> If you’re poor, Europe is better. If you’re middle class, it’s debatably, but probably Europe. If you’re rich, by which I mean you make a few hundred thousand a year or more, America. Obviously.
This is what most Quality of Life America/Europe arguments on Hacker News boil down to. Overrepresentation of rich people. America has more upward redistribution of wealth. Ergo America is better.
Indeed, and that's not what I said or was implying. My comment was an analogy in response to:
> Until very recently, I pored over every single line of code Claude generated with razor sharp scrutiny.
As LLMs generate better code in a higher level language (where better equals fewer defects, and does what you want), scrutiny of that code by humans will naturally drop. Human scrutiny will likely be replaced by something that doesn't exist yet, perhaps some sort of higher-order 'LLM linter', or Lean-esque language or tooling that somehow proves the LLM did the correct thing.
It's entirely possible in 2026, to further manually optimise compiler generated assembly, but vanishingly few people do that.
The point of my comment is that 'good enough' is almost here as demonstrated by the parent's comment.
> As LLMs generate better code in a higher level language (where better equals fewer defects, and does what you want), scrutiny of that code by humans will naturally drop. Human scrutiny will likely be replaced by something that doesn't exist yet, perhaps some sort of higher-order 'LLM linter', or Lean-esque language or tooling that somehow proves the LLM did the correct thing.
Your “analogy” doesn’t hold up. The scrutiny applied to compilers are done by the compiler developers. Eventually if requirements don’t change the full test suite becomes the oracle. Not because of an attestation from a ghost in the machine but because of scrutiny done, let’s say over two years on a compiler that was reaching feature parity.
This obviously holds for compilers generating correct code since it is so well defined.
And this also holds for the efficiency of the generated code, since that is also obviously scrutinized by compiler developers.
Granted, the venerable LLM and the compiler do meet in a sort of functional intersection where all you can concievably care about is some thing that has a well-defined test for functionality or fitness. In the compiler’s case that’s the benchmark (good enough to not look at the assembly). But then one should go to that example directly and not to compilers in general.
> The scrutiny applied to compilers are done by the compiler developers.
I apply scrutiny to Common Lisp compilers, and have done this for more than 20 years. I'm not a compiler developer. I don't even look under the hood, at the code of the implementations.
Instead, I run massive random testing. Billions and billions of randomly generated functions, thrown at the compiler to either try to get it to crash or to generate code that produces incorrect results (detected by differential testing with different settings or transformations that should preserve what is being computed.) It's a remarkably effective way to surface compiler bugs.
We’re seeing more and more slippery slope arguments, except the slippery slope leads to human cognitive oblivion and it is actually a good thing actually.
> I just hope that there are more Terence Taos out there than people like me.
Just spare me. Being under external pressure to “ship code” is one thing, but being personally inclined one way or another (no external pressure) is another. And when you think being inclined like that is existentially risk (for human civ?) then, what? It’s just the way you are wired and hopes and prayers that collectively that doesn’t drive us off the cliff?
This aw shucks persona isn’t convincing. Same thing with AI Bros who are (1) making the most awesome tech that has ever existed, and (2) aw shucks hope it doesn’t kill us all in the end.
Every ten minutes of worry becomes ten seconds of relief. Every tasteful delight is followed by three moments of gastric distress. Every fifteen second laugh is built on half an hour of stress/worry/trauma/hurt.
Enjoy every hedonic pleasure. But the balance sheet doesn’t look good even if you always do. It’s either all just a raw deal or we need to look beyond the low- and high-minded enjoyments.
I care a lot more about my gainful employment compared to the everyman being able to create their own... something.[1] That’s very selfish of me, AI Industry, and I’m sorry.
> Would you mind, if you could suddenly, over night, be a carpenter, a watch maker or glassblower?
Yes. If that came with the little-bitty stipulation of being tied to the “compute” property of these AI behemoths.
Of course going beyond that it gets less problematic. Some carpenter-skilled exoskeleton is a lot less problematic than disembodied intelligences spamming our minds and each other.
[1] What exactly? My mind is so saturated with AI tools being literally devtools. On top of devtools on top of devtools.
Well we can finally get back to a semblance of the status quo ante Internetum with something like businesses being able to list all of their contact information on their own websites instead of “see our FB page”.
This is what most Quality of Life America/Europe arguments on Hacker News boil down to. Overrepresentation of rich people. America has more upward redistribution of wealth. Ergo America is better.
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