by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-11 09:53:22+00:00
> But if you haven’t used specifically Opus 4.5/4.6 with specifically Claude Code for at least an hour, then you’re in for a real shock. Because all your complaining about AI not being useful for real-world tasks is obsolete.

Yeah, honestly, fuck off. I have. It sucks. Not only can I not get value out of it in a real codebase, I can't even trust it to make trivial tools. Just yesterday, I tried having an "agent" build a tool while I worked on game code, and at first it went smoothly as butter. But by the time the tool was at about 2k lines of code, there was a showstopping bug that neither Opus nor Codex could resolve with any amount of cajoling or context management. The time I spent looking into the code at that point made me quickly come to the determination that the fastest solution would be to rewrite the tool from scratch myself, because the tool was not actually very complicated but the "agent" had nonetheless made a complete mess of implementing it, and that if I wanted to continue building upon it further, my own code would be much more readily extensible and not collapse in on itself.

I understand if you're a hobbyist coder or someone who was programming-adjacent but never made the leap, and now you have a world opened up to you of being able to build something at all despite your lack of knowledge. That must feel like magic, and you don't know what you don't know, so you can't help but hype it up as the end of software engineering. The people with decades of experience harping on about this, though, all appear to be engaging in fraud. Yegge, certainly, who directly profited hundreds of thousands of dollars from shilling a memecoin scam related to this. I suppose SimonW stands to gain financially from his position as an "AI influencer" as well. Just recently he was promoting that sickening article, "Software factories and the agentic moment" (vomit), wherein he heaped praise after praise upon people who were relying on agents with a policy to not review the code, and didn't bother to critically view what they had built with this policy -- which is to say, nothing. They shared two repos, one of which was a set of .md files and the other which was another AI psychosis tool which had no real-world value. Much like everything Yegge has built with "10x productivity".

"10x productivity, 10x productivity, 10x productivity". And yet we have absolutely zero to show for it other than blogspam and psychosis tools. I am literally fucking begging any one of you to show the world real software that people will use at scale. Not a messy prototype that serves your and no one else's use-case. Not LLM tools that are only used to build other LLM tools that are only used to build other LLM tools and never encounter reality. Something that solves a real problem, such that a million people will use your software. A fully-fledged browser, an IDE, a non-trivial game, production-grade photo editing or music editing software, a Discord replacement with all of the same functionality, anything real, built to completion with agents and worth using in place of existing software.

This comment may violate HN's guidelines, and if so, I will accept it being killed. My patience for these people engaging in what I can only see as an MLM-style fraud scheme is gone, and it upsets me to see this website being taken over by this day in and day out. Even a disturbing number of comments are LLM-generated. Some get caught and banned because it is against the rules, but others don't. I want HN to be a site where humans can talk to each other about the real-world problems they're working on, or the cool things they're doing for fun, and not a place for the new wave of crypto shills to promote themselves constantly while insulting our intelligence. If I'm the only person who feels this way, perhaps HN is no longer for me, but before giving up on it I will still speak up about it. I want to believe we don't have to let the internet die this undignified death.