People don't appreciate how much of engineering is just as you've described.
When they imagine someone using AI (except for themself), they imagine the least curious, least inquisitive vibe-coder. And they invent the idea that the only way to be someone who asks questions or remains curious is to have paid the dues that they see themself as having paid. Therefore the world must always need them.
Well, all you have to do now is imagine the vibe-coder who has the same curiosity and inquisitiveness that you had especially when you were starting out and weren't yet a professional programmer. The only difference is that now you don't have to bootstrap a whole software career to understand how things work; you can skip that and merely ask.
> "...imagine the vibe-coder who has the same curiosity and inquisitiveness that you had..."
We're required to imagine them because they don't seem to exist in the real world. The vibe-coders seem almost entirely composed of the "I commit 20 kLOC a week without reading a single line, lol" or the "LLMs are like calculators/basic arithmetic skills are obsolete" lunatics.
Admittedly, a lot of my identity was wrapped up in those hard earned skills. I have empathy for those struggling to chart a new path for themselves. It does not, however, change the fact that tools evolve. Ultimately, using tools effectively is how we are measured and while you may have needed a shovel yesterday, today you have an excavator.
I saw something similar on Twitter responding to 45yo software engineers making comments of depair in that HN thread about the increased suicide rate of middle-aged men.
For some reason I'm stuck in a real depressing, doomer algorithm / homepage on Twitter. But everyone on my homepage seems to have a take on the HNer comments along the lines of "see, this is why you don't make your job into your identity".
But that's such an antihuman response. The only reason you can put decades into a field to grind and build expertise is because you have an identity-level interest in a subject.
It's also not a good thing if the optimal way to live going forward is to have no passion for anything lest it changes so that we won't feel bad. I don't think that's possible unless you remove the human part of our brains or make life so horrible that we're happy just to survive another day.
Source? There has not been a statistically-significant increase in middle-aged male suicide rates between 2023 and 2024 confirmed data [1]. (2025 breakouts aren’t out yet, but top-line data show decreases.)
In 2025 in the UK men age 45–64 had a suicide rate of about 24 per 100,000, which is the highest it has been in the past half century, and is higher than other age categories. In the mid 2000s, the rate was like 17 per 100,000.
From your link, in the USA the overall rate for men of the same age is about 30 per 100,000, but varies dramatically between states.
> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
> I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
This is probably the saddest comment I've read on HN. It really shows the state of this place and how far into psychosis the comments have fallen.
every comment mentioning "ai psychosis" is an amazing caricature. people whining about original thoughts repeating the same resident tropes over and over again. basically just throwing out insults. try that for sad.
same people usually who'd be livid about misusing mental health status labels, and torturing language in general. but it's okay, as it is for a noble purpose: insulting people whose opinion you currently feel sufficiently uppity and righteous about. that will raise the bar!
the "last bastions of human values" demonstrating the absolute bottom of the barrel human behavior and intellect. good bit worse than sad, really.
> The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.
It's "sort of" a dark forest problem because admitting you're using AI is socially risky. Indeed, this entire thread is built on the idea that Epic's lazy use of AI has been bested by the savvy & righteous programmers at Valve[1].
So people who think AI is actually a really useful tool and that using it to make your project better will imagine that everyone who makes things better today uses AI at least a little, and assumes they don't talk about it because they don't want to get yelled at. Meanwhile, if you think AI does bad work (or is often used badly) you can ascribe bad software to bad uses of the tool. We can never know for sure because people don't talk about it.
[1] I happen to agree with this dichotomy but that belief precedes AI
It is definitely very risky among gamers. Hence why all the serious game developers use AI, but very-very few are willing to publicly admit it. They have seen the insane and unhinged reactions of gamers (or role-playing as those).
Gamer community does like AI. Admitting it would cause an uproar among gamers, be socially risky among them. Hence gamedevs are keeping quiet about their extensive use of AI.
Yeah exactly, Valve engineers probably just told AI to make it faster.
Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
Epic Games wants to make an "AI-first" game, so they need to push "vibe coding" onto the gaming audiences to get them to accept it before they lay off people and ask $69 for a game where the art is made by an AI model.
>I went through this Ford engine plant about three years ago, when they first opened it.
> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.
>One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”
>And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines
I know a few very serious and well compensated programmers with decades of experience. These people work on prominent open source projects, climate modelling, linear programming, large org enginneering. Every single one of them uses LLMs heavily and swears by the increased productivity of using them.
Maybe that's true, I don't know. I make no claims of an unbiased sample. Merely a counterfactual to the parent comment's claim that they aren't useful.
I find the opposite. A good engineer would tell the agent the "know what they know they're doing" part. Let the AI take that direction and context, let it implement/test it 100x faster than a human can by hand, the engineer come back and confirm AI did the job about the same way as they would have wanted it to be done themselves.
> for an engineer who knows what he's doing, LLMs are of very limited use
LLMs are very good at code analysis, and finding both security issues and optimization opportunities. Yes, even in code written by highly experienced human engineers. Failing to have an LLM look for places where your code could be optimized is, IMHO, indefensible. It's like shipping your binaries compiled at -O0 - deliberately choosing to waste your users' time and hardware resources because you couldn't be bothered to properly configure and run a tool.
Code has never been the bottleneck for a skilled engineer, and if you value high quality then you need to spend a lot of time reading over the slop LLMs produce to turn it into something hardened and reliable. So, for a skilled engineer, LLMs have a very marginal benefit in terms of delivery speed.
I think there is some nuance to this. As a self-identified skilled engineer, most or what i -actually do- is not bottlenecked by writing code. However, there is a lot of stuff that I pre-LLM -didn’t do- because it was medium value and high effort. There is a class of work that is now zero effort to have an LLM generate, still medium value, and crucially low effort to validate.
I’m not sure this is a large class of work created in the long run, but since this efficiency is new, our backlogs are full of these tasks, and people are feeling immense efficiency gains from unlocking them.
They literally just shipped a massive update for a game they've been developing for several years (Deadlock) and are releasing more content for it this Friday
Do you think Deadlock will not devolve into a mixture of gambling and hvh like every Valve multiplayer game that’s been relevant in the last 10 years (except Dota because hvh in dota sounds complex, so it's just gambling there)?
Fortnite avoids this by having no gambling and by making hvh infeasible FYI
Every Valve game utilizing this is rated M. Control your children better instead of blaming others for being a bad parent. If you children have money to gamble and you let them play mature-rated games then you are doing it wrong.
The person in the TikTok put on their Scientist Halloween costume though so at least we’re getting good production value. Wouldn’t want to pour dangerous chemicals like corn syrup without gloves on!
I think there are certain things good people ought to do to combat brain rot and malicious actors that they don't do because they feel too icky for a good person to do. Like using a some basic baysian filter trained for sanity. You just take the 160 people that upvote some garbage and penalize them. The internet is too hostile for passive pure hearted systems to survive.
I started to notice a subtle shift a couple years ago. An increase in vibes and hype and a decrease in reason and critical thinking.
Reminiscent of something like Eternal September possibly, but with bots this time? Maybe my interests have simply grown beyond what is typically found here.
I don't think there's "we" anymore. A large population of HN readers got to hate the combination of tech and capitalism that HN stands for because its effects on society are horrible. Techno-optimism is dead.
I keep lazygit open next to each Claude/Codex session that's working on a change, but over time scrolling the changes has gone from necessary to just out of curiosity.
At this point of 2026, if you're reading code and still catching things, then the problem was before the code was written. You should have decided more high level preferences like invariants before the work began.
LLMs have changed the obstacle of doing something from (time, attention, expertise) to (time, attention, tokens).
I don't see what's unique about GTA6. It's just larger in scope if you wanted to decompile or greenfield a custom engine.
But at the end of the day you'll be able to unpack the assets yourself and immediately have the worldmap running in a browser in Three.js. And once you're there, you can vibe-code any game you want on top of it.
When they imagine someone using AI (except for themself), they imagine the least curious, least inquisitive vibe-coder. And they invent the idea that the only way to be someone who asks questions or remains curious is to have paid the dues that they see themself as having paid. Therefore the world must always need them.
Well, all you have to do now is imagine the vibe-coder who has the same curiosity and inquisitiveness that you had especially when you were starting out and weren't yet a professional programmer. The only difference is that now you don't have to bootstrap a whole software career to understand how things work; you can skip that and merely ask.
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