If the discussion was "Sitting in a submarine is not as fun as scuba-diving", I would recognize the conversation is not about me, and not jump in and tell all of the recreational scuba-divers they're wrong.
it's 2026. people can't understand when things aren't for them. they will see a french onion soup recipe and comment "any dairy and onion free version?"
Yes. Who says people must enjoy coding? People enjoy trying new things and building new products, and coding isn't the goal, it's just the tool you use use to get to your goal. If now you can build things without you doing the coding part, then why is that bad?
I think this berating of people who don't enjoy coding is cope and bile by coders who feel being left behind by an industry who only values the end product and doesn't care about their idealist craft for the code, but this always had been the case. People bought Half-Life because the game was good, not because the code was written with enjoyment by the devs(Valve source code is full of swear words).
There's plenty of products with shit code that sell well, and plenty of products with good code that don't sell and bankrupt the company. The end-product is king, not the code. Did Steve Jobs just care about the end product UX or about how nice the code inside was?
GGP was being judgemental on people not enjoy coding, which means for him the default status quo is that one has to enjoy coding, therefore my assessment was correct.
Nobody. But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind. I really like understanding what I'm building and creating works of art in code. The sense of accomplishment is gone.
But we can still be sad that we can't get paid to do something we enjoy anymore, right? I'm planning to leave the industry once my role at this company is up. The fun is gone now and I don't want to do the new form of the job.
Yes, you don't need anyone's permission to be sad.
I enjoy the act of coding, but my ambition to create almost always exceeded my ability and the number of hours in the day. So the transition from coder (and sometimes manager) to agent orchestrator has been fairly positive.
It's not necessarily easy or pleasant to evolve, but that's life.
I didn't say it's natural. It was unnatural when the internet started taking over, when humans, first shifted to office work, and for every other major technological advancement before that.
I think the cat was out of the bag as soon as OpenAI proved that scaling up transformers was effective. I don't think the way it's playing out is particularly good for normal people, but the advancement of these models can't be stopped.
The light at the end of the tunnel is hardware advancement and open models. In 5 or 10 years if we can run an Opus 5.5+ model on a local device, things might not turn out so bad.
There is a huge skill gap arising in using LLMs. You have some people (like me) who are able to direct LLMs and get them to produce (nearly) perfect code, while there's others who can't even get them to make a CRUD website without exploding.
Yeah, i've seen this when others shown. We're no longer in the days when you just copy and paste code snippets in the browser window, nor just dump and entire codebase in the harness and letting it rip, there's an entire new skill tree on how to use each model and harness correctly for maximum gains and bypassing various context hiccups.
>You have some people (like me) who are able to direct LLMs and get them to produce (nearly) perfect code, while there's others who can't even get them to make a CRUD website without exploding.
Well it seems unfair to compare anyone to your brilliance.
Didn't you just accuse someone above of not enjoying coding as if that's somehow a must?
>But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind.
Nobody here is saying that. People are saying whether you enjoy coding or not, doesn't matter for the end product if it does the job just as well. When people buy an iPhone, a pair of Nikes, or some other China made nicknack off Amazon, they don't care if the factory workers who assembled it enjoyed their time on the assembly line making stuff for you, or if they're sweatshop workers assembling your stuff in absolute pain and misery, they care if the end product in their hand satisfies them.
>I really like understanding what I'm building and creating works of art in code.
Is passionate code something customers are willing to pay a premium for versus the AI written one, or do customers only care about the end product and nobody gives a shit if it was vibecoded or whether you poured your soul in the code?
>To be fair, I've definitely seen that said multiple times on HN, even if not in this particular thread.
To be fair, after talking to AI devs on the frontline at a local meetup, I learned that models, agents and harnesses have so many edge cases, traps and footguns, that aren't really well documented anywhere, especially visible on large codebases, that you really need to stay up to date to keep up and squeeze the best out of each model for your intended use case.
More money than the GDP 90% of the sovereign countries around the world is hanging in the balance, and people are taking everything OpenAI and Anthropic are saying at face value as if this isn't the financial / marketing equivalent of war, assuming they they wouldn't use every legal and shady tactic, bending every truth available to them to sway the balance of public opinion in their favor. It makes me feel like I'm living in the twilight zone. People need to wake up.
Despite the announcement originating from a blog named "AI Clambake" covering "weekly, human-powered newsletter for advertising folks". Written by a personal friend of the author. Announced without any corroboration or commentary whatsoever from academics or subject matter experts of any kind. And, of course, not submitted to any peer reviewed journal or even Arxiv.
The author of the purported discovery was described as a "self taught AI engineer and amateur linguist". In the comments the friend insisted several times that a draft of the paper (not posted), was emailed to a top professor at Rutgers, giving it additional credibility that his friend wasn't another one of ten thousand cranks who has made the same claim over the years (seemingly unaware that cold emailing random professors found from a Google search is the first thing basically every crank does).
You would think this should have set of dozens of alarm bells for everyone, making the value of this announcement basically zero. And yet it hit the front page with the bulk of comments ecstatic that some random guy with Claude Code could do something experts in academia who spent their lives devoted to the problem couldn't.
I had become accustomed to the toxic optimism of this hype cycle in which even mild criticism leads to accusations of being a discredited "AI skeptic"/Gary Marcus/Ed Zitron type who was "coping" (?). But this was like something you'd see shared on FB linking to a .xyz domain by an elderly family member who recently drained their accounts buying Xbox gift cards to pay their IRS bill.
It feels a lot like the week or two when HN was overflowing with exuberance from the LK-99 room temperature superconductor "discovery ". You'd see post after post fantasizing about an imminent future with a world full of maglev hovercrafts, MRIs built into every phone, fusion reactors and more. But people pointing out none of that was scientifically plausible and evidence of LK-99 superconductoring was non-existent were accused of knee-jerk negativity and the typical HN cynicism and pessimism.
For context for those outside the US, this is a play on a common saying "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."
It's commonly used in relation to the 2nd amendment which gives citizens the right to bear arms. It comes up when there are political debates relating to gun violence.
It's a statement of responsibility. Whether it's the government, gun makers', or citizens' responsibility to ensure responsible gun use.
It wouldn’t actually be _that_ surprising. Tech isn’t progressive or countercultural* anymore. And a lot of how people feel about gun rights/gun control stateside really comes down to whether people identify with the population they perceive as owning guns—are they my people or The Other? (I don’t mean to dismiss that there’s an entirely rationalist argument to be had around whether permitting gun ownership and to what extent is good or bad or multivariate for society; I just don’t think it’s the one most people have. And—I’m fairly sure _my own_ take is colored this way.)
* if you know of an industry that’s properly progressive and countercultural and could conceivably pay at least survival wages, sign me right up. I’m good at this one but it no longer fills my cup. I’m tired.
This seems like an odd take. I remember when a large portion of the people I'd speak with online were very pro 2a while also being countercultural. There was a strong individual liberties/responsibilities, anti-government, pro-decentralization and devolution of power, and dare I say libertarian streak. This isn't an attitude I'd associate with the modern definition of progressive.
The big tech era certainly diluted a lot of that but I don't think it ever went away. I haven't seen a huge resurgence in this either so it seems strange to believe that tech is becoming less progressive. From my vantage it is still very far away from where it was in the 80s and 90s. I can agree that it has become much, much less countercultural since it's basically 100% mainstream opinion now.
You're not wrong. We're talking about different eras--and it sounds like you may have been around a bit longer. The mostly libertarian/individualistic (I would dare say _left libertarian_, who seem now to be pretty much politically extinct) era was notable to me in the late 90s through about the mid-aughts. This transitioned into a more progressive culture somewhere in the 05-08 era -- and its rise and fall pretty well overlapped with Twitter's, as best I can tell.
I can't directly speak to The Culture Of The Internet before about '97.
The political, rather than legal, justification for unrestricted gun ownership in the US is that an armed citizenry is able to resist a tyrannical government.
Regardless of your opinion on that argument, I don't think it applies well as an argument against AI regulations.
Sure, but with a harness, said emitted text can run terminal commands and call APIs, which, with the right hardware or auth keys, can do just as much (if not more!) harm.
An incomprehensible amount of money is at stake in an upcoming IPO.
Traditional companies took out superbowl ads, OpenAI manufactures "scares". It's extremely unethical. But we're facing biblical levels of greed here, OpenAI is still wildly unprofitable, so they will attempt to survive at any cost.
It's not just $2k lost here. There's a lot to be said about the immeasurable value of a high-trust society.
As another commenter said: It's incredibly easy to not get shot; don't burglarize someone's home the same way you wouldn't jump in front of a moving train.
Holding the threat of death over people isn't the way to a "high-trust society." Maybe you think it's the way to something similar, but you have to give up the word "trust" because it doesn't apply here. If the only reason I think a man isn't going to rob me is because I will shoot him if he does, I don't trust that man.
A society which only has low crime because everyone is able to use lethal force to defend themselves and their property isn't one I would call higher "trust" than one that maintains the same crime levels without that threat.
High trust doesn't mean you can trust that the people are angels. It means you can trust that they will behave as such. The threat of force is only there for those who otherwise wouldn't.
So, either citizens bear force, or they plead with the government to wield their force. But, force is there, either way, keeping people in line. It has never been any other way.
Correct, the "No object is worth someone's life" is easy to say. However if you want a high trust society, it needs property rights. That only comes through enforcement of some sort.
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