Conflicting evidence: the fact that literally everyone in tech is posting about how they're using AI.
The startups, founders, VCs, executives, employees, etc. crowing about how they love AI are pandering to the first group of people, because they are the ones who hold budgets that they can direct toward AI tools.
This is also why people might want to remain anonymous when doing an AI experiment. This lets them crow about it in private to an audience of founders, executives, VCs, etc. who might open their wallets, while protecting themselves from reputational damage amongst the general public.
People are excited about AI because it's new powerful technology. They aren't "pandering" to anyone.
And the only people actually excited about the useful kinds of "AI", traditional machine learning, are researchers.
Lots of folk here will happily tell you about how LLMs made them 10x more productive, and then their custom agent orchestrator made them 20x more productive on top of that (stacking multiplicatively of course, for a total of 200x productivity gain).
You're presented with hundreds of people that prove you wrong, and your response is "no, I assume I'm right"?
Most of these peoples are managers, investors, or junior.
Ok that's not true. I know one junior who is very excited, but considering his regular code quality I would not put much weight on his opinion.
Surely you have an LSP in your editor and are able to use sed? I've never had moving files take more than fifteen minutes (for really big changes), and even then most of the time is spent thinking about where to move things.
LLM's have been reported to specifically make you "feel" productive without actually increasing your productivity.
I am definitely more productive. A lot of this productivity is wasted on stuff I probably shouldn't be writing anyways. But since using coding agent, I'm both more productive at my day job and I'm building so many small hobby projects that I would have never found time for otherwise.
But the main topic of discussion in this thread is the excitement about technology. And I have a bit mixed feelings, because on one hand side I feel like a turkey being excited for the Thanksgiving. On the other hand, I think the programming future is bright. there will be so much more software build and for a lot of that you will still need programmers.
My excitement comes from the fact that I can do so much more things that I wouldn't even think about being able to do a few months ago.
Just as an example, in last month I have used the agents to add features to the applications I'm using daily. Text editor, podcast application, Android keyboard. The agents were capable to fork, build, and implement a feature I asked for in a project where I have no idea about the technology. Iif I were hired to do those features, I would be happy if I implemented them after two weeks on the job. With an agent, I get tailor made features in half of a morning. Spending less than ten minutes prompting.
I am building educational games for my kids. They learn a new topic at school? Let me quickly vibe the game to make learning it fun. A project that wouldn't be worth my weekend, but is worth 15 minutes. https://kuboble.com/math/games/snake/index.html?mode=multipl...
So I'm excited because I think coding agents will be for coding what pencil and paper were for writing.
I can think of roughly 0 fratures of run-of-the-mill software that would be impossible to implement for a semi-competent software developer. Especially for the kinds of applications you mention.
Also it sounds less like you're productive and more like the vibeslop projects are distracting you.
I produce more good (imo) production features despite being distracted.
The features I mention is something that I would be able to do, but only with a lot of learning and great effort - so in practical terms I would not.
It is probably a skill issue but in the past many times I downloaded the open source project and just couldn't build and run it. Cryptic build errors, figuring out dependencies. And I see claude gets the same errors but he just knows how to work around those errors. Setting up local development environment (db, dummy auth, dummy data) for a project outside of my competence area is already more work than I'm willing to do for a simple feature. Now it's free.
>I can think of roughly 0 fratures of run-of-the-mill software that would be impossible to implement for a semi-competent software developer.
Yes. I'm my area of competence it can do the coding tasks I know exactly how to do just a bit faster. Right now for those tasks I'd say it can one shot code that would take me a day.
But it enables me to do things in the area where I don't have expertise. And getting this expertise is very expensive.
I have a large C# application. In this application I have a functionality to convert some group of settings into a tree model (a list of commands to generate this tree). There are a lot of weird settings and special cases.
I asked claude to extract this logic into a separate python module.
It succesfully one-shot that, and I would estimate it as 2 days work for me (and I wrote the original C# code).
This is probabaly the best possible kind of task for the coding agents, given that it's very well defined task with already existing testcases.
Were you exaggerating earlier or do you have more examples?
You can browse the code at <my_username>.com/slop/hn_tb/
I have also sloped the simple code viewer. So you can make your judgement if it looks like 1 hour task.
I have been in meetings where my director has said that AI will enable us to shrink the team by 50%.
Every single one of my friends who do knowledge work has been told that AI is likely to make their job obsolete in the next few years, often by their bosses.
We have mortgages to pay and children to feed.
An anonomyous platform like Reddit and even HN to a certain extent has issues with bad faith commenters on both sides targeting someone they do not like. Furthermore, the MJ Rathburn fiasco itself highlights how easy it is to push divisive discourse at scale. The reality is trolls will troll for the sake of trolling.
Additionally, "AI" has become a political football now that the 2026 Primary season is kicking off, and given how competitive the 2026 election is expected to be and how political violence has become increasingly normalized in American discourse, it is easy for a nut to spiral.
I've seen less issues when tying these opinions with one's real world identity, becuase one has less incentive to be a dick due to social pressure.
Your answer to that can color how I read your post by quite a bit.
At one time, I was an actual troll. I said bad stuff, and my inner child was Bart Simpson. I feel as if I need to atone for that behavior.
I do believe that removing consequences, almost invariably brings out the worst in people. I will bet that people are frantically creating trollbots. Some, for political or combative purposes, but also, quite a few, for the lulz.
Some people may want to publicly state "I use AI!" or whatever. It should be unsurprising that some people do not want to be open about it.
They didn't hide because of a vague fear of being associated with AI generally (which there is no shortage of currently online), but to this specific, irresponsible manifestation of AI they imposed on an unwilling audience as an experiment.
You are assuming people are acting in good faith. This is a mistake in this era. Too many people took advantage of the good faith of others lately and that has produced a society with very little public trust left.
Since we are in a Matplotlib thread: People on the NumPy mailing list that are anti-AI are actively bullied and belittled while high ranking officials in the Python industrial complex are frolicking at AI conferences in India.