Hacker News Reader

Comment by NewLogic | Hacker News Reader

I am getting increasing disillusioned by the number of peers I am seeing completely hand over their thinking to a tool. Agents are great, but if you can't explain to me how your PR changes a system and why design choices were made you are no longer an engineer.

View on HN

Agreed. Used to be prevalent in the frontend world (now I think it's the only thing that exists seemingly), where programmers would copy-paste stuff from Stack Overflow until things worked, and when you asked "So why did this actually fix the issue?" they usually said "I'm not sure, but it works now, that's what matters". This seems to be standard practice across the entire stack now.

I've even wasted my time jumping on calls (requested by the other party) where after 5 minutes of conversation, it's extremely clear this "technical founder" doesn't even understand the basics of their own design and architecture of the product itself, even less the technical parts.

This seems more a product of the incentives we have in society, namely seeing the rich and wealthy on social media and then wanting that quick and easy. So many of those cases are not people with passion for the problem.

Good things take real effort, bring back the TLC!

> Good things take real effort, bring back the TLC!

Ain't no one willing to reward the real effort any more. I take pride in not using LLMs beyond the capability of IntelliJ's advanced autocomplete, but then again, I only code for fun these days given I fled IT for electrical engineering.

> Ain't no one willing to reward the real effort any more.

A product of the times we currently live in, but which can also be changed.

This is a recent Michael Sandel talk I watch that has my brain gears turning on this subject

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo

What we don't want to do is mirror the partisan political environment in the Ai yay, nay, or how. We need to be able to talk to each other in understanding and a shared reality of facts. Too much hyperbole right now, starting from the top of the big US labs. They need to step down a few ego and sycophancy pegs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com