MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eranation | 2026-02-07 20:54:35+00:00
I can't explain it in a way that will make sense or base it on any data, but I do see that moat all the time. For example, Microsoft / GitHub somehow taking a 3 year lead (with Co-Pilot) and losing it to Cursor in months, and still catching up.

Microsoft / GitHub have no real limitation to doing better/faster, maybe it's the big company mentality, moving slower, fear of taking risks where you have a lot to lose, or when the personal incentive for a product manager at github is much much lower than the one of a co-founder of a seed stage startup. Co-Pilot was a microscopic line item for Microsoft as a whole, and probably marginal for GitHub too. But for Cursor, this was everything.

This is why we have innovation, if mega-corps didn't promote people to their level of incompetence, if bureaucracy and politics didn't ruin every good thing, if private equity didn't bleed every beloved product to the last penny, we would have no chance for any innovation or entrepreneurship because these company have practically close to unlimited resources.

So my only conclusion from this is - the moat is sometimes just the will to do better, to dare to say, I don't care if someone has a billion dollars to compete with me, I'll still do better.

In other words, don't underestimate the power of big companies to make colossal mistakes and build crappy products. My only worry is, that AI would not make the same mistakes an we'll basically have a handful of companies in the world (the makers of models, owner of tokens e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Meta, xAi), if AI led product teams will be able to not make the mistakes of modern corporations of ruining everything good that they got in their hands, then maybe software related entrepreneurship will be dead.
by aspecter | 2026-02-07 20:54:36+00:00
I’ve been working on a small public-health surveillance platform focused on county-level disease trends, early risk signals, and quick epi calculators.

The goal wasn’t to replace CDC dashboards, but to make exploratory analysis and situational awareness faster for understaffed teams.

I’d genuinely love feedback from folks working in public health or epidemiology — what feels useful, what feels unnecessary?

Link: https://thehealthspectrum.net
by tibbar | 2026-02-07 20:54:54+00:00
Wait, you're completely skipping the emergence of reasoning models, though? 4.5 was slower and moderately better than 4o, o3 was dramatically stronger than 4o and GPT5 was basically a light iteration on that.

What's happening now is training models for long-running tasks that use tools, taking hours at a time. The latest models like 4.6 and 5.3 are starting to make good on this. If you're not using models that are wired into tools and allowed to iterate for a while, then you're not getting to see the current frontier of abilities.

(EG if you're just using models to do general knowledge Q&A, then sure, there's only so much better you can get at that and models tapered off there long ago. But the vision is to use agents to perform a substantial fraction of white-collar work, there are well-defined research programmes to get there, and there is stead progress.)
by davnicwil | 2026-02-07 20:55:00+00:00
Something I'm finding odd is this seemingly perpetually repeating claim that the latest thing that came out actually works, unlike the last thing that obviously didn't quite work.

Then next month, of course, latest thing becomes last thing, and suddenly it's again obvious that actually it didn't quite work.

It's like running on a treadmill towards a dangling carrot or something. It's simultaneously always here in front of our faces but also not here in actual hand, obviously.

The tools are good and improving. They work for certain things, some of the time, with various need for manual stewarding in the hands of people who really know what they're doing. This is real.

But it remains an absolutely epic leap from here to where the idea that writing code per se is a skill nobody needs any more.

More broadly, I don't even really understand what that could possibly mean on a practical level, as code is just instructions for what the software should do. You can express instructions on a higher level, and tooling keeps making that more and more possible (AI and otherwise), but in the end what does it mean to abstract fully away from the instruction in the detail? It seems really clear that will never be able to result in getting software that does what you want in a precise way rather than some probabilistic approximation which must be continually corrected.

I think the real craft of software such that there is one is constructing systems of deterministic logic flows to make things happen in precisely the way we want them to. Whatever happens to tooling, or what exactly we call code or whatever, that won't change.
by Atlas667 | 2026-02-07 20:55:05+00:00
An explanation to your analysis:

"War begins to be presented as the heroic alternative, the last hope, the “way out” from the unending nightmare of economic crisis, misery and unemployment. Fascism, the most complete expression of modern capitalism, glorifies war. The filthy sophism “War means Work” begins to be circulated by the poison agencies of imperialism, and filters down to the masses.
...
War is only the continuation and working out of the crisis of capitalism and of the present policies of capitalism. It is inseparable from these, and cannot be treated in isolation. All the policies of capitalist reorganisation, all the policies of Fascism, can only hasten the advance to war. This is equally true of the line of a Roosevelt, a MacDonald or a Hitler. War is no sudden eruption of a new factor from outside, a vaguely future menace to be exorcised by special machinery, but is already in essence implicit in the existing factors, in the existing driving forces and policies of capitalism."

- R.P. Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1935
by bloomca | 2026-02-07 20:55:10+00:00
I agree, LLMs definitely sand off a lot of personality, and you can see it in writing the most, at this point I'm sure tons of people are subconsciously trained to lower the trust for something where they recognize typical patterns.

With the code, especially interfaces, the results will be similar -- more standardized palettes, predictable things.

To be fair, the converging factor is going on pretty much forever, e.g. radio/TV led to the lots of local accents disappearing, our world is heavily globalized.
by sintem | 2026-02-07 20:55:53+00:00
Looks interesting. My app is rather simple and I am too lazy to spin up a Xcode project for that. So here are my questions:

1. Can I finish an app end to end with that 100$ credits?
2. Also, do you publish it for the user or I must setup Apple Developer account?
3. If I store data, can I store it in my supabase / firebase or I have to share data with you?

Not sure if I am your ICP, but let me know. I want to give it a try.
by jaybrendansmith | 2026-02-07 20:56:03+00:00
Horseshit. We have 70 years of evidence to back it up, you cannot call it coincidence without another counter theory. Your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant. It's clear as day in the data. You could say that the Ds govern with facts and science, the Rs govern with emotion. But what's far more likely is that the Rs believe in theories that run counter to economic principles.
by mati365 | 2026-02-07 20:56:27+00:00
Oh, it looks like my X86-16 boot sector compiler that I made recently [1]. Writing boot sector games has a nostalgic magic to it, when programming was actually fun and showed off your skills. It's a shame that the AI era has terribly devalued these projects.

[1] https://github.com/Mati365/ts-c-compiler
by crazygringo | 2026-02-07 20:57:27+00:00
Yup. If you follow the links to the original JP Morgan quote, it's not crazy:

> Big picture, to drive a 10% return on our modeled AI investments through 2030 would require ~$650 billion of annual revenue into perpetuity, which is an astonishingly large number. But for context, that equates to 58bp of global GDP, or $34.72/month from every current iPhone user...
by bayarearefugee | 2026-02-07 20:57:44+00:00
While what you're saying is true, I think it is important to recognize that painting in a way that generates a livable income is mostly a marketing gig.

Likewise, being a podcaster, or "influencer" in general, is all about charisma and marketing.

So with value destruction for knowledge workers (and perhaps physical workers too once you factor in robotics) we may in fact be moving into a real "attention economy" where all value is related to being a charismatic marketer, which will be good for some people for a while, terrible for the majority, but even for the winners it seems like a limited reprieve. Historically speaking charismatic marketers can exist through the patronage of people who mostly aren't themselves charismatic marketers. Without patrons (who have disposable income to share) the charismatic marketers are just as fucked as everyone else.
by soueuls | 2026-02-07 20:57:45+00:00
I found the article interesting yet my thinking is at the opposite spectrum. I also spent a lot of time using LLM, and I am moving away from "no framework" or "library pretending to be a framework".

Not that I was a fan of it, but for work purpose I was using React / Next.js etc.

Now, I am using Laravel. lots of magic, pretty much always one recommended way to do things, excellent code generation using CLI. When you combine it with AI it's following the framework's guideline. The AI does not have to think about whether it should locate business logic with UI, use a hook or not, extract a helper, etc.

It knows how to create route, controller, validator, view, model, migration, whatever.
by bunderbunder | 2026-02-07 20:57:52+00:00
I am feeling this loss. I spent most of mu career scrupulously avoiding leadership positions because what I really like is the simple joy of making things with my own two hands.

Many are calling people like me Luddites for mourning this, and I think that I am prepared to wear that label with pride. I own multiple looms and a spinning wheel, so I think I may be in a better position speculates on how the Luddites felt than most people are nowadays.

And what I see is that the economic realities are what they are - like what happened to cottage industry textile work, making software by hand is no longer the economical option. Or at least, soon enough it won’t be. I can fret about deskilling all I like, but it seems that soon enough these skills won’t be particularly valuable except as a form of entertainment.

Perhaps the coding agents won’t be able to make certain things or use certain techniques. That was the case for textile manufacturing equipment, too. If so then the world at large will simply learn to live without. The techniques will live on, of course, but their practical value will be as an entertainment for enthusiasts and a way for them to recognize one another when we see it in each others’ work.

It’s not a terrible future, I suppose, in à long enough view. The world will move on, just like it did after the Industrial Revolution. But, perhaps also like the Industrial Revolution and other similar points in history, not until after we get through another period where a small cadre of wealthy elites who own and control this new equipment use that power to usher in a new era of neofeudalism. Hopefully this time they won’t start quite so many wars while they enjoy their power trips.
by koiueo | 2026-02-07 20:58:15+00:00
We are not talking about deterministic instructions, we are talking about deterministic behavior.

UB is actually a big deal, and is avoided for a reason.

I couldn't in my life guess what CC would do in response to "implement login form".
For all I know CC's response could depend on time of day or Anthropic's electricity bill last month more, than on the existing code in my app, and the specific wording I use.
by Keyframe | 2026-02-07 20:58:22+00:00
Your question also hides an answer. You don't often get to chose a group of people you work with, and unlike projects that self-attract and self-distill ideal profile (like linux mentioned in sister comment), you're left with people usually not used to ye olde C idioms. With C++ it's a bit easier since it is more widespread and supports some of the idioms people get used through schools and other projects. Of course, projects (should) always dictate a certain discipline by different mechanisms, but if certain way of thinking isn't ingrained then it introduces just that much more pain to the communication layer between people.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-07 20:58:23+00:00
Yeah, not sure how people form almost "relationships" with their tools and refuse sometimes to even explore options. I'm always open to switching almost anything. I never end up doing, because things are usually not better, but maybe 1/100 times something is better, and then I switch. Initially did that around Ubuntu 9.10 before, and I'll switch away from Arch in a heartbeat if anything better comes around.
by BadBadJellyBean | 2026-02-07 20:58:31+00:00
I think saying "I'm a _______ guy" with any brand or company filling that blank can be a big problem. Most companies are there to make money and loyalty is often a one way street.

From my view it is more productive to find out what you like about something and always be open to maybe finding someone else who can deliver on that. And sometimes things that we thought were essential are not. You might even find something new to like.
by guytv | 2026-02-07 20:59:09+00:00
you’re probably not doing it right.

I’ve been programming since 1984.

OP basically described my current role with scary precision.

I mostly review the AI’s code, fix the plan before it starts, and nudge it in the right direction.

Each new model version needs less nudging — planning, architecture, security, all of it.

There’s an upside.

There’s something addictive about thinking of something and having it materialize within an hour.

I can run faster and farther than I ever could before.

I’ve rediscovered that I just like building things — imagining them and watching them come alive — even if I’m not laying every brick myself anymore.

But the pace is brutal.

My gut tells me this window, where we still get to meaningfully participate in the process, is short.

That part is sad, and I do mourn it quite a bit.

If you think this is just hype, you’re doing it wrong.
by oblio | 2026-02-07 20:59:21+00:00
> Singapore is an IQ shredder.

Heh, I've just realized about 2 years ago that it's worse.

Cities are people shredders. Based on the information I've found, cities have lower fertility rates than rural areas and this has been the case ever since they were created.

I absolutely love cities, but with ever increasing urbanization and unless we make HUGE changes to facilitate people easily having kids in cities (and I'm talking HUGE, stuff like having stay at home parents for the first 6-7 years of their childhood, free access to communal areas that offer all the services required to take care of kids of any age, free education, etc), humanity will probably not be able to sustain a population of more than say, 1 billion people. Probably much fewer.

Which I guess, could work, but we will be in totally uncharted territory.

And then AI comes in and things become... very interesting.

https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria
by Bengalilol | 2026-02-07 20:59:24+00:00
I did read the whole article thinking "who is he, his name reminds me something, but why isn't he providing game names?" and so on. Then I clicked on "back to main site". Revelation. A lot of his games are jewels. I have a special thing/relation with Sportsfriends. So many hours of fun while playing with my son.
by Lerc | 2026-02-07 20:59:46+00:00
Can you point to the most optimistic six month projections that you have seen?

I have encountered a lot of people say it will be better in six months, and every six months It has been.

I have also seen a few predictions that say 'in a year or two they will be able to do a job completely. I am sceptical, but I would say such claims are rare. Dario Amodei has been about the only prominent voice that I have encountered that puts such abilities on a very short timeframe, and he still points to more than a year.

The practical use of AI has certainly increased a lot in the last six months.

So I guess what I'm asking is more specifics on what you feel was claimed, by whom, and how much did they fall short?

Without that supporting evidence you could just be being annoyed by the failure of claims that exist in your imagination.
by brandensilva | 2026-02-07 21:00:15+00:00
I'm probably a minority, but I've never loved dealing with syntax. The code itself always felt like a hindrance to me that reminded me that my brain was slowed down by my fingers. I get it though, it was tactical and it completed the loop. It was essential for learning I felt like despite eventually getting to a point where it slows you down the more senior you get.

AI has a ways to go before it's senior level if it ever reaches that level, but I do feel bad for juniors that survive this who never will have the opportunity to sculpt code by hand.
by jdiez17 | 2026-02-07 21:00:25+00:00
I predict there's going to be a niche opening up for companies to recycle the expensive parts of all these compute hardware that AI companies are currently buying and will probably be obsolete/depreciated/replaced in the next 2-5 years. The easiest example is RAM chips. There will be people desoldering those ICs and putting them on DDR5 sticks to resell to the general consumer market.
by gtech1 | 2026-02-07 21:00:45+00:00
My team of 6 people has been building a software to compete with an already established piece of software written by a major software corporation. I'm not saying we'll succeed, I'm not saying we'll be better nor that we will cover every corner case they do and that they learned over the past 30 years. But 6 senior devs are getting stuff done at an insane pace. And if we can _attempt_ to do this, which would have been unthinkable 2 years ago, I can only wonder what will happen next.
by clarity_hacker | 2026-02-07 21:01:15+00:00
The blacksmith analogy is poetic but misleading. Blacksmithing was replaced by a process that needed no blacksmith at all. What's happening with code is closer to what synthesizers did to music — the instrument changed, the craft didn't die.

Musicians mourned synthesizers. Illustrators mourned Photoshop. Typesetters mourned desktop publishing. In every case the people who thrived weren't the ones who refused the new tool or the ones who blindly adopted it. They were the ones who understood that the tool absorbed the mechanical layer while the taste layer became more valuable, not less.

The real shift isn't from hand-coding to AI-coding. It's from "I express intent through syntax" to "I express intent through constraints and review." That's still judgment. Still craft. Just a different substrate.

What we're actually mourning is the loss of effort as a signal of quality. When anyone can generate working code, the differentiator moves upstream to architecture, to knowing what to build, to understanding why one approach fails at scale and another doesn't. Those are harder skills, not easier ones.
by bisonbear | 2026-02-07 21:02:20+00:00
Intuitively makes sense, but in my experience, a more realistic workflow is using the main agent to sub-agent delegation pattern instead of straight 7x-ing token costs.

By delegating to sub agents (eg for brainstorming or review), you can break out of local maxima while not using quite as many more tokens.

Additionally, when doing any sort of complex task, I do research -> plan -> implement -> review, clearing context after each stage. In that case, would I want to make 7x research docs, 7x plans, etc.? probably not. Instead, a more prudent use of tokens might be to have Claude do research+planning, and have Codex do a review of that plan prior to implementation.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-07 21:03:53+00:00
The fact you're nitpicking specific details instead of actually absorbing and discussing the core argument (that AI is having negative impacts on multiple systems, sectors, and markets beyond narrow verticals like programming, and that this is something worth acknowledging and discussing) really reveals that you're not here to discuss things seriously and are just looking to feel right about your personal positions.

Be better.
by light_hue_1 | 2026-02-07 21:04:19+00:00
Assembling code doesn't require typing. Linking doesn't require typing.

Even though once upon a time both did.

Claiming that this isn't coding is as absurd as saying that coding is only what you do when you hook up the wires between some vacuum tubes.

The LLM is a very smart compiler. That's all.

Some people want to sit and write assembly. Good for them. But asserting that unless I assemble my own code I'm not a coder is just silly.
by doodlebugging | 2026-02-07 21:04:34+00:00
>Both that inequality increases but also prosperity for the lower class? I don’t mind that trade off.

This sounds like it is written from the perspective of someone who sees their own prosperity increase dramatically so that they end up on the prosperous side of the worsening inequality gap. The fact that those on the other side of the gap see marginal gains in prosperity makes them feel that it all worked out okay for everyone.

I think this is greed typical of the current players in the AI/tech economy. You all saw others getting abundant wealth by landing high-paying jobs with tech companies and you want to not only to do the same, but to one-up your peers. It's really a shame that so much tech-bro identity revolves around personal wealth with zero accountability for the tools that you are building to set yourselves in control of lives of those you have chosen to either leave behind or to wield as tools for further wealth creation through alternate income SaaS subscription streams or other bullshit scams.

There really is not much difference between tech-bros, prosperity gospel grifters or other religious nuts whose only goal is to be more wealthy today than yesterday. It's created a generation of greedy, selfish narcissists who feel that in order to succeed in their industry, they need to be high-functioning autists so they take the path of self-diagnosis and become, as a group, resistant to peer review since anyone who would challenge their bullshit is doing the same thing and unlikely to want too much light shed on their own shady shit. It is funny to me that many of these tech-bros have no problem admitting their drug experimentation since they need to maintain an aura of enlightenment amongst their peers.

It's gonna be a really shitty world when the dopeheads run everything. As someone who grew up back in the day when smoking dope was something hidden and paranoia was a survival instinct for those who chose that path I can see lots of problems for society in the pipeline.
Show HN: We had 20 Claude terminals open, so we built Orcha
by buildingwdavid | 2026-02-07 21:05:24+00:00
My co-founder and I hit peak chaos last month. 20 Claude Code terminals. Tab after tab. Copy-pasting context between them, tracking which agent was on which branch, merge conflicts everywhere.

If AI agents are supposed to 10x productivity, why were we spending half our time just managing them?

So we built Orcha (orcha.nl) - an orchestration layer for AI coding agents.

- One dashboard, multiple specialized agents (React dev, API dev, DB expert, etc.)
- Each agent on its own git branch
- Visual workflow builder to define task hand-offs
- 100% local - your API keys never leave your machine

We went from mass-chaos to shipping features 3x faster.

Private beta is free. Would love feedback from the HN crowd - what would you build with multiple coordinated agents?