sillyfluke

>asserting that AI will botch software might hold more weight with people who have already forgotten how dogshit software was pre-AI.

You're responding to an assertion with an assertion. It has been empirically proven that SOTA models can create more dogshit software than pre-AI software. It is also trivially known that the user is unable to predict when and how the AI will introduce dogshit into the software. We literally had a study posted on this forum claiming models give more accurate answers if you're mean to them. This is the shit we're dealing with. Stuff you couldn't make up in a dystopian Douglas Adams novel.

>you can encode these things into prompts

Is this satire? SOTA models randomly disobey rules in prompts all the time.

When a dev drops a production db I can warn them. If they do it multiple times during their employment I can change their roles or fire them.

I can count the number of companies providing SOTA models with the fingers on my hands. Imagine having an employee pool of only 5 savant coders with dementia to choose from to hire to your company. That's it. Thats the entire applicant pool. You can only fire one of them by hiring one of the other four to replace them with. And you can't really fire them for dropping production dbs if you can't prevent the other ones from making the same mistake. This is the current AI-first hellscape as it stands.

The AI cartel's hope is that the market will stay irrational longer than the naysayers can stay solvent both financially and intellectually.

Putting it a different way, it won't matter if the firms who went too deep at the very beginning are fucked if the rational are forced to succumb to the market pressures created by the irrational and thus are reluctantly pushed to adopt AI-first workflows for appearance's sake in order to survive anyway. Because then everybody will be likewise fucked and completely dependent on AI, despite it being a subpar development paradigm with respect to robustness of the systems under development. History has taught us that it is adoption dynamics not capability that determines the winning paradigm or technology (Betamax vs VHS is one historical example. Javascript vs everything else is another one).

(We know it's a subpar development paradigm with respect to robustness because the entire coding agent paradigm turns the most knowledgeable programmer into a person "who doesn't know what they don't know" because development speed far exceeds their ability to reason about the codebase and the underlying SOTA models that they depend on to fix the bugs that the model itself has introduced are at best unreliable narrators with no objective evidence of correctness or deterministic behavior.)

In what context did you witness all these cases?

It's one thing to know these cases exist because they all have been reported in the news or having made a note of it through separate and unrelated word of mouth interactions, but one person having direct experience of all these cases is unusual for a civilian (ie non-medical or healthcare professional).

>Why would I consider [maintainence]...Its funny how the default with programming is that the piece of software exists forever.

By all means don't consider it if you don't plan on using them for a considerable amount of time, but there's a lot of of distance between a decent amount of time and "forever". You listed a mini OS and a UI toolkit among your projects, I hope you can forgive me for assuming you were planning to use those things to build more things, which would in turn often entail improving and maintaining these building blocks while they are actively used.

It's a bit weird when the article in question is predominantly about software development in a professional setting and the top comment is about how some people in thread are disregarding this context and opining unrelatedly about their unique solo development or personal project development experiences, to then respond to said comment by insistently going on about how AI is great for your personal projects, when people are unable to assess the value of your AI-assisted personal projects and whether they would concur with the high opinion you have of them. A turd with a CI pipeline is still a turd, I think we can all agree on that. IF someone said AI is great because they can now expand test coverage and build a CI pipeline for their todo app in rust, it wouldn't exactly be the proof you're looking for I don't think.

But I agree fully with your last paragraph, and said something similar in a comment elsewhere where I stated my tangible bar as being a Ladybird like browser built from scratch achieving Chrome parity in six months while doing continuous stable releases with coding agents in tow. Otherwise, as you said, the jury is still out.

I support this take especially since you added the "I don't care if nobody else uses what I make", but you should at least acknowledge what you're talking about is pretty unrelated to the article, as the author's entire context seems to be making something for other people to use and building it together with other people.

Since you said you want to make those things that you list, I assume none of these things have been built yet. If so, I would encourage you to consider how excited you will be to constantly maintain those things you build. But even if the maintainence cycle won't be as exciting, since you are the sole user you have the advantage of being able to proceed at a leisurely pace even while doing maintainence work.

In a professional setting, the dopamine hit of being able to build something quickly that works in an area that you have little to no knowledge in makes you more dependent on the AI in the maintaince cycle as you want to chase that dopamine high by maintaining the same development speed. This in turn leads to a bigger burnout crash after that peak dopamine hit. Maintainence is a phase of diminishing returns even without AI, but when your coding agents are introducing new bugs at record pace with their bugfixes with no new features to write home about you are in a special place in Hell.

I'm all for using AI to build ambitious projects. I have yet to see a person/company/organization continuously release huge software endeavours in a stable professional manner day in and day out with a coding agent harem in tow.

If something like the Ladybird browser, or any browser that is "built by scratch", achieved Chrome parity in six months and consistently maintained the same level of stability with continuous releases then I would see that as proof that this approach has become professionaly sustainable.

The reason people are getting away with so much using AI is because of the open secret in most enterprise engineering practices: the customer cares more about the response time for fixes they report than they do about overall or longterm product quality.

>I guess I thought this should be obvious

People in this thread are talking past and misunderstanding each other and making unrelated points.

The point of the response to the top level comment was questioning the conflict of interest in model providers creating separate revenue streams for themselves by selling a product that fixes problems their other product created, akin to OS providers selling anti-virus software back in the day.

Similarly, it should be obvious to you that a software engineer can trivially get into the mindset of writing more expoitable code by pretending the production code they're tasked with writing is hobby code or prototype code.

If profitable revenue streams with adverserial products are in place, no one should be surprised when model providers are disincentivised to improve the "garbage code quality, but hey it works!" nature of their most used code generators.

>And, LLMs are ALREADY trained negatively against writing buggy or exploitable code.

...it should also be obvious people in this forum have wildly different experiences with respect to the code quality the LLMs they use generate. I personally find it difficult to find anyone that argues that the LLMs they are using are consistently generating high-quality code across a vast codebase.

>I never thought I’d see the day when the open source “information wants to be free” crowd is complaining about intellectual property and “stylistic inspiration sources.

Please stop pretending to be debating many people when you are responding to a single person, otherwise quote specific statements that you think you are responding from "the crowd". No, you should not be surprised when OSS people reevaluate the landscape any time they witness OSS being weaponized against them even though the possibility of that happening is written on "the tin" so to speak. There have been an increasing number of debates around well-known cases a decade or half before the advent of this most recent incarnation of AI. Companies with deeper pockets and larger market access burying a popular OSS product through duplication was a common category.

Do you think these anti-AI folk wouldn't evaluate the situation differently if AI, trained on public data was in fact a public utility, seeing as you are concerned about democratization?

You and the parent may be talking about two different events.

There was an initial release of "binders" to known rightwing influencers in a choreographed photo event. It was a predominantly bullshit release that pissed off the conspiratorial wing of MAGA and the Epstein Republicans (Massie et al). This happened in early 2025.

The blowback from this event resulted in Congress passing the Epstein Transparency Act in Nov. 2025.

The biggest dump of files came after this (tho congressmen are claiming most files are still unreleased) , which is what you might be referring to.

But feel free to argue your point either way.

This is such a bizarre misrepresentation of the author's point that I have to assume in good faith that it's based on a misreading of the post. Otherwise, you are unintentionally proving the author's point by describing (now) trivial uses of AI as some sort of counterpoint, or simply making an unrelated point that doesn't have anything to do with the author's main argument.

The author's point is not specifically about Photoshop. It's right there in the second paragraph:

>Where is the vibecoded Photoshop. The vibecoded Excel. The vibecoded Maya. The vibecoded Blender. The vibecoded compiler that compiles itself. The vibecoded database, the vibecoded OS, the vibecoded anything-that-requires-architectural-judgment-to-hold-together

What do all these examples have in common, besides requiring "architectural judgment-to-hold-together"?

They are software created by mid-large companies or organizations with a large of numbers of contributors. It's not about Photoshop, it's about developing complex software with high quality control and a continuous mature and continuous release cycle to a demanding set of hundreds/thousands of users. So to take that it in and then say, "Well, I don't think AI going to be used fo build that stuff, it's going to be directly used by non-technical end users to bypass existing more complex legacy software like Excel," is only proving the author's point.

Cause at the end of the day, what are all these companies "token-maxxing" actually building and selling to their customers? That's the larger point the author is making. Just as you imply, a large swath of apps and SaaS are being wiped out by end-users directly using AI. So the only viable path is to raise the bar on what is being built. Someone should be vibecodinfg a phone OS and vibe-building an actual phone alternative to Android and iOS, if it's actually possible. Someone should be vibecoding the Metaverse and vibecoding hundreds of Apple Vision Pro apps to make VR/AR actually viable (again). And on and on.

The only honest counterpoint to the author's post, unless you can cite vibecoded software at the level of scale and maturity they are seeking, should be:

Yeah, 2026 was the year the coding performance of LLMs passed a certain maturity threshold adoption-wise so we should realistically give it a few more years to see if it is actually possible to vibecode continuously released ambitious complex software used by demanding users on the scale you mention.

If I have an issue with my phone when travelling I usually tell them beforehand and luckily all of them have figured out a workaround thus far.

I would suggest slightly adjusting your expectations by factoring in the difference between video training data and text training data. Due to computation and cost limitations, the idea of video training data being polluted with AI video slop is less of a thing. Also, humans don't generate a lot of biology and physics defying fictional video relative to the abundance and generation ease of real-life video.

The main problem currently with LLM text is not that they create incoherent sentences, it's that what they purport to be statements of fact or general consensus often times aren't, because they are bullshit machines that become better and more accurate bullshitters the more context-accurate data they are fed. AI videos may still have issues with "looking plausible" whereas LLM text currently has less issues with "sounding plausible" and more issues with "being correct" with respect to reality. Which they have no direct connection to.

No one is penalizing an AI video generator for creating a scene that never happened in real life.

Right, but you simply stated but haven't explained why bloat is inevitable in the government except to say there is no market pressure applied in government. Whereas the parent is literally talking about employing people using market rates, an example based on market pressure.

What you wrote has nothing to do with what the parent wrote.

>There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value.

The parent is specifically claiming gov jobs don't allow for near market rates. That number would literally be formulated by current market pressures. If that goes lower in the private sector it will go lower in the gov sector.

For your point to be correct with respect to their specific example, you would have to claim the gov could pay £300k/year when the going market rate was £100k/year and there would be no pressure to prevent this. Whereas all it would take would be someone to ask why a run-of-the-mill programmer is getting paid 3x the market rate?

This comment is amusing on several levels.

It's the "aide", the thing that is accused of being a "veneer" that is the actual provably tanigble object of reality in all of this, and it was this indisputable reality that led the receipients of that aide to credit USAID for certain tangible improvements in their country. This in turn functioned as US propaganda and extended US soft power, two things that are much more intangible and volatile than physical and the tangible aide that created it. Where the "aide" tangibly resulted in worse conditions it functioned as anti-US propaganda, as it should do.

When the CIA and gov black ops use the US treasury as a vehicle for their nefarious operations do we also say that "The US treasury is just U.S. propaganda wrapped in a veneer of 'banking'"? We could but it would be useless in describing the US Treasury's operations in general accurately.

All this looks like abject infantilism when all the nefarious institutions that were using USAID as a vehicle for their blackops, the CIA etc, are still unaffected in pristine condition and are simply doing the same shit they were doing under USAID but now under a different government agency label. The CIA is laughing their ass off as these guys are blaming USAID for their own operations.

The 7 billion or more current animal enslavers and devourers of the world would like to have a word, just in case some of have a few choice quotes on the nature of freedom as well.

I think you are misunderstanding the parent's comment.

>the LLM-generated results were read, understood, and confirmed by the mathematician whose work they built on.

The mathematician and the blog author are not the same person (as you seem to understand). Nathanson (the mathematician) is the one who is the expert verifier. He is the person who has the higher value and won't be fired in some hypothetical.

>>They don't own it, they can't explain it. They literally have no value whatsoever; they're a passthrough; they're invisible.

This is the blog author in the parent's description. If their boss asks them what they need to prove that the AI is more than capable in this domain and the author tells their boss they need Nathanson (the mathematician) to verify the results, his boss will thank him for demonstrating the AI's capability in this domain, fire him, pass his prompt history to Nathanson, and keep Nathanson on the job (the expert verifier).

Which is the parent's point after all, because he's referring to the hypothetical job security of the blog author not the mathematician.

This has been a feature request since AWS was a thing.

>AWS is not built around hobbyist needs

Yes, as if no startup teams are tasked to remain within hard spending targets when they're trying to build a POC with technologies that they are not initially experts in.

Now explain why they don't have a killswitch for a user defined spending limit.

>But that is not going to happen.

I don't think the 8-hour work day was accepted during the industrial revolution because job providers were convinced of productivity gains. It was won due to the leverage the labor unions and workers had over job providers.

The whole thing rests on whether workers can maintain their leverage in the AI era. That leverage is being eroded by the attempt by job providers to decouple humans from production and productivity (whether they will be succesful in this iteration is, as you say, debatable). The other axis is the attempt to erode democratic norms in order to prevent the majority from checking the power of a wealthy minority.

Once those two points of leverage are completely eroded, the only leverage left is mob power. And as history has shown on multiple occasions, excercising that leverage is ugly and messy.

AI-native should mean those who were born/came-of-age/started learning programming in the era of mature AI. It shouldn't be many people (relatively speaking) at this stage.

The term that best suits "people who embrace AI-assisted programming" is AI-first programmers, which is what they literally mean by the looks of it. Clearly, they just use what they think sounds cooler.

I don't understand. I would assume most people don't think small kids should smoke crack. That doesn't mean that they are automatically in favor of creating a 24/7 survelliance state just to prevent that from happening.

Not sure you're aware, but the joke may be on you. It's apparently Putin who's convinced Trump and the Mullahs (not the band) to choose civility over babarity by allowing a superyacht of one of his cronies to pass through the Hormuz.[0]

Russian trolling at its finest, truly. This timeline keeps raising the bar on the absurdity quotient.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2pn8zdxdjo

dupes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835490

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47845197

>Part of me wonders if Karp might just be mocking recent rants by the Trump & Tech Bro's gang.

You haven't been following Palantir in the news in Trump's second term I would wager. This is definitely not the case. If it is, Karp is engaging in a multi-year performance art gimmick.

Palantir and other Big Tech execs were given the rank of Lt. Colonel in the army last year:

https://thegrayzone.com/2025/06/18/palantir-execs-appointed-...

I could have sworn Nelson Mandela played Fortnite growing up. weird.

If it's interesting to note that there are mostly nuanced takes and positive vibes in the thread, and an otherwise low-value meta comment is deemed to be a worthy top comment for saying so, then I suggest an auto-generated AI summarization comment pinned to every long HN thread. This will surely save everyone the trouble of doing so...

(I am not claiming the top comment is AI generated, only that an AI generated summarization of the thread can function just as well in its stead, despite the occasional inaccuracies)

I end up eating a similar breakfast when I visit Swiss/Austrian/Dutch friends in their natural habitat.

>people also want phones these days that are physically durable,

Anecdotally on this front, I have had to replace the screens of my iphones at least three times in the past (different models). Incidentally, I have never needed to replace the screen of a phone that had a replaceable battery. YMMV, but this seems needlessly defeatist.

>maximum battery life

One could also claim that bespoke charging cables allow for faster charging or longer battery life, but I don't know any iPhone users that are a crying a river for their deprecated non-standard chargers. But again, YMMV I guess.

I don't understand why people don't just say "This is wrong. try again." or "This is wrong because xyz. try again." This anthropologizing by asking why seems a bit pointless when you know how LLMs work, unless you've empirically had better results from a specific make and version of LLM by asking why in the past. It's theoretically functionally equivalent to asking a brand new LLM instance with your chat history why the original gave such an answer...Do you want the correct result or do you actually care about knowing why?

>Introspection mostly amounts to back-rationalisation, just like in humans.

That's the best case scenario. Again, let's stop anthropologizing. The given reasons why may be incompatible with the original answer upon closer inspection...