ryaniscool

The capital outlay is eye watering and it feels like an over extension. Neither of the two major pure AI providers are close to profitable (OpenAI, Anthropic) while having valuations close to a trillion dollars.

Their ROI is paradoxical. If they succeed in disrupting knowledge work. Who will be around to use or buy their product?

AI maximalism is making a lot of assumptions that I think are not a given

* The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace

* AI companies will have the capital continue to expand infrastructure

* there will be some kind of functioning economy if all knowledge workers are replaced

There are strong headwinds to all three of these.

Hey it may come to pass but it’s very speculative at this point. I see a lot of tech people simply overlaying the progress curve of previous tech booms which is reductive.

This needs to be read after the article from Turso on how they're retiring their bug bounty program because of being inundated with useless AI slop reports. It's the top story on HN right now.

https://turso.tech/blog/the-wonders-of-ai

Yes, it will take longer but all value comes from labor, so the consumption of the wealthy is literally produced by the working class. The rich can't eat money.

Also, data centers, chips, and energy require massive working-class supply chains, and enterprise AI revenue depends on customers whose own revenue depends on regular consumers.

Yes, it was responding. One of my points was that it has nothing to do with society's expectations but people's lived experiences and observations.

You seem to think I'm advocating for working your entire life. I'm just trying to share my lived experience so please take it easy.

There is some bitterness that's coming across in your response.

Ok but one of the great things about retiring when everyone else does is you have a community. If you stop working when you're young, everyone else in your network is probably still working.

I'm not against early retirement. One of my points was that, in general, it's harder to find fulfillment as a working age adult outside of work. Not impossible, just more challenging.

Sure working sucks, but have you tried not working? I think this is from lived experience because I've gone for stretches of not working (intentionally). It can be challenging to find a sense of fulfillment. I know it seems counter-intuitive but if you do succeed in your dream of retiring in your 50's I think you'll understand what I mean when you get there.

It's bizarre that some of the doomsayers are AI stakeholders. It's like they don't realize that most people don't have net worth in the 7-8 figures.

I console myself with the fact that without a functioning economy, AI will implode since capital will dry up. Then all of the investment in data centers, R&D, etc. will never be recovered. Then we'll be back to rational thinking? Maybe?

No, it's not just text in -> text out.

Skills can include scripts, tools, etc.

The entire point of hooks is deterministic responses to signals from the LLM. You run a function in response to some event and the function is given json data that conforms to a specific schema.

I might not be smart enough to grasp what you're saying because it sounds a little ridiculous to me.

Do you mean the AI will "figure out" how to just do the things we use skills and hooks for today? Do you understand the difference between deterministic and probabilistic behavior and why the difference matters a lot when doing technical tasks?

Are you using a tool like Claude Code or Codex or windsurf? I ask because I've found their ability to pull in relevant context improves tasks in exactly the way you're describing.

My own experience is that some things get better and some things get worse in perceived quality at the micro-level on each point release. i.e. 4.5->4.6

I agree completely. I haven't noticed much improvement in coding ability in the last year. I'm using frontier models.

What's been the game changer are tools like Claude Code. Automatic agentic tool loops purpose built for coding. This is what I have seen as the impetus for mainstream adoption rather than noticeable improvements in ability.

Ok, but the real issue with kids looking up porn is how it warps general expectations around sex. Singling out specific fetishes and taboos that involve consenting adults seems a little bit like misdirected moral panic.

To be more specific, the idea that step-cest warps children's minds is laughable when the larger issue is that 95% of porn portrays women as submissive sex dolls that exist for male pleasure. Don't forget the unrealistic expectations around body and beauty standards

Yeah I feel like this will funnel everyone's opinion into sounding like it was written by an AI.

Love the idea but the example they give with bears is absolutely hilarious. Calling bears dumb animals is offensive? God help us.

If they tank the white-collar middle class, there won't be anyone to buy the goods and services their potential AI customers will be trying to sell.

It's like a snake eating its own tail.

> The thing with coding agents is that it seems now that you can eat your cake and have it too. We are all still adapting, but results indicate that given the right prompts and processes harnessing LLMs quality code can be had in the cheap.

It's cheaper but not cheap

If you're building a variation of a CRUD web app, or aggregating data from some data source(s) into a chart or table, you're right. It's like magic. I never thought this type of work was particularly hard or expensive though.

I'm using frontier models and I've found if you're working on something that hasn't been done by 100,000 developers before you and published to stackoverflow and/or open source, the LLM becomes a helpful tool but requires a ton of guidance. Even the tests LLMs will write seem biased to pass rather than stress its code and find bugs.

Yes, AI companies are bleeding money with current pricing. Your AI usage is heavily subsidized by investor dollars.

How far can Claude can take this beyond a cool demo.

Does it become exponentially harder to add the missing features or can you add everything else you need in another two days? I'm guessing the former but would be interested to see what happens.

Are you going to continue trying? I ask because it's only been two days and you're already on Show HN. It seems like if you waited for it to be more complete, it would have been more impressive.

Not my experience at all. Claude Code is impressive but it needs to be used iteratively for serious development and requires lots of testing.

Need it to one shot that report against your db using React/Typescript? Or pump out a web form that submits to your backend? works every time.

Need it to do something a little more creative? It frequently fails in subtle ways that aren't apparent until later.

Jira has had free competitors that do at least 75% of what it does since it's inception. You could find a dozen on github that actually look good right now.

In spite of this, Jira is bigger than ever.

Sure, and Github is filled with these 10 feature competitors. Some even have active communities.

Didn't seem to kill off the big SaaS players or even weaken them.

Most of a software project's lifetime will be spent as a maintenance challenge. i.e. How do we add the 237th feature without adding to the performance problems that already exist. Hence, the desire to rewrite the codebase to incorporate the abstractions of all 236 features.

I don't see AI helping with this. From my experience, it seems like the opposite. It can help you write the code after you've deconstructed the problem yourself and know how to keep it in check.

Creating massive amounts of semi-structured data is the missing layer? I can see an argument for that if you're a non-programmer who wants to create something. Although, at some point, it's a form of programming.

As a developer, I would rather just write the code and let AI write the semi-structured data that explains it. Creating reams of flow charts and stories just so an AI can build something properly sounds like hell to me.

What are you coding with this? Is it a product you're trying to launch, an existing product with customers or custom work for someone else?

You're on HN so I assume you're in a technical or technical-adjacent role. Of course, you could be an accountant at a restaurant supply company or something.

Here's another data point for you. A few weeks ago, I had to do a screenshare with a product manager just to help them install Claude Code. There is a wide spectrum of technical literacy out there.

Low-code tools for actual developers is dying but AI might be the thing that makes low-code take off for the broader market. Software development will look very different five years from now. It could be filled with knowledge workers with no CS education using no-code tools and AI while the hardcore engineers still build technology that they build on.

A strong advantage a platform like retool has in the non-developer market is they own a frictionless deployment channel. Your average non-developer isn't going to learn npm and bash, and then sign up for an account on AWS, when the alternative is pushing a button to deploy the creation the AI has built from your prompt.

I'm confused by this comment because there is an entire industry (personal injury attorneys) dedicated to extracting every dollar possible from the insurance company when an accident happens.

I've personally known at least five people who have been in a car accident and then received a windfall of cash after paying off their medical bills and having their car repaired/replaced.

I don't know if this is still the case but years ago my friend, who was in a collision with a drunk driver, was told by his attorney that the insurance will just settle for 3x your total expenses (medical, car repairs, etc). He was being encouraged by his attorney to see chiropractors and specialists because of this.

Execution has gotten much cheaper in a small enough problem space. Yes, we get it, it's game changing. It doesn't mean you're building products. There's more to it than just writing code.

Writing a formbuilder and saying you've replicated Typeform is like finishing a todo app and saying you've replicated Jira. Yes, in a way I guess...but there is way more to the product and that's usually where the hard parts are.

One observation I've had recently. Postman files seem more popular the OpenAPI specs lately. Major SaaS companies will produce a postman file but not an OpenAPI spec. Two examples: Salesforce and Notion

This is really unfortunate because Postman requires you to have an account and log in to download or export these to another format.

Prediction: Postman produces a paid MCP for API lookup in the near future

What are we arguing about? Is it the way he expressed his opinion?

Would you agree that whether something is an opinion or fact is itself objective, for most cases at least?

I ask because nobody is questioning whether or not what he states was actually an opinion. They seem to simply be upset with the manner in which he phrased it. He was simply too sure of himself and people found that offensive. Which seems a little ridiculous don't you think?