kerkeslager

No, that's not "in fairness", that's misunderstanding the entire problem.

Having worked 20 years in this field and managed a few projects, no, I wouldn't make a dozen mistakes, because I would refuse to take on work I can't responsibly do.

Invasive and risky work IS the thing I want to be working on because it's the place where I can be most valuable, but part of my value comes from asking the right people the right questions. If I'm working on something invasive and risky, I'm going to work directly with the people who wrote it, and only when THEY think I understand it well enough am I venturing in alone.

Absent access to the people who wrote the code, I'm going to start by writing tests around the code and spend a lot of time checking my initial assumptions upon reading the code, because I know that I don't know what I don't know.

Yeah, if I did foolishly just started making changes, I'd make mistakes but that's missing the point: a good senior engineer knows not to do that.

That's the failure point of AI: it's arrogant. It will provide you statements without any idea if they're true and make changes without any idea if they're correct. It will never tell you "I don't know how to do that" or even "I am not sure if this is correct". It just does the work with infinite confidence even when that confidence is not justified and often it will be just as hard to figure out if the AI's work is correct as it would be to do the work yourself.

I started coding before Stack Overflow existed, and those were the days when coding was most fun for me. Learning HyperCard Basic from the manual that came with the computer was so full of joyful moments.

Stack Overflow had it's heyday, but by the time AI came around I already wasn't using it. Stack Overflow for a long time has been inundated with the kind of people who think everything is the XY problem[1], and arrogantly assume they know what your problem is better than you do. Stack Overflow was all-but-useless for at least 5 years before AI broke into the public eye.

[1] https://xyproblem.info/

When the LLM presents what it learned as its own thoughts without any attribution, that's the theft.

And you understand that. You're not stupid. This is the thing: AI is convenient for corporations, so you'll make dishonest arguments to justify your unethical behavior. Maybe you even believe what you say, but that's because people will hold on to any flimsy thing that lets them feel like they're good people, not because the reasoning actually makes any sense.

This is why people talking about AI get booed at speeches. There's no conversation to be had: you're not interested in the truth, or what's right, or what's good for anyone but yourself.

Donations.

I don't think these complex institutions can be viewed as having a uniform ideology.

Yes, any university understands that many (most?) of their students are simply there for a diploma that opens up opportunities, and the parts of an institution that view it as a business are going to want to maintain the value of that product.

But the faculty of a university isn't typically in it for the money--in most fields you can make more money in industry than in education. A lot of teachers just want their students to learn, whether their students want to learn or not. Faculty senates aren't powerless in steering an institution, and sometimes knowingly make unprofitable decisions--something a lot of HN can't imagine or understand. ;P

And a lot of students are there for that--in fact some of the most profitable students are. Do you think a Saudi prince need a diploma to open up opportunities? No--they're there because they, or someone in their family, values something else about the institution, be it knowledge, networking, etc.

I wouldn't reduce student motivations to career vs. learning.

I'm not, that's why I said "Students are at school for a lot of [...] reasons".

College can also be about aspiring to a better society, with the university as microcosm.

For example, a society in which people are honest, and have integrity.

Sure, but that's irrelevant:

1. A cheater is capable of not cheating when they're taking a proctored exam, but it doesn't make them honest--they'll just cheat later in life when given the opportunity.

2. People don't suddenly become cheaters when they're given the opportunity to cheat--the people who would cheat when an exam isn't proctored were going to cheat in other areas anyway.

Integrity and honesty are values, and it's pretty difficult to change people's values. I don't think either policy changes anyone's values. That's particularly true of integrity and honesty as those are how people behave when nobody's watching--if you watch and people know you're watching, everyone behaves honestly.

If you want to change people's values, I'd argue universities are pretty poorly-situated to do that. Philosophers are better at finding ethical ideologies that justify unethical behaviors than they are at getting anyone to give a shit about what behaviors they find ethical or unethical. Changing people's values is best achieved by a society that rewards values we uphold and gives us leaders that embody those values. What we have for leadership is pedophiles and grifters, and a lot of those came from our most prestigious educational institutions.

I think it really depends on how you view our high education system. As a middle-aged man returning to school to switch careers, my entire reason for going to school is to learn, and I'd never cheat because that would undermine my own goals. To me the purpose of school isn't the degree--I made an entire career already without one--it's to learn.

Students are at school for a lot of poorly-thought-out reasons: inertia, not knowing what else to do, because their parents made them go, etc. If they're not there to learn, you can't make them learn. No, not even by proctoring exams. The only purpose that achieves is to gatekeep.

And, gatekeeping for doctors and pilots is a good thing. We don't want to let just anyone become a doctor or pilot. But frankly, I don't give any shits about whether an AI programmer has made it through a gatekept degree. That stuff can be gatekept at other points--if they show up to work pretending and don't know anything, that will become obvious, and degrees maybe aren't the only or even best way to obtain that knowledge anyway.

All that's to say: if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it--that simply closes doors to interested learners, while allowing people who can "college" well to thrive without really learning. Let the cheaters cheat--they're only hurting their own learning--and I think it's often because you're forcing them to take some gen-ed thing that isn't useful knowledge to them (I'm looking at you, calculus--why was I forced to take 4 semesters of calc, when I always knew that the prob and stat classes I took as electives were more useful?).

Right because without AI everything you read on the internet is 100% true and correct.

The hallucination percentage of referenced sources such as Wikipedia is much better than AI, and for many sources such as the NYT or Al Jazeera, it's easier to tell what human bias would cause someone to maybe be inaccurate--we're leveraging our existing knowledge because we deal with other humans all the time.

AI, on the other hand hallucinates in unpredictable ways.

Learn how to use AI properly just like any tool and you can benefit.

Sure. But the claim I was disagreeing with was that it's easy to use AI ("properly" being implied). I'm saying it's NOT EASY to use AI properly. In fact, it's so difficult that even intelligent people can't do it, and many more won't do it.

...such as?

Are cryptocurrencies supposed to be a potential replacement for real life cash? This was my understanding of the motivation behind Bitcoin, at least.

This was the original stated purpose, yes. But this works poorly in practice. Hypothesized frictionless tooling that would make it easy to make purchases with crypto has not emerged.

Nowadays it's held more like a speculative asset with value that comes from scarcity and demand, much like gold (though gold has some industrial application which Bitcoin does not).

Side question: what's the least scammy and complicated way to buy Monero these days?

It's easy to use AI to greatly increase your knowledge of a subject.

It's actually not.

It's easy to get an AI to say a lot about a subject, but that doesn't mean anything the AI said was true. There's a significant risk that the AI has simply hallucinated the information, and now you "know" a bunch of false ideas about the subject, which is worse than not knowing anything about it.

So what? AI companies are buying laws, and a lot of people thinking that's true doesn't make it less true.

I believe you when you say it mattered to you, but:

1. Your experience is likely an outlier--I'm not saying your experience doesn't matter, I'm saying that your experience and experiences like yours are likely not represented significantly in the data.

2. Other people with outlier experiences may have different needs, i.e. an intervention which improves one reader's experience may make another reader's experience worse.

I did some web accessibility work which involved interviewing a number of disabled clients, and the ultimate conclusion was that we needed to make our site colors configurable. One group with visual impairment needed high contrast, while a few clients with sensory issues were unable to use the site for long when high contrast was used because it was overstimulating. The lower-contrast modes also had issues for colorblind clients, although these clients were less common in the user pool.

In typical American corporate fashion, the entire research results were scrapped when a donor wanted us to use color schemes related to our brand, despite overwhelmingly positive feedback from users on our accessibility configurability.

This seems pretty intent on burying the lead.

The long conclusion seems to be that all the conventional wisdom on the subject is not borne out by the empirical evidence. So why spend so much time explaining all the the conventional wisdom? I don't need you to tell me about 100 people's opinions just to tell me they're all wrong.

In theory, vibe coding and understanding don't have to be mutually exclusive, but in practice, I think that the people who have the discipline to actually maintain their understanding of a codebase are few. I've code reviewed things from people who claim they are reviewing what comes out of the LLM carefully, and talked to them about the code, and while they think they understand the code, they simply don't, which becomes abundantly clear when I try to explain the problems I find in the code.

Does anyone ever actually use that line?

Yes, I've heard that exact wording from cops.

From normal people, the more common way of saying it is along the lines of "well I don't really care if the cops see anything on my computer".

If you are a two man startup, burning through runway and pre-product-market fit... then spending a lot of time on tests is questionable (although the cost-benefit now with AI is changing very fast).

What's insane that people in 2026 still think tests slow you down.

It takes me maybe 40 hours (1 week) of coding to start receiving ROI from writing tests in a greenfield project, and by 80 hours I'm pretty sure I've saved more time from bugs and improved design due to TDD than I've spent writing the tests.

The ROI is even faster if I'm not the only developer on the project.

If your flagship product takes less time to develop than 40 hours, then your product is extremely vulnerable to being copied by another company, so your entire software project is a bad business idea.

So there really aren't many exceptions: either your project benefits from tests, or it's too easy a project to be a business.

So frankly, it's your comment lacking in cost/benefit analysis.

While working on Cutlet, though, I allowed Claude to generate every single line of code. I didn’t even read any of the code. Instead, I built guardrails to make sure it worked correctly (more on that later).

The "more on that later" was unit tests (also generated by Claude Code) and sample inputs and outputs (which is basically just unit tests by a different name).

This is... horrifically bad. It's stupidly easy to make unit tests pass with broken code, and even more stupidly easy when the test is also broken.

These "guardrails" are made of silly putty.

EDIT: Would downvoters care to share an explanation? Preferably one they thought of?

It would be great if people would drive safely, but they don’t, so that’s why I think redesigning roads is the only real way to change driving behavior.

This is really the crux of it: why are you so insistent that we can only redesign roads? Why can we not redesign roads AND have people do community service?

An aside: red light cameras being illegal is such an unfortunate thing, but I really don't see a solution to that. My ideal world would have red light cameras that can only save the recording when they detect an infraction, so that everyone else's privacy is respected. But of course there's nobody I'd trust to implement, install, or use those cameras--law enforcement doesn't care about privacy--so we can't have red light cameras and have privacy.

And speediots' data free claims don't ever honestly talk about how they're totally okay with letting thousands of people die every year so they can save a few seconds that they're just going to waste posting their self-centered opinions to Hacker News.

There's no ethical justification for speeding--you're just okay with being unethical if it allows you to not have to learn patience.

That’s reality, you aren’t going to change that unless you start executing people that speed, and that isn’t a realistic solution.

This is an adult conversation, please think before you type absurdities like this.

If (A) there was enough enforcement to actually catch people that speed, and (B) the punishment was rehabilitative (you have to clean up the roadway you were endangering people's lives on and take a class to retest for your license) there would be far fewer speeders.

What you’re arguing for is akin to operating industrial machinery without safeties

No, actually, I'd love if we redesigned roads so people instinctively drive slower. I'm not arguing against that in any way.

All my post was doing was insisting that if you're going to blame someone, you place blame where it belongs. You're blaming people doing what they should be doing instead of the people endangering everyone around them.

Don't even get me started on how easy it is to get a driver's license with no clue how to drive. If they wanted to reduce deaths they should start by raising the bar on license difficulty.

Retesting is vital, too. Every 10 years. And if you have something like 3 moving violations you should have to do some community service, and retake the test.

I don't believe in fines on individuals: if the punishment for a crime is a fine, that law only applies to the poor. If you insist on endangering the lives of the people around you, then you get the same inconvenience as anyone else.

As you said, that doesn’t do anything since the road is designed to go 35-45 MPH, that is how fast people will go, with the exception of inflexible rule followers that drive 25 MPH and cause dangerous speed differentials.

If speediots followed the rules, there wouldn't be a speed differential. You're blaming the rule followers, when in fact it is the people with the patience of a toddler causing the speed differential.

Driving is, in most cases, the only life-and-death activity you undertake during your day, and if you don't have the emotional capacity to handle not being where you want instantly, you don't have the emotional capacity to handle a machine that can kill other people.

OPs comment isn’t a charade, he’s pointing out that it’s a very blurry line.

Sorry, it just isn't, at least not in a lot of the examples he gave. It's not ambiguous whether "sponsored by" scenes on YouTube are ads: they're ads, and bringing them up only highlights how many OBVIOUSLY NOT BLURRY situations exist that we could easily ban.

I’m not trying to gish gallop you here - the point isn’t to cherry pick any specific example it’s that advertising isn’t just a billboard or a sponsored VPN segment in a YT video.

Well, whether you're trying to gish gallop or not, you're succeeding!

You're simply ignoring the obvious: it seems you agree that billboards and sponsored VPN segments on YT videos are obviously ads. So we can ban those.

That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.

And I'm equally allowed to point out when what passes for "discussion" here is nakedly disingenuous pro-advertising FUD. Sorry, I just don't believe that you're too stupid to identify advertising when it's blatantly obvious. It's a compliment! You're intelligent!

Sure, there are some ambiguous situations, and that simply does not matter. Ban the obvious cases, then iterate to close further loopholes.

I’m a hugely pro EU person, and support the vast majority of what they do. The Cookie Banner is a disaster and has just resulted in a massive step back for the Internet worldwide. The USB C charger rule missed the forest for the trees. Their stance on technology has been poor, misguided and misunderstood, and often pushes the needle towards US companies winning out.

Is this the "discussion" you're talking about? It seems like you're just bringing up irrelevant stuff.

It's always funny to me when people feel the need to tell us they won't be inflicting their poorly-thought-out fallacies on us any more. Don't threaten me with a good time!

The argument you're making is known as a "perfect solution fallacy".

I don't even know for sure whether I think cereal boxes displaying their contents is advertising--I'm not going to make a snap opinion on that--but it's completely irrelevant. We're drowning in advertising, advertising where it isn't ambigious whether or not it's advertising. We know that YouTubers "sponsored by" scenes are ads--this isn't ambigious, and we can write legislation that bans it.

AI agents mean that dollars can be directly translated into open-source code contributions, and dollars are much less scarce than capable OSS programmer hours.

I think this is true, but misses the point: quantity of code contributions is absolutely useless without quality. You're correct that OSS programmer hours are the most scarce asset OSS has, but AI absolutely makes this scarce resource even more scarce by wasting OSS programmers' time sifting through clanker slop.

There literally isn't an upside. The code produced by AI simply isn't good enough consistently enough.

That's setting aside the ethical issues of stealing other people's work and spewing even more carbon into the atmosphere.

I've got a few open source projects out there, and I've almost never received any PRs for them until AI, simply because they were things I did for myself and never really promoted to anyone else. But now I'm getting obviously-AI PRs on a regular basis. Somehow people are using AI to find my unpromoted stuff and submit PRs to it.

My canned response now is to respond, "Can you link me to the documentation you're using for this?" It works like a charm, the clanker doesn't ever respond.

I support government funding for things that keep the population exercising. It literally saves taxpayers money by driving down healthcare costs.