drusepth

I'm not sure time or money inherently equal difficulty. There's plenty of things that take a long time to build and/or are expensive to build, but are still easy to build.

> My hunch is when it comes time to polish and fine tune all the moving parts, this process will remain much faster to do by hand. It will be faster to update a specific field or line of code and test/iterate than to prompt your way through that process (the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time)

I think you're mostly right here -- however, I think you've framed prompting as an all-or-nothing (or maybe the OP did, as I only skimmed the article too...). LLMs are great for some things (scaffolding, review, refactoring, etc) but way less efficient at others (tweaking and letting the artist eye shine).

I think the crux is this: you shouldn't be asking an LLM to make these tweaks for you; you should be asking an LLM to build the tools that let you make these tweaks by hand faster or more effectively.

For example, we have probably a hundred tools [0] for quickly making all kinds of changes and tweaks in one of our Steam games, that are of course all done by hand. The tools were built by LLMs based on what would speed up our existing by-hand workflows, and once they're built they're just tools that let our people shine.

1. Do a thing by hand

2. Have LLMs build a tool that makes it easier to do that thing by hand

3. ????

4. An artist with a vision can bring that vision to life faster

[0] https://i.imgur.com/b4nSFjV.png

"10% of the way towards AGI over ~5-10 years" (depending on how you measure it) would be a terrifying statement even if the rate of progress weren't also exponentially increasing.

> Durable rents will end up going to those who owns the scarce assets, zuck is building those as we speak.

I'm following but maybe I'm a little dense here: what are the scarce assets that Meta is building in this analogy?

..in two different "password managers", which people regularly open up and look up passwords to manually type in the other device from.

Don't forget to put on your robe and wizard hat

I don't see how this quote is relevant here.

Most software developers (or people in any field, working for anyone) rarely own anything they do at work.

And the entrepreneurs running their own companies (which there's an explosion of atm largely because of AI) do indeed "own" the higher-level products and things they're producing, even if AI writes the code.

What is supposed to have changed?

We have a "vibe coded" game on Steam[0] we're seeing the start of this trend on. There was a noticeable point when people stopped referring to it as "slop" (we put it out originally for very early feedback) and started referring to it as "vibe coded" (it's a way more mature game now). We have players who've played for 300+ hours, and 25% of players played the original demo for longer than 5 hours.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/4489800/Alchemy_Survivors...

I actually think "easily distributable" is the least necessary of the three bullet points here (though arguably Steam does make things easily distributable, just not as easily as, say, web games or mobile games). IMO this is a maybe a really good "pick two" triangle.

Extra steps couched in corporate speak is often the defining line that defines whether something is technically legal or not.

I don't know when you last tried agy, but if you ever go back to try it again, you'll hopefully be happy to know it does indeed support skills, sub-agents with pretty good inter-agent communication, and probably more.

edit: removed persistent memory from list since I realized I'm using a plugin for that and it's apparently not native

What basic features are missing from agy? I've been using it and cli-cc + web-cc for months (among a few other random harnesses to test here and there) and they all seem roughly comparable to me.

I actually just cancelled Ultra also because I couldn't subscribe to a YouTube Family plan while I had it active (Google... :[) but trying to use Codex as a replacement while I testdrive Astra makes me yearn for agy again.

It's almost certainly the software side. Expect "dot" pendants or "dot" pocketwatches in a year or two.

Indeed, I've been coding for ~25 years (competitively and in open source for many of them) and I max out at least two subscriptions' worth of tokens every week across a half dozen active projects.

I still code "by hand" sometimes (mostly Ruby/Rails, C#, and random languages for code golf) but just for fun at this point. Serious projects started being 95-100% AI over a year ago.

But only if you promise to spend the billion dollars on something NVIDIA is selling

I'm always curious why paywalled links aren't outright banned on HN. How is the average person supposed to read the article before commenting?

Which humans were arrested or held accountable for the Minab school attack?

True, but it's also not your job to understand what post-docs are suggesting (hopefully), unlike post-docs who kind of need to understand what LLMs are suggesting.

I think this is a severely outdated take that was true a few years ago, but has not been true for at least 1-2 years. Especially from the top models at the top labs.

Qualitative measurement is always hard, but plenty of studies have come out in the past year that generally find many models' code to be roughly equal to human code in terms of maintainability, complexity, readability, etc.

I think it's most likely the big labs have something close enough to what they'd call[0] "AGI" that they're now calling for regulation to lock up the market and prevent competition.

[0] Whether they've actually achieved some definition of AGI is way less important in this context than whether they can /sell/ what they've built as AGI.

> with vibe coding you can't cast aside the AI after you've taken the initial step

Sure you can, why wouldn't you? Good models these days spit out architecture and code fairly indistinguishable from your average developer.

It's always hard to jump into an existing project and understand it all, but it's doable and in 2026 it's no harder to jump into a vibed project than it is to jump into any other project (with exceptions in both directions, of course).

You still have the code and can switch back to "fully human" (or any other point on the spectrum of human-ai) any time you want by just opening the same editor you would use if you cloned any other project.

> I would argue that if you belong to group one you have not actually "made" anything.

That's exactly the sentiment I'm referring to.

I'm excited that group one is full of people who couldn't previously "make" anything with code, but now can (in the same way I'm excited that more people can now "make" music, art, stories, movies, etc). And they're definitely making stuff (friends with kids are making games that their friends play, sharing homemade videos with each other, making bedtime stories, making websites and apps that others use, etc).

I'd also argue that theory and architecture have always been closer to "software engineering" than coding ever was, but I also acknowledge I've got a bit of a bias belonging to group 2 (otherwise: been coding for ~25 years).

I don't know about online dating, but I think the vibe coders I've interacted with the past few years break down into two distinct groups:

1. People who let agents drive designs/plans and just let them rip (what I would /actually/ call vibe coding) -- who place value in the final product, and aren't shameful about the tools used to get there as long as the product is "good" (and generally reroll entire apps from a single prompt until they get something that's actually good)

2. People who provide (or collaborate with AI on) designs/plans and use AI to write the code (which I wouldn't call vibe coding, but often gets conflated) -- who place value in the planning, and aren't shameful about the tools used to implement them as long as the architecture is "good"

Either way: I'd say most people who "vibe code" (in either category) are a little annoyed at the term inherently belittling what they make, but generally dismiss the term rather than feel any shame about it.

I'd be surprised to learn anyone in my programming network doesn't use any AI anywhere. It's a very powerful tool that's integrated pretty much everywhere into the 2026 Developer's toolkit, and the question is generally /where/ you use it (or not), not whether you use it at all.

I mean, that post /is/ entirely about AI.

The "I love AI" posts are just as bad as the "I hate AI" posts, and the same "this is my opinion on AI" posts are as bad as the onslaught of poorly-AI-vibed demo posts. Makes sense to filter them all out IMO.

Same here. I assume this doesn't work in Chrome or something?

Yes, but why?

Yes, but presumably they'll work on another problem instead, because they're mathematicians who enjoy doing mathematics.

Is there value lost in them working on problems that don't have solutions instead of problems that do?

I have a hunch the real killer feature of assistants like this will actually be the ability to identify moments like this where it'd actually be helpful, instead of relying on users to actually try/do everything with it.

Ironically, I feel like LLMs have really unlocked Windows work since they all know how to use Powershell and all the weird Windows commands/hacks that you otherwise either wouldn't even know about, or would have to Google every time.

I used to hate working in Windows, but now it feels roughly comparable to Mac (though at the risk of inciting an OS war, I do feel like Linux still beats both out...)

> GLP-1 receptor agonist medications typically cost between $149 and $350 per month for cash-pay oral pills, and $900 to $1,400+ per month for list-price injectables without insurance.

LLMs started meaningfully passing the Turing test a year or two ago, around GPT-4.5. Is there another version or bar for "passing" you're looking for?

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674