HN user
"How many times can we have the same discussion."
Until the people wishing it to be true are thoroughly sated.
The reality is that this is the end of programming as a large scale well paying white collar profession as we knew it.
This is the best advice I've read on HN in a long time. Kudos to those with FU money who can ignore it, but this is how you stay employed and thrive in a corporate environment.
"So what do you / your team do?"
Probably the hard part; figuring out what the heck to actually build, talking to customers, and figuring out whether it's actually working for people.
Nobody cares that your codebase is Clean and SOLID, or uses $whatever_framework of the day with 100% test coverage.
"It was easier, I imagine. Now you can vibe code your way out, no?"
Coding was always the easy part of a CS major. Claude won't help you on a proctored Differential Equations exam.
codebases for production code will be so low in quality that they will be unintelligible to humans, and LLMs, too, will have trouble maintaining them
The concern for code quality has become increasingly unfounded. I have noticed over the last year or so that you can still tell when a codebase is 100% AI generated, but not because it is poorly written or disorganized, but that it is now dramatically better than any human would have written.
To each his own I guess. There was nothing more frustrating than walking away from a CC session you expected to churn away at for an hour and coming back to a user question sitting there. More useful would be just getting a list of clarifying questions at the end of the session along with how it answered itself to follow up with or not.
That "+" is making me really nervous. Is this just a naming quirk, or the start of them trying to monetize Vite? If the latter, this is a dark day for frontend dev.
It's only half the full model price, $30/m output: https://cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/ge...
Nano Banana is head and shoulders above the rest, but still too steep for personal use, and half off doesn't really mean much for enterprise if the results are worse. Hopefully this drives the rest to catch up at least.
" After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax."
Apple has always been the most cost effective choice for the value you get going all the way back to the Apple II, it's just that the floor of that cost has always been high. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a just a fanboy one way or the other.
Do they actually have solid delivery dates yet? This still reeks of vaporware to me.
"We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down."
Because a lot of people earn their living by producing or selling food. Your other necessities don't become more affordable just because food prices go down, but if that's your livelihood it becomes at risk. Food was incredibly cheap during the great depression. There's an amazing quote from the PBS documentary series on it; "A sack of flour cost a nickel, but where were you gonna get a nickel?". Steady, controlled inflation via fiat is the only way to keep a capitalistic economy functioning, because you can't micromanage or control the price of everything, and people need money to live. The real issue is stagnation of wage growth while assets explode. It's the transfer of real wealth from earners to owners that has put us in the current position, not absolute prices.
"We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off"
The humble Hot Pocket is the perfect analogy for this. Since the dawn of time, every single Hot Pocket included its own crisping sleeve, that served as both a cooking vessel and eating utensil. The perfect microwaveable snack. And yet, in all of their wisdom, our corporate overlords have declared that they've "cracked the code" through various ingredient changes, to where it's no longer necessary, and through a combination of that plus some vague language around environmental concerns, we no longer need it. So now every Hot Pocket costs the same as it ever did, but gives us a strictly inferior experience. Copy and paste this "Screw you, I don't care because I know you'll just have to deal with it" attitude across all of society, and you get what we have today.
Tailwind is the answer. Always pure Tailwind, not custom classes + utilities. It makes a massive difference vs. stylesheets. The LLM is able to actually reason about your UI in discrete chunks with a semantic layer over the styling, vs. bouncing back and forth between CSS/HTML and trying to reason about custom classes generated on the fly.
"I have to say, to your first point, that exploitation (of humans, labor, resources, consumers, etc.) has always been the primary driver of accumulating large wealth under capitalism"
Under all forms of human civilization, since the beginning of agriculture allowed one person to accumulate more cattle than another. Capitalism is actually a great equalizing force from that yoke - it allowed for the first time to get out of it through ingenuity and hard work. The rule for practically all of existence before that was "you do what the biggest baddest guy around tells you to do or you die", and your entire life and your children and their children's will be the exact same, with no hope of betterment whatsoever. It's what led to the rise of slave morality religions like Buddhism and the Abrahamics; if you have no chance at happiness in this life, best to believe there's something better after, and that those responsible for your suffering will be punished.
I would not be at all surprised if they can put a nought or two on that number.
People keep saying this and it keeps not happening.
ChatGPT Pro was $200/mo when it launched in '23 for a ~100B class model with 8k context. Claude Max is now the same price for practically unlimited access to a ~1T class model with 1M context.
Moore's Law never died, it just switched architectures.
"Ignoring time value of money"
The time value of money is the entire point of what I've said.
And it goes up exponentially when you are just getting by as most of us are. $17k right now is worth incredibly more to me than saving $200/month for the next 20 years.
Why do you need to assume 100% generation
For the time to payback to be even remotely close to 5 years in that scenario. Otherwise you're easily talking a decade plus.
"Saying there's no "ROI" is looking at the situation like the only variable is your monthly expenses."
That's the reality of life for most people outside of our little bubble of six figure earners. If it's a higher monthly price, it's a nonstarter.
"Additional home value/equity"
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Solar is a massive maintenance liability that a majority of buyers will avoid. Fine if you find the right one willing to pay a premium, but how much more are they going to pay for an old system vs. installing their own?
That 5 years assumes you can provide 100% of your electricity usage via solar, which is a complete fantasy outside the south/southwest US, and would realistically require a >10kw system. But again, it's also the out of pocket money we're talking about. Very few normal people can float that, and opportunity cost is real.
I installed a solar system at my home in Massachusetts for 17k last year (after tax credits), 7.82 kw.
This is the problem still in the US. Even at ~$0.23/kwh delivered in the northeast, you're looking at an ROI of nearly five years. Fine if you can float that kind of cash to feel better about yourself, but the economics just aren't there for most people, especially in cheaper parts of the country where rates are ~$0.12. Even financing you're looking at a monthly payment equal to or greater than an electric bill. Of course if you have the time to amortize it you'll come out ahead, but there's simply no cheap solution that can actually save real money out of pocket in any reasonable amount of time beyond theoretical future savings on paper. It will never be a true solution without massive subsidisation that reduces out of pocket to a 1-2 year horizon.
Thank you!
I do this via a simple local MCP tool provided to every harness, that creates a single sqlite .db file in all my repo roots. Anyone can drop in and see what the team is working on, join in, and ask for something to do.
For many, the appeal of a Mac is that it isn't running Windows
Pretty much. I broke down and finally bought my first Windows machine in over a decade to play Subnautica 2. It was so infuriating to use I returned it a week later. You literally have to hack it with shell commands to bypass Microsoft login now. Never again.
"Lest we forget, MIT’s The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 study found that 95% of AI projects fail to deliver measurable P&L impact."
Well we can pretty much ignore this after that line. It's completely meaningless to still be discussing AI capabilities pre-Claude Code and Opus 4.5.
Nope, never would.
"Risks? The risks of a colonoscopy are crazy low though."
Not at the statistical level. Death rate from complications is about 1 in 10,000: https://www.endoscopy-campus.com/ec-news/risk-of-death-from-...
People can simultaeneously be reprehensible idiots while being a reliable expert on something they have personally invested billions of dollars into and operate at scale.
Having your own home and property where no one on earth can tell you how to live: priceless.
Maybe home ownership is becoming a luxury, but humans don't exist in financial spreadsheets. The intagibles of SFH ownership are worth literally everything to me after a lifetime of renting.
It's also absolutely a class differentiator in the US. If you're behind on your rent and getting evicted, that's seen as a personal moral failure. If you're behind on your mortgage and getting foreclosed, it's considered a tragedy, and there are many options for support like forebearance. Just look at what happened during COVID; red state renters were getting knocked on by the sheriff within 90 days, while it can take years for someone to lose their house.
why is the medium relevant at all? what does radio do that a podcast cant
Deliver the news to you anywhere and everywhere with a receiver that can be built from scavenged garbage. Terrestrial absolutely still has a place, and will most likely outlive the internet.
Boomers get all the hate but GenX really is the absolute worst. They took the me-me-me of Boomers without the civic minded temperance of their G.I./Silent grandparents. Life goals of that generation include climbing mount everest, writing a novel, really anything that would make you sound "cool" at a cocktail party, but they never realized that nobody cares unless you've made the world a better place for others.