NichoPaolucci

Maintaining these lists USED to be a lot easier though.... Once you found a good resource, you could generally chuck it into the list and, for the most part, expect it to continue to be 'good'.

Now, good resources can turn into bad resources much more quickly, so maintenance + keeping track probably requires a lot more effort.

Well... On HN, the crowd is largely technical and the rhetoric has been that our jobs are no longer useful or required. Seeing 'that' idea fail (in any capacity, efficiency gain and usefulness of the technology aside) is probably some schadenfreude, and a bit of self preservation.

I also believe that a lot of the hype has been unrealistic, so IF there is a bubble and IF it is bursting, I'd hope it to be a wake up call and give investors, companies, and regular people more realistic expectations about what we're working with here.

I am investigative of this scenario, but it can go two ways, if models continue to approve in leaps (IMO):

1 - People build more and more complex implementations, and your "working mess" software DOES still need time to maintain it, is unstable, and they will still want something that "just works" so they hand it off to another person / group. (This would be AI effectively creating "more software + jobs"

2 - People build more and more complex implementations, and AI no longer creates a "working mess" as it improves, it creates "working software" that does not need time to maintain it, is stable, and they do not need to hand it off to another person / group.

I think it's more likely that scenario 1 is going to be the case. I've seen the things people are building around my company. They are enthused, creative, and useful - but need a ton of work, and are continuing on the path of "usable mess", and are now getting fatigue because they need to maintain the tooling they built...

In your scenario anyone who had $1B or more before midnight is now $1B poorer, so I don't think people would be very happy with that engineer either, regardless of whether there's a break glass system.

Don't these sort of conflict with being "aggressively pro AI"?

> how awful everything is to read lately > flooded with AI generated content, all of it terrible > everything sounding identical and everything being a rambling unconcise mess.

I can see the benefits of AI and enjoy using the technology - but, like many have said, it's wreaking havoc on the "content" that's out there nowadays. Gotta take some bad with the good, I suppose.

Yeah... N=2-3 here but my team prefers having 1 main agent and maybe a couple more finely tuned ones for review / analysis / security... I generally have 2-3 chats going on different tasks but more than that and I lose the plot.

Well, the community never made it a very welcoming place... But, I think a part of this is that it's just faster to throw a Q into ChatGPT. There's no waiting for a response, a major bonus is the non-hostility + willingness to respond to 'stupid' questions.

I think that assuming work can be done more easily in the future should not stop people from doing work that needs to be done in the present.

(If a painter knew that the camera was coming out I would not want them to throw their canvas away)

Hard agree on the prompting rabbit hole.

I've done it a handful of times, I'll get a little ambitious... "Oh, 6.1 Sol can totally handle this" and have it spin up a project, keep going, keep going.

Eventually, I get to a point where I start to do the homework and I have to step way back to "fully understand" the work from the ground up... It sucks, but I've largely stopped losing time to that.

For me, "pair programming" and incremental changes beats the "one shot" approach every single time.

We cannot seem to skip the stage of understanding (as much as some people on my team want to!)

Well... I think the converse to this is the companies that WOULD pay you (slightly less than they currently pay Atlassian) TO replicate those products.

I expect some BRUTAL competition for these larger software companies. My company just recently replaced our CRM with an in-house tool. (Of course, the maintenance / buildout of that is costly, but it's eventually going to be less than we are paying for the third-party CRM)

Honestly, I cannot personally decide whether or not this is Jevon's Paradox in action or not. In theory, that software could be entirely hands off (Claude write me a 1:1 implementation of Salesforce CRM and make it never go down) but in reality, someone is going to want it tweaked, modified, changed, and thus we now have an internal CRM that we own that requires some level of expertise. Maybe it's not a software engineer, but a software engineer is probably the most well equipped to take that process over...

Who knows, though.

Not picking a side, but do you really think that language models should have a political bias? I personally don't interface with AI in a way that engages political / social bias - but if I did I definitely wouldn't want that to be predetermined, whether left or right.

Though, with the safeguards put into place on these models, they are naturally going to have SOME amount of bias, but we should be working to minimize that, no?

To play devil's advocate, couldn't certain modifications to a heat pump damage the unit?

I'm guessing they made "happy path" decisions thinking most people aren't going to modify cycle timing, or know how to do that or what it entails. That 3 minutes was probably decided on by a group of engineers who thoroughly know the product. Especially if they provide a warranty.

You may know / understand a heat pump system but if I modified values with no safeguards on mine I'd probably break it within the hour.

> the app owns the workspace, the editor, and the wire — it never assembles prompts behind your back.

Thanks JetBrains, I assumed the app would assemble prompts behind my back, so I'm glad they clarified that.

If they bothered reading this that would have been removed. I understand smaller players... Vibe Coders, Solo projects, something on its initial commit (to be edited / cleaned up / improved).

But, from JetBrains? Bad sign for the industry, IMO. Is it that fucking hard to have a decent technical writer collect some some human-readable documentation? This just exudes lack of effort.

You're right - having many possible implementations is NOT the problem here, if a natural language spec covers all the 'necessary' functionality of a piece of software, the implementation does not matter (whether it's implementation ID 4 or ID 27548323)

My argument is more of a forecast, and your last paragraph fits it correctly. I don't think we'll be able to maintain it once we get past a certain level of complexity. Or the maintenance / modification of that specification will be much more difficult to work with, to the point that we'll decide code is the solution.

Hah. This reminds me of "Fight Club". He's all beat up in the office and nobody has the guts to ask what happened.

Good luck in training, I've always wanted to get into BJJ but don't have the time right now.

Yeah - I wish my team would adopt a "no AI prose" rule for team communication.

It's one thing to say "please review this code that I used AI to generate". It's entirely different to say "Please read this 7 page document that AI generated about a plan to generate this code, and I'm passing it off to you as my plan"

It puts the onus of understanding onto the reader (writing a wall of text used to put the onus of understanding on the writer), and if the prompter hasn't read the output, then it's putting most of that effort onto the reader.

Horrible in practice, and yes - I can tell every single time someone dumps an AI generated message into the chat, because it's not succinct, it rarely directly answers my question, it's overly verbose, it has no style, and it lacks the depth of understanding of how our team works together.

This is an interesting failure-mode to me, and I've been interested in how accurate it is since the inception of these models.

My answer is still yes - I've got this personal concept that AI is sorta the "opposite" of lossy compression... As the model iterates on a larger corpus of context, things are missed, misinterpreted, slightly changed. This all eventually contributes to the writing feeling disconnected. LLMs make decisions on what the most important facet of a prompt is, obviously we can 'guide' it...

Over time, I feel that as we let more AI generated content (no human edited / modified / improved the output) sit around on the internet, the training data will pick up more of this 'poisoned' data and impact future output.

Do you have a 'technical writers' assessment at how good AI writing is currently (and do you see it improving with new models or no)?

I'm not great at writing, but this, I think, is one of the main shortcomings for me. I cannot understand the output, to the point where I need to do extra work for anything non-trivial. It feels like it's TERRIBLE at it once a task surpasses a level of complexity / context, but I cannot quite explain why... (lists/headings/length do make sense though)

I'm hoping that one day I end up looking like a junkyard cat. I don't know why, but I think it's pretty cool when someone is pretty banged up.

I'm not a very careful guy, so my hands are all torn up, burns on my arms / legs, old gashes... Each one's got a story but at some point they start to get hard to remember. I've still got two eyeballs, both ears, and all my digits though.

Maybe it's that Hunter S. Thompson quote; “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming 'Wow! What a Ride!'"

Good points. I've stood by this position.

"We'll just store prompts in VC and the agent will pick those up", "Code isn't going to exist anymore", "We will just write comprehensive specs of what the software is supposed to do"

This is short-sighted IMO. (Conversely, maybe my argument is short-sighted).

This is exactly why we use code... Natural language is ambiguous, to a fault. Any statement can impact depending statements in multiple ways, which creates this huge dependency graph that has millions, billions, trillions of "plausible" specifications.

It's pretty much ALWAYS going to be easier to just use a deterministic programming language to build the actual software.

We may never need to look at it, we may never need to write it, but having a deterministic specification of what a software system does seems like a much easier jump-off point to work with agents (whether or not we interface with the code).

Feels solved to me... A simple software example that creates users, logs them in, and shows them a dashboard turns into a TON of language and ambiguity.

Must be logged in to see dashboard datapoint A. Can log in with email or username. No log in if their IP is outside of [range]. Can log out. Logging out during a dashboard update cancels the transaction. Cannot see confidential data. Unless the user is an admin. User needs a strong password. Password must contain a capital letter.

Stuff like that just seems easier to parse + modify in code (whether human OR agent). Also, debugging natural language feels super icky. Which statement was it that got the password out of the formal spec?

And my biggest argument, we already HAVE code - reinventing the wheel for something that already works feels misguided?

Personally - I think most software is way more complex than it should be.

Depends what you're working on, but from what I have seen software always gravitates towards "unmaintainable mess of complexity" - and our job is to steer the system AWAY from that mess

Sure - but this comment said:

> anyone who can afford an assistant has one

And that's just not true. I know some independently wealthy people who do not have an assistant / cleaner / lawn care professional. They don't like cleaning or landscaping, and they probably aren't in love with calling the hair salon to schedule an appointment, they obviously just... don't want an assistant.

Maybe my circle just isn't busy enough? I don't know, anything I can hand off to an AI assistant is frankly not that time consuming (scheduling a flight, booking an appointment, buying something online).

When AI can clean my house for $20/Month, I'll be on board.

I think some of this conversation is circling around the concept of 'allowable risk'...

We have a couple of VMs that are not mission critical, and they don't hold sensitive data. We just inject the secrets into the runtime. Access to those machines is restricted to a single IP, there's not much more protection in front of them.

A meaningful attack on one of those machines would require a LOT of effort, and almost nothing in return. Some systems don't NEED to have government level security, as a developer it's my job to provide the best solution for each scenario.

(IE, I wouldn't put 12 security cameras and an armed guard around a fruit stand, but I might around a jewelry store)

This is a baseless statement.

Sometimes, people just... like to do things themselves, or don't feel like it's too much of their "precious time" to learn something new.

Example: I still do my budgeting / taxes / financial management on my own. Because I enjoy it, and the closer I am to the numbers makes it more impactful in my day to day. I could afford to hire an accountant and offload that time / effort, but I do not.

> One possibility is single-person startups, each with a human founder steering swarms of agents to rake in billions in revenue.

I guess I'd be curious to see what this single-person startup is offering...

I'm also reading this with a healthy dose of salt. They rely almost entirely on the concept that using their tools is an economic advantage to companies + individuals, so... Of course we're outputting 5X the commits per engineer and sales positions are seeing a 1.7X increase! Our agents work 6X the hours of our human employees!

Similarly, I got into software because I like working with computers and solving problems for others. I see TONS of similar sentiment where people are almost joyously exclaiming “Software is solved! Sorry!!! It’s been a long time coming, you all deserved it, get fucked!”

And I can’t imagine feeling the same about any group of people. It’s been odd, to me. I’m just trying to support myself and the people in my life, and now there’s a looming fear that I can’t do that anymore… business owners are drooling over that, and other sectors are laughing.

Hard times, I guess.

Do you have any that you enjoy playing? I've tried a handful but every time my response is mostly... "Wow, really cool that someone made this." Then about a minute later I leave because... it's not fun and there's no "soul" in it (hard to describe).

You're saying I can't get a rack of H100s in my garage and play Crysis 3 on medium

Did anyone find out what numbers trigger something on that counter box on the left?

Dentists, orthodontists, periodontists... I feel the same.

I'm a real case study, I was born without my 4 permanent lateral incisors (Top and bottom).

First orthodontist applied braces too early in my life - also decided that "eventually" implants would be placed on the bottom, moved my two bottom front teeth to the sides to create one large gap. (This was disapproved of by my second orthodontist).

Once an adult, my dentist recommended a new ortho + perio. The periodontist recommended an experimental procedure called "Periodontally Assisted Osteogenic Orthodontics". Which involved... filleting my gums to the bone, while I was awake.

Later, the dentist said he totally should have sedated me for that procedure. It was one of the most brutal experiences of my life, not joking, like... Actual torture.

The perio then placed two implants on the top. My dentist later disapproved of this, saying they were 'far too small'. One of the implants failed within 3 years. The other is barely hanging on. And the bottom could not have an implant placed, because the PAOO did not work (Surprise, I still owed 7200 dollars).

I've been in and out of these offices so much that I started picking up their jargon - two have asked if I'm IN dental school when we discuss treatment.

All that to say, these people seem to be winging it. I get it, every mouth is different, but man... It's such an important fixture socially / health-wise that I feel we should be doing better.

If anyone knows a good cosmetic dentist, I'm still in the search for one :)