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Comments (98)

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  mef51
  I always find so much cognitive dissonance in these kinds of posts.> My most successful work this year was hand-writing a tool, replacing ~4,000 lines of vibe-code with a few hundred. My system has proven more flexible, easier to test, and more generalizable than what it replaced.> agents still need human taste and experience to produce good work.Where do you think human taste and experience in software comes from?> overstimulating & exhausting in a way that coding never was.> for many of us, honing the code, finding the right design, seeing the parts mesh together — that was the meditative purpose we found in our jobs.> That’s not the only time AI waylaid me. LLMs could not figure out how to annotate that model’s training data correctly. I spent days going back and forth with them> LLMs are not yet good companions when brainstorming complicated things.Why do we expect this to get better? The training data will degrade in quality if more people rely on LLMs so I'd expect models to eventually start getting worse even if they currently enjoy apparent improvements in output.> Writing code is solved.What a strange thing to say given all the above experiences, which I think we all share.Why are we willing to give up so much in terms of purpose and understanding for perceived productivity gains?
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  Dzugaru
  There is no substitute for reading the code in many many cases. I spend more than 3k/mo on tokens. I find incorrect assumptions baked into the code (the ultimate spec) and missed by the agents and tests daily. This is more pronounced in data analysis and complex systems.As a side effect having to read the code at least once inevitably makes it way shorter and usually much better.
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  Daunk
  I believe that anyone who says that writing code is no longer needed, was probably not a very good coder to begin with. I have seen what the best models can do, and I've seen what people call "good", and I am not impressed.However, I'm still split. Because this could mean that we see a jump in code quality, due to bad coders getting someone better to code for them. But we could see a decrease in code quality, due to less people "caring".
• citelao
  OP: [last year][1], I shared how I was using AI day-to-day as an ordinary engineer. This year, I did it again!It's crazy realizing that Claude Code only started getting big in the last year or so. It feels so different now, with all the new models & tools we have to use. I hope you enjoy![1]: https://ben.stolovitz.com/posts/how_use_ai_oct_2025
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  vagab0nd
  Nothing against the post itself, but something I find funny: the development in AI is so rapid, that everyone thinks they are ahead of everybody else. Here we have a blog post telling us "coding is solved". In Oct 2026, how many of us don't know this already?
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  sashank_1509
  I find it amusing, that> my uncle can create softwareIs considered great> my uncle can create music or artIs not considered great.I guess humans have agreed, that art is a skill you must learn if you want to produce it, but engineering or software is not a skill worth learning and we are happy if computers can do that for us.So it’s great and amazing if anyone can create their gizmos and software to help them but not if they create music or digital images, which apparently it is wrong to prompt, and not a sign of a great future.
• 0xbadcafebee
  $3,000/month is nuts! For $36k (1 yr of spend) you can buy a system with dual rtx pro 5000 (144GB VRAM). or spend a little more ($44k) and get two M5 Ultras w/512GB RAM. the latter, clustered, is big enough to run the biggest open weights (quantized), or smaller MoE weights on each in parallel. what you get for these systems is way more than $3k/mo of tokens, because you can run it 24/7/365. you can have pass after pass after pass of optimization, bug fixing, orchestrated subagents on backlogs, etc. way more value than paying for managed inference
• simonw
  > I also now reckon with the fatigue of using these agents. Managing 6 different conversations with 6 different robots about 6 different features is overstimulating & exhausting in a way that coding never was.Big +1 to that.
• shubham-genai
  Over the past year, we’ve been using AI to solve everyday challenges and troubleshoot issues we encounter in our jobs. Now, we’re taking the next step by leveraging AI to build solutions, automate workflows, and improve the way we work.
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  amelius
  Why is product search still so bad? Google should have solved it ages ago, but even with AI it is still bad.
• simianwords
  I find that AI should be used more extensively for System Design. I have seen a lot of people not use AI for that and come up with frighteningly complex designs and let their agents run loose to implement it.Retroactively speaking, I engaged with the already agreed designs and used AI to find much better ways to do the same thing.Overall, I wish people used AI even for System Design as that seems to have a higher impact.
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  lbrito
  >I spend about ~$3,000/ month in tokens....>In case you’re wondering, I’m subscribed to: > Claude Pro ($17/ mo) > GitHub Copilot Pro ($10/ mo)Nothing wrong there at all, amirite?Maybe AI scrapped basic arithmetic and now those numbers are totally fine
• imhoguy
  TIL: AI Doompop
• skydhash
  > since agents write everything, it is simple to propose sweeping changes to my teammates during code review, or even write my own versions — both things unthinkable in the era of hand-written code.That is both untrue, and should be something that occurs rarely.Past Mid level, most dicussion in code review is centered around the conceptual level. Code is mostly use to highlight the point being made. I’ve never seen the need for someone to rewrite a patch proposed by another person. Add to it or correct misunderstandings, but never sweeping changes.
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  suddenlybananas
  >I’m really enjoying some AI musicI think I would rather shoot myself in the head
• johndhi
  Nice post!
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  stego-tech
  It’s kinda nice seeing more nuanced takes from folks as the bubble kinda deflates and both sides realize their idealized vision isn’t coming to pass. AI isn’t going to replace all the jobs, but it’s also not going away; finally, it is merely a tool in our toolchest.What does amuse me to no end, however, is how many craftsfolk in AI circles are loudly rejecting AI imagery and video in favor of humans. The only folks who seem fine with that are the grifters looking to slop out a bunch of adverts quickly for commercial gain rather than do actual art, or folks who want “art” but don’t want to pay a human to make it for them or learn the skills themselves. Both of those camps are viewed with disdain and loathing by both sides of the AI Boom/Doom arguments, so I’ll take whatever allies I can get on those fronts.AI music…man, I live with artisans and musicians and we have a number of “artists” we suspect are AI but whose music is pretty solid. We’re waiting for the shoe to drop, but I’m trying to look at it as a kind of turbocharged Fruity Loops/Logic as opposed to a human replacement. I hope I’m right on that, but time will tell.The game changer I think more doomers need to experience is agents. It sounds like a recipe for disaster (a bunch of models known to hallucinate and allowed to run roughshod over a computer unattended? What could go wrong?), and it often (hilariously) is for the scammers out there giving it full access to production and fucking off to hawk their latest Masterclass on X or LinkedIn, but that first time you give it a reasonably achievable prompt and come back to a halfway decent product you can review and refine into production in 15m or less?Absolutely magical, doubly so when it’s just 27B Qwen via Hermes and not some souped up stack in a frontier lab costing you thousands a month in tokens. If I were to evangelize AI, that’s how I’d do it. Fuck subscriptions, fuck cloud compute, fuck frontier labs and token buckets and whatever slop Sundar/Scam/Dario/Elmo et al are hawking this week; run that locally, give it a reasonable prompt that solves a real problem, and show them the results.Then do the right thing and go for a walk with the two hours of free time the AI just freed up for you. Don’t ask for permission to take back your time.
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  zzzeek
  you can totally tell Claude to take some AI technical writing (which is, to be clear, writing where you explicitly need to not sound creative or interesting, and you need to maintain very strict "voice" [a term I only even know because claude explained it to me] so this is not a creative endeavor) and make it sound "less AI". At least working with opus 5.5, textual output already has a lot fewer of the colons and "load bearing" of a few months ago, and if a PR does have that kind of lingo I can just have Claude rewrite it "like a human" and it does great.
• minfazhai
  [flagged]
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  keybored
  HN title: I use AI> I still believe I use AI fairly typically, but I’ve had a notable change in background. Last October, I was an engineer on Microsoft’s Windows AI team. I am now a research engineer at Salesforce AI Research.Priest wears robes.I guess it’s one of those nonsensical automatic rules.
• cyclopeanutopia
  [dead]
• likelybot
  [dead]
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  12317
  [flagged]