I'm not sure if this is snark or not, but yes, there is something fundamentally interesting about the fact that "personal finance tracker" is now a project with the same craft valence as a todo list, the "hello world" of the last 20 years of programming. It also says something new about todo list programs, and programs of that ilk/level of complexity: they're now subthreshold programming, or, the way I look at things, a level of programming now accessible to nonprogrammers.
I got through a trial using a document manager I vibe coded in two days. No crashes, no runaway memory usage with several gigs of PDFs. All my depo transcripts, expert reports, etc, indexed, with a terminal window integrated so i can ask Grok to “pull up the testimony on the first day when that guy said that thing.” The app has an API so the AI can directly control what documents i’m looking at and jump me to the right places. All I had to do was tell Claude to “expose all the document viewing functionality through applescript,” then tell Grok to “read the applescript dictionary and write yourself a skill.”
It’s like ye olde times when we had overqualified efficient paralegals who could do stuff like that.
I hope that’s sarcasm or that I’m misunderstanding what you mean. Have you looked at the front-page of HN? At the new submissions? Social media? Newspapers? YouTube videos? It’s bonkers to me anyone could claim with any degree of seriousness that we’re not talking about this enough. We’re talking about it too much.
I don't know what to tell you. I bounce off 80% of the AI stories on the front page too, and I have the same frustration. But the change that's happening now to our field is profound. It sucks that the conversation we're having on HN is a debate between AI maximalists and the "clanker" people, rather than e.g. reconsidering Raskin's Humane Interface in light of what we can see computers will be like in 10 years.
You are at a better position to start these debates about HCI and other things, and you should do it.
Most people are financially tied to their fields. I believe you are at a different stage of your career, so you are in a position to think about it without worrying about putting food on the table. I believe that automation of work being something so scary is a very sad thing, but it is how our current system works.
For sure, but it doesn't say anything about what GP was trying to communicate: that they can't relate to how anyone making serious (emphasis and paraphrasing mine) app with "AI" is facing these problems.
i was reading your comment as "todo app" replaced the "hello world", which is now replaced by "finance tracker app", but in fact the todo app didn't replace hello_world.
its something people want but has been both too difficult to be worth building, and not something you want to use some SASS for where youre giving all your financial data over to a third party and the government
suddenly they're tractable without taking too much time investment
