HN user
Incredible observation. Seasons begin and end on different days depending on sea level. I was under the impression that the first two thirds of March was winter at every elevation in the northern hemisphere. singleshot_ has added much to this conversation. You cannot tell AI slopposters from regular hn users because they all get out of the house the same amount of time.
Spring starts the last week of March. lazystar out there in floral print dresses on March first looking like an absolute tool. Enjoy your train set!
AI is another step up the ladder of abstraction, another tool like linters, compilers, IDEs, code completion.
Can Claude replace you? Have LLMs altered the software developer productivity equation?
In 1987, Fred Brooks wrote [1]:
"But, as we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet. There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."
Most companies do not measure software developer productivity. I have never been part of an organization that does.
Will it collapse the economy? The last innovation to collapse the economy was credit default swaps. This says more about the economic systems we have built than technology or progress.
No one knows what is going to happen. But humans are still necessary for every stage of labor, and software developers are still necessary for making software.
[1] https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/Outreach/pc204/NoSilverBullet.html
So 5-10 years to amortize the cost. You could get 10 years of Claude Max and your $20k could stay in the bank in case the robots steal your job or you need to take an ambulance ride in the US.
I hope someone tells the Mozilla CEO.
No. My labor is transactional. The rest of my time is leisure.
Same reason why I have no interest in working weekends. Is the CEO going to come by my house on Saturday and mow my lawn? Wait, HR said we were family...
The new CEO centered AI ("It's Time to Evolve Firefox Into an AI Browser") in his first communication to the community. Spawned at least three new forks and introduced people to LibreWolf.
His first communication reduced trust: "It is a privilege to lead an organization with a long history of standing up for people and building technology that puts them first."
Now let's put people first by making Firefox an AI first browser. Enzor-Demeo would have made an excellent Microsoft product manager. Too bad he didn't get the job.
It's OK. Paul Graham is one of the good billionaires.
It is satire. You don't need to know the writer to get it. McSweeney's publishes these type of pieces from time-to-time. Laugh or don't. I found this one amusing.
Wikipedia, a generation ago, was considered controversial. It is now more accepted as a legitimate encyclopedia and the criticisms appear quaint when compared to the post-truth atmosphere of our current media. The footnotes and the "citation needed" annotations are meant to mimic a Wikipedia article.
The donate button is a nice touch, from a time when web sites weren't afraid to put links to external sites. Wikipedia probably doesn't need your money, but it is, in my opinion, a solid organization providing an incredible resource to humanity. Though, as with all human enterprises, it has its flaws.
Why are you building projects? Why are you studying Software Engineering?
If you want a career in software development, it's better to learn, which means writing code. And maybe study AI tools as well because they will probably be part of the job.
If you want a career as a prompt engineer, study that. I'm not convinced this will be a viable path anytime soon, as in the next five years. But what do I know? I'm an idiot on the internet and am surprised as you are by this world.
If you want to build solutions for end users or customers, use whatever tools work for you. The only thing that matters is the functioning software and the technical debt to keep it functioning.
I'm old enough to remember Windows CE phones crashing during phone calls.
The best part of MacOS for me is the unix tools. The command line is a real unix command line. And the rest just works. If I need a linux environment I ssh into a VPS.
I truly believe we are in a bubble. I truly believe that AI will exist on the other side of that bubble, just as internet companies and banks existed on the other side of the dotcom crash and the housing crisis.
I don't know how to invest to avoid this bubble. My money is where my mouth is. My investments are conservative and long-term. Most in equity index funds, some bonds, Vanguard mutual funds, a few hand-picked stocks.
No interest in shorting the market or trying to time the crash. I would say I 90% believe a correction of 25% or more will happen in the next 12 months. No idea where my money might be safe. Palantir? Northrup Grumman?
I use vim. Very little flow. My personal journal is a single latex document, I write about 25k words per year in it. I have a macro that inserts the date and time and I write my entry after that. At the end of the year, I spend a few hours re-reading and reflecting. I'll probably convert it to markdown soon.
At work, I keep a markdown file open. I take notes from meetings, quick entries to describe what I'm working on a few times a day. It's a single file that goes back to my hire date with current employer. Super useful.
I store both in private git repo's along with shell scripts and config files.
It's a good point. Any business can get revenue by selling Twenty dollar bills for $19. But in the history of tech, many winners have been dismissed for lack of an apparent business model. Amazon went years losing money, and when the business stabilized, went years re-investing and never showed a profit. Analysts complained as Amazon expanded into non-retail activities. And then there's Uber.
The money is there. Investors believe this is the next big thing, and is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Bigger than the social media boom which made a bunch of billionaires, bigger than the dot com boom, bigger maybe than the invention of the microchip itself.
It's going to be years before any of these companies care about profit. Ad revenue is unlikely to fund the engineering and research they need. So the only question is, does the investor money dry up? I don't think so. Investor money will be chasing AGI until we get it or there's another AI winter.
1. LLM use has made me a more productive programmer, especially when learning new technology. The ability to ask questions about documentation, code, and best practices is nice. It's like Stack Overflow without all the toxicity, outdated answers, and user login antipatterns. Also, one less cookie notification to dismiss.
2. Energy is an important issue. We need a sane energy policy and worldwide cooperation. Corporations should pay the full cost of their energy use, including pollution mitigation and carbon offsets. Pragmatism suggests that this is not likely to happen any time soon. The US will be out of any discussion of sane energy policy for the foreseeable future.
3. The training of many (all?) major LLMs included a step that was criminal. That is, downloading Z-Library or Library Genesis. The issue of Fair Use for training models on copyrighted text is unsettled. The legality of downloading pirated ebooks is well-defined. These books were stripped of their DRM, which itself is illegal under DMCA. It's a crime and CEO's should be held accountable. Training an LLM on copyrighted works might be legal, but stealing those copyrighted works is not. At least buy a copy of the book.
There is more than enough homogeneity of labor in this industry. All workers should organize.
Like all other forums, public and private, HN has an ideological filter. I'm as surprised as the next person that the HN ideological filter turned out not to be permissive enough to discuss the downfall of the free society that fostered its creation.
The oligarchs will not lose their freedom or power and they won't fight (or even inconvenience themselves) to preserve yours. Next time you're reading a blog or a biography of a tech billionaire, remember that they got their wealth from wage theft and they will keep their power by destroying yours.
The only law tech companies -- and the oligarchs that own and control them -- have to obey is allegiance to Trump. No other law will be enforced.
Maybe Paul Graham was simply protecting his station within the oligarchy all along. The turn toward appeasing fascism is nothing more than the path of least resistance. But I'm sure he'll write some blogs warning of complacency and send some tweets on Musk's nazi propaganda site. He's one of the good ones.
The fact that HN is letting political posts stay on the front page after months of suppression shows that we are past the point of denying the authoritarian road we are on.
dizhn is free, for example, to lick as many boots as he desires. No one can take that away.
Lexapro made a huge difference for me. Much more than exercise, meditation, counseling, or journaling. I have tried to come off it a few times and each time it's kind of a disaster.
These threads sure drop off the front page fast. It's almost like someone doesn't want to talk about authoritarianism.
It's fascinating to watch the US Federal government dismantled by a tech giant while all of FAANG complies in advance. Thousands of software developers affected with Federal layoffs and DOGE defunding and yet it's not appropriate for discussion on HN.
I believe that the USA is now in the grips of a fascist government. Resistance is minimal and focused on fixing what the administration has broken last week or last month, and may take years to have any impact through courts, legislation, and direct action. The Federal government as we knew it, is gone. Power has been consolidated into the executive branch and a blue wave in 2026 will be too late. Congress is being stripped of its power and the judicial branch has been an enabler of unchecked executive power for a decade or more.
I recognize that this is a fringe belief.
All we can do now is help each other and resist as much as possible.
I work for a medium-to-large company in the US. I'm not sure how big the total IT department is, but the software development team is about a 10-15 people, most coders.
As a senior developer, I have yet to find a way for AI to make my job as a coder easier or more productive. It has about the same productivity gains (for me alone) as a good StackOverflow search in that AI can answer questions or write some example code for me, but it doesn't go much beyond that. My employer has purchased some AI tools and if there were a product that could help me, I believe they would invest in it.
How much does AI do for you? Can it implement a feature? Mine can write simple functions but most require some tweaking and aren't particularly difficult for me to do on my own.
As an idea-guy armed with AI, what will the senior-principal do that you and the AI cannot?
Or maybe someone can explain why a researcher would leave a platform with 100x the reach
Nazis. That's why I left.
The US has turned toward fascism and Musk is a big part of that. He has endeared himself to the Trump administration, which has promised to institute policies of nationalism, discrimination, and authoritarianism. Twitter will likely be used as a tool of propaganda and disinformation, if it's not already. Meta is equally compromised in my view.
Easy or hard, I have no interest in using the platforms of boot-licking oligarchs. Even if they have 100x reach. (I'm not a researcher).
I have been a software developer for almost thirty years. Every so often, I re-read Fred Brooks's essay "No Silver Bullet" and see if it still applies. My answer is always yes, though I'm amazed at the social, technological, and scientific advances that continue to sweep through the field.
My perspective is that every generation of software developer believes that one of these advances is going to end their career.
The dream of AI is a machine that can replace human coders. LLMs can reduce the number of human coders required for a project, which is simply a productivity advance. LLMs, if used effectively, might be able to replace an expensive coder with a low-skilled human, but you will still need coders. No software on the market today can replace a coder's job; it can only make the coder more efficient. This is as true today as it was in 1970.
The software I write today looks a lot like the software I wrote in 1995. It just does a lot more for the same effort on my part. I can create a complex, highly performant web application with almost no HTML knowledge. Frameworks can abstract all the hard parts of JavaScript. What even is SQL?
AI and similar advances only address the "accidental complexity" of software to use Brooks's term. The essential complexity remains a human task.
My advice is to learn about the history of software development and understand what you are doing when you make software. It's more than typing Unicode characters into a text editor.
As far as moving from web to something else, or incorporating AI into your personal coding practice, I don't think it matters. I have switched programming languages and technologies at least six times in my career. Yeah, it sucks to be in an area that is going away (desktop app development, like MS Word, was the Big Leagues in 1995), but most of your skills will be transferable if or when you have to switch.
I believe software development will be a good career for the next 25 years.
Of course, indie book cover design was a lucrative side project a few years ago. Now it's a struggle. Nothing is immune to the ravages of capitalism.
Health care costs will prevent me from retiring anytime soon, even if my savings are enough. (I am an American in the USA and emigration would be impossible for my family.)
Are you building your own products and launching them as a single developer? What platforms are you targeting and what kind of games are you making? How's the revenue?