Comment by mindcandy
11 hours ago
Agreed.
I've been seeing too much "I've been coding for decades and what I've always done has be reduced to telling AI to do it for me."
and not nearly enough "I've been coding for decades and recently worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before."
Much easier to complain that you are bored than to step back up to high-effort with your new fancy tools.
Those were exactly my thoughts when deciding to write a new JS engine [1] written from scratch.
Having been a product and UX-focused dev for my entire career, I knew only the basics about parsers and compilers, but have enough experience to grasp where each piece of the puzzle fits, and how to evaluate them. At the beginning it was just a fun test, but it got progressively more serious; it now implements 100% of the latest spec, beats QuickJS in performance, and surpasses V8/JSC in test262.
It took me four months, and I imagine it would take me a single month to do it again - I’ve learned a lot. Someone who already knew what they were doing, and with the right orchestration, could achieve this in weeks at minimal cost.
I really think we are in for a cambrian explosion of software, enabling things that were just always a little out of reach before (like why can’t most of your devices really talk to each other, in 2026).
[1] https://github.com/ricardobeat/boomkat
> from scratch
Beg to differ.
Please explain what you mean by that.
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In the spirit of the latter, here's mine!
https://blog.stuartspence.ca/introducing-asteria.html
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5482440/Asteria_4X/?beta=...
To be clear, I've made large software and game projects over the years, but no way I'd have found the time to do a remake/enhancement of a game I loved as a kid from 1995 that has zero business case. Not without AI.
>In the spirit of the latter, here's mine!
To pile on, here's mine: https://github.com/linsomniac/apt-cacher-ultra
It is a robust, reliable cache of apt packages, with the additional goal of still being able to serve packages from the cache even when the upstream is down. This was started shortly after that DDoS of Canonical this past year. We've run apt-cacher-ng and apt-cacher over the last dozen years, but (a) it requires hand-holding about once a month and (b) it did absolutely nothing for us when Canonical was under DDoS.
I've put well over 100 hours of my time into it. Still running into a lot of people knee-jerk calling it "slop", but I've had 200-ish machines pulling from it for 6 months and it has worked way better than apt-cacher-ng.
I'm not really sure what to do with people who dismiss AI-assisted projects, while dehumanizing the 100 hours of my time I've put into it. I fear we're running the very real risk of both sides losing: the people trying to thoughtfully create with AI losing because of the AI, and the people avoiding AI losing because they can't keep pace.
To play devil's advocate, that sounds like the sort of uncomplicated thing that you could've manually vibecoded in 2020 without an LLM. What changed is that the LLM doesn't let you get analysis paralysis.
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Building a procedural open world at the scale of a flight sim in UE5, in a month wrote 5k prompts, spent 40B tokens and will likely take at least a trillion more over the next year of full time dev work.
Big solo projects exist, they're just not coming out as frequently because of, uh, how time works
> "I've been coding for decades and recently worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before."
I think we'll see a lot less people willing to share if the end result is just to feed the machine no matter how they arrived at it.
Also, "ok, and now I've cloned your hard work overnight, no need for any decisions on my part, I just had my agent use yours and reverse engineered it and/or used it as an oracle. Why the frown? I thought you were in this for intellectual curiosity and exercising your creativity, not just stroking own ego, right?"
I think we'll see a lot less people willing to share if the end result is just to feed the machine no matter how they arrived at it.
I don't see why I should care about this any more than I cared about "somebody I don't like could read my code and learn from it" in the past. The frontier labs can generate or buy all the training data they need; not releasing your app isn't going to hurt them in the slightest.
I get not wanting to contribute to closed, commercial models. We need to hurry up and get Folding-at-Home style distributed community model training going. At that point, I’d be pretty happy if my projects contributed to improving community models. Even if commercial models benefited too.
It makes me feel actually sick that so many people can't separate their positive feelings about AI from people's misery (it must simply be "complaining"), and vice versa. As if both things can't exist, for some reason. It's a common tribalism problem, but it's been kicked up a hundredfold by AI.
Precisely. I have both feelings simulataneously. I am impressed by what it can do and horrified because I realize what it will do to the job market and society in general. Meanwhile everybody seems to believe that AI will cure cancer and therefore we should let it do all the damage it will do without realizing that people will die because of AI as well (in fact have already died because of AI).
This is a reply to the dead comment of buriram:
> If anything, it should make me more optimistic, not less. If you have an idea, you can turn it into product within 30 minutes, no matter how complicated it is.
There is no product in that anymore because someone else could copy your product in the same time.
Hyperbole much? If you are serious, then what cohort of people are dying more per million, than before 2025?
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Exactly. I feel both feelings simultaneously.
AI has essentially stolen my career from me. I _liked_ having to solve complicated problems with software, I enjoyed having to get into the nitty gritty to get things done. I never really cared that much about the actual business problems I was solving, so moving up a layer of abstraction to be some sort of bastardized product manager/architect does not scratch the same itch.
OTOH, for solving problems I care about, AI has been a god send. I can achieve things that I would have never had the time for.
We call that cuckcoding.
Despair is not a tribe.
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if youre complaining then youre part of the problem buddy. get out of my way while i work on the future^TM /s
The distinction you're making between "people's misery" and "complaining" is just emotive pandering. You're complaining that people aren't understanding the depths of your misery. That certainly annoys me; everybody has problems.
The amount of sympathy programmers are expecting others to feel about their problems has been kicked up a hundredfold now that its their jobs that have been threatened by AI. Their tribe feels pain more deeply than others, I guess.
My positive feelings about AI are marginal; my feelings about its performance and the power of the people who scheme to control it are very mixed. My negative feelings about the whining of the most coddled profession on the planet outside of finance are intense.
The problem is that making CRUD apps is not creative, and even if AI plateaus at mediocre, it will still replace a Rails monkey. If you are creative, AI has opened up a world of possibility and productivity, and you painfully feel the limitations and the stupidity of the current level of LLMs; but if you're a mechanic, it's over - I'm pretty sure that was the keynote at the last Rails con. Sorry. Hope you didn't spend all of your massive incomes on toys and rent.
> The amount of sympathy programmers are expecting others to feel about their problems has been kicked up a hundredfold now that its their jobs that have been threatened by AI. Their tribe feels pain more deeply than others, I guess.
Well, just wait then, lots of other professions will soon get to realize the same sort of pain, so you'll be able to be similarly dismissive and condescending to them, too.
A lot of people don't realize that the frontier AI companies are so focused on automating software development first because they are all racing to be the first to get to RSI. I don't know if RSI will actually happen, but many, many other professions will soon be in the same boat. Mathematicians have already felt the pain, and those mathematicians who aren't the few who have tenured professorships are certainly not (generally) some of the most coddled professionals.
But lots of folks low on the salary totem pole (copywriters, paralegals, etc.) are already being hit hard by AI and that blast radius will continue to grow.
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if the complaints can be properly pointed at the actual problem - the corporate culture the complainers are actively upholding or the capitalist system at large, id be much more sympathetic
its a tribalism problem, but one of trying to uphold the current tribe system while theres a pretty obvious new tribe system replacing it
I'm not trying to uphold any tribe I just want to feel secure in my job. :/
AI has taken that security away from me
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Count me in the second camp. I've been writing software for 20+ years, and I recently built a low-cost Google Voice alternative because every business VoIP option I looked at was either overpriced or missing something I wanted. Without AI, that's a project I probably would never have started. With AI, I built it solo in under a month. I even have some paying customers now, though that wasn't the primary goal. So far, the hardest part seems to be opening an Apple Developer account...
> worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before.
Don't we see this already a lot? I feel like people constantly say this exact same words.
I agree.. partly, and my problem is with enjoyment. I did some hand coding today and immediately got in the zone, something I'm still not able to do with LLMs. It most definitely took me probably ~2x longer than it would with an LLM, but it was much more enjoyable owning every decision behind the process, and having a full view of how the system worked.
I think this could be achievable with LLMs if they had a much higher token rate. That way you'd have less downtime and could work on the problem more aggressively. How it's designed to work now, offloading cognitively, doesn't feel very good, even when you 'ship' more.
>my problem is with enjoyment
I get it, I've gotten a lot of joy over the decades from the specific act of programming. But I also get a lot of joy from making something. I'm old enough now that I don't have a lot of my time left to "hand stitch an amazing tapestry". But with AI tooling, I do have time to try out a bunch of ideas and see how they work, scratch little itches and also just run a mad scientist library of experiments, without each experiment taking tens or hundreds of hours of coding to see how that experiment pans out.
> I'm old enough now that I don't have a lot of my time left to "hand stitch an amazing tapestry".
Why not? What is the goal of "having an amazing tapestry"? Do you need to do increasing more things in the limited time you have left and making a tapestry isn't one of those things? What will you have once you've "finished" an amazing tapestry, just something to hang on the wall and look at? How does one "use" a tapestry after it's "finished" such that the act of finishing it is the most important thing? If you've finished it, will you get more enjoyment from looking at it for longer because it was finished sooner and thus the length of time you can look at it before you die is maximized? Exactly what you are optimizing for here?
Yeah, I can never get in the zone with LLMs either. It’s like operating in constant interruption mode. And I always thought I was good at multitasking (even though I know formally it’s an illusion)
It would be nice if we could get a Show HN category specifically for this. I feel like often times when people share projects (whether on HN or otherwise) they're immediately downvoted and cast aside as "AI".
Can we get a forum for sharing project that were _proudly_ built with AI due how ambitious they are?
I am mostly in agreement. And I suspect there are many folks that’re trying to ship something AI-assisted that’s sufficient to get to income security first, and who would use success there as a stepping stone to greater things.
The problem is, why even produce something greater now when someone is just going to clone it with AI? And moreover, what differentiates software now will no longer be the care put into it but marketing and trends. The highly commercialized nature of software means that there's not much point now in doing anything except getting there first and exiting with a decent nest egg.
> And moreover, what differentiates software now will no longer be the care put into it but marketing and trends. The highly commercialized nature of software means that there's not much point now in doing anything except getting there first and exiting with a decent nest egg.
That happened at least 20 years ago. How many recent "this product did so great because of the care of software engineering, and now the creator is comfortable for the rest of their life without risk of it being copied" success stories are there compared to "this product chased some trends VCs were nuts about with a slapdash MVP and the founders took out 8 figures from their later fundraising rounds, but then the business sputtered out"?
I think there's an angle with AI tools where business-minded people will have a better chance of doing interesting things now than in the recent past, because you could potentially tailor much more deeply to individual customers with reasonable economics than in the past. There are fields where there's room for a garden of solutions from different small-team vendors appropriate for different use cases instead of a one-size-fits-all SaaS winner-take-all type market in the past. We could kill the old line about SAP around needing to change your business to accommodate SAP instead of customize SAP to accommodate your existing workflow.
But if you aren't business-minded at all there are likely less places that will need to hire as many careful maintainers or novel-software-writers, which obviously is a huge kick in the teeth to a lot of people.
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because its fun?
why are you here if you dont enjoy the solving of problems first and foremost?
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Yup
If you can make it solo with an LLM then someone else with an LLM can copy it immediately
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UBI or a living wage for part-time workers in-line with what was expected would be possible from productivity gains over the past half-century would do that. You just have to get the "hard workers" who are happy to race to the bottom on their way to the top, and undercut/throw under the bus everyone else in the process.
Can we please, for once, stop trying to figure out how to "get ahead" of each other, and instead figure out how to build a decent and dignified floor for as many people as possible? Because I imagine that, "Ultimate power in the hands of anyone with enough VRAM to run GTAVI," works better when people are in a culture of looking out for each other, versus a culture of clawing their way to one of the limited lifeboat spots (under the mistaken impression that there ARE lifeboats, when, again, everyone potentially has the power to blow up the lifeboats).
A UBI will never work, the Soviets tried effectively that and it fails miserably.
You end up with the government deciding how much bread each person needs, how much the bread will cost, how much to pay a person so they can pay the defined price for the allocated amount of bread, etc.
Either utopian claims of an AI and robot-powered future are right and we don't need money because you can just have what you want, or money and resources will still be scarce and we will continue to compete amongst ourselves for resources.
Problem is that before I wasn’t paying for tools like postgres, git or linux. I donate, and I know that money goes to good hands.
Now I must pay for codex/claude, and that money goes to billionaires psychopaths. So that sucks as you can imagine
Also if you do FOSS, renting model time to be able to work could hardly be more against the spirit.
Per Linus, you're not a serious developer unless you can afford access to these models anyway, so it's not really a big deal in the end.
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It's the same thing I feel when I hear Terence Tao speak about AI, to be honest.
> It's the same thing I feel when I hear Terence Tao speak about AI
Which talk of his gave this impression?
This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svl_1upFpQo
AI is my jet pack.
I was a fantastic IC and built really amazing software. I'm an even better AI-empowered engineer.
The old era is dead. The new one is exciting.
The problem is now the AI can do for $100 what took you 3 months full time.
Employers previously hired you because cheaper alternatives such as offshoring were impractical…
Now the AI is cheaper, faster, and better than domestic labor and offshoring while still hosted domestically…
Some will feel one doesn’t need an experienced rockstar to babysit an AI…
In about an hour I just solved about 80hrs worth of personal coding/debugging with a portion of a $20/month Claude subscription… Frankly it makes all my knowledge and experience feel kinda worthless… I only gave it a few sentences…
My POV is that indicates you need to up your expectations for yourself. You apparently have the knowledge and experience to cause 80 hours worth of work to be completed in a few sentences given today’s tools.
So then, given your knowledge and experience, what challenge would require 80 hours of real, focused work out of you using today’s tools?
You don't pay a milkman anymore.
Yes until the AI labs start charging the real price.
When AI labs mature and inference costs start to matter, they will start optimizing for inference cost instead of sacrificing everything for intelligence.
But even without that, open weight models are already good enough and everyone would be fine with paying unsubsidized prices for them.