Comment by fxtentacle
1 day 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.
From a developer POV, or at least my developer POV, less code is always better. The best code is no code at all.
I think getting results can be very easy, at first. But I force myself to not just spit out code, because I've been burned so, so, so many times by that.
As software grows, the complexity explodes. It's not linear like the growth of the software itself, it feels exponential. Adding one feature takes 100x the time it should because everything is just squished together and barely working. Poorly designed systems eventually bring velocity to a halt, and you can eventually reach a point where even the most trivial of changes are close to impossible.
That being said, there is value in throwaway code. After all, what is an Excel workbook if not throwaway code? But never let the throwaway become a product, or grow too big. Otherwise, you become a prisoner. That cheeky little Excel workbook can turn into a full-blown backend application sitting on a share drive, and it WILL take you a decade to migrate off of it.
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I am a (very) senior dev with decades of experience. And I, too, am blown away by the massive productivity gains I get from the use of coding AIs.
Part of the craft of being a good developer is keeping up with current technology. I can't help thinking that those who oppose AI are not protecting legitimate craft, but are covering up their own laziness when it comes to keeping up. It seems utterly inconceivable to me that anyone who has kept up would oppose this technology.
There is a huge difference between vibe coding and responsible professional use of AI coding assistants (the principle one, of course, being that AI-generated code DOES get reviewed by a human).
But that, being said, I am enormously supportive of vibe coding by amateur developers. Vibe coding is empowering technology that puts programming power into the hands of amateur developers, allowing them to solve the problems that they face in their day-to-day work. Something that we've been working toward for decades! Will it be professional-quality code? No. Of course not. Will it do what it needs to do? Invariably, yes.
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.
You should know better than to form a opinion from one study. I could show you endless examples of a study concluding untrue things, endless…
I’ve been full time (almost solo) building an ERP system for years and my development velocity has gone roughly 2x. The new features are of equal quality, everything is code reviewed, everything is done in my style, adhering to my architectural patterns. Not to mention I’ve managed to build a mobile app alongside my normal full time work, something I wouldn’t have even had the time to attempt to learn about without the use of agents.
So do you think I’m lying or do you just think my eyes are deceiving me somehow?
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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?