Comment by echelon
9 hours ago
You won't have to ignore this stuff for long. Pretty soon it'll be mandatory to keep up.
I've been a senior engineer doing large scale active-active, five nines distributed systems that process billions of dollars of transactions daily. These are well thought out systems with 20+ folks on design document reviews.
Not all of the work falls into that category, though. There's so much plumbing and maintenance and wiring of new features and requirements.
On that stuff, I'm getting ten times the amount of work done with AI than I was before. I could replace the juniors on my team with just myself if I needed to and still get all of our combined work done.
Engineers using AI are going to replace anyone not using AI.
In fact, now is the time to start a startup and "fire" all of these incumbent SaaS companies. You can make reasonable progress quickly and duplicate much of what many companies do without much effort.
If you haven't tried this stuff, you need to. I'm not kidding. You will easily 10x your productivity.
I'm not saying don't review your own code. Please do.
But Claude emits reasonable Rust and Java and C++. It's not just for JavaScript toys anymore.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Edit:
Holy hell HN, downvoted to -4 in record time. Y'all don't like what's happening, but it's really happening.
I'm not lying about this.
I provided my background so you'd understand the context of my claims. I have a solid background in tech.
The same thing that happened to illustration and art is happening here, to us and to our career. And these models are quite usable for production code.
I can point Claude to a Rust HTTP handler and say, "using this example [file path], write a new endpoint that handles video file uploads, extracts the metadata, creates a thumbnail, uploads them to the cloud storage, and creates the relevant database records."
And it does it in a minute.
I review the code. It's as if I had written it. Maybe a change here or there.
Real production Rust code, 100 - 500 LOC, one shotted in one minute. It even installs the routes and understands the HTTP framework DSL. It even codegens Swagger API documentation and somehow understands the proc macro DSL that takes Rust five minutes to compile.
This tech is wizardry. It's the sci fi stuff we dreamed of as kids.
I don't get the sour opinions. The only thing to fear is big tech monopolozation.
I suppose the other thing to worry about is what's going to happen to our cushy $400k salaries. But if you make yourself useful, I think it'll work out just fine.
Perhaps more than fine if you're able to leverage this to get ahead and fire your employer. You might not need your employer anymore. If you can do sales and wear many hats, you'll do exceedingly well.
I'm not saying non-engineers will be able to do this. I'm saying engineers are well positioned to leverage this.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't use AI.
There was a submission to a blog post discussing applications of AI but it got killed for some reason.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750927
I remain convinced that if you use AI to write code then your product will sooner or later turn into a buggy mess. I think this will remain the case until they figure out how to make a proper memory system. Until then, we still have to use our brains as the memory system.
One strategy I've seen that I like is using AI to prototype, but then write actual code yourself. This is what the Ghostty guy does I believe.
I agree that AI can write decent Rust code, but Rust is not a panacea. From what I heard, Cursor has a lot of vibe-coded Rust code, but it didn't save it from being, as I said, a buggy mess.
> I remain convinced that if you write code then your product will sooner or later turn into a buggy mess.
FYFY
Yeah the level of depraved code I've had contractors ask me to review... I don't think people realize how low the bar is.
> Holy hell HN, downvoted to -4 in record time. Y'all don't like what's happening, but it's really happening. > > I'm not lying about this. > > I provided my background so you'd understand the context of my claims. I have a solid background in tech.
There are lots of people claiming this. Many of whom have a solid background. Every now and then I check out someone's claim (checking the code they've generated). I've yet to find an AI-generated codebase that passed that check so far.
Perhaps yours is the one that does, but as we can't see the code for ourselves, there's no way for us to really know. And it's hard to take your word for it when there are so many people falsely making the same claims.
I expect a lot of HNers have had this experience.
Have you looked at antirez's code?
https://github.com/antirez/flux2.c
Generating code from scratch and modifying existing code are two different things, obviously the latter being where AI doesn't do great. Carefully managing and compressing context can somewhat help, but that is far from being a perfect solution.
> "The same thing that happened to illustration and art is happening here"
What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments.
> "I don't get the sour opinions."
The reasoning for folks' "sour opinions" has been very well-documented, especially here on HN. This comment reads like people don't like AI because they think it's slow or something, which is not the case.
> What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments.
large part of formerly done by humans graphics is now autogenerated
> What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments.
I don't know what jobs have been impacted yet, but there will likely be pressure for all content creators and knowledge workers to use the tools to get more work done.
We'll probably start seeing this in software development this year. The tools finally feel ready for prime time.
> This comment reads like people don't like AI because they think it's slow or something, which is not the case.
I am familiar with the most common arguments in opposition - stealing training data, hallucinations, not understanding logic (this is why "engineers in the loop" matters), big corps owning the tech (I really agree with this one), power usage, etc.
It feels as though the downvotes are from people that "dislike AI" for any of the aforementioned reasons. In the face of the possibility of losing jobs to engineers that leverage AI to get more quality work done, however, I don't know why HN engineers downvote anecdotes about real world usage. This is vital to know and understand. I would think one would want more evidence to consider about the state of things.
This is a quickly developing story. Your jobs are or will be on the line.
It doesn't matter what your personal misgivings are if your job will soon require the use of AI. You can hate it all you want, but if people are getting 10x more work done than you, you really don't have a choice.
This will be the same in every career sector with AI models that can be deployed to automate work -- marketing, editing, film, animation, VFX, software, music production, 3D modeling, game design, etc.
I don't think the jobs are going away, but I do think they're going to change. Fast.
No sense in sour grapes.
> I don't know what jobs have been impacted yet, but there will likely be pressure for all content creators and knowledge workers to use the tools to get more work done.
You claimed that it already happened to illustrators and artists, and while I am sure they use it one way or another, I don't think it transformed the industry. Now, I am not saying that it won't amount to anything in software, I just don't think it is ready as of right now outside of greenfield projects, mostly because the scope is limited.
I am pretty positive that at some point we'll have a tool which will automate the generation -> code review -> fixing (multiple loops) -> releasing without people. Currently people are the bottleneck and imo a better way is to exclude people completely outside of initial problem statement and accepting the result. Otherwise it is just too janky, that 10x comes with a huge asterisk that can unironically slow you down after all said and done.
2 replies →
> Holy hell HN, downvoted to -4 in record time. Y'all don't like what's happening, but it's really happening.
I gave you an upvote FWIW, after all, I mean, my job's codebase is already a buggy mess, so it doesn't hurt to throw AI on it, which is what I do.
> You might not need your employer anymore. If you can do sales and wear many hats, you'll do exceedingly well.
Wasn't this the case before AI as well?
right, but the productivity boost provides further leverage
> I've been
so not now, then?
“I’ve been alive for fifty years” does not imply one is dead.
"i used to do drugs. i still do, but i used to, too."