Comment by nl
1 month ago
He's a pretty decent programmer.
It's interesting that some months ago when his nanochat project came out the HN Anti-AI crowd celebrated him saying "I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful, possibly the repo is too far off the data distribution"
But now it is working for him he's suddenly not an expert...
What you’re calling the “crowd” was not the same people. Every time someone makes a claim like yours, I go and check and don’t see the same usernames in the conversation. “Different people have different opinions and different ways to express them” isn’t really an insight; it tells us nothing nor does it make anyone worthy of criticism.
You can’t, in an honest argument, lump different strangers into a group you invented to accuse them of duplicity or hypocrisy.
Having created 100 of nano-sized projects does not add up to having developed and maintained one large code base.
Coding agents are eating up programming from the lowest end, starting from pressing button on the keyboard to type the code in: completion was literally their first application. I don't think it will go all the way to the top, though, the essential part of the profession will remain until true AGI.
Metaphorically, think how integrated chips didn't replace electrical engineering, just changed which production tools and components engineers deal with and how.
Obviously we all are adapting to changes, but if he or someone are panicking about being behind, that can only be because they've never been in too deep.
> But now it is working for him he's suddenly not an expert...
Or maybe he didn't lie then but is lying now?
Calling him a liar seems fairly unnecessary? For one thing people's minds can change, or that can be talking in different contexts. Or - as in this case - new technology could have been deployed that changed the game.