aogaili

Clearly "mechanical" thinking has been automated, and you are better off, if not forced to outsource to AI. Humans have the biological needs, consciousness, taste and imagination, that's what we are left with thus far.

And just like people going to the gym to exercise their otherwise economically useless bodies, same thing will happen with the mind.

Folks, get over it.

Condescending, ignorant, and the author doesn't know what he is talking about.

I'll not explain why, and that would be as deep as the author explanation of his coping.

Why those articles get to hacker news?

Indeed

Leave markdown alone. Focus on JS frameworks and harnesses please.

You ain't much smarter either with by the way you judge things.. neither me for responding to a comment like yours.

When I started posting on HN, many times I get downvoted. And this an another example, you don't get discussion you just get downvoted.

And it's a good thing, it means I think differently.

The fact is, one could pump literally 10k LOC/Day using LLMs, and in the right hands, those will be quality code, and this is objective observation from someone who has been coding for 20+ years. It almost feels like we have tractors for mechanical thinking, but there are those in the industry who built their entire career and identity on the bottleneck of coding, and those struggle.

But those people will be left out, forgotten. Progress doesn't care about feelings and identities, entire civilizations with their minds collapsed, and buried because they didn't adapt to progress. Do you really think your ego can help you to shelter from that when many before you parished?

Machine hater and manual labour worshiper..he thinks he got stupid because he stopped doing if/else and for-loops. Life is full of complexity and it might be helpful to get one level-up in abstraction to try to solve real problems and other people actually care about.

And who are you my therapist? Just argue the point, this is not group therapy forum. Passive-aggressive people are the angriest/nastiest people around.

On one had, AI is being used to cybersecurity and used to find bugs in Linux etc. On the other hand, it seems that AI can't write code without bugs.

So where is the disconnect?

You need citations for humanity shared history?

Download the tools and use them along with your head? I mean a lot of what I stated there is the obvious.

We might need to agree to disagree on this one.

I don't think the transition will be as simple as just flipping a URL. There is an entire legal and technical infrastructure being built around these models and their integration. I think you underestimate an organization's resistance to change once things actually work, as well as the sheer complexity of making that shift.

I also expect pressure will eventually drive the cost of running these models down. Power plants are being built, more capable chips are being produced, and a big chunk of the capital right now is being used to scale the physical infrastructure—the data centers and energy grid. Once that stabilizes, these companies will have positive cash flows. Again, it's highly similar to what we saw with the expansion of social networks, just with more aggressive and widespread adoption.

Ultimately, a handful of companies are going to provide these core capabilities, just like we have a handful of major cloud providers right now. Why do you think this would change? If anything, the trend toward deep vendor lock-in is even stronger now.

I see your point, but having worked as a consultant for a few years, I think most companies will opt to stay once things are stable. Once these systems are functional, nobody wants to touch them.

I remember one government project where we wanted to migrate a system from COBOL to a modern stack. The requirement was for the UI to stay exactly the same as the old green terminal; the evaluation criterion was pixel-perfect proximity to the original. We literally had to build terminals using web tech.

These models are not the same as each other. Once they are integrated and working, the incentive to change them is incredibly low. So really, the race is about who can integrate deeper, wider, and faster over the next couple of years—that is what will determine the long-term winners.

This is the exact same playbook we saw with social networks. There is a reason why we have only a handful of them dominating globally, and guess what? It's not because of the tech.

It is not just about cheaper models; it is about integration with the economy.

These models are building deep integrations into companies and the entire economy. Once that stabilizes, it will be like the electricity grid—pumping tokens to fuel decision-making across the entire global society. Good luck unplugging from that.

Furthermore, there is a massive geopolitical aspect to it: those who are already on the Western financial and technical stack will get integrated even deeper now.

Agreed haha! our beloved fire.

I admit, I didn't read the whole article; I read a few paragraphs and extrapolated the mindset from which the author operates.

Regarding your comment about the business model—the people in Silicon Valley are not stupid. They know the playbook; we've seen it with social networks. The issue isn't the business model itself; it's that these companies need to dominate the market, and the big players are competing for that on a global scale. It's the exact same playbook that played out in financial systems and social networks, and now it's happening with AI. Once these technologies are deeply integrated into enterprises and the global economy, these players will dominate the market for decades to come.

I can assure you, the people running those companies are smarter than you, me, and the author of this article."

I share the same perspective.

It's still better than the sh*t developers produced three years ago.

Some people just like to feel superior by shaming others' work. You can easily tweak the visual output if you want to, but it's good enough for most use cases and better than what developers used to produce.

So, it's progress.

Some people seem to see the world only through bubbles. But if you look at human history, despite the ups and downs, we have a trajectory; generally speaking, human-created systems evolve toward ever-increasing complexity, impact, and efficiency.

The current wave of AI unlocked language - the tools are now speaking and understanding. This, on its own, is astonishing progress. Language is the foundation of our culture and society; it is the very technology that got us, as a species, to where we are today. To have tools that can understand, manipulate, and produce it is a massive leap forward.

Once you see things that way, it is clear that we are not in a bubble; we are in a transition. Yes, there is tons of hype and over-investment, but the demand is real, and so is the impact. Unless you are deep in the tech and have that structural depth, it is easy to dismiss. This is like the invention of the personal computer, but with 100x the impact and speed.

Yes, but I didn't mention that they accomplish anything? mid-managers role is not to accomplish is to manage the team that accomplish..duh

And what is your point? again, the tool is here to stay, it won't replace software engineers as of now, you can't undo progress, so what is your point exactly?

Same point as the textiles industry in the 18th century..and software engineers automating other industries for the last 50 years for what? for fun?

Sorry - I didn't get this comment? I mean isn't strange that people get to live in a digital reality that is dependant on a servers that could be taken down instead of being embedded in physical reality that we call life?

Build something? If the AI is that good then us it..and if it ain't that good then your boss did a mistake?

But they need headcount under them to justify their position...

Am I the only one finding the dependency on those videos games to be concerning?

If you really think those layoffs are due to AI, then you haven't worked in corporations long enough. If companies are not hiring, and are firing, then what do we need middle managers for? In fact, if an engineer is really smart and masters the tools, what do you need POs, managers, executives, and even sales for? If you stretch things to the max, those who master the tools are positioned to automate everyone aside from the capitalist, as they are protected legally

That is limited thinking. People are replacing their bosses, and your boss will be bossing what exactly? Right now LLMs cant' replace the entire spectrum of human intelligence. But if your entire work is just translating your boss ask to for-loops & if-statements, the I guess yes, I would be worried.

Regarding hubris, I've been in this field for 20 years, and there are people in it who are just intolerable, frankly. They memorize every Vim command, refuse to use any other tools, and treat everyone else as less intelligent simply because they can write code... those people are getting humbled hard right now.

Both of these have been happening before the advent of LLMs

I'm not sure about that. I read they are making better use of AI to accelerate building their businesses. Apparently, in China, people were not looking to work in corporations anyway, so they saw AI as a means to escape them.

The "means of production" means jack shit unless you have the capital to scale up rapidly

There are people topping music charts without even having a brand; they just produce good music. There are people automating entire marketing pipelines to minimize capital expenditure, and there are people building niches for small crowds and making a good living out of it. Not everything needs scaling.

Why is it hubris to give a damn about you spend 40 hours a week doing, or to lament change when it works against your enjoyment of those 40 hours a week. God forbid people value their time in any way that isn't monetary.

If you enjoy writing loops and if/else statements, you can still do it, but the market won't pay you when there is a tool that does it faster. That is the nature of the domain. Have you ever thought about the jobs that software engineers automated? What do you think those people did? They adapted, learned the tools, and moved on. This is the first time we are seeing automation at this scale in software engineering, and the reaction of software engineers is exactly the same as those in other fields.

Adapt.

Chinese Gen Zers are starting companies before graduating, people are generating music and starting their own studios, others are improving models and building harnesses, and the rest are on a mission to automate the entire knowledge economy—from healthcare to governance.

Regarding your employer's bank account: if that is all you were doing before, then that is all you will be doing after. You are just complaining about capitalism now. The irony, is that the means of production is now in the hands of millions. Those who are crying are those who paid their mortgages with for loops..well, I think they will continue doing so, with less hubris that's all. LLMs are nowhere near replacing full engineer.

So get a grip fellow engineers.