MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bdamm | 2025-06-17 01:44:15+00:00
No offense intended, but this is written by a guy who has the spare time to write the blog. I can only assume his problem space is pretty narrow. I'm not sure what his workflow is like, but personally I am interacting with so many different tools, in so many different environments, with so many unique problem sets, that being able to use AIs for error evaluation, and yes, for writing code, has indeed been a game changer. In my experience it doesn't replace people at all, but they sure are powerful tools. Can they write unsupervised code? No. Do you need to read the code they write? Yes, absolutely. Can the AIs produce bugs that take time to find? Yes.

But despite all that, the tools can find problems, get information, and propose solutions so much faster and across such a vast set of challenges that I simply cannot imagine going back to working without them.

This fellow should keep on working without AIs. All the more power to him. And he can ride that horse all the way into retirement, most likely. But it's like ignoring the rise of IDEs, or Google search, or AWS.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-06-17 01:44:32+00:00
They wouldn't threaten to dump shares (and they may not even be allowed to dump shares, eg. they may be an index fund). Instead, they'd threaten to exercise their votes, and potentially fire the CEO.

But most likely they wouldn't have to. The CEO knows that a deleveraging event would kill their stock options even if their company outperforms the market on the way down.
by gchamonlive | 2025-06-17 01:44:39+00:00
I go to raves, I take very modest amounts of LSD (100 maybe 150 micrograms), and the whole experience turns into very spiritual session where I dance with my entire being and let myself disolve into the Great Void.

It has lasting effects that go way beyond the effects of the drug.

However I think it's complicated to derive generalisms like saying it's a drug for everyone and everybody should take it. It's definitely not for everybody.

I'm also not going to be a hypocrite and say that you shouldn't do it. What I'll go and say is that it's your journey to figure out what you are going to invite into your life. In any case, depending on what you believe, you aren't actually here to figure things out. You already did. You are here to remember.

In more secular terms, you are here to do the required work to understand yourself, your circumstances, stand on the shoulder of giants and study the great minds that came before you. That will give you the necessary foundational philosophy to withstand and understand these experiences, should you choose to go through them. This is the only way to acquire a foundational respect for these substances and these experiences.

Have I done this work? Have I achieved the required level of understanding to make heads and tails of these experiences? Not for a while at least. It was rough the first couple of times. Very violent and crude, like rushing naked through a sea of people while being completely sure that that night is the last night of your life (I wasn't actually naked, it just felt like that and that everyone was eventually going to merge with me and that I should feel ashamed of it).

But with time and with the necessary exposure to understand the basics of existencialism I think I managed to pin down a more gentle form of this experience that can help me remember how to lay myself bare to the goddess and just be there when I dance.

So I think I can extend this invitation to anyone that feels brave enough to lift the reins of existence and reality and expose yourself to the truth. That everything is a story about the end of the world. About the beginning. And about everything at once.

It's scary, it's blissful and it's totally worth it.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-17 01:44:59+00:00
... kinda funny. I took a weight training & conditioning class in high school and one of my classmates was on the football team and told me that he didn't drink because the coach told him that if he trained hard and then drank a beer that would erase all his work. I thought he was gullible but this paper (linked from the above)

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

says there's something to that.
by jumploops | 2025-06-17 01:44:59+00:00
My workflow is to have spec files (markdown) for any changes I’m making, and then use those to keep Claude on track/pull out of the trees.

Not super necessary for small changes, but basically a must have for any larger refactors or feature additions.

I usually use o3 for generating the specs; also helpful for avoiding context pollution with just Claude Code.
by skydhash | 2025-06-17 01:45:09+00:00
I do agree with these points in my situation. I don't actually care for speed or having generated snippets for unfamiliar domains. Coding for me has always be about learning. Whether I'm building out a new feature or solving a bug, programming is always a learning experience. The goal is to bring forth a solution that a computer can then perform, but in the process you learn about how and more importantly why you should solve a problem.

The concept of why can get nebulous in a corporate setting, but it's nevertheless fun to explore. At the end of the day, someone have a problem and you're the one getting the computer to solve it. The process of getting there is fun in a way that you learn about what irks someone else (or yourself).

Thinking about the problem and its solution can be augmented with computers (I'm not remembering Go Standard Library). But computers are simple machines with very complex abstractions built on top of them. The thrill is in thinking in terms of two worlds, the real one where the problem occurs and the computing one where the solution will come forth. The analogy may be more understandable to someone who've learned two or more languages and think about the nuances between using them to depict the same reality.

Same as the TFA, I'm spending most of my time manipulating a mental model of the solution. When I get to code is just a translation. But the mental model is difuse, so getting it written gives it a firmer existence. LLMs generation is mostly disrupting the process. The only way they help really is a more pliable form of Stack Overflow, but I've only used Stack Overflow as human-authored annotations of the official docs.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-17 01:45:16+00:00
The main difference between CA and TX overtime laws is the exemption limit. It's twice as high in CA. That won't be an issue in either state unless you're grossly underpaying your employees though.

Of course, complying with a bunch of differing state laws is exactly the niche for services like Deel. They handle all of the HR nonsense in return for a small management fee and a few percent added to the costs.
by kibibu | 2025-06-17 01:45:37+00:00
My experience is that the "fancy autocomplete" is a focus destroyer.

I know what function I want to write, start writing it, and then bam! The screen fills with ghost text that may partly be what I want but probably not quit.

Focus shifts from writing to code review. I wrest my attention back to the task at hand, type some more, and bam! New ghost text to distract me.

Ever had the misfortune of having a conversation with a sentence-finisher? Feels like that.

Perhaps I need to bind to a hot key instead of using the default always-on setting.

---

I suspect people using the agentic approaches skip this entirely and therefore have a more pleasant experience overall.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-06-17 01:45:52+00:00
> Seniors' attitudes on HN are often quick to dismiss AI assisted coding as something that can't replace the hard-earned experience and skill they've built up during their careers.

One definition of experience[0] is:

direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge

Since I assume by "AI assisted coding" you are referring to LLM-based offerings, then yes, "hard-earned experience and skill" cannot be replaced with a statistical text generator.

One might as well assert an MS-Word document template can produce a novel Shakespearean play or that a spreadsheet is an IRS auditor.

> Or maybe the whole senior/junior thing is a red herring and pure coding and tech skills are being deflated all across the board. Perhaps what is needed now is an entirely new skill set that we're only just starting to grasp.

For a repudiation of this hypothesis, see this post[1] also currently on HN.

0 - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/experience

1 - https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/why-generative-ai-codin...
by ednite | 2025-06-17 01:47:02+00:00
I'll give this a shot, speaking from experience.

I’ve worked as a consultant with small and large organizations for most of my career, and I’ve seen this exact situation play out more times than I can count.

If I could go back, I’d tell my younger self not to stick around under bad leadership or in an unhealthy environment. It’s rarely worth it. Even if you care deeply about the mission, a toxic manager will slowly drain your motivation and confidence. I stayed in a few of those situations too long, thinking I had to tough it out. I didn’t, and neither do you.

The projects I’m most proud of were with teams I genuinely enjoyed working and growing with. That’s not a coincidence.

Start quietly looking. The right environment can bring out the best in you in ways this one won’t.

I really hope it works out for you.
by salawat | 2025-06-17 01:48:02+00:00
Agree the accountability dodge is absolutely a thing. Agree that the tendency is there to try to replace anything that might say no (why do you think capitalists are drooling over AI in the first place)?

The paying dividends bit is exactly what society can't afford to cut the psychopaths at the top loose with. The only counterbalance against that rank psychopathy is the fact they'd have to have moral buy in from the people doing the work to implement, giving a de facto check on their power. Remove that element, remove the check.
by waprin | 2025-06-17 01:48:15+00:00
To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing, so it's not surprising that some people are better at one than the other. The author is basically saying that he's much better at coding than AI coding.

But it's important to realize that AI coding is itself a skill that you can develop. It's not just , pick the best tool and let it go. Managing prompts and managing context has a much higher skill ceiling than many people realize. You might prefer manual coding, but you might just be bad at AI coding and you might prefer it if you improved at it.

With that said, I'm still very skeptical of letting the AI drive the majority of the software work, despite meeting people who swear it works. I personally am currently preferring "let the AI do most of the grunt work but get good at managing it and shepherding the high level software design".

It's a tiny bit like drawing vs photography and if you look through that lens it's obvious that many drawers might not like photography.
by analog31 | 2025-06-17 01:49:00+00:00
Something to consider is that entropy has units of measure. Why would a purely philosophical concept be given units of Joules per Kelvin?

I'm only reminded about this because, though I'm a physicist, I've been out of school for more than 3 decades, and decided that I owed myself a refresher on thermodynamics. This coincided with someone on HN recommending David Tong's textbook-quality lecture notes:

https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/statphys.html

I think at least the first few pages are readable to a layperson, and address the issue of our imperfect knowledge of the precise configuration of a system containing, say, 1e23 particles.

But if we knew all of those relationships, the system would still have entropy.
by cbsmith | 2025-06-17 01:49:04+00:00
There's an implied assumption here that code you write yourself doesn't need to be reviewed from a context different from the author's.

There's an old expression: "code as if your work will be read by a psychopath who knows where you live" followed by the joke "they know where you live because it is future you".

Generative AI coding just forces the mindset you should have had all along: start with acceptance criteria, figure out how you're going to rigorously validate correctness (ideally through regression tests more than code reviews), and use the review process to come up with consistent practices (which you then document so that the LLM can refer to it).

It's definitely not always faster, but waking up in the morning to a well documented PR, that's already been reviewed by multiple LLMs, with successfully passing test runs attached to it sure seems like I'm spending more of my time focused on what I should have been focused on all along.
by bagacrap | 2025-06-17 01:49:21+00:00
OpenAI keeps positioning itself as a scrappy little innovator, and anything that makes it harder for them to become the next trillion dollar company is anti-competitive. But the amount of funding they've received in proportion to their revenue is truly astounding. If anything is anti-competitive, it's that Softbank, MS, and others have poured billions into this one company in hopes of burying the chances of other startups. If the feds should do anything (which I doubt), it's to ban further investment in OpenAI.
by relaxing | 2025-06-17 01:49:58+00:00
Now that’s some intellectually dishonest sophistry.

The study on coping approaches shows how avoidance leads to maladaptive outcomes, but it also says that exposure in itself isn’t helpful either.

What is helpful is learning how to process and express your emotions, but the study does not address whether english class is the place to be taught good coping strategies (because it’s not, obviously.)
by bdamm | 2025-06-17 01:50:16+00:00
This is not the right way to look at it. You don't have to have the LLMs directly coding your work unsupervised to see the enormous power that is there.

And besides, not all LLMs are the same when it comes to breaking existing functions. I've noticed that Claude 3.7 is far better at not breaking things that already work than whatever it is that comes with Cursor by default, for example.
by roxolotl | 2025-06-17 01:50:37+00:00
> But interns learn and get better over time. The time that you spend reviewing code or providing feedback to an intern is not wasted, it is an investment in the future. The intern absorbs the knowledge you share and uses it for new tasks you assign to them later on.

This is the piece that confuses me about the comparison to a junior or an intern. Humans learn about the business, the code, the history of the system. And then they get better. Of course there’s a world where agents can do that, and some of the readme/doc solutions do that but the limitations are still massive and so much time is spent reexplaining the business context.
by ed_mercer | 2025-06-17 01:51:00+00:00
> It takes me at least the same amount of time to review code not written by me than it would take me to write the code myself, if not more.

Hard disagree. It's still way faster to review code than to manually write it. Also the speed at which agents can find files and the right places to add/edit stuff alone is a game changer.
by marssaxman | 2025-06-17 01:51:19+00:00
If I had been around at the time of the Chicxulub meteor strike, I don't suppose I would have been any happier about its after-effects than I am about the similarly devastating impact humanity has had - and continues having, knowingly, intentionally - on a world that was once beautiful.

I do not care whether humans become inter-planetary. We certainly will not survive in the long term, and that's okay.

> A bunch of biological machines fussing around accomplishing nothing and having no purpose.

We are no exception. Meaning is a fantasy we create for ourselves - or don't! - as it suits us.

> The concept of beauty only exists while there is an intelligence around to enjoy or contemplate it.

I think you under-estimate the intelligence of non-human life, and likely over-estimate our own.

In any case, there is no joy in the wanton destruction of beautiful things.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-17 01:52:16+00:00
Seems to match the rumour 2 months ago: Intel reportedly set to announce layoffs – 20% of workforce could be cut https://www.techradar.com/pro/intel-reportedly-set-to-announ...

Hopefully we don't see a repeat of 7 months ago: Intel reinstates free coffee for employees after mass layoffs (76 points, 72 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42116206
by codeguro | 2025-06-17 01:53:39+00:00
>If X works for your use case you’re a vaccine denier

Wow, you sure are convincing! /sarcasm

If you depend on shame and straw-man to get your argument across, it shows me you lack merit. I’d continue to use X to spite people like you. And all this done in context of corps like RedHat pushing for the outing of the main X developer for the past 11(?) years isn’t helping your case either. In fact, I think I’ll stay on X for the forseable future, and convince people I know with its reliability. X11 has been around for a long time, and it works for a lot of programs.
by skydhash | 2025-06-17 01:54:46+00:00
That usage is the most disruptive for me. With normal intellisense and a library you're familiar with, you can predict the completion and just type normally with minimal interruption. With no completion, I can just touch type and fix the errors after the short burst. But having whole lines pop up break that flow state.

With unfamiliar syntax, I only needs a few minutes and a cheatsheet to get back in the groove. Then typing go back to that flow state.

Typing code is always semi-unconscious. Just like you don't pay that much attention to every character when you're writing notes on paper.

Editing code is where I focus on it, but I'm also reading docs, running tests,...
by rtpg | 2025-06-17 01:55:27+00:00
A user send a request, and gets a response you don't grasp. In Darklang-like envs that request data is held onto for a bit, you can replay it and tweak things. And you don't have to think about environment differences because you're working _in production_.

You could be taking webhook values from some external service that starts passing in unknown values. That service's documentation might just be outright wrong about its behavior. But you don't have to play post-mortem forensics, as you can hold onto information.

This can be valuable for one-offs where you don't mind breakage, with relatively low request coutns and "time to fix" is what you're optimizing rather than general uptime/downtime. So some silly discord bot could work off of this, but you probably don't want your B2B SaaS being in cowboy mode.

Sometimes you want a thing that just does something and you don't care about how busted it is, but you want it to be _very easy_ to fix up issues you do care about.
by Spooky23 | 2025-06-17 01:57:55+00:00
The scale of the colonial horrors inflicted on various regions of Africa is poorly told, and was the pregame for the horrors of WW2 in many ways. The British and Germans “innovated” with the concentration camp in the early 20th century, for example.

The most obvious depravity was Leopold’s depredations of the Congo, but many many examples exist. The generational trauma on society is hard to fathom. And of course the arming and covert intervention of Soviet & western proxies during the Cold War fueled unrest and hostility.
by farts_mckensy | 2025-06-17 01:58:06+00:00
The idea that "power manufactures truth" sounds profound but it's ultimately a truism, and a somewhat unhelpful one due to the imprecise language of power and truth. Anyone who's worked at a small business with an authoritarian owner can attest to the distortion effect of authority. People trip over themselves to ensure such a personality remains placated. But truth, in any meaningful sense of the word, is something beyond the grasp of any single authority. Powerful elites may have sway over the narrative, but eventually the truth catches up with them, and that's when history starts moving again. The 2008 recession is a great example. Most financial authorities maintained that real estate was solid. Orwell's vision vastly oversells the true power of authoritarian states. At the end of the day, if you cannot keep a baseline number of the population satisfied, they will rebel in ways that will eventually undermine the status quo. It may not take the form of a full blown civil war, but people have a way of expressing their interests. For example, the birth rate is dropping in many countries. Increasingly, people do not see having children as viable. And for good reason. That undermines the present society. The upper classes need a working class to maintain their position.
by adriand | 2025-06-17 01:58:34+00:00
Do you have to review the code? I’ll be honest that, like the OP theorizes, I often just spot review it. But I also get it to write specs (often very good, in terms of the ones I’ve dug into), and I always carefully review and test the results. Because there is also plenty of non-AI code in my projects I didn’t review at all, namely, the myriad open source libraries I’ve installed.
by satisfice | 2025-06-17 01:59:30+00:00
You think he's not using the tools correctly. I think you aren't doing your job responsibly. You must think he isn't trying very hard. I think you are not trying very hard...

That is the two sides of the argument. It could only be settled, in principle, if both sides were directly observing each other's work in real-time.

But, I've tried that, too. 20 years ago in a debate between dedicated testers and a group of Agilists who believed all testing should be automated. We worked together for a week on a project, and the last day broke down in chaos. Each side interpreted the events and evidence differently. To this day the same debate continues.
by op00to | 2025-06-17 02:00:08+00:00
Your suspicion overlooks the substantial data showing productivity remained stable or even improved with remote work. Being physically visible doesn’t inherently equate to accountability or productivity. It often just encourages performative behavior (“looking busy”) rather than genuine output. Effective management relies on outcomes rather than proximity. If someone is “goofing off” excessively, that’s fundamentally a management issue, not a remote work one. Companies forcing RTO based purely on perceptions of productivity misunderstand or disregard the evidence and real metrics showing remote work effectiveness.