Comment by wouldbecouldbe

1 day ago

Developers that can’t see the change are blind.

Just this week, sun-tue. I added a fully functional subscription model to an existing platform, build out a bulk async elasticjs indexing for a huge database and migrated a very large Wordpress website to NextJS. 2.5 days, would have cost me at least a month 2 years ago.

To me, this sounds like:

AI is helping me solve all the issues that using AI has caused.

Wordpress has a pretty good export and Markdown is widely supported. If you estimate 1 month of work to get that into NextJS, then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.

  • it's wild that somehow with regards to AI conversations lately someone can say "I saved 3 months doing X" and someone can willfully and thoughtfully reply "No you didn't , you're wrong." without hesitation.

    I feel bad for AI opponents mostly because it seems like the drive to be against the thing is stronger than the drive towards fact or even kindness.

    My .02c: I am saving months of efforts using AI tools to fix old (PRE-AI, PREHISTORIC!) codebases that have literally zero AI technical debt associated to them.

    I'm not going to bother with the charts & stats, you'll just have to trust me and my opinion like humans must do in lots of cases. I have lots of sharp knives in my kitchen, too -- but I don't want to have to go slice my hands on every one to prove to strangers that they are indeed sharp -- you'll just have to take my word.

    • Slice THEIR hands. They might say yours are rigged.

      I'm a non dev and the things I'm building blow me away. I think many of these people criticizing are perhaps more on the execution side and have a legitimate craft they are protecting.

      If you're more on the managerial side, and I'd say a trusting manager not a show me your work kind, then you're more likely to be open and results oriented.

      4 replies →

    • Just look at the METR study. All predictions were massive time savings but all observations were massive time losses. That's why we don't believe you when you say you saved time.

      1 reply →

    • It is wild. I must admit I have a bit of Gell Mann amnesia when it comes to HN comments. I often check them to see what people think about an article, but then every time the article touches on something I know deeply, I realize it’s all just know-it-all puffery. Then I forget and check it when it’s on the many things I do not know much about.

      My cofounder is extremely technically competent, but all these people are like good luck with your spaghetti vibe code. It’s humorous.

  • You are assuming a lot of things.

    The work was moving the many landing pages & content elements to NextJS, so we can test, iterate and develop faster. While having a more stable system. This was a 10 year old website, with a very large custom WordPress codebase and many plugins.

    The content is still in WordPress backend & will be migrated in the second phase.

  • To me, this sounds like:

    If AI was good at a certain task then it was a bad task in the first place.

    Which is just run of the mill dogmatic thinking.

  • There is much going on in that exchange.

    I don't even know what a Wordpress site is anymore.

    > then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.

    But now it only takes days which makes it suitable?

    There also is the paradoxical question if it is worth the time from someone who knows what they are doing? how would you even tell?