reading HN these days feels like constant gaslighting. this is so far from my reality that i wonder what folks who are saying this are working on
In both cases, they have:
1. Weird bugs that a human would never write (e.g. doing async tasks in synchronous functions).
2. A migration guide that is so verbose as to be worthless. Think 50+ pages of text that give every minute change equal weight.
The old versions had some warts, but they worked fine. The new versions have been inflicted on us, and it feels like the intellectual version of digging a hole to fill it in. There was absolutely no reason for it.
I'm sure that the people in charge of those projects believe that they're massively more productive, and that what they're doing is good. But it's worse than useless, it's just a waste of time for everyone involved.
So whenever I see someone claim something like "I used to be a 10x developer, now I'm a 100x developer," I have to wonder how much they're just inflicting garbage on everyone else and they just don't have the self awareness to realize. The type of person to show up at a job, crap all over the codebase, and then leave before it catches up with them.
I don't use AI that much. When I do, it's often surprisingly competent in the topics I'm a specialist in, and it can do a lot of good work quickly. But other people in other organizations still continue building upon my work instead of asking AI directly. Apparently because they don't know what to ask.
Nobody knows how long this will last. Hopefully long enough that I can afford to retire, because I'm old enough that I would face ageism if I had to find a different job.
And if we get there, we will probably have a serious political debate on how many digits should there be in the wealth tax rate.
The worst part is the morons upvoting it as well.
For some reason I can “hold it right” and others cannot and for the life of me I cannot figure out what it is. I am not more intelligent and certainly not an amazing programmer. I currently suspect I am better at separating what is and is not important. I find many people miss the forest for the trees and overindex on irrelevant details. The more technical they are the stronger this tendency seems to be.
I regularly, like almost daily, encounter colleagues claiming it cannot do something I either did the day before or will just demonstrate right in front of them. The response is usually rationalizing and claiming it wasn’t “that hard to begin with” AKA shifting goalposts.
I have never once encountered a work problem which I truly found impossible to automate, which is insane, but the institutional inertia is not worth overcoming. Devs are a thorny bunch and usually think they are special. I am a recovering one.
I think many are in for a rude awakening.
I think we might already be there with security. Exploits, hack attempts are up and likely continue to stay high. Traditional development process could work but it’s probably more engineers than management wants to spend on a cost center.
HN these days is mostly literal bots, AI company shills or people working on some shovelware AI slopware themselves, so they constantly throw out these generic statement as if it's fact. I've been reading this same crap here for the last 3 years, how "Wow, now with Newest Model Mk. 3 (tm) from Anthropic (R), everything is automated!" with very little variation.
It's getting pretty tiring listening to the shilling to be honest. The best part is that when you actually look into any of this crap, or read any of the comments [0] from people in the industry you realize how fucking amateurish and ignorant they all are
Nothing devs do is interesting or hard. “Rocket trajectory optimization” is not dev, it’s math. Dev work is very boring and very simple.
I regularly deal with people that think they have amazingly hard jobs and it usually boils down to it being undocumented, arcane and/or math-y. The software itself is always uninteresting (as it should be).
Everything is “CRUD”. Name something that does not amount to taking input, performing a transformation and producing output. I am so tired of this overused thought-stopping cliche.
As if math has no interesting problems to solve, and training data exists for every possible scenario.
> Everything is “CRUD”. Name something that does not amount to taking input, performing a transformation and producing output.
This is true in the "Reductio ad absurdum" sense, but software has to be written to drive hardware that interacts with the real world. Physics is arcane and/or math-y, and many of the problems that are still outstanding in the field of software engineering (or engineering as a whole) are a result of this. The world is full of unknowns, and inferring how those work with a pattern-matcher will only get you so far.
what folks who are saying this are working on