People are using AI to write code. But HN is the wrong place to try to figure out how much they are using it. This site is full of bots and shills and has become a wasteland since AI. You can tell by the way they make short super confident (even ridiculous) statements in order to try to bully the insecure into buying into the hype. It matches exactly the patterns you used to see with crypto. Even the more subtle comments are often lacking in any kind of specifics. Of course there are some genuine AI users also but the point is that the overall volume of comments is completely unrepresentative of reality.
The tradgedy is that HN used to be a great place to get honest and well argued opinion and anecdotes about new technologies and the different tradeoffs etc.
I think the combination of YC being “a place for founders” and the proliferation of useless AI startups, each with its own little weird AI-booster founder, probably has added to this phenomenon as well.
I recently saw a video where one of these founders showed their “programming” setup, and it was a cashier’s microphone wherein he whispers sweet nothings to the LLM, because of course he doesn’t write code anymore (who even reads code nowadays, am I right?!). I think this is the type of individual who’s lost in the bubble sauce that ends up writing the most absurd comments around here.
How do you know these are bots and not Redditors? There's an HN sub on Reddit, and one of the hallmarks of Reddit are the 'mic drop' big pivotal one liner comments that get upvoted or cause lots of replies or engagement.
But I do feel, to reply to you, that crypto was a lot more critically received on HN than AI is right now. We're too busy debating humanity's end rather than if this crap actually works.
For those of us who actually work with technology (not product managers, executives or salespeople, this stuff doesn't work well at scale. It might in a research department at Google or a hedge fund, less so in the messy corporate world.
I can't remember when I started reading HN. Possibly as late as around 2017/18. I lost one account I had when I changed company, and this is my latest account. Obviously you can't tell for sure, but I know that I am not a bot and I know that every single developer in my company (only a few hundred) have agents writing almost all of their code. I'm in the fintech industry (trading side). I have a lot of connections from my long career in the industry. Everyone else is using coding agents too.
I don't think I could find a job in my industry if I tried that didn't want me to write code using coding agents.
Obviously I can't prove any of this, so try emailing a recruiter and test it for yourself.
From what I can tell, a lot of newly registered users are equally as vehemently against AI as there are those that are pro. I guess we see things through our own personal filter.
That depends on how you see it. I started off studying physics, but transitioned to CS. I found I was good at CS and loved tinkering, but the tinkering was always for the exploration of problems. That was always the point, not typing characters on a screen.
I admit, there is/was a certain element of enjoying the zone during development sessions. But mostly, it was the problems, not the tool.
I happened to become good at coding, and good at doing it in a corporate setting, so I adapted my habits, learned to write the best sort of code that keeps a production system solid and fast. But as I say, typing the characters was never really the point. Now a very fast assistant helps me type the characters. I guide it very closely. A lot of the time I have to correct it. Often if I know it is going to probably take a wrong direction I'll write the skeleton of the code I want, write the skeleton of the tests to prove it, and give it this as a "spec". This gets fantastic results.
I have to be honest and say it's not very useful for me to hear you say this because you make your living from AI consulting and in a previous thread [1] you said that you don't review the code and then that you do. I'm not saying you have psychosis but your take on AI is inconsistent and confusing to me.
Yeah, that's why I said "I'm not sure how useful it is to say this", because I know a lot of people will be a) offended by the message or b) offended that I was the one to say it.
The issue of "do you review every line of code or not" is the single most complex in all of the conversations about the practice of applying coding agents. If my messaging on that is inconsistent it's because of that complexity, and because my understanding of that issue is evolving over time.
I don't actually buy that tweet from Boris Cherny. When the Claude Code source leaked some months ago, there were many posts on Mastodon about how the revealed code was a shit show, a big pile of hacks. I wish now that I had bookmarked some of those posts.
I wasn't very impressed by that pile-on, personally.
Has there ever been a rapidly evolving 1,000,000+ line codebase that suitably motivated critics couldn't pick a thousand holes in and conclude that the code was garbage?
Claude Code is used by millions of people on a daily basis, has generated billions of dollars in revenue, and spits out new features on a weekly basis.
Many of the complaints I saw - things like the absurdity of asking for JSON and then looping against a schema until it matches - are common patterns for building software against language models, which are weird components to need to tame.
I'm still inclined to question whether the agent harness needs to be a million lines, or even a hundred thousand lines, in the first place. I mean, isn't one supposed to just hook up tool calling and let the LLM's intelligence do the rest? At least, that's the way it appears from things like tptacek's post about writing an agent. https://fly.io/blog/everyone-write-an-agent/
Then again, I'm also sympathetic to the idea that the anti-AI backlash has also provoked an unreasonable backlash against development speed and scale themselves.
To be fair, I was mostly pointing out that you can get to the kernel of a useful agent very quickly and without much code, not making a claim that coding agents would or should generally be tight. Competitive coding agents in particular are tricky, in part because the two mainstream agents (Codex and Claude) are big RL targets and you generally want to be in their slipstream --- or so I'm told.
On the other hand: I have basically zero interest in writing a coding agent (there are so many effective ones already), but I write lots of little agents, for instance in my music player, and those are as code artifacts pretty trivial.
Harnesses are a lot of prompting and sandboxing also. Then you need to add goldfish reminders when it makes mistakes depending on model quality. It isn’t a lot of code, it definitely isn’t a lot of code that you can’t build with an agent.
That's just the media noise. Yea there were purges. But its a big leap to go from "some" to "all" the best people. Government is the largest employer in the country. The nonsense you see constantly by politicians and other leaders is a tiny fraction of what the government workforce is. This is why despite the chaos you see in the media, life hasn't changed much for the great majority of people all things considered. The government remains functional where it needs to be.
The purges haven’t reached too deep into the rank and file yet, which is why the walls are still standing. But they’ve hit the top of the pyramid hard, which is why nothing makes sense.
> it will be sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool
If, as an engineer, you rely completely on AI then you will be selected out of the work pool. Some engineers will still be needed. If I was interviewing them (I used to do a lot of this) then I will want the ones who understand the code. If they only use AI then it will quickly become clear that they don't understand it. Why would I hire them when another person can understand it?
Because you will have an understanding of the complete system. Your domain and the code. This means that you can be more creative with it and also get yourself out of a mess if it occurs (which it will).
From what I have seen AI doesn't understand the code. But even if you argue that it does understand the code it definitely doesn't understand the domain because it's only input channel is a stream of text and you didn't even type in a "full" text representation of the domain.
So you remain the only thing that can understand the whole system. If your competitor has no one (or no team) who can put together a full understanding of the system then you will have an advantage.
You will have a good understanding of a system which is 20 times smaller in size/features.
For a todo app that is fine. But for most projects your competitor will leave you in the dust with the speed at which they add features.
Same story, 25 years ago:
> But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too.
What happens when the biggest feature that can be touted is concrete objective metrics about bugs/uptime/quality-stuff? Can't slop your way to having the "crafted with love and care, no bugs in production in the last 2 years" feature.
From my experience building different systems, there is no moat anymore ( beside your commercial connections for B2B). If one lack understanding of a domain, he will get it by testing the system.
So basically nothing has changed from before AI.
The argument against "they can do something else with their lives" is not a strawman though.
In a hypothetical end state where the people who own fully-automated production of everything, and need maybe few millions employed to support and guard that production, the "freed" people are not going to do something better with their lives.
> In a hypothetical end state where the people who own fully-automated production of everything, and need maybe few millions employed to support and guard that production, the "freed" people are not going to do something better with their lives.
AI will bring about a post-scarcity society, just not for you, worker.
> there is no replacement for humans immersed in their world yet, so we need developers with with good understanding of the domain
It's not enough. The software model that you produce ends up becoming part of the domain. You need to understand the system. You are the only one who has the potential do that if you have the ability and are willing to work at it.
> I think a lot of shops are going to have to go through a couple years of Github-style "why the fuck is our service always down?" before they put 2 and 2 together.
I think it will be like the outsourcing wave in the early 2000s. A lot of places ended up pulling development back in house when it became unsustainable.
> I've never seen a company that was a., successful and b., prioritizing tech debt/upkeep at the same time.
Maybe you have only worked in start ups? I have certainly seen products fail or partially fail because of tech debt. One product was extremely unproductive to work on because of a patched together architecture. To the extent that bugs were introduced easily but took so long to turn around that customers left the product and told us that was the reason.
The tradgedy is that HN used to be a great place to get honest and well argued opinion and anecdotes about new technologies and the different tradeoffs etc.
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