dakiol

People are not idiots. AI benefits only the ones at the top of the chain, and the 10% of the rest of us. Are you in the top 10%? No, you typically are in the bottom 90%. So we don't want AI, we don't want the top getting richer at our expenses. We just want a job to bring bread home and keeping pushing our store while being "happy". You take that away from us, just so you can double your net worth, and well, bad things will start to happen

Because it would be sponsored by anthropic/google/openai? You cannot do it (typically) without paying for the tokens they only can offer. Programming used to be free, but slowly, we need to pay for every single line of code. It's sickening

There must be such a disconnection between the general people and more technical oriented people. I would never ever buy such a laptop. The reasons are very simple:

- it's owned by Google. Google is the worst tech company out there to trust your data

- it has AI all over the place. Overuse of AI depresses me. And a laptop is something very personal to me. I don't want to be depressed every time i open my laptop

- the "files" functionality is cloud-based. That's insane. I don't want my files in the "cloud". I want a file system

I run linux, and still own Macs (because their hardware is great on laptops). Of course I'm not the target audience. But still.

True, but in my experience teams don't make the whole codebase type hinted. There's always something that escapes.

I want to use Obsidian... but I won't as long as it's not open source. I know I can keep all my files as plain text, but that's not enough for me. Using a KB on a daily basis shapes my workflows and having to change that from one day to another (e.g., because maybe Obsidian changes in a way I don't like) is too much for me. I could already handle all my plain txt files using simply the file system, but of course I would prefer a KB program. It's a shame because Obsidian looks great.

Problem with Python and other non-strict typed languages is that if you let an LLM to write some stuff, you cannot truly be confident that nothing has broken. Even if your tests all pass. The LLM could have broken some path that only gets run in production in a very specific case. At least with strongly-typed languages you get a compiler error. In big codebases is non-negotiable

We're forgetting one thing: we (mere engineers) have control over nothing. The vast majority of us are at the mercy of executives and investors. Before AI we had some sort of grip because our skills weren't so much a commodity, and yeah, dealing with code and systems architecture and data and distributed systems wasn't that easy. Now AI is a tool not for us but for the higher-ups, they can finally commoditize software engineering and need only a small fraction of us. I see engineers around here fighting and discussing who'll be left behind (the 80%) and who'll remain because they're "more than mere coders" (the 20%)... what we don't discuss here is that we're all now at the mercy of Anthropic et al, and that's bad. The irony is that the vast majority of us use Anthropic, so we are just loading the guns for them to use them. It's sad, but we call it progress. Nuts

That doesn't hold because the goal for executives is to increase revenue and the main sales pitch of Anthropic et al is to pay for agents instead of paying for engineers. That means 80% of the workforce is out no matter what. Whether or not one belongs to the remaining 20% is a different story, but obviously not all of us will be there.

> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions

AI is coming for that too. Don't be naive

I've come to the conclusion that using AI is:

- good for me in the short term (e.g., I can fulfill what my company asks from me)

- good for the company in the short term (see above)

- bad for me in the long-term. E.g, I'm starting to become more and more replaceable at my job; I don't have the same depth of understanding of the systems we're building as I used to; my peers and I collaborate way less now (instead of talking to each other, we just ask claude directly); and there's not much to be proud of in my day-to-day work (we're not building CRUDs, but we're not building netflix either, it's something in between). The compounding effect worries me too: every shortcut I take today is a piece of context I'm not internalizing, a debugging instinct I'm not sharpening, a tradeoff I;m not learning to weigh. The skills that used to differentiate me are slowly atrophying. We're all individually more "productive" on paper, but collectively i think we're gonna end up with a codebase nobody fully understands and a team that barely knows each other

- good for the company in the long-term: they can fire me easily, they don't need 80% of us anymore. They can just pay anthropic for the agents instead. They don't need people to maintain or read the codebase either: agents do that now. And executives never really cared about us in the first place, so that part hasn't changed I guess. The math is simple from their side: headcount is the biggest line item, and agents don't ask for raises, don't burn out, don't go on leave, and dont push back when leadership makes a dumb call. We're the worst part of the business on a spreadsheet, and the tools to replace us are finally cheap enough that someone is gonna pull the trigger

I'm not a superstar engineer. I know that. I'm probably in the 80% bag of engineers out there. Some of you may be in the top 20%, and you probably gonna keep your job somehow (or not, who knows). But for the rest of us, I think we simply cannot compete anymore.

I regret every single time I've used AI so far. Nothing good has come from it for me; the feeling is so different from any other technology I've used in the past (frameworks, languages, libraries, whatever): it used to be fun, it improved my career prospects, it expanded my knowledge. AI/LLMs are precisely the opposite: it's not fun, it's making my career worse, and it's not expanding my knowledge.

    I CANNOT UNDERSTAND HOW MOST OF US, ENGINEERS, ARE OUT HERE VOUCHING FOR AI. WE ARE LITERALLY CHEERING ON THE THING THAT IS COMING FOR OUR JOBS, AND WE'RE DOING IT FOR FREE, POSTING BENCHMARKS AND EVANGELIZING IT TO OUR MANAGERS LIKE WE'RE GETTING A COMMISSION. WE ARE NOT. THE LABS AND THE EXECS GET PAID. WE're HANDING THEM THE ROPE

When are we gonna start hearing the same stories about Anthropic/Openai/etc? The whole AI thing kinda smells like the early days of AWS: everyone was getting onboarded, but later realized they'd built up a pretty big dependency that's not easy to shake

The way I understood op is that we don't necessarily have to pay to use linux or postgres (when self hosting, for example). But we have to pay to use claude code... which sucks big time (also, open source models are behind private models)

I guess it's anecdata. Polish engineers I've worked with weren't that good at technical stuff nor communication (in English). They're overprotective with "their" code and in general we've had more luck with western/southern Europeans.

> And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?

Exactly. People are too naive these days

If you're a regular engineer like me, there's no real upside to using AI in a company setting. They're boiling us. Of course, the HN elite (investors, execs, celebrities, and top-tier engineers) will say otherwise because "how can you be against innovation man?"

AI/LLMs aren't innovation the way TCP/IP, linux, or postgres were. To be clear: claude/codex/gemini/grok/whatever exist for profit, to squeeze the last drop of productivity out of you until there's nothing left, and then you're disposable (laid off).

If you like AI, use open source models, use them in your side projects.

I see engineers addicted to Claude the same way non-tech people (friends of mine) are addicted to instagram. At the end it's all the same: making multibillion dollar companies richer every day

Right. It seems then that all these "elite" engineers on HN aren't as smart as we thought (and yeah, I include myself in that bag).

It's deeply sad to see how our most beloved work (those side projects we pour ourselves into purely for the joy of it) will, at the end, be the very reason most of us lose our jobs (not all of us, but the majority). Openai/antrhopic/etc and others simply took all of that and turned it to their advantage. It's capitalism, sure, but it's heartbreaking... I wouldnt mind be out of job for another reason, but not for that one pls

Same can be said about Claude, Codex, etc. These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees). Only the usual suspects benefit from AI (executive layer, investors, etc)

Still amazes me how engineers on HN are in awe of AI and LLMs knowing that 90% of us will be affected (we won't be able to bring money to the table) once the higher ups start to normalize even more the usage of AI to reduce headcount. Not everything is about the technical details people, grow up

> and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.

I don't see anything wrong with this. My integrity and values are above any company's. Companies can go to hell for all I care

You could quit, for starters

Invest in local and open source LLMs. They are not as advanced as proprietary ones, but we can all use them and define them as the standard. We don't need closed models

C'mon folks, let's stop using Claude|ChatGPT|etc en masse. It's time to start the revolution (from our beds, at least)

Why are we still building stuff in TS/npm? Given that LLMs can code in any language, I'd expect people would use "better" languages at this point.

So, I typically follow blogs from people I already knew (online) pre 2022. In that regard, I'm sure about the quality of such places.

I don't have social media accounts (HN counts as one?) so whatever happens in IG, YT, Twitter or facebook: i simply don't give a fuck

I don't really follow more of the internet tbh: dont use reddit, or read the news... I don't even have an adblocker (which reveals that I get bothered very little by ads on the sites I frequently use)

I read a bunch of ebooks, though (but again they all are pre 2022... there's so much to read out there).

Less is more!

$25K. Really? They make $65 million a day, so they pay you what they earn in about 33 seconds for a critical vulnerability. WTF

> On the flip side, there are hundreds of ways that these tools cause genuine harm, not just to individuals but to entire systems.

Yeah, agree. I think it's the first time I'm asking myself: Ok, so this new cool tech, what is it good for? Like, in terms of art, it's discarded (art is about humans), in terms of assets: sure, but people is getting tired of AI-generated images (and even if we cannot tell if an image is AI-generated, we can know if companies are using AI to generate images in general, so the appealing is decreasing). Ads? C'mon that's depressing.

What else? In general, I think people are starting to realize that things generated without effort are not worth spending time with (e.g., no one is going to read your 30-pages draft generated by AI; no one is going to review your 500 files changes PR generated by AI; no one is going to be impressed by the images you generate by AI; same goes for music and everything). I think we are gonna see a Renaissance of "human-generated" sooner rather than later. I see it already at work (colleagues writing in slack "I swear the next message is not AI generated" and the like)

That's fine. When the "best of the best" is offered only by a couple of companies that are not looking into our best interests, then we can discard them

> I completely see your point, but when my / developer time is worth what it is compared to the cost of a frontier model subscription, I'm wary of choosing anything but the best model I can.

Don't you understand that by choosing the best model we can, we are, collectively, step by step devaluating what our time is worth? Do you really think we all can keep our fancy paychecks while keep using AI?

Where's the evidence of competitors being 10x more productive? So far, everyone is simply bragging about how much code they have shipped last week, but that has zero relevance when it comes to productivity

We dropped Claude. It's pretty clear this is a race to the bottom, and we don't want a hard dependency on another multi-billion dollar company just to write software

We'll be keeping an eye on open models (of which we already make good use of). I think that's the way forward. Actually it would be great if everybody would put more focus on open models, perhaps we can come up with something like the "linux/postgres/git/http/etc" of the LLMs: something we all can benefit from while it not being monopolized by a single billionarie company. Wouldn't it be nice if we don't need to pay for tokens? Paying for infra (servers, electricity) is already expensive enough

I struggle to understand the "hackers" in HN vouching for proprietary LLMs. Like we have so much so good open source software that is top notch like linux, git, postgres, http, tcp/ip, and a long etc., and now we have these billionaires trying to make us use LLMs for coding at a hefty price.

I understand it from people like PG and the like, but real hackers? C'mon people