blanched

"Sufficiently developed" seems like a cheap proof. There are still many non-technological problems above and below it.

For example, how do you ensure everyone on the road has a self-driving car? We've sufficiently developed electric cars, but they're not nearly the majority.

Are you making a joke? Not being snarky, I actually can't tell if it's a real suggestion or satirical.

The distance between DeepSeek and Claude is far, far less than the distance between Google Search and any of those.

The frustrating part is that these posts will never post any details about the business, despite the fact that it would immediately invalidate most criticism.

It seems to be a similar phenomenon to productivity "gurus" who write and evangelize polyphasic sleep and "grindset" and so on - when you ask what they're using these superpowers to actually accomplish, they're very quiet. Or it's "coming soon." Or "I'm not going to waste time explaining to someone who obviously doesn't ~believe~." It quickly becomes religious.

I don’t even know the names of any open source search engines, but the open source models perform decently on various benchmarks and in personal experience.

Was it ever even a claim that open source search engines were trying to outperform google, let alone kill it?

I get what you’re saying, but I think it’s fair to view it as equivalent to drinking a protein shake after a workout. You used the resources in a productive and healthy way, now you need to replenish them.

From what I can tell, the sad truth is that people think “he’s a billionaire / trillionaire, I want to be involved with that.”

It’s a variant of the people who pick “Jay-Z” in the meme question “would you rather have half a million dollars or lunch with Jay-Z?”

Personally my least favorite is the overuse of "quietly" (e.g. "No tricks. No marketing gimmicks. Just one company quietly outperforming the others"), and the one that makes the least sense to me is "that's the wedge."

I'm curious how these become so ingrained. Then the uncomfortable part is humans start repeating it more (a colleague said "belt-and-suspenders" during brainstorming the other day).

I think it's a little different because:

1. This person is asking us to use/try their product. Very different from a boss/subordinate relationship.

2. This is Hacker News, which has a certain tone and intention. I might text in lowercase and slang with my friends, but I try to write a little more thoughtfully here. This is just one person offering advice on presenting yourself when presenting a product. Not to mention that they politely hedged - "not a big deal", "I would recommend", "it comes across". The OP is free to disregard.

It’s not my area of expertise, but a friend in the field told me the fun fact originally.

Looking into it, it seems like smell has the most potential for genetic variance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3990440/

That said, I can’t find any direct research comparing perceived senses. So they (and now I) might have oversimplified.

Thanks for the link, looks interesting!

I don’t really understand what you mean. How can you have a community without identity? Isn’t that just a category? i.e. “a person who uses rust” vs “a member of the rust community”. There’s nothing wrong with either one, but the latter tends to define the culture.

Pairs nicely with the fact that smell is the sense most likely to be experienced differently between two people :)

I think this is really insightful. Every "good and invisible" tool I thought of fit neatly into one of those two categories. Examples:

Powerful and specialized: automatic transmission, display/monitors

Simple and limited: syntax highlighting, deterministic autocomplete

The closest ones imo that bridge the gap: ssh, google search

Makes sense! My mistake for assuming it was the former definition, lesson learned.

Hopefully soon our industry will align on some standard terms. I feel like "AI-assisted", "agentic coding", "vibe coding", etc each have a few different meanings already.

I think programming is work, but I get your point :). And yes, of course - I'm mostly just curious how peoples roles at various companies are evolving as they hand off more and more to AI.

To be fair, thraway3837 posted a reply on a sibling comment and offered "AMA" :).

That said, I do see a lot of those posts you're talking about, and I think a lot of AI development is way overhyped. But I also think internal tools like this can be a good use case.

Personally "none of them have read any more than a few lines of code" makes me wary, but if it works for them, then so be it!

Thank you for the thorough reply! I also appreciate that you recognized my question as good faith (and my apologies, based on other replies I should have been less brief to avoid misinterpretation.)

It seems my definition of "vibe coding" was wrong after all, at least in this case, and that you're still doing design. My initial read was that this was fully AI-powered, and while that sounded interesting, it did leave me wondering what the humans did :)

Yes, I'm familiar with these talking points. I didn't mention clean code or solid or frameworks or anything like that.

However, the poster explicitly said they don't do what you said (EDIT: I misinterpreted some of these):

RE "talking to customers"

We get feature requests, improvements, ideas, feedback. JIRA tickets get created, and we ask AI to reference that ticket, code to it, and create a PR

RE "figuring out whether it's actually working for people"

have senior engineers review the actual functionality and none of them have read any more than a few lines of code

RE "figuring out what the heck to actually build"

replaced by "vibe" coding

Maybe my definition of vibe coding is wrong?

--

In any case, I don't have some ulterior anti- or pro-AI motive. I'm genuinely curious why and how a project run this way has humans in the loop at all.

To be clear, I didn't mean this as an anti-AI gotcha. They also said:

We get feature requests, improvements, ideas, feedback

So maybe I misunderstood, but it sounded like the design was external (and based on an existing product to begin with).

Also, my understanding was that "vibe coding" meant more of "make it do X" as opposed to "here's a design for X, implement it."

we ask AI to reference that ticket, code to it, and create a PR

none of them have read any more than a few lines of code

So what do you / your team do?

What are you basing “it delivers more value to customers” on?

Oh haha, kind of embarrassing on my part. Thank you!

What is Halo 14-39? Google wasn’t helpful for me.

Quick fyi that your website is “zoomed in” on mobile safari and a little difficult to use

(Apologies if it’s just my device)

I’ll take a closer look on my desktop later today, I love seeing new programming languages. Sounds interesting!

You know the radiologist you're responding to is a real person? Your last line seems needlessly callous.

If the choice is meaningless, why defend it?

And if the choice is meaningful, why this?

Well said. So many of these painful "discussions" could be ended quickly if people would just honestly answer these :)

Why are you passionately defending this? I doubt the author cares much, it's clearly an example that came about through vibe coding.

It's not core to the tech/product, people think it's off-putting, why not change it?

Hacker News loves to talk about being amazing business-people and "understanding the customer" but somehow that gets dropped for things like this.

Sure, and he's probably not being censored on those.

I had a coworker who occasionally clearly wouldn't mode-switch from LLM to person mode when asking me questions over slack, which was very jarring. They were normally were personable and friendly, so it was obvious when it happened. Grammar and niceties went out the window.

I briefly felt like I was roleplaying an LLM!

I consider myself someone who takes it seriously, and have spent time and resources fighting for change. But it’s wholly unrelated to this particular thread, phenomenon, and story. So having a little “ha ha” moment accomplishes nothing towards the actual cause. It makes people uncomfortable, but not the useful kind of uncomfortable.

That said, maybe we just disagree on how to drive change, and that’s fine. I’ll leave it.