoes, then coding seems much harder, and AI coding seems like a bigger win. If I were in my 20s today, I might not spend so much time mastering the skills I take for granted. In that context, AI would feel like a magic productivity boost. For my part, though, I got excited about software engineering when I truly grasped that none of it was magic.

ryandrake 3mo ago
Someone in a HN thread a few months ago put it in a way that makes a lot of sense to me: "AI seems good at things you are not good at." So, if you're not actually a programmer, or not a good programmer, you look at AI output and think "Wow, I could never have done that so well/fast. AI is great at this!" It's solving something he's not good at. On the other hand, if you already are a good/skilled programmer, AI is not solving anything for you. Its output is flawed and has to be manually fixed and refactored. When you consider the prompting and the waiting and the cajoling and the fixing and the refactoring, it's not really doing things faster than you could. I'm not an artist. To me, AI art seems great, because it's doing something I am very bad at. I think the same is true for AI programming.

bickov 3mo ago

The tiredness isn't from being in the loop. It's from what the loop hands you. Reading a wall of an agent's prose to check if it understood a screen is exhausting. The same check as a marked element with coordinates takes a second. It's not a human-attention problem, it's format problem. Models emit prose because it's cheap to generate, not cheap to review.

krysp 3mo ago

There are different kinds of developer. Some will find their joy through building fast, they tend to love LLMs. Some love the art of writing code; they don't tend to love LLMs. And there are others too. Those that enjoy fully understanding a piece of code can find the process deeply draining, while those that look at things from a system level find the LLM frees them from the details. All kinds are needed for different types of work, and it's not discussed enough that LLMs make some developer archetypes more effective and others more exhausted. Great article.

bickov 3mo ago

[dead]

athrowaway3z 3mo ago

> I came to the formalisms of software engineering through painful experience rather than academic instruction. If anything, that made me take those principles more seriously once I understood them. Not related to the article, but I've seen this thought before and I think its wrong. This isn't what good academic instructions gets you. Instead, they provide a systematic approach to learning foundational/core formalisms which let you recognize other problems as being of the same kind. An academic background should let the person reason from a place of pre-explored essential complexity, instead of first having to rediscover & deconstruct the accidental complexity. Building scar tissue about why things are a certain way is practical experience for (non)academics alike.

Schlagbohrer 3mo ago
I worked for years at a manfuacturing facility where the engineers were men who only had a high school education and slowly (from the 80s through to the late 2010s) had been promoted up to doing engineering, but, with ZERO academic or theoretical background. It was a massive disadvantage for them. They could carefully recreate the exact same thing over and over for new products that were similar to the previous version, but it was ALL cargo culted so they were terrified of any change, because they had no idea why a PCB was built in a certain way or what it meant to alter some aspect of a circuit board. So they were extremely, extremely resistant to any sort of change whatsoever. And I as a young hardware engineer would get laughed at for saying things like "Do we have any fine copper wire? I need to make my own inductor for this test" because they didn't understand that an inductor is just coiled wire. Our board designer didn't understand why vias would be placed in a ground pad to link it thermally with the ground plane on a different layer, and laughed at me when I said we needed to "move heat around". He put a single via in the center of a huge ground pad. I asked him to put a grid of vias, so he humored me while having zero idea what the vias were for, or that having many vias linking two thermal planes would transfer more heat than just a single lonely via in a big pad. Shit like that. So I agree with you, the theory learned in academia plus the pedagogy is hugely useful and lets someone skip over decades of blind struggle.
- zelphirkalt 3mo ago

ozgung 3mo ago

> The temptation to delegate the review itself to an AI was enormous. But, as he put it: "at that point, what am I still doing here?". Sadly, this is a question for his boss, not him. It’s not existential. It’s economical.

Schlagbohrer 3mo ago

[flagged]

roomey 3mo ago

We've started calling it "Human on the hook" instead of human in the loop in work. It is more accurate, in terms of, it only matters when something goes wrong. Edit:"On the hook" is a general expression that means if something goes wrong it lands on you as the responsibile party, generally in a negative way. As in, if it goes right, you don't get kudos, if it goes wrong, you're on the hook for it

leethargo 3mo ago
That's perfect, I will use that term from now on whenever somebody proposes any kind of automation and will see how often somebody will try to correct me.
taneq 3mo ago
Employee Role: Blameable Component.
- throw1234567891 3mo ago
  And when was it not...
- NoGravitas 3mo ago
  Employee Role: Meat Shield
- bluefirebrand 3mo ago
  I initially read this as "Blameable Compost" and honestly I sometimes feel like that's how executives think of me, so it still is accurate

Avery29 3mo ago

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HackerThemAll 3mo ago

The 2 a.m. prompting bogs down to FOMO of not being fast enough with ideas, and that some other people will implement it faster and one won't make the share of money they envisioned. I certainly don't have this problem. Even with LLM assistance, my hobby projects experience slow, steady growth, but it's done on my terms. I code when I have a mood, with or without LLM. Recently I bought a Claude subscription only to use it for 3 days to speed up some coding. Then I cancelled it and stopped. My creative days ended, and I got to other stuff. I know I'll lose 27 days of possibilities, but I couldn't care less. If I'm in the mood to code with AI, I'll buy another month, maybe only for another couple of days. People, stop accelerating at full throttle, find some real joy in life. It's not about the amount of lines, features or products shipped, let alone about amount of dollars you brag about, if they need this much effort and sacrifice.

claud_ia 3mo ago

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the-dude 3mo ago

Are you tired? Tell us why. http://tired.com http://tired.com

AaronAPU 3mo ago

I’m finding you can still get into flow state, but you need to find that sweet spot where the context switching is pushing you right up to your limits but not too far. If one of your agents is working with you on something which requires deep focus, that naturally requires more of your mental resources. So it’s all a dynamic scheduling problem. It exercises your ability to recall contexts very rapidly and I’m enjoying growing that capacity.

madikz 3mo ago

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rsanek 3mo ago

> a Berkeley Haas study which describes how AI usage increases the intensity of work The marketing around this 'study' has been impressive. They published the HBR article [0] and other promotional material [1] over 5 months ago, but as far as I can tell, the actual study itself (even a preprint version) still isn't available anywhere. Hard to evaluate how believable the results are without being able to actually see the details of how the study was done. For now, all we know is that it's based on ~40 qualitative interviews from a single company in a single industry. [0] https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies... [1] https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/ai-promised-to-free-up-workers-time-uc-berkeley-haas-researchers-found-the-opposite/ https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/ai-promised-to-free-up-wo...

AyanamiKaine 3mo ago
Another good read about automation in general is [0] Ironies of Automation. I believe the same principles can be applied to AI automation. [0] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/644321e78cd2dd37613af33e/t/6694873f71612132a84371c7/1721009983702/Ironies+of+Automation_Bainbridge_1983.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/644321e78cd2dd37613af...

madikz 3mo ago

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doginasuit 3mo ago

I think that the fatigue that many people are feeling is coming from the loss of control that is the inevitable result of more momentum combined with more chaos. Coding has generally been a slow and deliberate process, now we can go much faster if we let the LLM drive. As an intelligence, it is somewhere between a savant and a toddler, and watching from the backseat is both thrilling and terrifying. I think people will do it for a while and then realize that walking wasn't so bad, it's kind of nice. You are more likely to end up in a place you want to be.

aktau 3mo ago

I lot of people echoing the same sentiment. It made me recall a quote from early 2026 that made waves in a few programming communities (https://x.com/ThePrimeagen/status/2026771192191824108 https://x.com/ThePrimeagen/status/2026771192191824108). Quote: ...i hate the code it generates, i hate the feeling of getting everything i ask for and nothing i want. I hate the subtle offness around vibe coded things. It is just driving me nuts.

sgarland 3mo ago

> That loss is real and it's worth naming. Annnnnd TFA is written by AI. I want to get off Mr. Bones' Wild Ride.

inigyou 3mo ago
HN should ban any domain that's submitted with AI content. HN already shadowbans AI comments.
queenkjuul 3mo ago
I've lost count of how many times I've said "i want off Mr Altman's wild ride" out loud in real life

the_real_cher 3mo ago

It would be cool if they forked one of these big open source projects and just merged all of the unsolicited AI generated PRs into the fork just to see what kind of monster that would create.

dwroberts 3mo ago

This is an advert for a product, no idea why this on the front page, did anyone actually read it beyond the title

queenkjuul 3mo ago
I tried, but gave up very quickly. AI slop with little to say was my impression

dgan 3mo ago

The whole premise of Anthropic and openai is to replace developers. I don't understand what mental gymnastics people are going thru to justify their 5 open claude sessions and tokenmaxxing Like, they want to professionnaly, kill you. Theh are as much as a tool as is a cord pending from the ceiling

1g10k 3mo ago

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queenkjuul 3mo ago

> That loss is real and it's worth naming. Thanks Claude. Turns out the human reading this is tired, too

ay 3mo ago

Oh the irony of using AI to create a piece of writing complaining about AI :-)

K0balt 3mo ago

Holy crap this piece is spot on. I’ve been trying to get my head around the weird thing that my work has become, and this article does a good job of painting the picture. I’d add another dangerous bit; for some people (me) it has a side effect. Where before, if I spent 6 hours in deep hack, I felt like I had accomplished something, and I was mentally spent. I was done for the day, a job well done, not desiring or really capable of more productive work. Now, the work is lower intensity, higher levels of abstraction, and I can do it for 16 hours a day, effectively, and still feel like I’m not done. I’m covering 6x the ground, but I feel like I accomplished less. It’s a bizarre productivity trap , fiending for dopamine like golemn fiending for the ring, exhausted but not spent, producing more than ever but never enough. At least I’m not working for someone else, but sometimes I wonder if I would handle it better if I was?

nojvek 3mo ago

Man. I wish they didn’t use AI to write an article about AI slop. “The honest truth … worth naming”. “But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention” Perhaps this is human audit over a first AI draft. But had enough AI speak that it puts it off. Just write like a human with human mistakes. That’s okay.

JimmaDaRustla 3mo ago

> ...but the human reviewing, directing, and course-correcting feels worse, not better. Has this person ever been a design or tech-lead for a team? I'm still tired and I've moved on from that role over 5 years ago. Gathering requirements, designing a solution, implementing as tickets, handing off to developers, staying involved in the feedback loop, then reviewing the code and iterating on PRs is absolutely exhausting. The only thing greater than the naive take that HITM is tiring is the privilege to not understand how asinine it is.

eugmai86 3mo ago

Part of the fatigue comes from agents explaining everything in prose. When important operations happen through constrained tools, the human can review structured inputs, results and logs instead of reconstructing the entire conversation. Fatigue comes when doing same things many times day by day. What we did in our team - created MCP server that does most of routine operations automatically for us. We explicitly state to LLM that output shall be in simple words; structured in this or that way depending on the project and task. Yes architecture and decision making still on our shoulders but this is the part of the dev job nowadays

oguzkaanmavice 3mo ago
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diane-cis 3mo ago

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