dasil003

When you are rich, it allows a lot more time and funding to come up with arguments supporting policies that will make you even more rich.

The best framing I've seen so far—and boy have a lot of people tried to frame the capabilities of AI recently—is that AI shines for people who use it to extend their thinking, and fails for those who use it to replace their thinking.

The latest frontier model developments have chipped away at that latter category. But ultimately the ceiling for that is mediocrity. Yes, if you imagine the most average common thing that has been done a million times, AI can absolutely give a bespoke version of it that matches your words of choice. For the moment it's still an impressive parlor trick to a lot of people, but the novelty wears off fast, and then you realize there's very little value in that. Doesn't mean everyone has to learn to code to use AI effectively, but it does mean they need to be curious and engaged or they'll just become part of the increasingly irrelevant slop machine.

I agree it's funny and won't really work on any kind of extended timeline. I mean Claude Code already added Auto-mode as a perfect example of this. But that said, I think it actually kind of makes sense in a transitional phase the power vs safety tradeoffs different users want to make varies so incredibly wildly that one product can't contain it all.

What I think will happen is that as model capabilities plateau (I'm not an accelerationist) the harnesses and products around them will start to specialize and they'll have different security models based on the product needs for those particular use cases.

For now, asking user to click a bunch of approvals, and occasionally making a mistake is a reasonable way to cover their asses until they see how bad security outcomes actually are in practice.

The basis of my comparison was nothing to do with business circumstance, but just that Apple and Oxide both were known for having taste in software (in Apple's case faded but still apparent in the DNA), and they build their own hardware to express that taste.

I think perhaps Solaris had a bit of that under Sun but I can't imagine that being the case under Oracle. And I'm not really an enterprise infra guy so can't really speak to IBM or Unisys offerings.

Sure. What's your point with regards to Oxide?

Being the "Apple" of enterprise compute (ie. vertical hardware software integration), solving the layers of aggregrate cruft that every single player in the Linux space (including Facebook/Google and other hyperscalers to some degree) have to deal with for compatibility since no one company has enough leverage to clean up poor or outdated legacy decisions in the stack. This is just a bigger market than anything EdTech, and with a real moat. Plus bonafides and actual evidence they are pulling it off, but that's honestly all gravy on top of the market opportunity.

It's funny you say this, because as someone that rejected emacs (default editor was XEmacs on the Sun machines in my 90s CS computer lab) in favor of vim early. I think a big part of the appeal of vim for me is that it's a great editor just based on the defaults. Sure you can configure it but you don't need to. Emacs strength is customization, and that's what Pi feels like compared to batteries-included harnesses.

I understand both world views and both are legitimate. But I do feel like LLMs are advancing so quickly that it's not a good use of my time to optimize harnesses at this point. I have actual work to do, so sharpening my tools needs to be selective and time-boxed. Personally I'm staying agnostic on harness, not locking into Codex or Claude Code, but also not prematurely optimizing things that tens of thousands of other tools-focused developers are going deep on across the ecosystem. My goal is not to be an early adopter but to reap the benefits of all that experimentation.

A lot of this rings true, but I think it's still too narrow. Sure, coding does not equal productivity, that is well debunked already. But I would argue that productivity is a product of engineering delivery + product decision making. Now where is the line between product and engineering? It varies by company, team and individual, but I don't think productivity can be measured for those functions independently, and in fact I see gains from AI on both the coding AND the product management side.

Basically as a senior tech lead in a large company engineering org, I don't have the bandwidth to individually validate every assertion from engineers on other teams OR from every product manager that comes with a half-baked ask. In the past I would be limited by the influence I could get through human relationships to strong SMEs with good judgment, and those folks always thin out as a company grows and calcifies. The number of creative and innovative thinkers dwindles, and the number of people protecting their turf and doing the minimum not to get fired increases. As a result many good ideas can get blocked by random gatekeeprs with poor imagination, poor expertise or both. However with AI I can follow up on gut instincts and fact check a lot more things, and ask incisive questions that can cut through a lot of organizational bullshit.

That's where I think most of the AI gains are today. Of course once AI plateaus and normalizes I think it will be baked into the org structures of tomorrow. But for now it offers real competitive advantage to those with the expertise to ask the right questions.

The only reason they deleted the static list of identified repositories was because of the negative PR of hitting HN. Although I have no affiliation with GitHub, I would imagine that no one with any resource allocation power is incentivized to take action to police public repos in general. The reality is that as soon as they start, it will become an arms race, and they will have to deal with false positives and the community headache that comes with that. They also have bigger fish to fry with the effect the influx of AI slop is having to their open source bread and butter. The two problems are not entirely disjoint, and I suspect solutions won't come until the problem gets much worse, and the agentic coding space stabilizes a bit more.

As a hiring manager I take candidate experience seriously because I know it’s easy to get wrong and leave people with a really bad taste in their mouth at a sensitive time.

As a candidate, though, I have learned not to take offense to being ghosted or the million other indignities that one is subjected to in a modern interview pipeline. It’s just a part of the modern economy, and far from the worst one. As terrible as it is, it’s not a hill worth dying on, suck it up and just move on with your search.

I get what you mean about the conflict of interest for consumer software, but I don’t think a product mindset is inherently toxic. It’s more a function of where you are in the enshittification cycle.

The majority of people who use LLMs today never even heard of ML though a non-trivial percentage have heard that modern AI is powered by LLM. You can’t forget what you never knew. Such is the evolution of language when a formerly niche technical concept crosses the chasm to mass awareness.

Is this a rant from an abused 19-year old? The lack of anything resembling nuance or recognition that the world is complicated renders any of the accurate observations sterile and unactionable.

For example, any who says something like this can not expect to be taken seriously:

> In my entire life, I have never known a parent that actually cared about his kids. Everyone had sent them to the torture chamber known as school, which to me, alone eliminates them

Some good points, but I think it still treats “tech” as too monolithic. It’s not simply that tech leaders made bad choices or that products are inevitably enshittified. If I had to summarize the root cause I’d say it’s that the scaling properties of tech have enabled capitalist and political excesses with a velocity and power never before seen, and it happened so quickly that we really haven’t had time to even understand what’s happening systematically, let alone update societal norms and governance to address the problems.

How can you separate those things? The changes happened because there were more people, and those people were valuable to market too. Hosting and moderation became more expensive, so that created a form of pressure as well. It's convenient to blame the producers (I hate Facebook as much as anyone), but I don't think it's terribly useful to try to hold them accountable.

I believe the economic forces were more or less irresistible. In other words, if the current powers that be had behaved more ethically according to early internet norms, the only thing that would be different is they would have lost in the market and been supplanted by equivalent mass consumer oriented companies pursuing the same enshittification cycle we dislike.

I don't think this can change unless there is a cultural shift away from worshipping at the altar of raw capitalism and GDP at the expense of everything else. The way our political discourse and regulatory capture have evolved recently I am not super optimistic, though I do think the mass hatred of AI across political lines does offer a glimmer of hope.

I'd wager that if a manager says that they want you to take it more like a real marathon and less like long hike.

Just realized zombo.com recently got a major update

You make it sound like a conspiracy but the article clearly argues that this is what the people want. If there really was that much centralized control then crypto would have been much bigger.

This smells more like the fluidity of what people mean by “junior” more than anything else. Journeymen engineers in their over-engineering phase, or even very “senior” expert programmers can suffer over fitting the product to their own mental model. The most senior judgment is to understand when an abstraction makes sense at a customer level, because that defines the durability of a business-logic abstraction.

Agreed, that's why I said used the phrasing "tend to". There's no silver bullet.

Huh? Hiring being broken has nothing to do with cost, it's a filtering problem. Even when there's no HR or bean counter in sight it's still hard. There's fundamentally limited signal you can extract from interviews, so there's very loose correlation to on-the-job performance. Saying it's a cost-cutting problem would just encourage more and longer interviews, which could actually work against you because high performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops.

The call for CSS specialization strikes me as seriously misguided (even before agentic coding became a thing). Yes, web development is complex and you can’t know everything, but it is possible to learn what you need as you go and generally build up a strong high-level sense of what is possible and what approaches are reasonable for quality. But web development is not rocket science. Someone with CSS skills but not JS or probably some backend sensibilities as well is just not very useful. Being a software engineer inherently means comfort with change, it’s definitely a field that comes with a lot of challenge and potential for burnout if you don’t take care of yourself, but atomization of roles is definitely not the answer.

I think it was a joke

I don't really understand what you're nitpicking, the rule is "don't feign surprise". It seems perfectly well-stated to capture the spirit of the intent, and it explicitly allows for genuine surprise as you suggest.

Now, human interaction is squishy, so yeah, they are also trying to cover the all-too-common-in-tech case where someone is just being an asshole. Let's call it the Comic Book Guy case. In this case, it actually doesn't matter whether surprise is feigned or not, because what's actually happening is this person is listening and waiting for someone to express a blind spot so they can prove their intelligence by correcting them. You can't really write down an explicit deterministic rule for this, because it's all cognitive behavior social stuff that people are generally unaware of moment to moment. However the recurse center rules plus live feedback when it happens is as good of a solution as I can imagine.

I agree with you there's a lot of gatekeeping around "passion" for tech. I don't like that framing, but having seen the effect of success and the type of people it has brought into the industry that would never have even considered a few decades ago, I see why people look for supplemental signals, even if the ones they pick are wrong and effectively just shallow tribalism.

However I think this really misses the mark:

> Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.

This is a strawman based around immature, fragile-ego individuals. There are plenty of nerds who realize intelligence, talent, and resourcefulness are completely orthogonal traits from interest in tech. The former is over-represented in online discourse, and the latter is more common in engineering leadership in top companies. You can't really be a top-performer in any large-scale effort without realizing that there are top performers in all domains, and they have insights you don't have. You can't do great things if you don't leave space to learn about your own blind spots, and have a productive dialogue with people who have a completely different mental framework than you.

> Who cares if it might be illegal or the spirit of the law frowns on what we do?

Surely these things are on a moral and ethical continuum and we need to look at them individually? Pretty much every person has broken some law at least once in their lives. I don’t disagree that moral ambivalence is often necessary to make billions, but I also don’t consider all laws sacrosanct, or that breaking the law is the primary measure of a company’s moral standing.

There is no conservative party in America because Trump has taken control of the Republican Party. He has no values except what is expedient for himself, any principled conservatives who speak up commit political suicide. Such is the world we live in when trust of institutions and expertise as eroded to the point that any acknowledgment of tradeoffs or nuance is met with knee jerk suspicion from the populace.

I think this is true when models were going from bad to pretty good like happened last year. But when they start to get good, and can work deeper and with more nuance, how you prompt also can change the results quite a bit. Note this is also true of asking smart humans to do things; personality and approaches vary, they don’t exist on a single axis continuum of quality

I agree we have more software than most people want, but I don't think bespoke software is the answer. Sure, that is an interesting new area that AI makes possible, but I don't think it's more than a niche because people don't fundamentally want software, they want certain problems to be solved, and if AI creates a custom solution and it doesn't work, they won't be able to get help from anyone. More fundamentally, there is value in standardization and polish on well-worn paths. Even if you're right and people do end up with personal AI driving everything, I still think the lower layers need to be standardized because of the nature of distributed data. For example, you still need to talk to your bank to get your financial state and automate any payments, and that stuff has to be rigorous, with strong consistency and accounting guarantees.

For these reasons, I think people are overestimating the end-state impact of AI. Right now the hype cycle is fierce, and it definitely changes the economics of producing software (with a lot of negative effects forcing adjustments in open source ways of working), but I don't think in the end state the core landscape of software changes all that much. Well worn and hardened infrastructure like the Linux kernel is infinitely more valuable than CRUD apps used with small user populations on the edge. User space libraries and frameworks fall somewhere in between. AI increases the volume of new software, yes, but I see it as mostly fractal bits filling in the margins.

There's no point debating people who are in a blind mania. Sometimes it's better to just keep your head down and focus on what you can control while "mistakes are made". You will be infinitely more appreciated once they acknowledge that help is needed.