MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by asenchi | 2026-02-07 20:23:06+00:00
Yeah I think there is a lot of truth here. You can't solve all the problems and in Heroku's case we focused on user experience (internally and externally). Great ideas like "git push heroku main" are game changers, but what happens once that git server is receiving 1000 pushes a minute? Totally different thought process.

Perhaps the thing I would add is that even with the tech debt and scaling problems we still had over a million applications deployed ready for that request to hit them.
by koiueo | 2026-02-07 20:23:38+00:00
> LLM would be if

you'd sometimes discover a city communication line destroyed in the process; or the dirt hauled on top of a hospitals, killing hundreds of orphaned kids with cancer; or kittens mixed into concrete instead of cement.

And since you clicked "agree" on that Anthropic EULA, you can't sue then for it, so you now hire 5 construction workers to constantly overlook the work.

It's still net positive... for now at least... But far from being "without any people". And it'll likely remain this way for a long time.
by twelvechairs | 2026-02-07 20:24:02+00:00
For use cases like this - long term geospatial people still use postgis as foundational - mainly for its speed at scale and spatial indexing.

For the wider tech world - I would say postgres suffers from being "old tech" and somewhat "monolithic". There have been a lot of trends against it (e.g. nosql, fleeing the monolith, data lakes). But also more practically for a lot of businesses geospatial is not their primary focus - they bring other tech stacks so something like postgis can seem like duplication if they already use another database, data storage format or data processing pipeline. Also some of the proliferation of other software and file formats have made some uses cases easier without postgis.

Really Id say the most common path ive seen for people who dont have an explicit geospatial background who are starting to implement it is to avoid postgis until it becomes absolutely clear that they need it.
by dgacmu | 2026-02-07 20:24:13+00:00
'multifarious uses' -> the implication would be having not just many but also a wide diversity of uses

M-W gives an example use of "Today’s Thermomix has become a beast of multifarious functionality. — Matthew Korfhage, Wired News, 21 Nov. 2025 "

wordhippo strikes me as having gone beyond the traditional paper thesaurus, but I can accept that things change and that we can make a much larger thesaurus than we did when we had to collect and print. thesaurus.com does not offer these results, though, as a reflection of a more traditional one, nor does the m-w thesaurus.
by guygurari | 2026-02-07 20:24:18+00:00
Programming brings me joy in two different ways.

1. Crafting something beautiful. Figuring out correct abstractions and mapping them naturally to language constructs. Nailing just the right amount of flexibility, scalability and robustness. Writing self-explanatory, idiomatic code that is a pleasure to read. It’s an art.

2. Building useful things. Creating programs that are useful to myself and to others, and watching them bring value to the world. It’s engineering.

These things have utility but they are also enjoyable onto themselves. As best I can tell, your emotional response to coding agents depends on how much you care about these two things.

AI has taken away the joy of crafting beautiful things, and has amplified the joy of building things by more than 10x. Safe bet: It will get to 100x this year.

I am very happy with this tradeoff. Over the years I grew to value building things much more highly. 20yo me would’ve been devastated.
by IhateAI | 2026-02-07 20:24:21+00:00
I love paying some billionaire $0.0001 to use his thinking machine / Think for me SaaS. I love my competency and speed being rented from a billionaire, removing all value of my labor and agency. I really feel sorry for all of you LLM pilled people. You need to be shamed. This is going to be used as a weapon to devalue every working persons agency in this world and remove all of the working class's bargaining chips.

You think its just SWE? It will be accountants, customer service, factory workers, medical assistance basically anyone who doesn't work with their hands directly, and they'll try to solve that here soon too and alienate them too.

Look at who's in charge, do you think they're going to give us UBI? No, they're going to sign us up to go fight wars to help them accumulate resources. Stop supporting this, they're going to make us so poor young men will beg to fight in a war. Its the same playbook from the first half of the 20th Century.

You think I'm paranoid, give it 5 years.

We are at all time high's in the stock market/equities and they've laid off 400k SWE's in the last 16 months. While going on podcasts to tell us we are going to have more time to create and do what we love. We have to work to pay our bills. We don't want whats coming, but they're selling us some lie that this will solve all our problems, it will solve the ruling classes problems that will be it. You will have no bargaining chips and you will be forced to take whatever morsels given to you.

Your competency will be directly correlated 1:1 to the quantity and quality of tokens that you can afford, given access too (or loaned??) We're literally at the beginning of a black mirror episode before it gets dark.

People that grew up in the Capitalist West have been brainwashed since they were 10 years old they they can be a billionaire too, no you can't there's 2k-3k of them and 8 billion of us.

These automation tools are the ultimate weapon for the ruling class to strip all value of you from your labor, and you're embracing that as a miracle. Its not, your life is in the process of being torn of all meaning.

Good luck to everyone who agrees, we're going to need it.. Anyone supporting these companies or helping enhance these model's capabilities, you're a class traitor and soon to be slave.

Required reading: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...
by onerandompotato | 2026-02-07 20:24:42+00:00
I agree with your opposition to the comment above, but I feel like the condescension towards silicon valley, and non-government employees is not a way to start a healthy dialogue. Like you are not going to convince anybody by calling 80+% of people here (private sector employees) "a joke".

I agree that randos on twitter are a bad source of information.
by keynesyoudigit | 2026-02-07 20:25:05+00:00
This is the right take IMO, so thanks for a balanced comment.

I would add a nuance from OPs perspective sorta: a close friend of mine works in construction, and often comments on how projects can be different. On some, everyone in the entire building supply chain can be really inspired to work on a really interesting project because of either its usefulness or its craftsmanship (the 2 of which are related), and on some, everyone’s, just trying to finish the project is cheaply quickly as possible.

It’s not that the latter hasn’t existed in tech, but it does appear that there is a way to use LLMs to do more of the latter. It’s not “the end of a craft”, but without a breakthrough (and something to check the profit incentive) it’s also not a path to utopia (like other comments seem to be implying)

Craftsmanship doesn’t die, it evolves, but the space in between can be a bit exhausting as markets fail to understand the difference at first.
by yorwba | 2026-02-07 20:25:05+00:00
A quick overpass-turbo search for "brand:wikidata=Q24933714 in Moscow" https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2kaO (Q24933714 being Wildberries https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q24933714 ) reveals that almost all locations are tagged shop=outpost https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop%3Doutpost which identifies them as pick-up locations for goods ordered online. I assume the dataset in the post has mostly the same locations.
by rubenflamshep | 2026-02-07 20:25:27+00:00
> will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human

I share this sentiment. It's really cool that these systems can do 80% of the work. But given what this 80% entails, I don't see a moat around that remaining 20%.
by simonw | 2026-02-07 20:25:51+00:00
The multi-agent "swarm" thing (that seems to be the term that's bubbling to the top at the moment) is so new and frothy that is difficult to determine how useful it actually is.

StrongDM's implementation is the most impressive I've seen myself, but it's also incredibly expensive. Is it worth the cost?

Cursor's FastRender experiment was also interesting but also expensive for what was achieved.

I think my favorite current example at the moment was Anthropic's $20,000 C compiler from the other day. But they're an AI vendor, demos from non-vendors carry more weight.

I've seen enough to be convinced that there's something there, but I'm also confident we aren't close to figuring out the optimal way of putting this stuff to work yet.
by dragontamer | 2026-02-07 20:25:54+00:00
We can use the GPUs for research (64-bit scientific compute), 3d graphics, a few other things. We programmers will reconfigure them to something useful.

At least, the GPUs that are currently plugged in. A lot of this bullshit bubble crap is because most of those GPUs (and RAM) is sitting unplugged in a warehouse, because we don't even have enough power to turn all of them on.

So if your question is how to use a GPU... I got plenty of useful non-AI related ideas. But only if we can plug them in.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of those GPUs are just e-waste, never to turn on due to lack of power.
by mejutoco | 2026-02-07 20:26:04+00:00
Following the RAM analogy, this sounds like saving files only in RAM, instead of creating the files in the file system, persisted on disk, and then caching it in RAM.

Personally, for me without writing or sketching I cannot think complex things: as in complex logic, constraints, etc.

I guess this is topic too abstract, so we can read into it different things.
by duxup | 2026-02-07 20:26:26+00:00
I struggle with some folks impressions of AI vs my experience.

I was working with it last night and it would create a function, and almost immediately delete it and things wouldn't work. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Like right there in your own code man you're calling a non existent function... how did you even "know" what parameters to send it?

Sure I can get a bit of a nice greenfield project going, and some focused changes if I can put blinders on it and hold AI's hand. But after that I'm prompting it to put back code it deletes for no known reason. It seems to lose focus and think it is working on something else ... forget initial guidelines.

Code also has built in assumptions that aren't apparent and AI does not seem to care. This is hard for humans, but also seemingly impossible for AI. "We handle our X,Y,Z like A,B,C for reasons." only seems to keep AI on the ball for a short bit of time. AI has no ability to UNDERSTAND "oh yeah that will blow up because L,M,N" like a human does, and no matter how foolish the prompt AI will do it.
by flowerbreeze | 2026-02-07 20:26:45+00:00
This is in my opinion the greatest weakness of everything LLM related. If I care about the application I'm writing, and I believe I should if I bother doing it at all, it seems to me that I should want to be precise and concise at describing it. In a way, the code itself serves as a verification mechanism for my thoughts and whether I understand the domain sufficiently.

English or any other natural language can of course be concise enough, but when being brief they leave much to imagination. Adding verbosity allows for greater precision, but I think as well that that is what formal languages are for, just as you said.

Although, I think it's worth contemplating whether the modern programming languages/environments have been insufficient in other ways. Whether by being too verbose at times, whether the IDEs should be more like databases first and language parsers second, whether we could add recommendations using far simpler, but more strict patterns given a strongly typed language.

My current gripes are having auto imports STILL not working properly in most popular IDEs or an IDE not finding referenced entity from a file, if it's not currently open... LLMs sometimes help with that, but they are extremely slow in comparison to local cache resolution.

Long term I think more value will be in directly improving the above, but we shall see. AI will stay around too of course, but how much relevance it'll have in 10 years time is anybody's guess. I think it'll become a commodity, the bubble will burst and we'll only use it when sensible after a while. At least until the next generation of AI architecture will arrive.
by IhateAI | 2026-02-07 20:27:04+00:00
Its going to strip all value from labor you idiot, you won't be able to afford to create anything unless you can afford some billionaire's thinking machine. I guess for people like you that had 40 years to save up SWE salaries that's fine, you're a class traitor. Stop cheering on the destruction of human agency, and labor.

Typical boomers think the world is perfect because they have everything they need, without any care for the next generation. Thinking, oh they'll figure it out. Guess what we're not. The world is going to shit because of attitudes like this, you'll leave us with nothing.
by ethin | 2026-02-07 20:27:04+00:00
I write all of my games in pure C++. C++ all the way. FMOD for the audio engine, Steam Audio or Atmoky TrueSpatial for HRTF/geometric occlusion, and Jolt Physics for, well, physics. I'm sure many might say I'm a bit insane to do that, but eh, I do it anyway because it's fun.
by k33n | 2026-02-07 20:27:06+00:00
This entire panic is a mass-hysteria event. The hallucination that "an LLM can do software engineering better than a 10x engineer" is only possible because there are so few 10xers left in the business. 99% either retired or are otherwise not working at the moment.

The "difficult", "opinionated", "overpaid" maniacs are virtually all gone. That's why such a reckless and delusional idea like "we'll just have agents plan, coordinate, and build complete applications and systems" is able to propagate.

The adults were escorted out of the building. Managements' hatred of real craftspeople is manifesting in the most delusional way yet. And this time, they're actually going to destroy their businesses.

I'm here for it. They're begging to get their market share eaten for breakfast.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-07 20:27:09+00:00
So many people responding to you with snarky comments or questioning your programming ability. It makes me sad. You shared a personal take (in response to TFA which was also a personal take). There is so much hostility and pessimism directed at engineers who simply say that AI makes them more productive and allows them to accomplish their goals faster.

To the skeptics: by all means, don't use AI if you don't want to; it's your choice, your career, your life. But I am not sure that hitching your identity to hating AI is altogether a good idea. It will make you increasingly bitter as these tools improve further and our industry and the wider world slowly shifts to incorporate them.

Frankly, I consider the mourning of The Craft of Software to be just a little myopic. If there are things to worry about with AI they are bigger things, like widespread shifts in the labor force and economic disruption 10 or 20 years from now, or even the consequences of the current investment bubble popping. And there are bigger potential gains in view as well. I want AI to help us advance the frontiers of science and help us get to cures for more diseases and ameliorate human suffering. If a particular way of working in a particular late-20th and early-21st century profession that I happen to be in goes away but we get to those things, so be it. I enjoy coding. I still do it without AI sometimes. It's a pleasant activity to be good at. But I don't kid myself that my feelings about it are all that important in the grand scheme of things.
by boothby | 2026-02-07 20:27:19+00:00
And now I'm picturing a dragon with bombardier-beetle style pulsed jet boosters. And while I'd typically question your assumptions of how big dragons need to be in order to deserve the name, I'll assert that quetzocoatlus nothropi[1] was big enough.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus
by zeroonetwothree | 2026-02-07 20:27:32+00:00
(a) it's relaxing and pleasing to do something like typing out a for loop. The repetition with minor variation stimulates our brains just the right amount. Same reason why people like activities like gardening, cooking, working on cars, Legos, and so on.
(b) it allows you to have some time to think about what you're doing. The "easy" part of coding gives you a bit of breathing room to plan out the next "hard" section.
by Alex-Programs | 2026-02-07 20:27:40+00:00
The state of the art is moving so rapidly that, yeah, Copilot by Microsoft using gpt-5-mini:low is not going to be very good. And there are many places where AI has been implemented poorly, generally by people who have the distribution to force it upon many people. There are also plenty of people who use vibe coding tools and produce utterly atrocious codebases. That doesn't preclude the existence of effective AI tools, and people who are good at using them.
by jaccola | 2026-02-07 20:28:29+00:00
Not really your point but I think the skills to create these things are much slower to train than producing chips and data centres.

So they couldn't really build any of these projects weekly since the cost of construction materials / design engineers / construction workers would inflate rapidly.

Worth keeping in mind when people say "we could have built 52 hospitals instead!" or similar. Yes, but not really... since the other constraints would quickly reveal themselves
by ori_b | 2026-02-07 20:28:37+00:00
> For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.

Why did you stop? Because, you realize, LLMs are giving up the act of creating for the immediacy of having. It's hiring someone to make for you.

Things are more convenient if you live the dream of the LLM, and hire a taskrabbit to run your wood shop. But it's not you that's making.
by H8crilA | 2026-02-07 20:28:56+00:00
Nah, it's the 50 tabs in my browser that I no longer have to open before I know the correct incantation to type. I bet someone knows how many tabs an average deveoper is keeping opened when working (like Google or someone with a nasty spying browser extension) - would be cool to see that plotted against the fraction of Github commits that are co-authored by Claude. I predict a fairly tight negative correlation.
by kgeist | 2026-02-07 20:29:05+00:00
>is going to improve the human programming skills worldwide to levels never before imaginable

"We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand"

https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...
by blackjack_ | 2026-02-07 20:29:32+00:00
You are arguing that everyone is as money driven as you are. Plenty of people who are more altruistic people take employment based on non money factors all the time.

Plenty of people will also earn their chunk of change as an l5 at Amazon or whatever, then transition to a lower paid job with more impact.

In fact, I know almost nobody who makes their employer decisions based on the pay factor alone.
by mapcars | 2026-02-07 20:29:50+00:00
>I really dislike javascript, it is so loose that I marvel that people are able to write big chunks of software in it. I have no interest in trying.

Because they use Typescript.

>The stop-the-world garbage collection is a big pain for games

There is a number of languages that allow manual memory management: Zig, Nim, Rust and few others
by ori_b | 2026-02-07 20:30:06+00:00
The analogy you're making is that wiring a taskrabbit to assemble Ikea furniture is woodworking.

There's a market for Ikea. It's put woodworkers out of business, effectively. The only woodworkers that make reasonable wages from their craft are influencers. Their money comes from YouTube ads.

There's no shame in just wanting things without going to the effort of making them.
by svara | 2026-02-07 20:30:17+00:00
The writing on this website is giving strong web3 vibes to me / doesn't smell right.

The only reason I'm not dismissing it out of hand is basically because you said this team was worth taking a look at.

I'm not looking for a huge amount of statistical ceremony, but some detail would go a long way here.

What exactly was achieved for what effort and how?
by sandGorgon | 2026-02-07 20:30:27+00:00
docker compose is beautiful because it uses a simple elegant compose yml file - this is now an open standard. https://www.compose-spec.io/

the standard does not make it mandatory that underlying system should be docker compose (the reference server). it can be anything.

IMHO - kappal is the first project that takes your compose yml file and transparently/drop-in runs it on kubernetes. there is nothing extra you need. It is useful for people who want to maintain their stack as close to production as possible (kubernetes).

If that's not a big goal for you, then this is not very useful for you. But I'd argue ...why do you care if the compose yml is the only think you are using. you get all of kubernetes.
by frays | 2026-02-07 20:30:52+00:00
The majority of the code currently running in production for my company was written 5+ years ago. This was all "hand-written" and much lower quality than the AI generated code that I am generating and deploying these days.

Yet I feel much more connected with my old code. I really enjoyed actually writing all that code even though it wasn't the best.

If AI tools had existing 5 years ago when I first started working on this codebase, obviously the code quality would've been much higher. However, I feel like I really loved writing my old code and if given the same opportunity to start over, I would want to rewrite this code myself all over again.
by carlcarrie | 2026-02-07 20:30:58+00:00
Good article: Software Engineering is finally being liberated from the "Middle Work" of the last decade.

The AI tsunami isn't just about coding faster—it’s about reclaiming architectural sovereignty from hyperscaler blueprints.

The future is Just-in-Time and Highly Customized.

My full thoughts here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/carlcarrie_software-engineeri...
by sunshowers | 2026-02-07 20:31:28+00:00
I need you to understand that immigration controls are fundamentally and inherently antithetical to freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and freedom of association. And this applies both to immigrants and to citizens.

Imagine if you needed government approval to live with the one you love! What a completely unreasonable intervention into the private lives of ordinary people. Oh wait, that's the actual reality immigrants live in.
by whyenot | 2026-02-07 20:31:33+00:00
For many (most) people, it was never a "craft," it was a job where with the appropriate skills you could make a ton of money. That's possibly, maybe, maybe not ending, we will see. It is still possible to treat coding as a craft. There are tons of open source projects that would love to have your help, but the days of making big money may be drawing to a close.

Also, don't forget the things that AI makes possible. It's a small accomplishment, but I have a World of Warcraft AddOn that I haven't touched in more than 10 years. Of course now, it is utterly broken. I pointed ChatGPT at my old code and asked it to update it to "retail" WoW, and it did it. And it actually worked. That's kind of amazing.