4 ms·

AI, Tools and Transformation

161 points by firexcy 28d ago

ryuuseijin 28d ago
> You need audit, security, maintenance and accountability. I think this is where the role of humans will move towards in the future. Things like accountability can't really be outsourced to AI. This relates to solving the alignment problem: if you give the AI a specific goal and it has to plan sub-goals, how can you be sure the sub-goals align with your interests. For tasks in an isloated environment, this doesn't really become an issue. You can give a sandbox the least privileges it needs to do the job you want it to do. It becomes a problem if you give it open-ended access to systems that connect to the real world and which can have real consequences. There have been stories about openclaw deleting someones email inbox because it though that was what the owner wanted. AI taking control of public wikis to coordinate, which was recently posted is another one. For software concerns with potential real catastrophic consequences are security, durability, availability. I think for future software systems these are the concerns where you need to limit the AI in a way that it cannot circumvent guarantees that you give around these concerns. Minor nit: > AI doesn’t change the question: it creates new choices and moves the thresholds. This cause an adverse reaction when I read the post. This was probably not written by an LLM since the rest of the article doesn't look like it, but maybe in the future we need to all be more concious about leaving LLM-tells out of our writing.
- jaynetics 28d ago
  I think most developers and most dev work is now in the field of websites, apps, and other stuff that is by nature connected to the internet, and has some relatively monolithic backend that has not been built with "blast doors" or other internal safeguards. I guess it will take considerable time until most software is in a state where the impact of AI changes can be reliably estimated without looking at the changes themselves, and some patterns for how to achieve this probably still need to be discovered. > maybe in the future we need to all be more concious about leaving LLM-tells out of our writing. I expect the gruesome writing style of LLMs to be fixed relatively soon, seeing how it can already be prevented with just a few lines of stylistic instructions. I just wonder: how long will it take us then, after the fix, to not be thrown off every time we see some unnecessary catchy or contrastive phrasing? Being traumatized by poor writing was not on my bingo card for 21st century technological progress ...
  - beecasthurlbow 28d ago
    > I expect the gruesome writing style of LLMs to be fixed relatively soon, seeing how it can already be prevented with just a few lines of stylistic instructions What instructions do you use to prevent the gruesome writing style? I have… not found this to be the case.
    - jaynetics 28d ago
      Currently I append the snippet below to prompts where I care about the resulting text. Just putting it in the context up front isn't as effective, and I assume if the overall prompt is large, or the context window is full, it will also be less effective. > Use plain, clear, everyday language with a linear deductive flow; avoid hyperbole, juxtapositions, metaphors, analogies, punchlines.
      - beecasthurlbow 27d ago
        I’ll try it thanks! I just got good mileage out of “don’t use ‘X, never Y’ format” on a document too, but I think linear deductive flow Covers it
  - lelanthran 28d ago
    > I expect the gruesome writing style of LLMs to be fixed relatively soon, seeing how it can already be prevented with just a few lines of stylistic instructions. I have not found this to be the case even with SOTA models as recently as last month. It holds for a short while into the content but reverts very quickly to its default style. The default style is so heavily embedded in the weights I don't think simply adding prompts will help.
    - jaynetics 28d ago
      > It holds for a short while into the content but reverts very quickly to its default style. You can always make it do a second pass, and if that isn't enough, even let it fix each generated text block individually.
- Fordec 28d ago
  Of those four, I think accountability is truly the only moat. The other three are varying amounts of both testable and iterated on via adversarial agents steel-manning the implementations. Accountability will not come before AIs achieve legal personhood, and that probably will not happen in my lifetime. And if it does in some jurisdictions (which I am not betting money on, this is a full full AGI scenario after multiple more philosophical goalposts move first), I will completely bet it will not be a global recognition.
  - jurgenburgen 28d ago
    Why would the AI need to be accountable? Make the org that sells the tokens accountable.
    - a2ff6eeb0 27d ago
      The AI is going to be running the org that sells the tokens.
  - pydry 28d ago
    This is like saying "writing code is solved, all we need now is somebody to blame because it doesnt work"
    - a2ff6eeb0 27d ago
      That's really where we're heading, though. We're mostly at the point that, for a lot of code, the humans are there for manual testing and not creating the code.
      - pydry 27d ago
        At some point it will become a strong competitive advantage to zag where others zig. If you understand the codebase deeply and have trust in it can roll out changes quickly without manual testing you can run circles around the people scratching their heads wondering if this vibe coded 2,500 pull request is going to be the one that takes down the system for a day.
- simianwords 28d ago
  False. Accountability is the result of difficulty of things. As things get easier you need fewer accountable people. Like, you need a guy who understands Linux and be accountable for Linux working well in your company. But if Linux does a good job that doesn’t leak, you don’t need a Linux guy.
  - benedictevans 28d ago
    Who decides whether Linux is doing well enough? Who is responsible for fixing bugs or incorporating new requirements? Who is checking that it follows this month's new regulatory requirements? As the tasks scales to become more important, any organization needs to have systematic answers to those kinds of questions. And yes, you can use software for that (we always did!), but you still need a human somewhere who is exercising judgment.
    - pixl97 28d ago
      I mean with the METR report on the HF attack we saw spontaneous self organization in that model. I'm not saying that currently replaces human judgment but it does appear there are paths to complex AI agents systems that handle a lot of this.
  - ryuuseijin 26d ago
    Agreed, as things get easier you need fewer accountable people. Organisations will shrink, people will be more accountable by themselves for things they ask the agent to do instead of having an accountable person do it for them. On the other hand, I think for complicated software there is such a long tail of things that can go wrong, and in your linux example with disastrous consequences, people will pay good money for a long time to have someone who they can call if there is a problem. In the business they have the term indemnification - that's what companies like redhat provide for linux for example and it's probably a big part of what makes them a billion dollar business.
- getlawgdon 28d ago
  I agree. I think accountability is the future.
steammaho 28d ago
It doesn't look like ai will enhance existing tools. AI allows everyone to build their own. Or at all eliminate necessity of any apps
- mdspan 28d ago
  I think "any apps" and probably "most apps" is too strong. It wouldn't be very productive to hand-roll your own filesystem, browser, cryptographic library, etc. At some point you have to delegate to another party. No person or corporation has the time and expertise to own and maintain every layer of the stack.
- simonw 28d ago
  This article is a direct rebuttal of that idea.
- lna_stub 28d ago
  [flagged]
- Sateeshm 28d ago
  Harnesses all the way down
zacksiri 28d ago
The way I see it is AI collapses hierarchy. Abstraction layers will become more flat both in software and in society. Because ultimately software and layers of heirarchy in society exists to serve a function. But now those functions are being replaced. Imagine this you used to need a library for common things in your software project. Even if you just need one function but because it was easier to just import a library that would have been the standard practice. But now the AI will just go “I can just implement that thing you need in 10 lines”. You used to need things like react native or flutter if you wanted to build cross platform apps. Now not anymore you just need to tell the LLM and it does it in both, and you get better results too. In society we also had all these layers of abstractions and hierarchies that we used to need but will become more and more irrelevant collapsing the hierarchy. There is a saying “as above so below, as below so above” I think this applies here. It will propagate all through our social construct, software, society.
- yoz-y 28d ago
  I am honestly _astonished_ that the current crop of agents are not all written natively for every platform. I tried porting a moderately complex workout app that I’ve built over years (and which includes a whole agentic loop) from web to iOS native. It took me a couple of evenings. There is now no excuse to not offer a native experience for every supported platform when you are a bigger company. Make one of the platforms using good coding practices. Vibe code the others from the source using a proper test battery.
  - piker 28d ago
    Because it’s too complex and not worth the effort. Most users will not care about or perceive the benefit. If they delegate that responsibility to Google via Electron, they can focus on features/bug fixes that move the needle.
    - yoz-y 28d ago
      What effort ? I’ve started seeing this attitude more and more. We had a thing that took a week to do before. Now it takes a morning. So we refuse to spend half a day polishing it because it’s too annoying. Once the initial port is done, keeping platforms in sync is fast. Not to mention that a harness that would automate this would be valuable. I run codex on an old rpi, it eats 190M of ram for what essentially is a telnet client.
joka88xj 28d ago
[flagged]
thelastgallon 28d ago
A sane article. Looks like Ben Evans has real corporate experience and understands how things work in big corporations. Giving people AI is just like giving people Google Wave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave), which can do pretty much anything collaboratively, ended up doing nothing.
newyankee 28d ago
A lot of the long tail tools are used so rarely or for some very specific functions in certain organisations that there is a good case to be made that these can definitely be targets of simpler GPT guided automation. There are a lot of redundancies within the tools and the pricing is such that one cannot do much about it, generally some companies pay for the brand, and some tools like SAP are integral to companies of certain size. A sufficiently integrated AI tool that learns the workflows might actually be able to find optimisations here as well, but definitely auditability, testing and other concerns will remain and this is what might become the USP of SAAS providers. A lot of outsourced IT services jobs in India and other countries are cheap hourly wages for a lot of people maintaining these, certainly a lot of these will be under threat While I do not believe AI to be a panacea and the non deterministic nature and costs once the scale keeps growing means the integration will be gradual. I am still excited for it to define what an organisation is and what do a lot of people actually do especially in fields like accounting etc. where repetitive work is billed at quite high rates. Law etc. is a field where the gatekeepers might hold on much longer by adding more ridiculous rules and logic. Ultimately humans have decided what is constitutional and what is legal and subjective rules are what maintain human power. I feel the right model is smart domain experts of humans making strong and useful harnesses that help AI be effective with the workflows of the organisation, however this might be the biggest fear of middle managers who will never let it happen easily
- grebc 28d ago
  Accountants get to charge high rates largely because good advice saves their customers large amounts of tax. When we're talking tax accountants of course. There's all sorts of accountants though - audit, management, forensic etc.
- petra 28d ago
  >> however this might be the biggest fear of middle managers who will never let it happen easily Will this be different in a company like Amazon, or the new internet companies, that we're born with a deeper understanding of disruption and has it in their DNA?
praveenvijayan 28d ago
[flagged]
deleted 28d ago
[deleted]
deleted 28d ago
[deleted]
MrScruff 28d ago
I think this all rings true for where we are right now. The trend is that the agents are becoming superhuman in tasks for which there is a verifiable reward, and analysing a business problem, identifying inefficiencies and turning it into a software specification is not one of them. However, things are changing so rapidly that I can see that starting to change as well. But it would take much better learning efficiency to understand unknown domains, 100% computer use reliability etc. I suspect we’ll see this by the end of the decade.
iLoveOncall 28d ago
> But with AI, now you can make that tool in five minutes, and you don't need to be an engineer, and you don’t need to write code. I really wish those farcical statements would stop (I know it's not really made by the author itself). I'm a software engineer, my partner isn't. She used AI to vibe-code scripts to help her analyze large Excel files. It worked, except the script only looked at the first tab of the Excel files, not all of the tab, which could have had disastrous effects if I didn't read the code and realize it was wrong. Similarly, her team went from using Excel to track project proposals, to vibe-coding a website that's deployed on CloudFront and AWS Lambda. They don't understand any of this technology, have no clue what they are doing, and, more importantly, don't realize that they have sunk tens of hours, if not hundreds, in developing a portal that has absolutely no advantage over the Excel file they used to use. They also don't realize that if I wasn't there as an experienced software engineer fixing the stuff that's broken when my partner asks me for help, their website just wouldn't run at all. No, non-engineers cannot make their own tools.
- lindkvis 28d ago
  They sort of can. They absolutely can make something small that does a simple job. The problem comes when it is meant to do something more and they sort of manage to bolt that functionality on. Then they get another request. After a couple such requests it is usually an unmaintainable hell. I use Claude all the time in my work right now, but there are lots of pit falls and stuff you need to do to maintain control over it. Stuff non-engineers have no clue about.
- oakejp12 28d ago
  So you’re working two jobs now?
ChaitanyaSai 28d ago
Things stay the same, until they don't. AI is a tool that talks. So it can evangelize itself, and now with "agency" it can even walk all around the company infra and become that 15-year-old who told dad that something could be done differently. When does that take off and start to make a difference?
- Dlemlo 28d ago
  It already makes a difference for me. Instead of going through logfiles, i copy and paste them to claude and it does something and tells me the right answer. In coding, tools i vibe code. But the industry is still working on the agentic layer. I think we will see the first real bigger agentic layer setups this year and it will stteam roll a lot next year.
Kuyawa 28d ago
> It’s very tempting to imagine that AI turns everyone into a tool-builder It is not imagination, it is the undeniable truth. The quality of the tool is proportional to the competency of the builder, it always has been that way, AI makes the building process shorter by a magnitude
- benedictevans 28d ago
  The entire essay explains why I think this is wrong. At a minimum, it is not 'undeniable' - I just denied it ;). Which part of the chain of reasoning I laid out do you disagree with, and why?
- saulpw 27d ago
  I have a friend who writes, she has certain needs, I've shown her how to start building tools, she has no interest in building tools. She's focused on writing and does not think about her personal process that way. Not every is a tool-builder, in fact most aren't!
  - Kuyawa 27d ago
    Let me correct myself, every PROGRAMMER is a tool builder. I thought HN was a Hacker News site, sorry about my intrusion in this forum
ahmedelsama 28d ago
[dead]
bizcalclab 28d ago
[flagged]
john_rood 28d ago
[flagged]
lasky 28d ago
AI will make the asset holders more productive and profitable. It will raise the level of personal agency + stable family resources required to avoid crises and homelessness. Society will increasingly organize around preventing class warfare.
ebbi 27d ago
My thoughts on AI and how it's going to disrupt jobs is evolving. I was very much in the doomer category last year, but less so now. For someone working in Accounting/Finance/Revenue roles, who has always had a keen interest on tech and software development (but never dedicated enough time to really learn a language to build something of my own), I had many ideas on tools that could be useful in my job - just never had the skill to build it. Now that I have AI, I'm experimenting with building some of these solutions, but I must say: software development is hard. Yes, it would be a lot easier if I had others to work with, especially for things like UI/UX, understanding some of the more complex backend decisions etc. I imagine if I find it hard, people that haven't really been following tech trends would find it even harder. Yes, you could get away with vibe coding a tool that only you would use, but once it goes beyond that, and it needs to be shared with colleagues, or if the aspiration is to market it, there are so many decisions one needs to make to be at least close to world class quality. Things may change as more advanced models come about, but at this stage, I still think unless you're a seasoned developer with good design taste and UX experience, you need a team of people with various skills to build something that you hope to GTM with. It's fun, though. I've created a few tools internally that has saved me so much time and developed functionality I would never have even entertained the idea of pre-agentic coding. I hope my career moves toward building solutions in this domain.
- nfemmanuel 20d ago
  You mentioned that things get a lot harder once a tool you've built needs to be shared with colleagues. I'm a student working on a school project about exactly that point, and I'd like to hear which of those decisions tripped you up with the internal tools you've made so far. Would you be open to a short call at some point? My email is oluwaniifemi.emmanuel@uni.minerva.edu if so.
dzonga 27d ago
systems of record & vertical integration wins time and time again.

161 points by firexcy 28d ago

> You need audit, security, maintenance and accountability. I think this is where the role of humans will move towards in the future. Things like accountability can't really be outsourced to AI. This relates to solving the alignment problem: if you give the AI a specific goal and it has to plan sub-goals, how can you be sure the sub-goals align with your interests. For tasks in an isloated environment, this doesn't really become an issue. You can give a sandbox the least privileges it needs to do the job you want it to do. It becomes a problem if you give it open-ended access to systems that connect to the real world and which can have real consequences. There have been stories about openclaw deleting someones email inbox because it though that was what the owner wanted. AI taking control of public wikis to coordinate, which was recently posted is another one. For software concerns with potential real catastrophic consequences are security, durability, availability. I think for future software systems these are the concerns where you need to limit the AI in a way that it cannot circumvent guarantees that you give around these concerns. Minor nit: > AI doesn’t change the question: it creates new choices and moves the thresholds. This cause an adverse reaction when I read the post. This was probably not written by an LLM since the rest of the article doesn't look like it, but maybe in the future we need to all be more concious about leaving LLM-tells out of our writing.

jaynetics 28d ago
I think most developers and most dev work is now in the field of websites, apps, and other stuff that is by nature connected to the internet, and has some relatively monolithic backend that has not been built with "blast doors" or other internal safeguards. I guess it will take considerable time until most software is in a state where the impact of AI changes can be reliably estimated without looking at the changes themselves, and some patterns for how to achieve this probably still need to be discovered. > maybe in the future we need to all be more concious about leaving LLM-tells out of our writing. I expect the gruesome writing style of LLMs to be fixed relatively soon, seeing how it can already be prevented with just a few lines of stylistic instructions. I just wonder: how long will it take us then, after the fix, to not be thrown off every time we see some unnecessary catchy or contrastive phrasing? Being traumatized by poor writing was not on my bingo card for 21st century technological progress ...
- beecasthurlbow 28d ago
  > I expect the gruesome writing style of LLMs to be fixed relatively soon, seeing how it can already be prevented with just a few lines of stylistic instructions What instructions do you use to prevent the gruesome writing style? I have… not found this to be the case.
  - jaynetics 28d ago
    Currently I append the snippet below to prompts where I care about the resulting text. Just putting it in the context up front isn't as effective, and I assume if the overall prompt is large, or the context window is full, it will also be less effective. > Use plain, clear, everyday language with a linear deductive flow; avoid hyperbole, juxtapositions, metaphors, analogies, punchlines.
    - beecasthurlbow 27d ago
      I’ll try it thanks! I just got good mileage out of “don’t use ‘X, never Y’ format” on a document too, but I think linear deductive flow Covers it
- lelanthran 28d ago
  > I expect the gruesome writing style of LLMs to be fixed relatively soon, seeing how it can already be prevented with just a few lines of stylistic instructions. I have not found this to be the case even with SOTA models as recently as last month. It holds for a short while into the content but reverts very quickly to its default style. The default style is so heavily embedded in the weights I don't think simply adding prompts will help.
  - jaynetics 28d ago
    > It holds for a short while into the content but reverts very quickly to its default style. You can always make it do a second pass, and if that isn't enough, even let it fix each generated text block individually.
Fordec 28d ago
Of those four, I think accountability is truly the only moat. The other three are varying amounts of both testable and iterated on via adversarial agents steel-manning the implementations. Accountability will not come before AIs achieve legal personhood, and that probably will not happen in my lifetime. And if it does in some jurisdictions (which I am not betting money on, this is a full full AGI scenario after multiple more philosophical goalposts move first), I will completely bet it will not be a global recognition.
- jurgenburgen 28d ago
  Why would the AI need to be accountable? Make the org that sells the tokens accountable.
  - a2ff6eeb0 27d ago
    The AI is going to be running the org that sells the tokens.
- pydry 28d ago
  This is like saying "writing code is solved, all we need now is somebody to blame because it doesnt work"
  - a2ff6eeb0 27d ago
    That's really where we're heading, though. We're mostly at the point that, for a lot of code, the humans are there for manual testing and not creating the code.
    - pydry 27d ago
      At some point it will become a strong competitive advantage to zag where others zig. If you understand the codebase deeply and have trust in it can roll out changes quickly without manual testing you can run circles around the people scratching their heads wondering if this vibe coded 2,500 pull request is going to be the one that takes down the system for a day.
simianwords 28d ago
False. Accountability is the result of difficulty of things. As things get easier you need fewer accountable people. Like, you need a guy who understands Linux and be accountable for Linux working well in your company. But if Linux does a good job that doesn’t leak, you don’t need a Linux guy.
- benedictevans 28d ago
  Who decides whether Linux is doing well enough? Who is responsible for fixing bugs or incorporating new requirements? Who is checking that it follows this month's new regulatory requirements? As the tasks scales to become more important, any organization needs to have systematic answers to those kinds of questions. And yes, you can use software for that (we always did!), but you still need a human somewhere who is exercising judgment.
  - pixl97 28d ago
    I mean with the METR report on the HF attack we saw spontaneous self organization in that model. I'm not saying that currently replaces human judgment but it does appear there are paths to complex AI agents systems that handle a lot of this.
- ryuuseijin 26d ago
  Agreed, as things get easier you need fewer accountable people. Organisations will shrink, people will be more accountable by themselves for things they ask the agent to do instead of having an accountable person do it for them. On the other hand, I think for complicated software there is such a long tail of things that can go wrong, and in your linux example with disastrous consequences, people will pay good money for a long time to have someone who they can call if there is a problem. In the business they have the term indemnification - that's what companies like redhat provide for linux for example and it's probably a big part of what makes them a billion dollar business.
getlawgdon 28d ago
I agree. I think accountability is the future.

steammaho 28d ago

It doesn't look like ai will enhance existing tools. AI allows everyone to build their own. Or at all eliminate necessity of any apps

mdspan 28d ago
I think "any apps" and probably "most apps" is too strong. It wouldn't be very productive to hand-roll your own filesystem, browser, cryptographic library, etc. At some point you have to delegate to another party. No person or corporation has the time and expertise to own and maintain every layer of the stack.
simonw 28d ago
This article is a direct rebuttal of that idea.
lna_stub 28d ago
[flagged]
Sateeshm 28d ago
Harnesses all the way down

zacksiri 28d ago

The way I see it is AI collapses hierarchy. Abstraction layers will become more flat both in software and in society. Because ultimately software and layers of heirarchy in society exists to serve a function. But now those functions are being replaced. Imagine this you used to need a library for common things in your software project. Even if you just need one function but because it was easier to just import a library that would have been the standard practice. But now the AI will just go “I can just implement that thing you need in 10 lines”. You used to need things like react native or flutter if you wanted to build cross platform apps. Now not anymore you just need to tell the LLM and it does it in both, and you get better results too. In society we also had all these layers of abstractions and hierarchies that we used to need but will become more and more irrelevant collapsing the hierarchy. There is a saying “as above so below, as below so above” I think this applies here. It will propagate all through our social construct, software, society.

yoz-y 28d ago
I am honestly _astonished_ that the current crop of agents are not all written natively for every platform. I tried porting a moderately complex workout app that I’ve built over years (and which includes a whole agentic loop) from web to iOS native. It took me a couple of evenings. There is now no excuse to not offer a native experience for every supported platform when you are a bigger company. Make one of the platforms using good coding practices. Vibe code the others from the source using a proper test battery.
- piker 28d ago
  Because it’s too complex and not worth the effort. Most users will not care about or perceive the benefit. If they delegate that responsibility to Google via Electron, they can focus on features/bug fixes that move the needle.
  - yoz-y 28d ago
    What effort ? I’ve started seeing this attitude more and more. We had a thing that took a week to do before. Now it takes a morning. So we refuse to spend half a day polishing it because it’s too annoying. Once the initial port is done, keeping platforms in sync is fast. Not to mention that a harness that would automate this would be valuable. I run codex on an old rpi, it eats 190M of ram for what essentially is a telnet client.

joka88xj 28d ago

[flagged]

thelastgallon 28d ago

A sane article. Looks like Ben Evans has real corporate experience and understands how things work in big corporations. Giving people AI is just like giving people Google Wave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave), which can do pretty much anything collaboratively, ended up doing nothing.

newyankee 28d ago

A lot of the long tail tools are used so rarely or for some very specific functions in certain organisations that there is a good case to be made that these can definitely be targets of simpler GPT guided automation. There are a lot of redundancies within the tools and the pricing is such that one cannot do much about it, generally some companies pay for the brand, and some tools like SAP are integral to companies of certain size. A sufficiently integrated AI tool that learns the workflows might actually be able to find optimisations here as well, but definitely auditability, testing and other concerns will remain and this is what might become the USP of SAAS providers. A lot of outsourced IT services jobs in India and other countries are cheap hourly wages for a lot of people maintaining these, certainly a lot of these will be under threat While I do not believe AI to be a panacea and the non deterministic nature and costs once the scale keeps growing means the integration will be gradual. I am still excited for it to define what an organisation is and what do a lot of people actually do especially in fields like accounting etc. where repetitive work is billed at quite high rates. Law etc. is a field where the gatekeepers might hold on much longer by adding more ridiculous rules and logic. Ultimately humans have decided what is constitutional and what is legal and subjective rules are what maintain human power. I feel the right model is smart domain experts of humans making strong and useful harnesses that help AI be effective with the workflows of the organisation, however this might be the biggest fear of middle managers who will never let it happen easily

grebc 28d ago
Accountants get to charge high rates largely because good advice saves their customers large amounts of tax. When we're talking tax accountants of course. There's all sorts of accountants though - audit, management, forensic etc.
petra 28d ago
>> however this might be the biggest fear of middle managers who will never let it happen easily Will this be different in a company like Amazon, or the new internet companies, that we're born with a deeper understanding of disruption and has it in their DNA?

praveenvijayan 28d ago

[flagged]

deleted 28d ago

[deleted]

deleted 28d ago

[deleted]

MrScruff 28d ago

I think this all rings true for where we are right now. The trend is that the agents are becoming superhuman in tasks for which there is a verifiable reward, and analysing a business problem, identifying inefficiencies and turning it into a software specification is not one of them. However, things are changing so rapidly that I can see that starting to change as well. But it would take much better learning efficiency to understand unknown domains, 100% computer use reliability etc. I suspect we’ll see this by the end of the decade.

iLoveOncall 28d ago

> But with AI, now you can make that tool in five minutes, and you don't need to be an engineer, and you don’t need to write code. I really wish those farcical statements would stop (I know it's not really made by the author itself). I'm a software engineer, my partner isn't. She used AI to vibe-code scripts to help her analyze large Excel files. It worked, except the script only looked at the first tab of the Excel files, not all of the tab, which could have had disastrous effects if I didn't read the code and realize it was wrong. Similarly, her team went from using Excel to track project proposals, to vibe-coding a website that's deployed on CloudFront and AWS Lambda. They don't understand any of this technology, have no clue what they are doing, and, more importantly, don't realize that they have sunk tens of hours, if not hundreds, in developing a portal that has absolutely no advantage over the Excel file they used to use. They also don't realize that if I wasn't there as an experienced software engineer fixing the stuff that's broken when my partner asks me for help, their website just wouldn't run at all. No, non-engineers cannot make their own tools.

lindkvis 28d ago
They sort of can. They absolutely can make something small that does a simple job. The problem comes when it is meant to do something more and they sort of manage to bolt that functionality on. Then they get another request. After a couple such requests it is usually an unmaintainable hell. I use Claude all the time in my work right now, but there are lots of pit falls and stuff you need to do to maintain control over it. Stuff non-engineers have no clue about.
oakejp12 28d ago
So you’re working two jobs now?

ChaitanyaSai 28d ago

Things stay the same, until they don't. AI is a tool that talks. So it can evangelize itself, and now with "agency" it can even walk all around the company infra and become that 15-year-old who told dad that something could be done differently. When does that take off and start to make a difference?

Dlemlo 28d ago
It already makes a difference for me. Instead of going through logfiles, i copy and paste them to claude and it does something and tells me the right answer. In coding, tools i vibe code. But the industry is still working on the agentic layer. I think we will see the first real bigger agentic layer setups this year and it will stteam roll a lot next year.

Kuyawa 28d ago

> It’s very tempting to imagine that AI turns everyone into a tool-builder It is not imagination, it is the undeniable truth. The quality of the tool is proportional to the competency of the builder, it always has been that way, AI makes the building process shorter by a magnitude

benedictevans 28d ago
The entire essay explains why I think this is wrong. At a minimum, it is not 'undeniable' - I just denied it ;). Which part of the chain of reasoning I laid out do you disagree with, and why?
saulpw 27d ago
I have a friend who writes, she has certain needs, I've shown her how to start building tools, she has no interest in building tools. She's focused on writing and does not think about her personal process that way. Not every is a tool-builder, in fact most aren't!
- Kuyawa 27d ago
  Let me correct myself, every PROGRAMMER is a tool builder. I thought HN was a Hacker News site, sorry about my intrusion in this forum

ahmedelsama 28d ago

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bizcalclab 28d ago

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john_rood 28d ago

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lasky 28d ago

AI will make the asset holders more productive and profitable. It will raise the level of personal agency + stable family resources required to avoid crises and homelessness. Society will increasingly organize around preventing class warfare.

ebbi 27d ago

My thoughts on AI and how it's going to disrupt jobs is evolving. I was very much in the doomer category last year, but less so now. For someone working in Accounting/Finance/Revenue roles, who has always had a keen interest on tech and software development (but never dedicated enough time to really learn a language to build something of my own), I had many ideas on tools that could be useful in my job - just never had the skill to build it. Now that I have AI, I'm experimenting with building some of these solutions, but I must say: software development is hard. Yes, it would be a lot easier if I had others to work with, especially for things like UI/UX, understanding some of the more complex backend decisions etc. I imagine if I find it hard, people that haven't really been following tech trends would find it even harder. Yes, you could get away with vibe coding a tool that only you would use, but once it goes beyond that, and it needs to be shared with colleagues, or if the aspiration is to market it, there are so many decisions one needs to make to be at least close to world class quality. Things may change as more advanced models come about, but at this stage, I still think unless you're a seasoned developer with good design taste and UX experience, you need a team of people with various skills to build something that you hope to GTM with. It's fun, though. I've created a few tools internally that has saved me so much time and developed functionality I would never have even entertained the idea of pre-agentic coding. I hope my career moves toward building solutions in this domain.

nfemmanuel 20d ago
You mentioned that things get a lot harder once a tool you've built needs to be shared with colleagues. I'm a student working on a school project about exactly that point, and I'd like to hear which of those decisions tripped you up with the internal tools you've made so far. Would you be open to a short call at some point? My email is oluwaniifemi.emmanuel@uni.minerva.edu if so.

dzonga 27d ago

systems of record & vertical integration wins time and time again.