bigstrat2003

> Yet here we are as software engineers...ready to surrender our craft to mere "prompts" with reckless abandon.

It's worth remembering that, contrary to what HN acts like, software engineers are not uniformly accepting of LLMs. They are still quite controversial in the industry. Now management, on the other hand, is completely sold on the supposed benefits of LLMs. So many engineers feel forced to use them, but it's not enthusiasm on their part which drives them to that.

> Who cares if it's good enough? Send the product, if people use it, it's good enough. If not, let users debut it and give "feedback", problem solved.

I care, because doing a sloppy job and seeing if people will tolerate it is not acceptable engineering practice. It's not engineering at all. More pragmatically, if you do the thing you are suggesting, you won't have users for much longer. They will abandon you and go to someone who actually makes good products.

> But code craft not the job. The job is to produce business value. Code craft used to aid that, but now it's an impediment.

That is false. Code craft is still very much an aid to business value. If you just turn an LLM loose and don't review its work, you get a buggy mess over time. If you use an LLM, you must review and understand each line of code or you are sabotaging the quality of your work.

When I was a kid, I was very confused by the names of Fleetwood Mac band members. It really threw me for a loop that they had a Lindsay who is a dude, and a Stevie who is a girl, both counter to my intuition about names.

You could (and should) have made this point without the personal attacks. Something like "if you're blaming immigrants for this, you are greatly mistaken".

They do those things all the time. More often than humans, in my experience.

No, not really. Two wrongs don't make a right. It doesn't matter who started it (especially since each party claims to be responding to the other, and the only thing they differ on is where to draw the zero point), it is still not acceptable to continue in kind.

Every administration since Clinton, no matter the party, has run a deficit. It actually is both sides who are the problem. The only argument I've seen to the contrary in this thread is that Democrat administrations have had a smaller deficit, but that is an irrelevant argument. Any amount of deficit is unacceptable, you don't get brownie points because you filled the ship with water slower than the other guy did.

They are not wrong, they're lying. Very important difference. There are a lot of people who will say "I'm getting mega productivity boosts" who aren't getting financial returns from you believing them; those people are wrong.

I think it's fair to attribute the result to both the writer and the actor. You're right that Stewart could've sold a morally compromised captain, but equally so he brought something to the Picard role that other actors would not have necessarily brought. One can commonly see in theatre how with the same vision by the playwright, two actors can turn out wildly different results for that character. The same would have happened to Picard if he had been played by someone else.

> A lot of the reactions treat this as an AI story, as if any AI-written code poisons the well, and I think that misses the point. Engineers using AI to write code is the new norm.

It is not the norm for any engineer, or any company, who cares about the quality of the product. I will not say there are zero people who care who are trying to use LLMs to write code, because that isn't true. But neither is it true that most engineers find the tool useful. It is still wildly controversial in the programming community, contrary to what you state here.

> For most companies, trading some caution for speed is a reasonable call.

That isn't a reasonable call for any business, but it is an especially bad call for a business which sells itself on offering greater security.

My issue with what happened at Proton is twofold: first, the CEO treats his workers like dirt. That isn't a company I wish to do business with no matter how good their product is. Second, the CEO is in the full grip of AI psychosis, telling his engineers to use the tool just because it's trendy, not because it actually produces good results. That suggests that the product Proton produces will, sooner rather than later, turn into AI slop, full of bugs. I wouldn't wish to do business with such a company even if the CEO were a nice guy. So Proton now has a product going downhill, and a CEO who is a jerk. I'm not sticking around for that. I could just pay Microsoft if I wanted that kind of experience.

Yeah, the best way to put it that I've seen is that tomatoes are botanically fruits, but culinarily vegetables.

It most certainly gets you better. Arguably not cheaper, though that depends on whether you're writing the code yourself (in which case it's cheaper) or hiring it out (in which case it's more expensive). But it's definitely better, because LLMs still are worse than humans at programming.

As an engineer with 20 years experience, I can say this is bogus. LLMs still - right now, today, with the latest model - make errors that humans would never make. They cannot be trusted. So you have to carefully review everything they produce, which negates the productivity gains. You may as well just write your own code, it will be similarly fast and better quality.

> I ported it in two steps

You didn't port it at all. You had Claude do it for you.

Psychic is a damage type in D&D (and probably other RPGs too), so that is most likely a reference.

The vast majority of kids will be just fine if you take them grocery shopping. Yes, exceptions exist. But "just take the kids shopping" is good advice for almost everyone.

That is not true of Terraform, nor any other language. If you aren't at minimum reading and understanding the code, you are bad at your job, full stop. More realistically, you should still be writing a lot of code, because most of the time you will waste more time trying to work with LLMs than doing it yourself.

> Let’s say you have an incident, and you need a resolution. Do you send out the AI for the hunt and fix it within 5 minutes, or spend 30 minutes going around, figuring out the problem yourself?

It is far more often the case that you will spend more time getting the answer out of the LLM than you would've gotten yourself. They suck ass at troubleshooting systems, very frequently jumping to completely implausible scenarios that no human would think of as the first thing to try, and almost never asking questions to clarify the situation the way a human does.

> I feel it falls well short of what a proper, forward-thinking "AI-native" engineering org would actually look like. That is, the author is presenting this as kind of a radical departure from normal engineering, but I just see it as normal engineering with more AI. I don't see that as AI-native.

A company which proclaims they are "AI-native" isn't actually interested in engineering, they are trying to ride the hype wave. Companies who care about engineering just... do engineering, and don't make a big deal out of whether they are chasing trends.

Using AI for support is such a dick move to your customers. I can't understand how companies don't see how disrespectful it is. I ran into that at work with Sonicwall recently, and had to contact our account rep to get my case to a human, not a clanker. It really made me feel like they don't care about solving my issues, and as a result I doubt very much if I would ever choose the company if I were given the power over that decision.

If you haven't already, it's a good time to pay for a domain. That way, no matter what host you may choose to use in the future, people will still be able to email you with the address they already know. It does add some additional cost, but imo it's well worth it.

My wife and I met through OKCupid, and one of the things that most caught my eye on her profile was that she had a crush on Picard as a teenager. I knew then that she was a woman of impeccable taste.

There's a very important difference between the author's worldview shaping the fictional world, and preaching. For example, nobody who reads Tolkien can doubt that his devout Catholic faith shaped his storytelling. It is everywhere you look. But not once does Tolkien have one of his characters give a speech about the necessity of Jesus for a happy life, or introduce a character who had a child out of wedlock just so Aragorn could chastise her about the immorality of extramarital sex, or anything like that. Modern writers, by contrast, do that kind of thing on a depressingly regular basis. I have read so many books, seen so many TV shows, where the author thought it was appropriate to use the work to lecture me about their political views, and it ruins the work every time.

I don't expect, and don't think most people expect, for authors to not have their storytelling shaped by their views. That would be impossible. But it's not impossible for them to refrain from derailing the story just to lecture the audience on morality.

> Do we really need humans writing code anymore though?

Yes, we do.

> Another year of development and AI is just going to be superior to a human writing code.

I've been hearing that for multiple years now. Why is it true this time when it wasn't in the past?

Also, they don't need shaking out of their ways. Aren't the AI bros always trying to tell us to evaluate the results, not the tool used to produce them? That argument cuts both ways. The Proton engineers are demonstrably doing a good job at building the software, so they shouldn't be punished if they believe LLMs aren't the right tool for the job.

> I think we all know the game has changed.

We do not all know anything of the sort. From my perspective, the game hasn't changed at all, and it's just a bunch of people hyping up a bubble who think it has.

That is an evil way to think, my friend. It is not okay to write someone off because they don't view a transaction with the same moral gravity you do. I encourage you to reconsider your perspective, because this kind of thinking is unfortunately commonplace and it is corrosive to our society.

> Writing code by hand is dead. It just is. In a couple years this won’t be controversial, just accepted fact.

Bull. Models still can't be trusted to write decent code, even with all the supposed "improvement". The time it takes you to review the slop they put out and fix it wipes out any potential productivity gains. Unless the tech improves, it is perfectly reasonable (and even superior) to write your code instead of handing it off to a model.

I certainly agree that the obligations of family can bring serious hardship as well as happiness. But I think that, on balance, most people believe it to be a net positive.