apsurd

I agree with you. There would be no X without Y person. Undeniably. The scope of the project matters seems clear though. I think it should be clear and obvious what one means when they say "I made this" recipe from scratch. Even then, there's "did you invent this recipe!?" or do you mean you "prepared it in your kitchen?." That scale and scope is very different from what it means to make a film. And it's where I agree, there's substance to a Hitchcock film being made by Hitchcock. It doesn't mean he literally wrote, acted, set/wardrobe-created, and filmed the movie! But we're losing the plot here to give a similar substance to "I made this app" and allow it to mean one-shotting Fable to clone the latest "you don't prompt AI, you build your empire with a team of Agents" orchestrator.

Typically the builder crowd absolutely agrees that leadership did not in fact make the things that bear their name. Like Musk didn't make Tesla, neither the company nor the cars nor any of its engineering advancements.

So I think it's playing both sides. Nolan didn't make The Odyssey. He directed and produced it. Large projects require many many people; with this in mind I realize this whole discussion is just one's ability to make something of their own accord: a cake, a pottery bowl, a wood shed. The whole LLM thing blurs the lines but really it turns the conversation into AI rallying.

It's as simple as recognizing the difference between "making" The Odyssey and "making" breakfast from scratch for your family. (and no you didn't have to have laid the eggs to claim "making" so it's really not so rigid)

But that’s just arguing about the meaning of the word “make” now.

This is what communication is. Words are representations for whatever it is that we're talking about. There is no other way.

Agree with you on what we're talking about, disagree on the stance. It's a discussion of value yes. vibe-coded software has less "I made this" value but still holds "does this have utility" value. They're different. Making things with AI is its own kind of making, but it is not the same kind of making as baking a cake from scratch, building a doghouse, or planting your own garden.

Plenty of comments already. "I made this" is a reserved concept for one's hands being in the clay. It's different. It is its own experience. And it is different from any other approach toward the end result. That's it.

features with theoretical use incur cost up front and yield no value. tech debt is only part of the cost, the other is opportunity cost of writing the OPTION. There’s really no good reason to create theoretical use features.

Thinking of software from finance and derivatives pov really blew my mind. here’s the article, it has AI smell but it’s short and the mental model is good: https://newsletter.kentbeck.com/p/the-cost-yagni-was-never-a...

it’s a breakthrough for me because i too like to build so it’s hard to not build. With options, i don’t get to build blindly but there’s still satisfaction in holding the option. collect the options, system design them, build on that layer.

ooh I like your site: https://webb.page

false equating that author's AI hate is hating SF tech-bros? Oh I think I am being misunderstood, that makes me feel better about the insta-downvotes. Author states it plainly:

This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.

damn, you all hate SF that much?

Your SF hate isn't a good look.

There are many things to be critical about but shoehorning an entire metro into the echo-chamber you're supposedly beyond yet can't help but orient your entire world view as the anti-SF-tech-bro all while running a startup and discussing AI on HN.

TLDR: SF is more than Paul Graham worship parties.

EDIT: Think I'm being misunderstood! author goes out of his way to blame shitty San Francisco.

This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.

The moving of money across time is 100% central to money's value. Passing digital money around to cook the books is moving money... fraudulently. So yeah, they're not the same unless you're goaling on the semantic purity of the word "move".

self-evident quality

+1 as adults we intellectualize way too much what kids are reasoning… they aren’t reasoning! they aren’t fully developed. it’s literally not that deep to them.

every year that passes, the idea of the only personal time one has is in the bathroom on the toilet hits harder and harder. there’s a whole back catalog of jokes about this; hiding in the bathroom, talking extra long. yep, checks out.

this post is no good. It's a continual rehash of what's going on in the industry. That's how all social media is, it's entirely time sensitive, keep saying the the same things and be the one to say it so the discussion happens on your "content".

OP is playing the game. The post literally says "from LinkedIn" so if you look, he has 500+ connections and 1400 followers. That's not nothing. Good for him, all advice points to this new attention economy we live in.

I'm a bit aged out of all this. And I rode the 2010s wave so I can't give any advice in good conscience. I can only say that I see you and there's a whole world of silent majorities out there with no follow count and no broetry with our name on it. (search for that word in this thread, just learned it, it's great!)

I don't think that holds. Internal docs for bespoke frameworks, with examples, are effective at steering AI. The main thing is that both the API and the docs are well written. Easier said than done, but you can ask AI how to write effective documentation for AI.

again with these linkedin "articles".

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This is valid in the other direction as well. Principle engineers, CTOs, with legitimately earned authority end up using that authority to 100x their output onto the team as if it was a Godsend unlock.

It's not. There is no one person that has universally good taste. Also, we're not in your head, no matter how much better of a coder or whatever. We're not in your head and it's all terribly painful to navigate.

You're convincing me to side with this ori_b here.

I knee-jerked downvoted their initial take because it reads as ineffective. boycotts just concentrate the energy of the other side even more. If anything we need more participation across the spectrum to shape what isn't going away.

But reading the discussion, deliberate advocacy and taking a stance counts too. Um yeah, there is a problem with profiting from real-estate-go-up willful-ignorance.

it’s easy to agree with your point on the surface, but then we’d be handwaving a lot of negative subtle signaling. I think because HN is mostly developers on the inside we have to assume that a non-Technical audience might see it differently. That is of course true but one very realistic problem I see is that a vibe coded app with made up testimonials, figures, facts pretty much made-up everything is indistinguishable from an actual company. And we put this entirely on the customer to discern. That’s a terrible precedent, no different from posting falsehood on Facebook.

edit: OK I wrote this before I even opened the page and now that I seen i the entire persona is made up. Or it’s seeded in reality and then AI fills in the 80% to round it out, except it’s on the audience to trust. Sad.

from a business standpoint, PMF was never about the underlying software. It’s a developer’s wet dream to toil away in a garage toward some Technical ideal, and then have the world applaud their genius and shower them with money.

Now to be fair, there are windows of time where that really did happen for some few. As a craftsman developer, I have the same wet dream. The problem is I know it’s just a dream now that I’m older.

So what AI has done is condense the frame in which a developer can spend years toiling away in the belief that they just need to keep going. Now the feedback loop is more instantly connected to reality and the reality is most all this stuff nobody wants or needs. starting a business now is ironically about all the business bits and that’s just rather annoying for builders like the HN crowd, myself included. This is more cathartic than anything. What do I know about entrepreneurial success?

it cannot be discussed or else it becomes the flow.

i’m not the parent, but you’re using college and learning interchangeably in the discussion. Learning is indisputably causal and necessary and valuable toward a better life and better earning and employment opportunities. what’s in debate is whether college as the mechanism for learning still holds up with regard to various parameters. it’s not obvious and the problem is there’s tremendous inertia biasing the status quo.

On if college was accessible and free would that change the equation: yes of course. I’d recommend anyone go to college that can, (i didn’t) but it wouldn’t because it’s the best way to learn a topic, and id recommend it with the transparency that it won’t make or break the rest of your life and you can learn whatever you want whenever you want for the rest of your life so take the long view here.

Zuck is a world class operator. He’s led one of the top richest companies of all time.

I think the world is worse for it but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The list is just to refute the idea that it was one weird trick that gave him the keys to the planet.

and it’s not about him being first or coding it himself, it’s that it happened with him at the helm. that’s just how it goes.

also: face tagging in photos, the fb app platform and the like button pioneered concepts that we take for granted today. also, how product is done internally, growth metrics, all borne from facebook.

The like button is an ingenious and insidious invention. It compelled every other external web property to willingly load fb sdk. It’s mind blowing how effective it is.

I am morally against Facebook, but anyone that says zucky was lucky, as a tech person, likely just sour grapes.

corporate espionage at global scale to get ahead of existential threats is some pretty insightful leadership, it’s all a matter of what team you’re rooting for.

the distinction is specific to the economic value calculation.

it’d be disingenuous to assume the conversation is about anything other than the economic trade off. That said, wholly agree that if school was about learning, it’s great for advancing and curating an environment for learning as its own value.

fwiw in high school, authority figures justified college as a way to counteract the failure scenario of dead-end jobs. success looked like a good paying job and opportunities to do what you’d like like vacations and raise a family. Maybe thats the right framing for the rank and file public school, but it’s why I didn’t even apply to college, let alone attend.

edit: it is objectively economically more valuable to hold a degree, the data is clear. my issue is that it’s reverse causality as is always the issue with data signals.

when you go back to the scenario of what to tell a public school kid, going to college actually works as a negative motivation tool, because the majority of kids won’t go to college so you’re basically telling them their economic value is shit before they are even grown. I don’t believe in that.

Same experience. "Is school worth it" is divisive because it speaks to people's investment and value system. I too have a full and successful career in software without any degree largely for the same reason you mentioned: I learned the hard way and continued to show up.

Earned experience is objectively valuable. The problem is people don't want to be fools so "working hard" looks suspect when you see plenty of people do well because of network and social aspects.

When it comes to school, there's obvious value in the social/status/network aspects and debatable value in the actual content, but what I find most discussion worthy is how one's background shapes mentality toward "putting in the work" when there's no explicit reward for said work.

The simple difference is that school promises you results. One at least leaves with a paper that's supposed to be worth something. Doing anything else, provides no such guarantees.

causality direction violation. is it because of the degree that people get jobs or is it because everybody tells everyone that they need a degree that they get a degree to permit themselves to apply to get the job?

the productive takeaway is that of course its safer to come with a degree but it’s hardly proof that one needs the degree. Nobody is going to risk their or their kids livelihood on being the variant for the a/b test though.

Yes, this is documented in Bloom's Taxonomy for learning/education. Creating is the highest level of understanding.

    Remember – Recall facts, definitions, formulas (memorization).
    Understand – Explain ideas in your own words.
    Apply – Use knowledge to solve problems or perform tasks.
    Analyze – Break information into parts and identify relationships.
    Evaluate – Judge, critique, or justify decisions.
    Create – Synthesize ideas to produce something new.

point 3 means basically optimize for not retaining wealth? =\

You'd be missing the point though. The foundational point. All things have their origin story.

(both things are true, yes reality is infinitely more complex and no you're probably not going to be the next President or cure cancer, but that's not the lesson one ought to instill. And I do believe there is a scaffolded way to do it. All things are possible... to explore. The feedback loop of fidelity of lessons, comes incrementally, after.)

yeah clearly a manufactured excuse to get attention on the project. This is YC HN after all, can't knock it but I also can't bring myself to upvote either.