7 ms·
Meanwhile, I can't even get Astra to consistently re-use the same font-size across all of my HTML page headings+subheadings. There's just no world where this a
by nullbio 20d ago
Meanwhile, I can't even get Astra to consistently re-use the same font-size across all of my HTML page headings+subheadings.
There's just no world where this actually results in a stable, respected business. It will be death by a thousand bad impressions, mistakes and oversights. Yeah, you can automate everything. That doesn't mean it's being done well.
That's not to say this might not be something feasible in 2-3 years from now, but we're still a long ways away.
- aurareturn 20d agoPeople said Devin, the AI coding agent, was garbage in 2024. Now it's weird if an agent isn't writing 99% of your code. So you're right to be skeptical as of September 2026. But September 2028? It might just be weird to run companies without AI management.
- bootsmann 20d agoI don’t think this is true at all. Maybe if you have an agent writing some of your code it will be 99% because its so verbose but I don’t think the modal software engineer is a vibecoder.
- weird-eye-issue 20d agoIf you think that all instances of using AI to write code is vibe coding and you can't even spell model you might not last much longer
- yk_42 20d agoI think this is an uncharitable misinterpretation of the parent comment. I took “modal engineer” to mean “the statistical mode of engineers”, not a misspelling of “model engineer”. Which means I think you’re in agreement that using AI to write code is not necessarily vibe coding and that vibe coding is not what the majority (mode) are doing. But I may be wrong.
- bootsmann 20d agoYou are absolutely right :)
- weird-eye-issue 20d agoThanks I had never seen that word used in this context!
- nxc18 20d ago“Modal” is a word. The AI brainrot is real.
- Hamuko 20d agoYou can’t definitively say that using AI is making people stupid. It could as well be that stupid people are drawn towards using AI.
- techpression 20d agoAI is just another way to not use your brain, I think there’s plenty of consensus around the fact that not using your brain makes you dumber. So actually, yes you can say that definitely.
- weird-eye-issue 20d agoUnfortunately I was like this long before LLMs, trust me ;) And yes I know it's a word, I know at least two meanings it has but in this particular usage I was not familiar with it. Anyways, I was wrong and I will take the L
- vector_spaces 20d agoThe certitude with which you condemn your peer without the slightest consideration for subtlety or alternate explanations for what you've understood to be true -- this comment is such a beautiful encapsulation of the state of discourse today. In some ways it is the modal comment of the moment. Tastelessness and mediocrity and inability to grasp nuance or feign at humility are on full display, not to mention a fantasy for violence It's a work of art
- weird-eye-issue 20d ago> Tastelessness and mediocrity and inability to grasp nuance or feign at humility are on full display, not to mention a fantasy for violence You are doing the same thing, very ironic. At least I'm not the one trying to act like I'm on the moral high ground.
- ryan_n 20d agoHow is that the same thing at all? You didn't understand the comment you replied to and were confidently wrong. The person replying to you understood what you were saying very clearly and didn't make any ridiculous "you may not last long" comments like you did...
- cindyllm 20d ago[dead]
- weird-eye-issue 20d agoYou're taking this far too seriously. You'd think I'd committed a terrible crime or something. Give it a break.
- instantlyblocke 20d ago> and you can't even spell model Were this a different type of social media, I'd praise you on what you did here. But on this place, I can just be certain you're ignorant.
- weird-eye-issue 20d agoThat's true
- d5lt5 19d ago"If you think that all instances of using AI to write code is vibe coding" Your comment from 4 days ago: "Vibe coders like you who don't even understand basic fundamentals are pretty infuriating"
- weird-eye-issue 19d agoYes, those are not conflicting statements. All rectangles are not squares after all. If you can reply to me and actually put the point that you are attempting to make into words I would be shocked. Give it a try!
- d5lt5 14d agoI will reply when you have anything substantial to talk about except for personal attacks.
- unclebucknasty 20d ago>Now it's weird if an agent isn't writing 99% of your code. >But September 2028? It might just be weird to run companies without AI management. Coding is pattern matching and still requires a human in the loop to manage. But, any human in the loop managing the "Ai management" is the manager, by definition. Only way true Ai management is viable is via non LLM Ai, so completely depends on advancements there.
- andyroid 20d agoI don’t know a single developer who has an agent write 99% of their code. Is that the norm outside of my bubble?
- swazzy 20d agoit's the norm in my bubble
- juggle-anyhow 20d agoIt writes all the code but we often have to go through several iterations. It won't work autonomously yet.
- vincnetas 20d agoYeap, one more data point here. Most of code here is AI generated with some handcrafted adjustments.
- birdsongs 20d agoMy whole company (I hate it).
- mat_b 20d agoIt's writing nearly all of the code where I work. It also reviews all of the code (I review it as well). You still have to guide it and hold its hand though. I dont write code by hand anymore (and haven't in almost a year). The job is now about managing the bots, understanding the architecture and keep everything aligned.
- handbanana_ 20d agoFirst rule is AI cannot make a management decision
- tacomagick 20d agoBecause it cannot be held liable
- doc_ick 20d agoHR loves this one trick…
- krapp 20d agoThat will probably change sooner than you think. Now that it's commonly accepted* that AI has reached AGI status there are already movements to grant legal personhood and rights to it, which would mean legal liability for its actions. Eventually we get to the cyberpunk trope of entirely autonomous corporations that only ever hire humans for gig work and pay them in femtobitcoins or something. * I'm not arguing what that actually means, much less, whether or not that has actually happened, just that it's what people believe, and as we are a belief-driven culture rather than a data or fact driven culture, that belief is what will drive policy.
- tacomagick 20d agoThat sounds like a horrific dream than anything. How will you even punish an AI model? I think the cyberpunk trope is a bit out of touch from reality, but a lighter version of it can definitely happen where we do get AI companies and entire board coups replacing CEOs with AI for short amounts of time, but in the end people (both consumers and investors) will want something to blame and punish properly, and they will also want control (realistically if you told any of the big people in the AI scene you're replacing them with a model they will definitely reject and claim they are needed for the company to prosper) In addition this will probably only happen on America as most movies take place lol
- antupis 20d agowe aren't anywhere near lights off software factories, and writing software is easiest domain for modern llms, you can verify results rather easily, plenty of training data etc.
- lnsru 20d agoYou’re mixing things up. Coding is work while managing is status. Management will force the peasants to use any pitchfork management wants. But giving status and power away will never happen. It’s obvious that there enough managers to replace with AI for positive outcome. Bet it will never happen.
- hypfer 20d ago> Now it's weird if an agent isn't writing 99% of your code. It is? Are you sure that this is a representative reading that applies to more than just a tiny bubble?
- aurareturn 20d agoIt's probably 99.99%. 99% means I write 1 line for every 100 AI lines. It's probably 1 human line for every 10,000 AI lines right now.
- kakacik 20d agoThats you, don't assume everybody in the IT world works in code sweatshops like that. Your above ultra confident statements are also not correct across much of industry.
- aurareturn 20d agoThat's fine. It will be 99.99% for everyone soon except those who identify as an coding artisan. There are still people who ride horses.
- slopinthebag 20d agoyou sound like a web developer
- huijzer 20d agoI always write my assembly by hand because nobody appreciates the craft anymore. It’s all hidden by those pesky compilers which generate extremely inadequate code that could easily be improved by some thinking on the programmer side /s I do think a better programmer will be a better prompter just like a better compiler engineer will be a better programmer (when performance matters at least).
- dakolli 20d agoThe llm induced dunning krueger from you larper types is really funny. Software isnt all shitty webapps is you vibe coders create and declare software solved. None of the code written for a pacemaker, medical imaging, weapons systems, and thousands of other perf critical domains are written by llms in any meaningful sense. Not everything runs in a browser. Three years ago you asked this lol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36136015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36136015
- jeffreygoesto 20d agoAll extrapolations are wrong. Even this one. We just don't know how.
- dvfjsdhgfv 20d ago> People said Devin, the AI coding agent, was garbage in 2024. Now it's weird if an agent isn't writing 99% of your code. I have two comments to this statement. First, using "the" suggests being unique, where in fact there were several similar attempts of similarly low quality, including open-source autogpt even before that. Second, Devin is still bad, in spite of VC money spent on its development and costly billboards in SF.
- boonzeet 20d agoI still think it’s weird if an agent is writing 99% of your production code. It should be more like 80% with significant review.
- skylurk 20d agoAI writes 900% of my code. Only some of it is worth merging ;)
- grey-area 20d agoIt’s really not weird for humans to write code. You live in a bubble and your code is terrible if you write 99% of it with ‘agents’.
- bitlad 20d agogenie is out of the bottle.
- fatata123 20d ago[dead]
- catlifeonmars 20d agoI guess that makes me weird :)
- kkukshtel 20d agoDevin is/was shit though, compared to the other options available both now and then.
- steve-atx-7600 20d agoSame. But, yeah, I guess companies are "solved" now just like software engineering.
- sfn42 20d ago> can't even get Astra to consistently re-use the same font-size across all of my HTML page headings+subheadings. This is just basic software engineering. DRY. Define the style in one place and reuse it. This is also why you need a human in the loop, you need to make these kinds of design decisions and tell it to do stuff like this. Otherwise you're just building a pile of trash and you'll keep having these dumb easily avoidable issues. Humans have the exact same problem. If you want a consistent solution to a problem, solve it once and reuse it. Otherwise it won't be consistent.
- kaoD 20d ago> Define the style in one place and reuse it. If I had to guess, this is pure Tailwind rot.
- sfn42 20d agoI don't use tailwind but surely it has ways to standardize this kind of stuff?
- kaoD 20d agoTailwind's philosophy is that you must not use CSS facilities at all and instead all their utility classes should be inlined into the HTML soup. This leaves framework components as the only abstraction boundary, but that means if you're writing plain HTML without a framework there's literally no way to standardize your design system. That and the huge soup of classes in DOM is (part of why) I don't like Tailwind... but that ship sailed a long time ago.
- scoopertrooper 20d agoYou can define css classes that combine multiple tailwind classes https://tailwindcss.com/docs/functions-and-directives#apply-directive https://tailwindcss.com/docs/functions-and-directives#apply-...
- 20d ago
- protocolture 20d ago>It will be death by a thousand bad impressions, mistakes and oversights. Current human CEO outcome. Honestly, the C level are already finance maximising stochastic parrots so this tool seems perfect tbh.
- zyngaro 20d agoDid you try adding tests.
- Hamuko 20d agoI fully agree with the respected part. People hate when they need to contact customer support and are greeted with an AI chatbot. Now imagine if a customer needs to contact the CEO or sales department and is met with an AI chatbot.
- oxi113 20d agoI agree and I think that this will bring such abundance of information/slop to deal with / to injest. A lot of security concerns too. It's like the classic hot topic of having personal AI agents booking and ordering pizzas for you that are now all over social media. So pain to deal with when you're a human being on the other end receiving calls from an LLM. Given the fact that LLMs are very unstable and don't follow the rules and often diverge from the initial instruction list[1], I can't even imagine the responsibility of running such system interacting with humans / other systems online. [1] https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/ https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...
- safety1st 20d agoI can certainly understand why YC would fund an idea like this, and it's interesting to read about, but yeah the horizon for it working is surely very long if ever. A more appropriate scope would be "can any element of a business at all be handled autonomously by an agent in the long run?" because I would buy that product, but I can't think of one. Andon's real world experiments are a lot more interesting than the simulations IMO. They ran a retail outlet which has burned through 97% of the money in its bank account. A cafe which is well into a downward slide. Some online radio stations which have listener numbers you can count on one hand. Seems a little insane that they opened expensive physical businesses like retail and a cafe without doing anything digital successfully first. Surely a dropshipping business is easier and cheaper to test out than a brick and mortar clothing store! So if nothing else, they have a looooong way to go on distribution. I would argue that distribution in particular might be unsolvable with an agent. If your agent can do it why can't a thousand others? At which point the cost of customer acquisition will be driven up by thousands of robo-competitors until it's no longer viable. The robots mutate the problem and the closest real analogy ends up being perfect competition where no one has any profits.
- MadrasTh0rn 20d ago>Surely a dropsharing business is easier and cheaper to test out than a brick and mortar clothing store! I'd assume those test cases already exist.
- gchamonlive 20d ago> Meanwhile, I can't even get Astra to consistently re-use the same font-size across all of my HTML page headings+subheadings. Are you using a consistent or centralised design system across all your projects?
- sharemywin 20d agoI wonder if any of there businesses are profitable?
- datsci_est_2015 20d agoMaybe very passive businesses which are basically just capital investments with some paper pushing (e.g. real estate slumlord). But these types of businesses don’t really create value as much as seek rent.
- iforgotmypasswo 20d agoThat’s a user error. Tell it to utilize a UI component library to separate styling from feature implementation and add tests which fail any feature level component outside of the UI component library which directly specify style. As a bonus, you can now easily reskin and maintain dark and light modes. I agree with your main point though. AI isn’t trained to run a company, it’s trained to solve complex puzzles. We’ll need better models with substantially diversified training to run a company.
- iforgotmypasswo 20d agoI’ve gotten down votes on this comment, but this is the kind of work we have PMs doing now. We don’t even have dedicated frontend developers anymore. Continuing down this path is how you lose your job when someone who understands how to use the new tool comes along. You can either keep filling up your context window with thousands of instructions and hoping the AI will listen, or you can use AI to fix the problem permanently with automation that runs in CI and allows you to correct everything before a PR gets merged. Unless we’re training these systems on “solve this problem while following hundreds of arbitrary rules”, loading all your wants and needs into the context window is bound to fail. It’s not what the AI was built to do. Building tests to catch specific issues and transforming code to better architecture are tasks that AI is good at. You can mistakenly expect the tool to operate like a human, or you can understand what the technology was trained to do and build around that instead. I am doubling down here. This isn’t a real issue if you’re treating AI like any other tool and understanding how and where to apply it. Or you have no autonomy to mold the code base to AI. If so, that’s unfortunate.
- nijave 20d agoI think it's possible to get an LLM to run your business but I think it's still prohibitively expensive to spend the time and money getting guardrails, skills, knowledge, context setup. Getting it to work reliably is quite the feat. AI coding is a much lower bar when there's (ideally) still a human expert that can set it straight when it goes awry. I also think some of these debates get hung up on what's possible and ignore what's feasible and practical.
- partyficial 20d ago> feasible in 2-3 years from now > long ways away I'm constantly amazed by what people think is "long-term" on HN.
- ledgerkeeper2 20d ago[flagged]