MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Mtinie | 2026-02-07 19:58:25+00:00
It would be helpful if you could define “useful” in this context.

I’ve built a number of team-specific tools with LLM agents over the past year that save each of us tens of hours a month.

They don’t scale beyond me and my six coworkers, and were never designed to, but they solve challenges we’d previously worked through manually and allow us to focus on more important tasks.

The code may be non-optimal and won’t become the base of a new startup. I’m fine with that.

It’s also worth noting that your evidence list (increased CVEs, outages, degraded quality) is exclusively about what happens when LLMs are dropped into existing development workflows. That’s a real concern, but it’s a different conversation from whether LLMs create useful software.

My tools weren’t degraded versions of something an engineer would have built better. They’re net-new capability that was never going to get engineering resources in the first place. The counterfactual in my case isn’t “worse software”—it’s “no software.“
Ask HN: Are we at the point where software can improve itself?
by ManuelKiessling | 2026-02-07 19:58:28+00:00
Putting this out here to hear if you think this is feasible and/or useful, but also to find out if this is yesterday's news and everybody is already doing it.

So here is the gist of it: Imagine a user-facing software that is out there in the world, doing its thing. Doesn't have to be anything fancy for this example, let's say an inventory management system called Foo, used by several hundred people a day.

Now imagine you set up a kind of "loop" that works like this:

Every 24 hours, a Coding Agent launches, with the following prompt:

"Here is the codebase for application Foo. Over there are all application and system logs that Foo produced over the past 24 hours. Over here are all emails that went to support@foo-app.com in the past 24 hours. Over here is all UI telemetry that Foo collected: where users clicked, where they scrolled to, etc. Over there is the current database snapshot of Foo. Here is the document that describes the business goals of Foo, and the basic limitations (legal, financial) in which it needs to operate.

This is your mission: analyze all these inputs, analyze the codebase — and then create Pull Requests with the three most pressing improvements that make Foo a better software for its users, based on your analysis."

Yes, there's a ton of details I'm glossing over, and yet: shouldn't something like this lead to some kind of fully automatic improvement of software Foo over time?

Software is used, produces telemetry, Agent analyzes telemetry, improves software according to what the telemetry says, new software version is used, produces telemetry...
by Ronsenshi | 2026-02-07 19:59:10+00:00
Because such people are not sincere either to themselves about who they are or to others. It's really hard for me to take seriously phrases like "I joined this industry to make things, not to write code".

Do painters paint because they just like to see the final picture? Or do they like the process? Yes, painting is an artistic process, not exactly crafting one. But the point stand.

Woodworkers making nice custom furniture generally enjoy the process.
by theonething | 2026-02-07 19:59:12+00:00
A huge advantage of frameworks to me is to give new comers to the code a unified frame of reference. A Rails developer (or even a non-Rails guys who understands MVC) can jump into a Rails based codebase he is not familiar with a lot easier than the custom "from the ground up" thing the author espouses.

It's puzzling to me that the author doesn't even mention this huge and obvious benefit of frameworks.
by Schmerika | 2026-02-07 19:59:14+00:00
> they should certainly be opt-in issues, here.

Even if that were accepted as fact (it isn't), tech complicity in fascism and genocide shouldn't ever be among such issues.

> There is value in having sanctuaries.

There is, and there are many. But this isn't your sanctuary.

Never was, and never should be.

> If people from Kyiv, Gaza, Sudan, Syria, Congo, Venezuela or Rwanda can come here and contribute to topics of tech and curiosity without making it about their situation, then so can anyone else.

Imagine seeing 9 of your 10 children get blown up with the aid of Microsoft and Google and Amazon tech, then reading the above sentence on HN.

Really. Imagine it.

Imagine it. Imagine how you would feel. Imagine the rage. Feel it.
by voidhorse | 2026-02-07 19:59:17+00:00
In my opinion the relationship between level of detailed care and resulting beauty is proportional. Can you get the same level without getting your hands dirty? Sure, maybe, but I doubt a painter or novelist could really produce beautiful work without being intimately familiar with that work. The distance that heavy use of AI tools creates between you and the output does not really lend itself to beauty. Could you do it, sure, but at that point it's probably more efficient to just do things yourself and have complete intimate control.

To me, you sound more utilitarian. The philosophy you are presenting is a kind of Ikea philosophy. Utility, mass production, and unique beauty are generally properties that do not cohere together, and there's a reason for this. I think the use of LLMs in the production of digital goods is very close to the use of automation lines in the production of physical goods. No matter how you try some of the human charm, and thus beauty will inevitably be lost, the number of goods will increase, but they'll all be barely differentiable souless replications of more or less the same shallow ideas repeated as infinitum.
by shepherdjerred | 2026-02-07 19:59:37+00:00
I went into this field because I love programming. I didn't even know how well these jobs paid until my junior year of college. I constantly programmed and read programming texts in my spare time growing up, in college, and after work.

I love AI tools. I can have AI do the boring parts. I can even have to write polished, usable apps in languages that I don't know.

I miss being able to think so much about architecture, best practices, frameworks/languages, how to improve, etc.
by nubg | 2026-02-07 19:59:37+00:00
To the people who are against AI programming, honest question: why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you" "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries?

This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers as well, just one abstraction level higher.

I'm 100% honestly looking forward to finding a single justification that would not fit both scenarios.
by leecommamichael | 2026-02-07 19:59:43+00:00
> Now is the time to mourn the passing of our craft.

Your craft is not my craft.

It's entirely possible that, as of now, writing JavaScript and Java frontends (what the author does) can largely be automated with LLMs. I don't know who the author is writing to, but I do not mistake the audience to be "programmers" in general...

If you are making something that exists, or something that is very similar to something that exists, odds are that an LLM can be made to generate code which approximates that thing. The LLM encoding is lossy. How will you adjust the output to recover the loss? What process will you go through mentally to bridge the gap? When does the gap appear? How do you recognize it? In the absolute best case you are given a highly visible error. Perhaps you've even shipped it, and need to provide context about the platform and circumstances to further elucidate. Better hope that platform and circumstance is old-hat.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-07 19:59:58+00:00
No, it's more like moving from line cook, to head chef in charge of 30 cooks.

Food's getting made, but you focus on the truly creative part -- the menu, the concept, the customer experience. You're not boiling pasta or cutting chives for the thousandth time. The same way now you're focusing on architecture and design now instead of writing your 10,000th list comprehension.
by LanceH | 2026-02-07 20:00:17+00:00
I'm of the opinion that the teen novel has stunted literature in general.

As a kid beginning to read in the 70's I jumped from what were clearly kids books to Lord of the Rings (pure chance -- I liked the cover). There wasn't that watered down in between. It was a jump to real books with real consequences (spoilers: Boromir dies).

I've witnessed the rise of the teen section and seen how kids -- who are reading less in general -- never leave it.

It feels like the fantasy adventure lends itself a lot more to these teen novels and has a knock on effect into the mainstream. I for one could do without anther book about someone born to be a prince(ss) up against the evil realm who can't choose their way out of their romantic triangle.

I'm not knocking anyone's choices. There are more books already than I'll ever read. But it should would be a blast to get another Dune out of nowhere.
by apitman | 2026-02-07 20:00:17+00:00
> software engineering is the only industry that is built on the notion of rapid change, constant learning, and bootstrapping ourselves to new levels of abstraction

Not sure I agree. I think most programming today looks almost exactly the same as it did 40 years ago. You could even have gotten away with never learning a new language. AI feels like the first time a large percentage of us may be forced to fundamentally change the way we work or change careers.
by knuckleheads | 2026-02-07 20:00:30+00:00
December a few years ago, pre-ChatGPT I did Advent of Code in Rust. It was very difficult, had never done the full month before, barely knew Rust and kept getting my ass kicked by it. I spent a full Saturday afternoon solving one of the last problems of the month, and it was wonderful. My head hurt and I was reading weird Wikipedia articles and it was a blast. Nothing is stopping me from doing that sort of thing again, and I feel like I might need to, to counteract the stagnation I feel at times mentally when it comes to coding. That spark is still in there I feel, buried under all the slop, and it would reappear if I gave it the chance, I hope. I have been grieving for the last years I think and only recently have I come to terms with the changes to my identity that llm's have wrought.
by zeroonetwothree | 2026-02-07 20:00:31+00:00
I'm not going to code by hand if it's 4x slower than having Claude do it. Yes, I can do that, but it just feels bad.

The analogy I like is it's like driving vs. walking. We were healthier when we walked everywhere, but it's very hard to quit driving and go back even if it's going to be better for you.
by telesilla | 2026-02-07 20:00:40+00:00
I had just started getting an interest in computers and went to the cinema with my boyfriend at the time who was (and remains) a classic computer programmer. I remember sitting in the cinema with him, both of us laughing histerically at the ridiculousness of it all. I felt like I was in the in-crowd to understand the film was all artefact and fashion, but for all that it captured something accurate about the community's need for belonging, in spite of the anarchic messaging. I feel that hasn't changed much and maybe it's why we still love this movie, along with Sneakers and War Games.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 20:00:51+00:00
The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.

Looking at salaries, senior developers working for the government get paid about the same as entry level software engineers who get return offers at BigTech. Well actually senior developers in government only about 10%-20% more.

And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government?

I know how much senior cloud consultants working at AWS make working in the WWPS. I was there as an l5. Amazon is a shitty place to work. But I doubt it’s any worse than the government right now. GCP and Microsoft (not just Azure) both also pay their consultants a lot more than government employees make.

I’m not saying the government isn’t needed. But the best and the brightest aren’t going to give up the amount of money they can make in the private sector - especially now that government jobs are far from a secure paycheck
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-07 20:00:56+00:00
> The members of the pedophile club are way richer, more influential and have a vastly greater quality of life than you.

Pedophile's "quality of life" is a contradiction in terms. Neither pedophilia nor lust for power are compatible with anything that looks like truth or happiness... and no amount of money can change that. Even more, money can't cure an ego problem.

Totally by accident, a few days ago the richest man in the world whined about the inability of money to deliver happiness... from the horse's mouth.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-07 20:01:19+00:00
Did you look at the graph?

Eisenhower had two terms = 8 years - did poorly.

Kennedy + Johnson two Democratic terms in a row = 8 years, did well.

Nixon + Ford, two Republican in row = 8 years, did poorly.

Carter 1 term, did well.

Reagan Bush - 3 terms Republicans 12 years, did poorly.

Clinton 2 terms 8 years did well.

Bush the second, 2 terms 8 years did poorly.

Obama 2 terms 8 years did well.

Trump, 1 term did extremely poorly

Biden 1 term did well.

So this 4 years thing you're talking about you mean that we can't be sure about Biden, Trump, or Carter. Fair enough, is the 8 years good enough or is that also too short to draw a conclusion?
by lrvick | 2026-02-07 20:01:42+00:00
Sam Altman is pro-extinctionist like most of the surveillance capitalist ghouls. He literally invests in mind uploading companies and believes only the rich deserve to "survive" the singularity he believes it is his job to bring about.

Sure, humans going extinct is good for the planet, I guess, but be up front about what you are really supporting.
by plagiarist | 2026-02-07 20:02:00+00:00
I didn't imagine I would be sending all my source code directly to a corporation for access to an irritatingly chipper personality that is confidently incorrect the way these things are.

There have been wild technological developments but we've lost privacy and autonomy across basically all devices (excepting the people who deliberately choose to forego the most capable devices, and even then there are firmware blobs). We've got the facial recognition and tracking so many sci-fi dystopias have warned us to avoid.

I'm having an easier time accomplishing more difficult technological tasks. But I lament what we have come to. I don't think we are in the Star Trek future and I imagined doing more drugs in a Neuromancer future. It's like a Snow Crash / 1984 corporate government collab out here, it kinda sucks.
by scrlk | 2026-02-07 20:02:03+00:00
Chris Sawyer: I Write Games in x86 assembly (yes, x86 assembly)

> What language was RollerCoaster Tycoon programmed in?

> It's 99% written in x86 assembler/machine code (yes, really!), with a small amount of C code used to interface to MS Windows and DirectX.

https://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm
by thwarted | 2026-02-07 20:02:05+00:00
Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil". Some people find typing to be toiling, so they latch on to not having to type as much when using LLMs. Other people see "chores" as toiling, and so dream of household robots to take on the burden of that toil. Some people hate driving and consider that to be needless toil, so self-driving cars answer that—and the ads for Waymo latch onto this.

Personally, I am not stymied by typing nor chores nor driving. At some point in my life, all the "need to do things around the house" just became the things I do, and I'm not bothered by doing them, such that I barely notice doing them. But it's complex: the concept of "chores" is front and center when you're trying to get a teenager to be responsible for taking care of themselves (like having clean clothes, or how the bathroom is safer if it's not a complete mess) and participating in family/household responsibilities (like learning that if you don't make a mess, there's nothing to clean up). Can you really be effective at directing someone/something else without knowing how to do it yourself? Probably for some things, but not all.
by zeroonetwothree | 2026-02-07 20:02:10+00:00
I see my job as having many aspects. One of those aspects is coding. It is the aspect that gives me the most joy even if it's not the one I spend the most time on. And if you take that away then the remaining part of the job is just not very appealing anymore.

It used to be I didn't mind going through all the meetings, design discussions, debates with PMs, and such because I got to actually code something cool in the end. Now I get to... prompt the AI to code something cool. And that just doesn't feel very satisfying. It's the same reason I didn't want to be a "lead" or "manager", I want to actually be the one doing the thing.
by gugagore | 2026-02-07 20:02:15+00:00
Woodworking is, like, the quintessential craft. I think it is very useful to bring it in when discussion "craft"!

I am not myself a woodworker, however I have understood that part of what makes it "crafty" is that the woodworker reads grain, adjusts cuts, and accepts that each board is different.

We can try to contrast that to whatever Ikea does with wood and mass production of furniture. I would bet that variation in materials is "noise" that the mass production process is made to reject.

But could we imagine an automated woodworking system that takes into account material varition, like wood grain? That system would be making judgements informed by the judgement of the woodworker.

The craft lives on, and the craftperson enters an apprenticeship role for the automation... perhaps...
by koiueo | 2026-02-07 20:02:21+00:00
> We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM.

I'll miss it not because the activity becomes obsolete, but because it's much more interesting than sitting till 2am trying to convince LLM to find and fix the bug for me.

We'll still be sitting till 2am.

> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

I've been hearing this for the last two years. And yet, LLMs, given abstract description of the problem, still write worse code than I do.

Or did you mean type code? Because in that case, yes, I'd agree. They type better.
by cherrylinedev | 2026-02-07 20:02:28+00:00
I built Aurio, a free tool for finding wellness-oriented hotels across 50+ European countries. The core idea: instead of filtering hotels by stars or price, what if you could search by how close they are to nature and wellness amenities?
Every hotel is scored across 5 pillars:

Active Living – proximity to hiking trails, gyms, sports facilities
Water & Thermal – distance to pools, spas, hot springs, beaches
Calm & Quiet – how peaceful the surroundings are (away from noise/traffic)
Nature Immersion – nearby parks, forests, natural landscapes
Holistic Wellness – a combined score across all pillars

Some features I'm particularly happy with:

Interactive map with wellness points of interest around each hotel
Golden hour & sunset spots – find the best sunset viewpoints and beaches nearby
Dark Sky stargazing – hotels near certified Dark Sky Places
Pilgrimage routes – proximity to Camino de Santiago, Via Francigena, etc.
Best season indicator – monthly travel scores so you know when to visit
by philipallstar | 2026-02-07 20:02:35+00:00
I'm not quite sure what level of testing this facilitates. If you're testing as close to production as possible, you probably want templated k8s config that scales down to a k8s in CI (e.g. Helm with variables applied that make it minimal). If you just want a local stack to test components and not the k8s config, why not just use docker compose itself?
by 6gvONxR4sf7o | 2026-02-07 20:02:38+00:00
I don't mourn coding for itself, since I've always kinda disliked that side of my work (numerical software, largely).

What I do mourn is the reliability. We're in this weird limbo where it's like rolling a die for every piece of work. If it comes up 1-5, I would have been better off implementing it myself. If it comes up 6, it'll get it done orders of magnitude faster than doing it by hand. Since the overall speedup is worthwhile, I have to try it every time, even if most of the time it fails. And of course it's a moving target, so I have to keep trying the things that failed yesterday because today's models are more capable.
by gpt5 | 2026-02-07 20:02:44+00:00
The reason the stock market is generally "priced right", which we see in the strong long term returns of index funds, is because the winners get more money and get more influence, and the losers get less.

So you have a self selecting system, that have (over time) proved itself. Whatever you might think of the effect of certain effects (such as immigrant labors) you can end up reflecting in your investments, as others do - and if you end up being correct, you'll have more power to influence the price in the future.
by nubg | 2026-02-07 20:02:48+00:00
To the people who are against AI programming, honest question: why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you" "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries?

This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher.

I'm 100% honestly looking forward to finding a single justification that would not fit both scenarios.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-07 20:02:49+00:00
Not the GP I feel some of that energy. The parts I most enjoy are the interfaces, the abstractions, the state machines, the definitions. The code I enjoy too, and I would be sad to lose all contact with it, but I've really appreciated AI especially for helping me get over the initial hump on things like:

- infrastructure bs, like scaffold me a JS GitHub action that does x and y.

- porting, like take these kernel patches and adjust them from 6.14 to 6.17.

- tools stuff, like here's a workplace shell script that fetches a bunch of tokens for different services, rewrite this from bash to Python.

- fiddly things like dealing with systemd or kubernetes or ansible

- fault analysis, like here's a massive syslog dump or build failure, what's the "real" issue here?

In all these cases I'm very capable of assessing, tweaking, and owning the end result, but having the bot help me with a first draft saves a bunch of drudgery on the front end, which can be especially valuable for the ADHD types where that kind of thing can be a real barrier to getting off the ground.
by apitman | 2026-02-07 20:02:51+00:00
> If I have any doubt that someone might not complete a task, or at least accurately explain why it's proving difficult, with at least 95% certainty, I won't assign them the task

It gets hard to compare AI to humans. You can ask the AI to do things you would never ask a human to do, like retry 1000 times until it works, or assign 20 agents to the same problem with slightly different prompts. Or re-do the entire thing with different aesthetics.
by lucb1e | 2026-02-07 20:03:07+00:00
After having the same experience negative some time before Covid, I was kindly invited late last year to a homeserver of a local hackerspace and I gave it another try.

I cannot send messages to people on another homeserver (such as the obscure matrix.org one) whereas other people can, as well as some other issues which I forgot by now. Not at all usable. It was a short-lived stint and I didn't even try to enable encryption this time :(
by AppMesh | 2026-02-07 20:03:16+00:00
+1 there is an appetite for internal-population (company, org) inferred feedback. HR at megacorps are usually polling the population anyway to get NPS for the workers year over year. However they are often rolling out new policy and processes throughout the year. Having a set of bots trained on the existing internal data can be used to infer employee reception of any new rollouts and allow HR to tune them before live rollout.