MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by etchalon | 2025-06-02 22:57:44+00:00
The nature of a conspiracy theory is that it is a belief not-backed by facts in evidence, but one requiring the theorist to assume alternative information based on their own intuition and a distrust of official data.

Saying their beliefs are unfalsifiable is not a "accusation". It is a statement of fact.

If you arrive at your conclusion despite the evidence, then you are already relying on a process by which new evidence can be discounted.

The goal post can always be (and generally will always be) moved.
by gruez | 2025-06-02 22:57:49+00:00
Surely that's explained by factors like the market segment they're in? Just by math alone you'd expect them to have 15% less sales from having less hours open. Maybe 20% if you factor in that Sundays has more traffic than other days of the week. But it's not as if them being closed on Sundays can plausibly boost productivity. They already presumably have people working in shifts, so it's not like each worker is working less hours.
by mslzed | 2025-06-02 22:59:01+00:00
Zed Industries | North America, South America, Europe REMOTE | https://zed.dev/ Zed is a company for developers, by developers. All 3 of our founders have spent years in the trenches writing software and still do it almost every single day. We know the only way to build the world's best code editor is by equipping every single member of the team to do the best work of their career.

1. AI Rust Engineer - https://zed.dev/jobs/ai-engineer

2. Rust Engineer - https://zed.dev/jobs/rust-engineer

3. Windows Lead - https://zed.dev/jobs/windows-lead
by mrcwinn | 2025-06-02 22:59:02+00:00
>It’s getting the same kind of attention that smart phones got in 2008, and not as much as the Internet got. That seems about right.

Are you kidding me? Mosaic was released in 1993. In 1998 Apple released the iMac on a theory, based on some marketing research, that people might be really interested in "getting online." Five years. And that's about a decade before we realized we might want a touch phone. More than a decade before an App Store.

This is very much still the top the first. AI will make even the internet seem small. Which makes sense — the entire whole internet is merely one input into this technology.
by cube2222 | 2025-06-02 22:59:16+00:00
Maybe they're just busy shipping code instead of proving stuff to you, which they stand nothing to gain from?

You set up a strawman (AI only companies, agents doing everything on their own) which is irrelevant to the point the article is making. One excerpt:

> Almost nothing it spits out for me merges without edits. I’m sure there’s a skill to getting a SOTA model to one-shot a feature-plus-merge! But I don’t care. I like moving the code around and chuckling to myself while I delete all the stupid comments. I have to read the code line-by-line anyways.

I think this article is very on point, I relate with basically every paragraph. It's not a panacea, it's not a 10x improvement by any means, but it's a very meaningful improvement to both productivity (less than 2x I'd say, which would already be a ton) and fun for me. As I've mentioned in the past here

> I feel like there’s also a meaningful split of software engineers into those who primarily enjoy the process of crafting code itself, and those that primarily enjoy building stuff, treating the code more as a means to an end (even if they enjoy the process of writing code!). The former will likely not have fun with AI, and will likely be increasingly less happy with how all of this evolves over time. The latter I expect are and will mostly be elated.

which is a point the article makes too (tables), in a slightly different way.

Also, to be clear, I agree that 90% of the marketing around AI is overblown BS. But that's again beside the point, and the article is making no outlandish claims of that kind.

Overall, I hope this article (as intended) will make more people lose their dismissiveness and wake up their curiosity, as I expect the future of those is akin to that of people today saying they're "not really good at computers". It's a paradigm-shift, and it takes getting used to and productive in, as some imo smart people are mentioning even in this thread[0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164039
by onepremise | 2025-06-02 22:59:31+00:00
These systems do work, quite well. Especially the latest release of Claude. Palantir is using AI to process your IRS information without your consent, https://archive.is/QAY9E. This should concern everybody. Not only can this information be used to determine specific account details. They can use this to target individuals which don't align with the current administration's agenda, as well exclude hiring base of political alignment. They could also use this data to exclude and discriminate those against Peter Theil's network state agenda aka "Freedom Cities", but it seems everybody is complacent with that.
by quantadev | 2025-06-02 22:59:45+00:00
Even if you have one trillion juniors, you're not going to get them to spit out 1000 lines of code in a matter of seconds, after you give them an assignment, like LLMs do, so this is a faulty comparison.

Also often it takes a senior dev _more_ time to _explain_ to a junior what needs to be done than it takes to do it himself. What LLMs give us is the ability to generate a feature about as fast as we can type up the instructions we would have, pre-AI, given to a junior dev.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-06-02 23:00:28+00:00
The most salient part of the article IMO:

Under the heading: "but you have no idea what the [LLM's] code is."

> Are you a vibe coding Youtuber? Can you not read code? If so: astute point. Otherwise: what the fuck is wrong with you? You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. You were five years go. And you are tomorrow, whether or not you use an LLM. If you build something with an LLM that people will depend on, read the code.

> People complain about LLM-generated code being “probabilistic”. No it isn’t. It’s code. [...] The LLM might be stochastic. But the LLM doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you can make sense of the result

> Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates [...] how are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?
by lancekey | 2025-06-02 23:00:31+00:00
Location: Greater NYC Area Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: TS, React, Node, Postgres, AWS + UX design and growth engine optimization Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gkobilansky/ Website: https://lansky.tech Email: gene@lansky.tech

18 years of experience turning vague client requirements into revenue driving technical assets.

Looking to embed as a fractional tech lead or cto to contribute code and make sure team is aligned with business goals. Have 10-20 hrs / wk availability.
by tkiolp4 | 2025-06-02 23:00:36+00:00
I don’t think we would need less engineers… the work to be done will increase instead. Example: now it takes 10 engineers to release a product in 10 months without AI. With AI it takes lets say 1 engineer to release the same product in 1 month. What’s the company gonna do now? Release 10 products in 10 months without AI 10 engineers (each using AI).

It’s an exaggeration I know, but you get the point.
by kentonv | 2025-06-02 23:00:50+00:00
While implementing the OAuth standard itself is not novel, many of the specific design details in this implementation are. I gave it a rather unusual API spec, an unusual storage schema, and an unusual end-to-end encryption scheme. It was totally able to understand these requests, even reasoning about the motivation behind them, and implement what I wanted. That's what convinced me.

BTW, the vast majority of JS OAuth libraries are implementing the client side of OAuth. Provider-side implementations are relatively rare, as historically it's mostly only big-name services that ever get to the point of being a OAuth providers, and they tend to build it all in-house and not release code.
by robocat | 2025-06-02 23:00:57+00:00
Your answer is rather reductive. And unfortunately you seem to be strawmanning since your comment is replying to something that DougN7 never said.

I would summarize your point as: we need some money to be happy.

DougN7 said "[I] have finally discovered those [costly] things don’t bring happinessis".

I think lots of money doesn't make you happier. I strongly suspect that most people don't really understand that, because they don't have lots of money and therefore they have not learnt about the lies we are taught about money by our money focused societies.

Let's view your divorce argument from https://flowingdata.com/2021/05/04/divorce-rates-and-income/ :

Divorce rates are tied to job security, age, and occupation, so it should make sense that we see a pattern when we plot divorce rates against income There’s a tight decrease in divorce rate for incomes between $10,000 and $200,000 per year, and then rates seems to flatten out around 30 percent after that

I suspect your assumptions about divorce money and unhappiness are incorrect. And you were definitely ignoring the confounders mentioned.
by floxy | 2025-06-02 23:01:05+00:00
>no longer

This feels like some sort of cognitive bias. Seems likely that "news" has almost always been carefully crafted narratives designed to enrich someone or some organization. We are now living in an age where commoners can discuss things like this on a widespread enough basis that this fact is becoming better appreciated.

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

...is probably just the tip of the iceberg.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-02 23:01:11+00:00
You're talking about students, but the question was about seniors. You don't go to school to become a senior dev, you code in real-world settings, with real business pressures, for a decade or two to become a senior. The question is how are decent students supposed to grow into seniors who can independently evaluate AI-produced code if they are forced to use the magic box and accept its results before being able to understand them?
by idkwhattocallme | 2025-06-02 23:01:25+00:00
I just got a courtesy notice from the roll-out of these speeding cameras in San Francisco. This after getting 0 speeding tickets in SF for the last 15 years. It's admittedly had a chilling effect on my driving. It's hard for me to drive < 30MPH when there is no traffic. I have to deliberately focus on going that slow. I feel more compelled to take an uber.
by jcon321 | 2025-06-02 23:01:31+00:00
I think that experiment was very cool, but I will say that the OAuth2.0/OIDC protocol is very well documented and there are tons of tools already built around it in multiple languages.

I implemented the OAuth2.0 protocol in 3 different languages without a 3rd party library - entire spec implemented by hand. This was like ~2015 when many of the libraries that exist today didn't back then. I did this as a junior developer for multiple enterprise applications. At the end of the day it's not really that impressive.
by jedberg | 2025-06-02 23:02:12+00:00
If I were a professor, I would make my homework start the same -- here is a problem to solve.

But instead of asking for just working code, I would create a small wrapper for a popular AI. I would insist that the student use my wrapper to create the code. They must instruct the AI how to fix any non-working code until it works. Then they have to tell my wrapper to submit the code to my annotator. Then they have to annotate every line of code as to why it is there and what it is doing.

Why my wrapper? So that you can prevent them from asking it to generate the comments, and so that you know that they had to formulate the prompts themselves.

They will still be forced to understand the code.

Then double the number of problems, because with the AI they should be 2x as productive. :)
by Mofpofjis | 2025-06-02 23:02:59+00:00
> A heartfelt provocation

okay then (profanity begets profanity)

> Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue!

Do you /intend/ to spend /most/ of your work life reading AI puke? If so: sanity issue! You are advocating for replacing creative action that gives you Flow with reaction that gives you hemorrhoids, as the /bulk of the work/. Fuck right off.

> How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?

By correcting the deadline setting methodology for the next round of development.

> Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs

then rely on Cursor.ai to raise your next-gen seniors who are going to be supposed to review AI puke in the future

> but the craft [...] Do it on your own time

Go choke on a bag of dicks. You are the problem. This is why quality no longer exists in the world, only lowest common denominator consumerist shit. This is why cars, home appliances, and tools have been getting both worse and more user-hostile. Because nobody values the quality of their own creative output anymore. Quality should not be an exception (which makes it very expensive), but the standard. Quality should be a near-commodity, and therefore at least occasionally affordable for anyone.

> I buy a fucking table

A ridiculously low quality, but hey, cheap!, table, that will fail you at the most inopportune moment. IKEA does have its place, but it's probably not in your office where you receive clients. Do you want them to see the table top fly off?

> They almost certainly have a bigger bag of algorithmic tricks than you do: radix tries, topological sorts, graph reductions, and LDPC codes

and you'll have to review that bag of algorithmic tricks embedded in AI puke, with potential hallucinations introducing obscure, critical mathematical bugs. Good luck verifying all that as a senior, based on proofs and first principles. A human coder will either use a well-reviewed library, or cite a textbook, and implement the textbook very closely, so you can follow it, and have some trust in the intent at least.

> No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property

how disingenuous. you are showing contempt for copyright. You are totally missing the point of copyleft. Copyleft doesn't advocate for anarchy, it advocates for user freedom via the software copyright framework. When AI barfs GPL'd code snippets into a proprietary code base, that harms user freedom.

> and watched it in seconds spot LVM metadata corruption issues

you are drifting; this is not code generation. Fuzzy pattern matching has always been fair game.
by wordofx | 2025-06-02 23:03:00+00:00
> Lack of correctness, lack of understanding and ability to reason about behaviour, and poor design that builds up from commercial pressure to move quickly are the problems we need to be solving.

So good developers will become amazing with the assistance of ai while the rest will become unemployed and find work elsewhere. So we are healing the industry. Because without ai. The industry is a hell of a lot worse. You only have to look at the replies on HN to see how laughable the industry is.
by crazygringo | 2025-06-02 23:03:03+00:00
That's a strawman.

Nobody is saying it's "unlimited powers", that's your exaggeration.

And what you're proposing about an "AI only company" seems to be based on your misunderstanding.

What this article is saying is, you need the same number of senior developers, but now each one is essentially assisted by a few junior developers virtually for free.

That's huge. But saying you want to see an "AI only company" as "proof" has nothing to do with that.

And what you're describing -- "occasionally useful for exploring apis, odd bits of knowledge etc, but overall wasted more time than it has saved" -- is exactly what the author explicitly addresses at the top:

> If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. People coding with LLMs today use agents...

The entire article is about how to use LLM's effectively. What kind of "proof" do you really want, when the article explains it all awfully clearly?
by henlo | 2025-06-02 23:03:33+00:00
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I'm a designer who codes and the creator of Uisual (https://uisual.com), a free library of Figma, Framer, and Tailwind CSS components and templates. Built with Vue + Tailwind CSS.

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by kalkin | 2025-06-02 23:03:58+00:00
Some days it seems like the most vulgar Marxist would be more rigorous about doing a who-benefits analysis before using that to dismiss an argument than the median HN commenter. Fly.io benefits from AI hype because... more slop code gets written and then run on their servers? tptacek would burn his HN cred for that? Really?
by keybored | 2025-06-02 23:04:09+00:00
Certain discussions on HN are just diagrams thanks to Laws(tm) and various one-liner tier references.

- Hyrum’s Law (85%)

- Emacs spacebar overheating (15%)

The only way to prevent the decision diagram is to anticipate them and spell them out in the last paragraph. But on the other than that doesn’t very fun right.
by hollowturtle | 2025-06-02 23:04:19+00:00
> but the code is shitty, like that of a junior developer > Does an intern cost $20/month? > Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs.

So sick of hearing comparisons between LLMs and Juniors, first of all are we really are seniors? After almost 20 years sometimes I still think I know nothing. Second, when I was a Junior just me being younger, fresher and with an eager learner attidute brought a net positive impact on the team I joined back then, that I still hang out with those people to this day and we still have fun joining new projects together. I'm so sick of these snobbish "seniors" that keep throwing rocks at younger and well prepared people
by _dain_ | 2025-06-02 23:04:28+00:00
remember in 2022 when we "hit a wall"? everyone said that back then. turned out we didn't.

and in 2023 and 2024 and january 2025 and ...

all those "walls" collapsed like paper. they were phantoms; ppl literally thinking the gaps between releases were permanent flatlines.

money obviously isn't an issue here, VCs are pouring in billions upon billions. they're building whole new data centres and whole fucking power plants for these things; electricity and compute aren't limits. neither is data, since increasingly the models get better through self-play.

>fundamentally they're about as good as they're ever going to get

one trillion percent cope and denial
by sanderjd | 2025-06-02 23:04:38+00:00
Yeah, I should have posted the first version of my post, pointing out that the problem with this demand for proof (as is often the case) devolves into boring definitional questions.

I don't understand why you think "the code needs to be audited and revised" is a failure.

Nothing in the OP relies on it being possible for LLMs to build and deploy software unsupervised. It really seems like a non sequitur to me, to ask for proof of this.
by magarnicle | 2025-06-02 23:04:57+00:00
From what I've seen, it takes a deeply original thinker to get something great out of generative AI. But if you're a deeply original thinker, you're probably exceptional regardless of whether you are using AI or not.

Generative AI is too much of a blank canvas at the moment, and one that is always shifting. It's up to the user to find all the use cases, and even then in my experience it's just as likely to send me on a wild goose chase as it is to instantly solve my problem.
by johnfn | 2025-06-02 23:05:06+00:00
Who said "unlimited powers", other than you? That seems like an intentional distortion of the article, which says "LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write". Doing most of my tedious work is very different than "unlimited powers".

I use AI to chew through tedious work all the time. In fact, I let an agent do some work just before I checked HN to read your claim that it can't do that. Everyone at my job does the same, perhaps modulo checking HN. But there's no 'unlimited power' to show you - we're just about 30% faster than we used to be.
by jakebasile | 2025-06-02 23:05:53+00:00
Again, you're assuming they are required to be successful and those who don't use them won't be. That is precisely what is up for debate right now so you're just begging the question while belittling any opposition (imaginary walls).

And why shouldn't anyone defend their skill set?

Edit: I went through your recent comment history and it turns out you're just not the type of person I enjoy interacting with. You seem to take a good amount of joy in putting down others who disagree with you, or fantasizing about their financial ruin.
by henlo | 2025-06-02 23:06:27+00:00
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I'm El, a senior product designer and UX/UI designer with 7+ years of experience working remotely for US/EU/AU-based companies. I've worked for B2B and B2C companies and startups in various industries: energy, entertainment, education, and finance.

I'm a designer who codes and the creator of Uisual (https://uisual.com), a free library of Figma, Framer, and Tailwind CSS components and templates. Built with Vue + Tailwind CSS.

I charge $50/hr or offer a monthly retainer: $2,000/mo (10hr/wk) or $4,000/mo (20hr/wk). I’m also open to a project-based work at a fixed price.
by simonw | 2025-06-02 23:07:06+00:00
Most of the big AI vendors have liability policies in place where their lawyers are committed to step in and help you out if someone sues you for copyright infringement based on code their LLMs wrote for you. I think the term they use is "copyright shield".

OpenAI has that as point 14 in https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/

Anthropic mention theirs here: https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanded-legal-protections-ap...

Here's the Google post: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/p...
by bberenberg | 2025-06-02 23:07:18+00:00
I build tools all the time using AI tools that would have taken me 10x longer before. A couple examples below. The first example was a literal one shot of my dumping the full page html into cursor and asking it for the feature I needed. In using it today it already saved me over an hour of analysis time across the refunds I analyze. The second example includes using AI for better classifying text and having our support people better use their time to help customers. I could have probably made the second thing without LLMs but I didn’t have the skills. Here I was able to provide concrete value to our company and our customers.

https://github.com/Atlas-Authority/mpac-ui-improved https://moduscreate.com/blog/forum-monitoring-is-essential-b... (Pardon how marketing keyword stuffed the final post)
by monkaiju | 2025-06-02 23:07:27+00:00
I really hope this type of delivery never catches on... I live in a fairly urban location and still get to do great birdwatching in my backyard.

Woodpeckers, hummingbirds, geese and ducks flying over between the various lakes. Losing out on that just so Amazon can make more money (not to mention potentially spy on us even more effectively) would be tragic