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Andy Jassy, the chief executive, wrote that generative A.I. was yielding big returns for companies that use it for “productivity and cost avoidance.” He said working faster was essential because competitors would gain ground if Amazon doesn’t give customers what they want “as quickly as possible” and cited coding as an activity where A.I. would “change the norms.”

Like what exactly is Amazon giving us here? I don't get it. Also, I want to see Andy Jassy start writing some codes or fixing issues/bugs for next 5-10 years and have those reviewed by anonymous engineers before I take any word from him. These marketers/sales sleezy dudes claim garbage about things they do not do or know how to do but media picks up everything they say. It is like my grandmother who never went to school starts telling me about how brain surgery is slow and needs productivity else more people will die and those doctors need to adapt. Shameless behavior of these marketing/sales idiots as well as the dark side of media has reached new extreme in this AI bubble.

Meanwhile, I can see from comments how a lot of HNers totally agree everything this salesy guy says as holy bible verse and my colleague is sending me freaked out texts about how he is planning to switch career as Amazon Super Boss is talking about vibe coding now but became calm after I told him, these dudes are mostly sales/MBA who never wrote code of fixed issues, same way our PO doesn't know the diff between var and const.

Statistically immigrants in Germany are less qualified than the general population, so they’ll have an even more negative impact.

I need to see some data backing this. Also regardless of stats, many war refugees(the net negatives as told by media) are actually highly qualified but the asylum process and qualification recognition process is eternal. On top of the trauma and uncertainty, they also need to learn a new language, find a new community, patiently go through all the dystopian meetings, cope with their loss of loved ones.

In reality, it is possible for them to be net positive because if things were faster, they would often out qualify the average locals and this also has some effects on wage and market(over supply, constant demand and all the economics).

They don't understand the problem, and when I point that out by explaining my issue another way they just answer "Have I solved your issue?". Well, no, you didn't; you didn't even understand the problem.

This is a real thing. I had similar experience with Discord support. They closed me ticket or sent me to weird chases(restart app, reinstall app, format your phone!, upgrade to latest os version, try a different phone!, update your appstore!, change mobile operator etc). It was insane and in the end, I said I don’t care and will uninstall discord. Then I get a small reply to the ticket, did we solve your problem? If so, we can close this ticket.

And no, I was not doing vague descriptions, I literally sent screen recordings of exact steps to reproduce the issue.

Robber barrons rob people.

The issue with gig economy is that, the provider side is either doing it for some extra cash for as a short stint is fine, but people relying on it for survival do not want to shake the boat as they are desperate and have bills to pay and food to put on the table.

Consultants and contractors charge a fixed rate dictated by the work and contract. Gig economy pushes all liabilities on the consultants minus paying for that privilege. The bargaining power is heavily skewed in favor of then platform, hence nothing will change.

Number of people afraid to pickup the phone and talk to another human being instead of letting few hundred in forgotten subscription is larger than I previously thought. By that sense, without any data, I suspect that chargeback amount is wayyyy smaller headache compared to txn fees from forgotten uncancelled subscriptions.

This tune change should be also correctly correlated to their IPO delay. AI jump previously approaching to an IPO was a hasty attempt to rapidly cut costs and make the books more nice. Presently, they delayed the IPO again possibly to next Autumn.

I agree with /u/welder. Preferably neither. Both of these are custom and runs the risk of being acquired and enshittified in future.

If you are using VScode, get familiar with cline. Aider is also excellent if you don’t want to modify your IDE.

Additionally, Jetbrains IDEs now also have built-in local LLMs and their auto-complete is actually fast and decent. They also have added a new chat sidepanel in recent update.

The goal is NOT to change your workflow or dev env, but to integrate these tools into your existing flow, despite what the narrative says.

If you can find nothing else, you can add a little irritating floating chatbot icon on your product(I am making huge assumptions that it has somekind of UI whether native or web or touch screen or something), which you can converse with to may be RAG stuff from some panel/tab and respond to questions.

I have seen way too many products suddenly becoming ProductX to now ProductX-AI by simply adding a RAG powered document conversation popup.

I am curious, if everything is going to oAI, how are Anthropic, xAI and other unknown ones being funded? That being said, I suddenly realized that, I know only of things that are heavily on the media. Other than these few, I know Meta's LLama, Google's Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral and Qwen.

Aside: I shed a few tears reading the article, since the death of n-gate.com, nothing like that existed until today I found pivot-to-ai.com.

Successful execution is 33.333% of the journey. Solid marketing is the differentiator.

Take for example, we frequently see Cursor, Aider, Windsurf, copilot, but rarely are there mentions of cline, roo and I think like only once or twice in very early days we saw mentions or Supermaven.

While Cursor runs babble from supermaven creator, many cursor users don’t know what supermaven is though they may know Aider or even cline.

Now draw your conclusion.

P.S. while I have no connection with supermaven, I do use it day to day personally as cursor/windsurf feels overhyped and crucial target to be acquired and enshittified anytime now(windsurf already got digested by oAI).

Isn’t it a bit suspect that that particular image benefits a special new tool about which the OP is heavily speculating?

I am very surprised that no one in HN can see the correlation of the narrative and speculations vs the absurd age thrown around only to be repeated by actual people whose image is being tarnished because the mass narrative wants them to feel powerless(first stage of wage suppression).

In EU, obtaining an identity card needs one’s recent biometric(important!) photo and certain finger prints. Not sure about US.

Also where I work, to enter certain facilities, I also need to not only scan my badge, but also my fingerprint or sometimes palm(may sound absurd but I am sure some of you work in same sector).

To me, it sounds like, don't use the new prototype chainsaw, while it'll take down a tree real quick and many hobbyists use it for their first time tree chopping, overtime usage heats up too much and the blade may break open and severe you hand or face, whichever is closer.

If I am writing Go, it is easy to generate enough if/else and error checks. When working in java, basic code can bloat to big LoC over several hours(first draft, which is obviously cleaned up later before going to PR). React and other FE frameworks also tend to require huge LoC count(mostly boilerplate and auto completed rather than thoughtfully planned and written). It is not that serious amount as you may think.

I see a fraudulent benefit in this case. When these non-tech people go into public talks or anything, they can suddenly claim “oh, I use AI to write 80% of my code” and voila! No one will ask whether their responsibility is to write code or do any engineering, simply being able to give some surface level claims makes them credible enough and feed the hype while appearing cool.

It also gives investors more confidence to shower them with money when needed, as non-tech people are also doing AI coding and they are super agile!

When Msft CEO claims that 80% code written by AI, there is a 50% doubt, but when someone adds that, yeah so I have done 150 PRs, now it feels more concrete and real.

Whiz teen did :cool_thing: gets more clicks. Also 18 is adult in legal sense but still not enough adult in doing cool science things, hence any kid before 21 doing cool science thing is in theory an outlier/exceptional, imho.

How can a glorified NLP app be equated with being the backbone of economic development and a path to AGI ? So many people have been fooled by marketing.

Regulators are still figuring out this “AI” and oAI must move into as many market to sustain their valuation and future before regulations start to close many open doors.

Also, when entire EU comission makes “AI” a core focus, all other governments are having a FOMO, which is the most fertile opportunity to entrench oneself quickly before everyone realises the smoke and mirror of “productivity gain” song means just making another layer of middleman mandatory for everything(see Apple pushing towards modifying Safari to be AI first).

Also what climate change? Everyone was being shamed into indignation recently for their carbon footprints, only to wake up to massive power infra expansion and Nvidia/Amazon/Msft announcing that everything is on the table including burning more fossil fuel to power the energy demand(utilities are usually often govt controlled and hence a social cost overall).

Hmm, the cynic in me reads this as move fast and capture market(+regulation) before new regulation is setup to thwart the likes of GDPR and other privacy acts. When something is new and regulators are having hard time understanding the consequences and future risks, it is most efficient and cheap to capture the market. Once the fallouts start, regulations strike but by then the early players are too big and well established to deal with anything, while the new and smaller players get crushed under compliance and consequences of the early big players’ shenanigans.

Did I read that right? Sam Altman is funding this? If true, I am having some new perspective him.

Tipping is NOT omnipresent in the European capital I live in. Of course some apps have tipping options but I never found correlation in service quality to tipping. On the contrary, when I tipped, service quality was “less optimal” and I noticed visible entitlement.

That being said, it is cultural norm here to tip by rounding up the order(say total is 2.59/ you tip by asking to make it 3.00/) when you are ordering in person and the service is/was good and the food is/was also good quality. Alternatively, in some restaurant, it is not usual to tip as order is collected by someone near the cash register while served by someone else entirely and someone else is preparing it. Once you are done eating, you return the dishes and go home, so there is no option to tip as you simply don’t tip at the prepayment step because you don’t know the food and service yet, you don’t tip the server as they simply bring the food and walk away.

Those people will range from your president to regulators to your boss and local utilities. Unlike other novelties(iPhones and internet), AI mandates comes from top-down and is not optional or luxury anymore. We are beholden to the few capital lords if you come to think about it.

At the risk of sounding very naïve and making huge guesses, what you describe seems to be what docker-compose solves. Special order of services, launching several containers at once. However, I have seen my fair share of oddities in the trenches where containers are evolution of virtual machines(vagrant) running everything in one vm but now split out into containers without adapting to how containers work, because new tech lead thought vms were uncool and everything must be docker now.

May be these comments are actually originating from training annotated data? If I were to add code annotations for training data, I would sort of expect such comments which makes not much value for me but for the model, gives more contextual understanding…

Your sentiment is very common, which reminds me of those days where everyone claimed to be able to clone twitter/airbnb/dropbox/gmail/whatever over the weekend.

The real value lies in a successful execution, Windsurf is live and already has brand popularity with revenue stream. When it gets acquired by a titan, the die hard fans(vibe coders) will gain new trust that the product is not going anywhere and instead has solid future(we don’t yet know if oAI plans to do Msft style acquire, extend, kill yet). Cumulatively, this actually increases the value. Also Windsurf already has established enterprise revenue, hence brand trust and experience is already there.

In summary, an existing live and proven product is worth more any day over 100% uncertainty of building a sufficiently capable team to perfectly execute the same idea in specific deadline and also have the added burden of marketing, market penetration, user acquisition etc.

Cursor is gated, Aider is too open and unlocked. Also, Cursor starts with a subscription for basic tier which equates to proven revenue and revenue is proof of demand. Aider is… a product of love and is not valuable to investors.

Locking down Aider will result in backlash and driving all potential users to cursor/windsurf.

I personally use it on my devices as well as on TV and SmartPhones of my non-tech-savvy family. However, deep in my mind, I have a feeling that, any day they will turn face and sell off to some data brokers and suddenly all of my traffic history is centralized there. I used to run a personal AdGuard-Home on cheap VPS, but after NextDNS decomissioned it. May be need to go boot it up again.

people are convinced AI is a scheme by the evil capitalists to make you train your own replacement. The discussion gets very emotional very quickly because they feel personally threatened by the possibility that AI is actually useful.

Are not mutually exclusive. LLMs will train people's replacements while same people pay for the privilege of training those replacement. LLMs also allows me to auto-complete a huge volume of boilerplate, which would take me several hours. It also helps people step out of writer's block, generate a first draft of prototype/mvp/poc etc quickly without wasting long hours bike shedding. It also helps my previously super confident cousin, who blamed me for killing his dream of next AirBnB for dogs, Uber for groceries, instagram for cats not materializing due to me being selfish hoarding my privileges and knowledge, to finally create those ideas and kill his own dreams and definitely ignoring/avoiding me these days.

LLMs are same as knives, crimes will happen, but also necessary in the kitchen and industries.

Companies have decided they don't want to train juniors. They want seniors who already have the skills.

It got worse in last two years. Now Senior Engineers must have exact combo of the weird tech stack and tools with N years of experience exactly as the existing employees, else gtfo, you don't even get screening calls. You don't have something from nice to have list? Lol, why are you wasting our recruiter's time even? She needs to use GenAI to write her next rejection email.

Also, your 15yoe does not matter, unless you are coming from direct competitor, in which case your 1.5yoe with internship is also excellent.

Its a very old claim that the next technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work, or we work drastically less often. Time and again we prove that we don't actually want that.

It actually does but due to wrong distribution of reward gained from that tech(automation) it does not work for the common folks.

Lets take a simple example, you, me and 8 other HN users work in Bezos’ warehouse. We each work 8h/day. Suddenly a new tech comes in which can now do the same task we do and each unit of that machine can do 2-4 of our work alone. If Bezos buys 4 of the units and setting each unit to work at x2 capacity, then 8 of us now have 8h/day x 5 days x 4 weeks = 160h leisure.

Problem is, now 8 of us still need money to survive(food, rent, utilities, healthcare etc). So, according to tech utopians, 8 of us now can use 160h of free time to focus on more important and rewarding works.(See in context of all the AI peddlers, how using AI will free us to do more important and rewarding works!). But to survive my rewarding work is to do gig work or something of same effort or more hours.

So in theory, the owner controlling the automation gets more free time to attend interviews and political/social events. The people getting automated away fall downward and has to work harder to maintain their survivality. Of course, I hope our over enthusiastic brethren who are paying LLM provider for the priviledge of training their own replacements figure the equation soon and don’t get sold by the “free time to do more meaningful work” same way the Bezos warehouse gave some of us some leisure while the automation were coming online and needed some failsafe for a while. :)

he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems right after the section where a hospital team saves various people in a mass casuality situation by empowering nurses to perform formally doctor-only tasks.

Isn’t this the practice we do to sell ourselves during interview about quantifying our work and value?

I firmly believe that the author is the perfect interview candidate who will pass an engineering interview with flying colors. For rest of us, “so erm… I fixed a bug which allowed my employer to scale quicker globally during natural disasters and erm… allow emergency response teams to coordinate. My manager tells me it saves billions of life but I do not have access to actual numbers but the number of promotion each of my managers get when I fix a bug tells me, my contribution has good values”.

P.S. Off-topic.