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i think it's a give and take here, like the 5th time i injured myself working out i conceded that perhaps i am aging and can't go as hard lol. i suppose it's a slippery slope down now where you are now over time adjusting the workouts to be less and less intensive, but it's not for lack of trying.

modern society has made it acceptable perhaps and some of these in their 60s feel it's their last chance to live life on their own terms.

reddit largely went the same way as FB for me and it's continuing full steam, but for now i can at least stick to topics i want to lurk about. never saw the need for twitter or tiktok (former i can't express myself adequately and the entire place felt like hot takes. tiktok i suppose is like the next level IG but i'm happy being the older guy getting the "trickle down" content to ig heh).

everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.

unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflammatory. promptly deleted the app again.

SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you.

anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.

matt relies on the passage of time and the fact that nobody really cares too much about wordpress drama. it's best that people do not forget what type of person he actually is behind the public facade when he inevitably pulls this kind of shit again later.

from literally back in 2011 when someone predicted exactly what would happen and got crucified for it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger....

https://web.archive.org/web/20110117192124/http://wpblogger....

one of his responses to DHH when the WPE thing went down:

https://archive.md/UZZit

the fold 7 genuinely made me want to get a foldable for the first time, was that sleek. if it wasn't for being captive to the apple ecosystem i would strongly consider it (and may do so).

i think with agentic coding now my ideal setup would be to be able to walk away and remote in from my heavy desktop/laptop w/ just my phone and check in on stuff and do some light work, etc.

obviously i would still have my laptop but i wouldn't have to lug it around everywhere.

lol yeah never in a million years installing this as a chrome extension and this is coming as a heavy max user

leave it up to HN to once again choose the most black/white this or that extreme positions as if having a 24/7 tutor that isn't perfect is somehow worse than having nothing at all. if it hallucinates you keep digging and correlate with sources to figure out if it's true, or you ask other people.

the internet, wikipedia, SO, etc. all these things had the EXACT same arguments against it and guess what? people who want to use TOOLS that help them to study better will gain, and people who are lazy will ...be worse off as it has always been.

i don't know why i bother to engage in these threads except to offer my paltry 2 cents. for being such a tech and forward thinking community there's almost this knee jerk reaction against ANYTHING llm (which i suppose i understand). a lot of us are missing the forest for the trees here.

okay? why not just ban or create a special pricing for the 1% of less of users obviously abusing it. i get that they had to do this, but to frame it as some kind of community benefit is a little disingenuous. we know you're operating at a loss and trying to figure out a path forward.

pointing to the most extreme example as if you can't stop it in it's tracks is a bad argument. its like saying we will now restrict sending of emails for everyone because this one spammer was sending 1000x the amount of an avg or even power user when you should just be solving the actual problem (identifying and stopping those that disrupt).

that's not a maker problem, that's a social media modern day problem.

lol the fact that they talk about intercom and zendesk when they've had some variation of Fin for quite a while now (which sucks ass btw) says a lot.

seriously, the near future is going to be:

1) people who reject it completely for whatever reason. 2) people who use it lazily and produce a lot of garbage (lets be honest, this is probably going to happen a lot which is why maybe group #1 hates this future. reminds me of the outsourcing era) 3) people who selectively use it to their advantage.

no point in groups 1 and 3 trying to convince each other of anything.

and without concrete details about the exact steps you're taking to fail these conversations are heat without light. see how that works?

nobody can be bothered to show how these coding llms fall flat on their face apparently with their own real detailed examples and people can't be bothered to setup some detailed youtube video with all source code because in the end i'm not trying that hard to convince people to use tools they don't want to use.

i think with all the comments maybe the more people who stumble through this the better. the cloudflare example is a decent starting point and i've already given you the general approach. i'm fine with that being a copout lol.

i mean at this point i don't really know what to say to comments like these basically calling me a liar lol. i log increases in sustained lines outputted and removed, files touched, features pushed per day. you can argue the level of increase, but it's definitely not 20% slower shrugs.

and this is exactly what i'm talking about. in the end who gives a shit about some study that may or may not apply to me as long its actually working.

people literally frothing at the mouth to tell people who find it useful that they are utterly wrong or delusional. if you don't like it then just go about your day, thx.

i mean i get it, but at some point you have to either assume everyone is lying or we are all bots or something. it's probably the same feeling i get when i read someone having trouble and my first thought is like "they aren't using it right". i'm sure the reverse is something like "they aren't a real programmer" LOL.

this sounds like a cop out, but honestly you will probably see the most vocal on both sides of this here while vast majority are just quietly doing working and doing their stuff (ironic i'm writing this).

i feel like some kind of shill, but honestly i'm anywhere from 1.5x to 10x on certain tasks. the main benefit is that i can reduce a lot of cognitive load on tasks where they are either 1) exploratory 2) throwaway 3) boilerplate-ish/refactor type stuff. because of that i have a more consistent baseline.

i still code "by hand". i still have to babysit and review almost all the lines, i don't just let it run for hours and try to review it at the end (nightmare). production app that's been running for years. i don't post youtube videos bc i don't have the time to set it up and try to disprove the "naysayers" (nor does that even matter) and its code i can't share.

the caveat here is we are a super lean team so probably i have more context into the entire system and can identify problems early on and head them off. also i have a vested interest in increasing efficiency for myself wheras if you're part of a corpo ur probably doing more work for the same comp.

i don't really understand this thought process. all technology has it's advantages and drawbacks and we are currently going through the hype and growing pains process.

you could just as well argue the internet, phones, tv, cars, all adhere to the exact same prisoner's dilemma situation you talk about. you could just as well use AI to rubber duck or ease your mental load than treat it like some rat-race to efficiency.

yep. and even the sports analogy doesn't fully explain what's going on. if we are talking "true" AGI with potential to replace people wholesale their strategy is telling in that they aren't optimizing for the "end game". maybe it's a factor of just gathering all the mindshare/hype/resources and THEN they can go actually figure it out /s.

it would be like if you were looking to train the next tennis star that had the ability to basically upend the entire game as we know it. maybe you saw a few people with a unique way of playing that were dominating an order of magnitude higher. you DEF would see teams and coaches having open tryouts and trying very unconventional things for anyone they could find that had promise.

for the record i think "AI" is not hype and is changing the way things are done permanently, but it's yet to be seem whether all these spent billions can actually meet the expected return (AGI). it's hard to separate out the true innovations from the obvious grift/money grab also going on.

the demo is pretty impressive ngl. knowing it's a bot though makes you want to phrase your questions a certain way, so i tried to just pretend like i was talking to an actual support person.

i always feel with these bots its like way too "polished" in the responses or how it speak. maybe that's a good thing and we are just so used to hearing someone speaking more casually be less well spoken lol. it makes it feels inauthentic, but perhaps that will change over time.

which is weird to me because i'm using in prod? literally if i care about style and structure i just say, look at these other few files and figure it out and it's fine.

if i need to work on something mission critical or new i do it by hand first. tests catch everything else. or you can just run it so that you review every change (like in claude code) as it comes in and can still grok the entire thing vs having to review multiple large files at the end.

thus i literally wonder what people are working on that requires this 100% focused mission critical style stuff at all times. i mean i don't think it's magic or AGI, but the general argument is always 1) works for hobby projects but not "production" 2) the LLM produces "messy code" which you have to review line by line as if you wrote it yourself which i've found to not be true at all.

honestly my theory is part of it is people who are very caught up in the "craft" part of it and now hate these LLMs for producing shit that pretty much works but isn't like this "perfect specimen" of coding architecture that they now have to pour over.

honestly, the vast majority of basically CRUD apps out there we are inflating our skills a bit too much here. even if the code is junk you can adapt your mindset to accept what LLMs produce, clean it up a bit, and come out with something maintainable.

like do these people ever have to review code from other people or juniors? the feedback loop here is tighter (although the drawback is your LLM doesn't "learn").

i wouldn't use it for anything super novel or cutting edge i guess, but i don't know, i guess everyone on HN might be coding some super secret advanced project that an LLM can't handle....?

this was the same criticism against SO at the time too. people who want to learn and put in the effort will learn even faster with AI (asking, exploring the answers, etc.) and those who use it as a crutch will be left behind as always. we're just in the confusing staging.

do you let it generate lots of code before review? i find this feeling you describe if i let it run wild and then have to sit there and figure out what it did and slog through every line.

the happy medium for me is either giving it very defined small tasks that i can review (think small edits or refactors over a few files). or i baby sit it and review every change its about to make. doesn't always pan out but it's basically a super powered auto-complete and i can "steer" it the direction i want. i can validate chunks much faster and it's typically of good quality.

that or i make mental notes of what i want it to fix after the first pass and run it thru again with the edits. in that way it does feel more collaborative and less like reviewing some unknown piece of code from someone else.

how about lets stop making AI (i guess LLM here) some monolithic block that applies to every problem we could ever have on this earth? claude might suck at tower of hanoi, but in the end we will just use something better suited to the job. nobody complains that ML or vision models "fail spectacularly" at soemthing it's not suited for.

i get the criticism, but "on the ground" there's real stuff getting done that couldn't be done before. all of this boils down to an intellectual study which, while good to know, is meaningless in the long run. the only thing that matters is if the dollars put in can be recouped to the level of hype created and that answer is probably "maybe" in some areas but not others.

this AI doomerism is getting just as annoying as people claiming AI will replace everyone and everything.

it's really interesting to me because i feel like legacy code is where it actually excels very well. i have a large mental map in my head, so i usually just feed it some vague notion of what i want it do and use existing files as a reference ("i want to build this feature, look at X, Y, Z for reference. approach it this way" if i have some notion of how i want it go).

i usually don't let it go run off on its own unless it's a very defined task that i can review quickly later, i just review and approve every change and it takes big cognitive load off for me. at some point maybe this doesn't feel like "programming", but then i'll just tweak something else or modify it and then go onto the next review. i find i can't have it produce the entire thing and then review it since i have no idea how it got to where it did or takes just as much time to understand. but doing it this way it's faster + i gain understanding.

the prompts aren't overly complex or take a lot of time, certainly way less than speccing something out for a junior. all i have a is a base file for style and structure and then i describe the general problem and reference files ad-hoc. where i find it actually fails a lot is in novel code because it has nothing to ground it and starts exploring random stuff. i only use it for novel exploration to see what approaches it comes up with.

still trying to understand why there's this huge chasm between the two viewpoints. like a lot of the things you just said i can't resonate at all with. like maybe the 20% i feel like i'm "fighting" the LLM i just stop and go in myself. does that suck? sort of, but it's certainly way less tedious than directing some other person to do it or the time saved had i not used it at all.

edit: but to your point, yeah it really is just like magic with no way to like actually direct it in a way you would where a human would learn. maybe over a year ago i tried and wrote anything AI off beyond basic co-pilot completions (same issues, "fighting" the AI, having to specify a tons of exceptions in some god awful file). the new agents changed everything for me, esp claude code. i think it will only get better, so it's best to pick it up.

my only fears are

1) no juniors being trained, thus no future seniors. part of the power is that you have experienced people using it to enhance their context or understanding. for those with no experience and no drive to "improve" (honestly, think of the avg dev at big co) or straight up "vibe coding" i shudder at the output.

my hypothesis we are now going to enter a period where a LOT of shitty code is going to be created. it's already happening in education with people just cheating w/o learning. i already had issues trying to hire people who were using AI to get past initial exercises but failing on complex issues because they were just probably copy and pasting everything. best time to be a nimble startup.

2) top-down mandates to use this stuff. you should only use it when you want and if it helps you. i think there's this element of companies buying into the hype 110% and that puts a bad taste in everyone's mouth. "all devs replaced in 1 year!" type stuff.

there was literally a post a few days ago where someone from cloudflare or fly (can't remember) released a new feature built with AI (albeit heavily supervised) and answered q's along the way about it.

it's funny because what i'd also like to see is people who are skeptics make a video as well since sometimes i also have the opposite suspicion. i get a lot of the criticism, but i don't get the "it produces pure garbage" type ones.

nice deflection. i might not share your enthusiasm for mentoring junior devs, but i do it anyway because like you, i agree it's important. the point, though, is at the end of the day even if i didn't do it you have no fucking right to come with that moral high ground.

if you've optimized every facet of your life to do all the "responsible things" society needs then feel free to throw the first stone. anything else is just posturing.

and just a small thing, it's ironic that you're so fixated on socialization for society’s sake while being so tunnel-visioned in defending your own definition of what that even means. i've given you plenty examples but it just doesn't fit the one you personally adhere to.

alright, we can agree to disagree because this so obviously touching a chord with you and you're now literally making sweeping assumptions based on things i've never said.

maybe i like taking care of my friends kids, volunteering, or doing other things that contribute to the "future of society"? personally, i think mentoring junior devs is slightly lower on the priority list, but that's my opinion.

seriously, how arrogant of you to make assumptions about how others think about the future based on a tiny slice of your personal life lol.

and why do you think that has to exist solely within the confines of work? not that you said that, but your comments seem to suggest that if you don't like or want to mentor junior devs then you don't value human connections. thus my comment about having enough connections outside of work.

if it's rewarding to you that's great, but don't frame it as something bigger than it is. i would hope we are all "being a positive part of and building a society worth living in" in our own way.

i was trying to frame it as something i'm also grappling with, but i digress poor choice of words.

maybe you're responding to the wrong person? because i'm not even disagreeing with you on that. maybe they want both or neither, that's fine.

the person i'm responding to is framing mentoring as some kind must have from a "socialization" standpoint (which i disagreed with, but i get the practical aspect of it where if you don't have people train juniors there won't be seniors).