Comment by robswc
1 day ago
This is sort of my take. You could look around in 2016 and 2026 and honestly not much has changed... at least at first glance. There is a missing piece of the puzzle.
I'm noticing this even in industry. Yea, we can build and iterate on ideas 100x faster but has this turned into anything meaningful? Not really... Hell, look at the big companies spending billions on inference... nothing shipped and things are still buggy as ever. Where is everything?
The job market had changed that's for sure.
Fair point. I have to wonder how much is because of AI and how much is from ZIRP stuff though.
Neither.
How many more software projects are there really left that make economic sense? Zuck learned the hard way re. metaverse.
Not many - the set that make ECONOMIC sense is finite. Even though many want to believe its infinite because all of a sudden everyone can vibe code an app cringe.
If anything AI is going to cause an insane amount of consolidation - what used to be across 3 diff apps, that can be consolidated will be done -> many businesses will die. It will be painful.
Google was attacked by an activist investor pre LLM hype for being bloated - they promptly laid people off. Many software firms have been allowed to bloat up do to the nature of the business.
Its always about economics.
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We went from spending a lot of money on people to enshitify products and then charge more for them to spending a lot of money on agents to enshitify products to charge more for them.
And stall and sell your data quicker. It will certainly be a boon for companies and government agencies that want to profile.
As a person, I have a strong preference for the former.
That's what I'm saying.
Not only from the big companies. Where is the explosion of disruption ?
Why even bother when an AI is just going to do it better than you can? They have more money, more compute, and most importantly, will have next to zero cost of labor.
I can't even go a day without running into super frustrating bugs on the ChatGPT app.
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You could say the same about Amazon
Fck disruption. The fetishizing of disruption is annoying. The tech became all about destroying something someone else has. What about ... create good stuff, create non-gambling markets, make peoples lives better.
Sure, it did some meaningful things:
* Higher load on senior engineers who are about to burn out hard from fighting an endless battle against unreviewed slop people keep trying to yeet into production
* Less junior hiring and suppressed wages
* Culture of uncertainty and fear
* Computers are really expensive now
* Some people now live with diesel generators and gas turbines making their neighborhood hazardous to their health
Totally agree. IMO it's mostly behind the scenes stuff though.
I think some of the most impressive stuff to show someone from 2016 might be LLMs doing a summary of complex topics, followed by self-driving (actually) cars and intricate robots... but other than that there is no "future magic" touching the lives of every day people going on.
Actually I'm pretty sure if you showed someone the latest and greatest from these big AI companies, these AI companions that can book flights, people would go "Oh, so its like a smarter Siri" and proceed to not care at all lol.
> Higher load on senior engineers who are about to burn out hard from fighting an endless battle against unreviewed slop people keep trying to yeet into production
Gosh, this has been my entire experience with AI, and I’ve never seen it this well articulated. Thank you!
Less junior hiring is a reflection of a) the maturity of the software business b) current expectations of the future
I have no doubt startups in particular are able to get away with using LLMs to produce sloppy code and ship. But this trend was on-going and sped up due to the infiltration of LLMs and marketing.
You do realise markets are highly imperfect in reality? That nonsense in econ books is fantasy.
It has greatly changed for the worse I can't get all the flashing lights out of my face now, more algorithms to hook you in, more social media, more gambling, more news, more things to catch your attention.
More noise. The world is just so noisy now.
Even in software, there are many things that haven't changed.
e.g. Why do Rust and CPython still have over 5,000 open issues each? At some point, will the superintelligence fix all the bugs autonomously? When is that going to happen?
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues
https://github.com/python/cpython/issues
What about new features? In every thread about Rust, people are clamoring for new features and libraries. People wonder why there can't be a batteries-included standard library like Go.
So now that LLMs are so smart, is that a solved problem? Or are we still bottlenecked on the expertise of a few experts?
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Also, what happened to AI's passing the Turing test? I see tons of slop articles that are obvious to most HN readers. They haven't fooled us apparently -- the longer the interaction, the more obvious it becomes whether it's AI.
(That said, I use AI all the time and find it to be a great tool. IMO is is a tool, not an autonomous intelligence with a will of its own.)
>You could look around in 2016 and 2026 and honestly not much has changed
I find 2026 much more repulsive compared to 2016.
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