Just like any other tool, there are people who use it poorly, and people who use it well.
Yes, we're all tired of the endless parade of people who exaggerate the abilities of (current day) AI and claim it can do more than it can do.
But I'm also getting tired of people writing articles that showcase people using AI poorly as if that proves some sort of point about its inherent limitations.
Man hits thumb with hammer. Article: "Hammers can't even drive a simple nail!"
nessbot · 3h ago
It's not a tool its a SaaS. I own and control my tools. I think a John Deer tractor looses it's "tool" status when you can't control it. Sure there's the local models but those aren't what the vast majority of folks are using or pushing.
steventruong · 3h ago
This is an incredibly weird view to me. If I borrow a hammer from my neighbor, although I don’t own the hammer, it doesn’t suddenly make the hammer not a tool. Associating a tool with the concept of ownership feels like an odd argument to make.
Kinrany · 3h ago
You don't own the hammer but you control it.
collyw · 3h ago
As he says a tool's ownership shouldn't affect it's status of a tool.
AstralStorm · 1h ago
You do not control the tool either.
You cannot manually train it for your case.
You cannot tell it to not touch particular parts of your project either. It will stomp over all of the code.
You cannot even easily detect this tool has been used except for typical failures.
The tool may also leak your secrets to some central database. You cannot tell it to not do that.
(If you try either tack of those, it will lie to you that it complied while actually not doing that at all.)
When your networking fails, the tool does not work. It's fragile in all cases.
sadeshmukh · 16m ago
You control the prompt and the system prompt. No, it's not hyper specialized yet on the training side, but that doesn't matter. You can explicitly control the files it reads in Cursor, and I'm sure Roo and Aider can as well. If you self host, you can control exactly where your data is stored.
I've never seen so many false assumptions in one place.
nessbot · 1h ago
and my comment said "own and control" and later focused on "control".
benreesman · 2h ago
You get different models, configurations, system prompts (and DAN-descended stuff is like DMCA now, unaccountable blacklist for even trying in some cases), you get control vectors and modern variants with more invasive dynamic weight biasing. The expert/friend/coworker drop down doesn't have all the entries in it: there's a button to make Claude code write files full of "in production code we'd do the calculation" mocks and then write a commit message about all the passing tests (with a byline!), but some ops guy pushes that button in the rare event the PID controller or whatever can't cope.
These are hooked up to control theory algorithms based on aggregate and regional KV and prompt cache load. This is true of both fixed and per-token billing. The agent will often be an asset at 4am but a liability at 2pm.
You get experiment segmented always, you get behavior scoped multi-armed badit rotated into and out of multiple segment categories (an experiment universe will typically have not less than 10000 segments, each engineer will need maybe 2 or 3 and maybe hundreds of arms per project/feature, so that's a lot of universes).
At this stage of the consumer internet cycle its about unit economics and regulatory capture and stock manipulation via hype rollercoaster. and make no mistake about what kind of companies these are: they have research programs with heavy short-run applications in mind and a few enclaves where they do AlphaFold or something. I'm sure they created an environment Carmack would tolerate at least for a while, but I gibe it a year or two we saw that movie at Oculus and Bosworth is a pretty good guy, he's like Jesus compared to the new boss.
In this extended analogy about users, owners, lenders, borrowers and hammers, I'd be asking what is the hammer and who is the nail.
bcyn · 3h ago
Many SaaS products are tools. I'm sure when tractors were first invented, people felt that they didn't "control" it compared to directly holding shovels and manually doing the same work.
Not to say that LLMs are at the same reliability of tractors vs. manual labor, but just think that your classification of what's a tool vs. not isn't a fair argument.
benreesman · 2h ago
Intentionally or not the tractor analogy is a rich commentary on this but it might not make the point you intend. Look into all the lawsuits and shit like that with John Deere and the DRM lockouts where farmers are losing whole crops because of remote shutdown cryptography that's physically impossible to remove at a cost or in a timeframe less than a new tractor.
People on HN love to bring up farm subsidies, and its a real issue, but big agriculture has special deals and what not. They have redundancy and leverage.
The only time this stuff kicks in is when the person with the little plot needs next harvest to get solvent and the only outcome it ever achieves is to push one more family farm on the brink into receivership and directly into the hands of a conglomorate.
Software engineers commanded salaries that The Right People have found an affront to the order of things long after they had gotten doctors and lawyers and other high-skill trades largely brought to heel via the joint licensing and pick a number tuition debt load. This isn't easy in software for a variety of reasons but roughly that the history of computer science in academia is kind of a unique one: it's research oriented in universities (mostly, there are programs with an applied tilt) but almost everyone signs up, graduates, and heads to industry without a second thought, and so back when the other skilled trades were getting organized into the class system it was kind of an oddity, regarded as almost an eccentric pursuit by deans and shit.
So while CS fundamentals are critical to good SWE's, schools don't teach them well as a rule any more than a physics undergraduate is going to be an asset at CERN: its prep for theory research most never do. Applied CS is just as serious a topic, but you mostly learn that via serious self study or from coworkers at companies with chops. Even CS graduates who are legends almost always emphasize that if you're serious about hacking then undergrad CS is remedial by the time you run into it (Coders at Work is full of this sentiment).
So to bring this back to tractors and AI, this is about a stubborn nail in what remains of the upwardly mobile skilled middle class that multiple illegal wage fixing schemes have yet to pound flat.
This one will fail too, but that's another mini blog post.
pempem · 2h ago
I think the OP comment re: AI's value as a tool comes down this this:
Does what it says: When you swing a hammer and make contact, it provides greater and more focused force than your body at that same velocity. People who sell hammers make this claim and sometimes show you that the hammer can even pull out nails really well. The claims about what AI can do are noisy, incorrect and proffered by people who - I imagine OP thinks and would agree - know better. Essentially they are saying "Hammers are amazing. Swing them around everywhere"
Right to repair: Means an opportunity to understand the guts of a thing and fix it to do what you want. You cannot really do this to AI. You can prompt differently but it can be unclear why you're not getting what you want
hoppp · 2h ago
A tool and a SaaS. It can be both, they are not mutually exclusive.
johnisgood · 3h ago
You can use it locally. FWIW many tools are SaaS, yet people have no trouble with that.
nessbot · 1h ago
Good for them?
johnisgood · 1h ago
I said what I said because you care about others.
> those aren't what the vast majority of folks are using or pushing.
Good for them.
If you do not want to use SaaS, use a local model.
AstralStorm · 1h ago
That's where you find out you need $100k in hardware to do so, and I'm lowballing here. And a person who can put it together, it's not quite a typical ops setup.
More if you want to actually train it.
JHer · 3h ago
The television, the atom bomb, the cigarette rolling machine, and penicillin are also "just tools". They nevertheless changed our world entirely, for better or worse. If you ascribe the impact of AI to the people using AI, you will be utterly, completely bewildered by what is happening and what is going to happen.
No comments yet
Jackson__ · 2h ago
More like:
Man hits thumb with hammer. Hammer companies proclaim Hammers will be able to build entire houses on their own within the next few years [0].
What's the best way to insulate myself from the output of people using AI poorly?
benreesman · 3h ago
It's increasingly a luxury to be a software engineer who is able to avoid some combination of morally reprehensible leadership harming the public, quality craftsmanship in software being in freefall, and ML proficiency being defined downwards to admit terrible uses of ML.
AI coding stuff is a massive lever on some tasks and used by experts. But its not self-driving and the capabilities of tge frontier vendor stuff might be trending down, they're certainly not skyrocketing.
Any other tool: a compiler, an editor, a shell, even a browser, but I'd say build tools are the best analogy: you have chosen to become proficient or even expert or you haven't and rely on colleagues or communities that provide that expertise. Pick a project or a company: you know if you should be messing around with the build or asking a build person.
AI is no diffetent. Claude 4 Opus just went GA and its in power user tune still, they don't have the newb/cost-control defaults dialed in yet and so its really useful and probably will be for a few days until they get the PID controller wired up to whatever a control vector is these days, and then it will tank to useless slop just like 3.7.
For a week I'll get a little boost in my ouyput and pay them a grand and be glad I did, and then it will go back to worse than useless.
These guys only know one business plan.
despera · 4h ago
A tool can very well be broken thought or simply useless for anything but the most lightweight job (despite all the PR nonsense)
They call it a tool and so people leave reviews like any other tool.
pier25 · 3h ago
I'd agree with you if AI companies weren't relentlessly overhyping AI.
mplanchard · 3h ago
Isn’t this exactly what the article says? It’s the entire thesis of the second half.
dvfjsdhgfv · 35m ago
> Just like any other tool, there are people who use it poorly, and people who use it well.
We are not talking about random folks here but about the largest software company with high stakes in the most popular LLM trying to show off how good it is. Stephen Toub is hardly a newbie either.
croes · 3h ago
> Yes, we're all tired of the endless parade of people who exaggerate the abilities of (current day) AI
You mean the people who create and sell these AIs.
You would blame the hammer or at least the manufacturer if they claimed the hammer can do it al by itself.
This is more a your-car-can-drive-without-supervision-but-it-hit-a-another-car case.
baxtr · 3h ago
I think the difference is that a hammer manufacturer wouldn’t suggest that the hammer will replace the handyman with its next update.
deadlydose · 3h ago
> You would blame the hammer or at least the manufacturer if they claimed the hammer can do it al by itself.
I wouldn't because I'm not stupid and I know what a hammer is and isn't capable of despite any claims to the contrary.
OutOfHere · 4h ago
> there are people who use it poorly, and people who use it well.
Precisely. AI needs appropriate and sufficient guidance to be able to write code that does the job. I make sure my prompts have all of the necessary implementation detail that the AI will need. Without this guidance, the expected result is not a good one.
spookie · 3h ago
This often doesn't scale well. And coming up with all the necessary context in writing is a bit harder than when programming.
OutOfHere · 3h ago
Well, it's where we are now with AI technology. Perhaps a superior future AI will need less of it. For now I give it all that I think it won't reliably figure out on its own.
DragonStrength · 3h ago
It's actually where we have always been with software development, which is why so many software professionals think the media narrative is so stupid.
Oh, you want to fire your engineers? Easy, just perfectly specify exactly what you want and how it should work! Oh, that's what the engineers are for? Huh!
OutOfHere · 3h ago
Yup, but the management, essentially the ones who control the hiring and firing, are more clued into the media narrative, with a bias toward dismissing what engineers think.
dinfinity · 3h ago
> AI needs appropriate and sufficient guidance to be able to write code that does the job.
Note that the example (shitty Microsoft) implementation was not able to properly run tests during its work, not even tests it had written itself.
If you have an existing codebase that already has a plenty tests and you ask AI to refactor something whilst giving it the access it needs to run tests, it can already sometimes do a great job all by itself.
Good specification and documentation also do a lot, of course, but the iterative approach with feedback if things are actually working as intended is a game changer. Not unsurprisingly also a lot closer to how humans do things.
OutOfHere · 1h ago
The iterative approach has one problem -- it is onerous to repeat the lengthy iterative process with a different model, as it will lead to an entirely different conversation. In contrast, when the spec is well-written up-front, it is trivial to switch models to see how the other model implements it differently.
itishappy · 3h ago
Improve your efficiency with this double headed hammer!
I drove 200 screws in one weekend using this hammer!
With hammers like these, who needs nails?
Hammers are all you need
Hammers deemed harmful
yetihehe · 4h ago
I will say it again and again - AI will replace developers like excel and accounting programs replaced accountants.
tocs3 · 3h ago
An old (2015) NPR Planet Money story about VisiCalc.
Which is how? This is an honest question, I genuinely don't know what happened to all the people who used to be employed to do manual calculations. Or all the people who worked as typists for that matter.
bgwalter · 3h ago
I took it for irony, that is, accountants weren't replaced by Excel. There are thousands of articles right now of course that accountants will be replaced by AI.
Joeboy · 3h ago
Of course, but my question stands. Did all the people who used to do easily automatable clerical work remain in those roles? I presume that isn't the case, but like I say I don't really know what happened to them.
marcosdumay · 2h ago
Computers (what is a job title) were entirely replaced, but they were already on their way out for decades. The people on that job migrated up or down into programming and office assistance. Eventually (way into the 90s) the number of office assistants declined.
Accountants didn't stop increasing in numbers.
blooalien · 3h ago
Accountants are the only folks with the knowledge and skills to actually use the tools correctly that were to supposedly replace accountants... ;)
(Much the same as programmers will be replaced by "A.I." ... They won't as long as they educate themselves on proper use of the tools available to them. It'll likely someday be like the "Star Trek" computers, but even they still needed folks with the technical skills to use those computers well / properly.)
eastbound · 3h ago
1000x more reporting requirements?
sixtram · 3h ago
Yesterday, I asked AI for help:
Check my SQL stored procedure for possible logical errors. It found a join error that I didn't remember including in my SQL. After double-checking, I found that it had hallucinated a join that wasn't there before and reported it as a bug. After I asked for more information, it apologized for adding that.
I also asked for a C# code with some RegEx. It compiled, but it didn't work; it replaced the order of two string parameters. I had to copy and paste it back to show why it didn't work, and then it realized that it had changed the order of the parameters.
I asked for a command-line option to zip files in a certain way. It hallucinated a nonexistent option that would be crucial. In the end, it turned out that it was not possible to zip the files the way I wanted.
My manager plans to open our Git repository for AI code and pull request (PR) review. I already anticipate the pain of reviewing nonsensical bug reports.
aerhardt · 2h ago
I'm an experienced programmer but currently picking up C# for a masters course on Game AI. I appreciate having the LLMs at hand but I am surprised by how much of a step down the quality of the code output is compared to Python.
NBJack · 2h ago
Step down in terms of LLM performance? I think that is easily explained in the sheer bulk of articles, blogs, and open source projects in Python rather than C#. I actually prefer the latter to the former, but I know it is still not that widely adopted.
zkmon · 3h ago
AI adoption is mostly driven from the top. What this means is, shareholders and regulators would make the CEOs to claim that the company is using AI. CEOs trickle this grand vision and goals down, allocating funds and asking for immediate reports showing the evidence of AI everywhere in the company. One executive went to the extent saying that anyone not using AI in their work would face disciplinary action.
So the point is, it is not about whether AI can fix a bug or do something useful. It is about reporting and staying competitive via claiming. Just like many other reports which don't have any specific other purpose other than reporting itself.
A few years back, I asked an Architect who was authoring an architecture document, about who the audience for this document is. She replied saying the target audience is the reviewers. I asked, does anyone use it after the review? She says, not sure. And not surprisingly, the project which took 3 years to develop with a large cost, was shelved after being live for an hour in prod, because the whole thing was done only for a press release, saying the company has gone live with a new tech. They didn't lie.
One of my teammates recently decided to us AI to explain a config option instead of reading the 3 sentences in the actual documentation. The AI told him the option did something that the documentation explicitly stated the option did not do. He then copied the AI's lies as a comment into our code base. If I hadn't read the actual documentation like our forefathers used to, that lie would be copied around from one project to the next. I miss having coworkers that are more than a thin facade to an LLM.
data-ottawa · 3h ago
My experiences with Copilot are exactly like these threads – once it's wrong you have to almost start fresh or takeover, which can be a huge time sink.
Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet seem much better for me. The models needed alignment and feedback but worked fairly well. I know Copilot uses Claude but for whatever reason I don't get nearly the same quality as using Claude Code.
Claude is expensive, $10 to implement a feature, $2 to add some unit tests to my small personal project. I imagine large apps or apps without clear division of modules/code will burn through tokens.
It definitely works as an accelerator but I don't think it's going to replace humans yet, and I think that's still a very strong position for AI to be in.
NBJack · 2h ago
Note we aren't really seeing the price reflect the true costs of using LLMs yet. Everyone is prioritizing adoption over sustainable business models. Time will tell how this pans out.
fuzzzerd · 2h ago
Are those costs from the pay as you go credit system or is that on top of a max subscription?
I've tinkered with the pay as you go, but wonder if a higher cap on max for 100/month would be worth it?
data-ottawa · 1h ago
I bought $20 of pay as you go API credits to test out the models and how to use them.
I have not tried the $100/month subscription. If it's net cheaper than buying credits I would consider it, since that's basically 10 features per month.
The tax code Section 174 stuff sounds like a likely case for reducing the number of developers on staff.
bee_rider · 3h ago
The line:
> Become the AI expert on your team. Don't fight the tools, master them. Be the person who knows when AI helps and when it hurts.
Is something I’ve been wondering about. I haven’t played with this AI stuff much at all, despite thinking it is probably going to be a basically interesting tool at some point. It just seems like it is currently a bit bad, and multiple companies have bet millions of dollars on the idea that it will eventually be quite good. I think that’s a self fulfilling prophecy, they’ll probably get around to making it useful. But, I wonder if it is really worthwhile to learn how to work around the limitations of the currently bad version?
Like, I get that we don’t want to become buggywhip manufacturers. But I also don’t want to specialize in hand-cranking cars and making sure the oil is topped off in my headlights…
blooalien · 3h ago
If you want to play with "this A.I. stuff" and you have a half-way modern-ish graphic card in your PC or laptop (or even a somewhat modern-ish phone) there's a fair few ways to install and run smaller(ish) models locally on your own hardware, and a host of fancy graphical interfaces to them. I personally use ChatBox and Ollama with the Qwen2.5 models, IBM's Granite series models, and the Gemma models fairly successfully on a reasonably decent (couple years old now) consumer-class gaming rig with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and 64 gig of RAM. There's also code editors like Zed or VSCode that can connect to Ollama and other local model runners, and if you wanna get really "nerdy" about it, you can pretty easily interface with all that fun junk from Python and script up your own interfaces and tools.
AstralStorm · 53m ago
Except your toy model or toy version of the model will barely work to talk to you, much less write code.
I've done this experiment with a much beefier set of GPUs (3080 10 GB + 3060 12 GB) allowing me to run one step up bigger model.
It's not even comparable to free tiers. I have no idea how big the machines or clusters running that are, but they must be huge.
I was very unimpressed with the local models I could run.
bee_rider · 2h ago
This seems like becoming an expert at hand-cranking engines or writing your own Forth compiler back when compilers were just getting started.
My point of view, I guess, is that we might want to wait until the field is developed to the point where chauffeurs or C programmers (in this analogy) become a thing.
grogenaut · 3h ago
It's rapidly evolving, if you were to master just one explicit revision of say cursor then I think your anology would be correct. However to me it's more like keep abreast of the new things, try new stuff, don't settle on a solution, let the wave push you forward, don't be the coder who doesn't turn their camera on during meetings coding away in a corner for another year or 2 berfore trying ai tools because "they're bad".
But this is the same for any tech that will span the industry. You have people who want to stay in their ways and those who are curious and moving forward, and at various times in people's careers they may be one or the other. This is one of those changes where I don't think you get the option to defer.
cjalmeida · 3h ago
Definitely don’t dismiss it. While there are limitations, it’s already very capable for a number of tasks. Tweaking it to be more effective is skill itself.
blooalien · 3h ago
> Tweaking it to be more effective is skill itself.
^^^ This is actually one of the currently "in-demand" skills in "The Industry" right now... ;)
abletonlive · 3h ago
It is worth it and anybody that hasn’t spent the past month using it has nothing useful to say or contribute, their knowledge about what these tools are capable of is already outdated.
I would bet about 90% of the people commenting how useless llms are for their job are people that installed copilot and tried it out for a few days at some point not in the last month. They haven’t even come close to exploring the ecosystem that’s being built up right now by the community.
bee_rider · 3h ago
The issue (if you aren’t interested in AI in and of itself, but just in the final version of the tool it will produce) is that the AI companies advertise that they’ve come up with an incredible new version that will obsolete any skills you learned working around the previous version’s limitations, on like a monthly basis.
Like, you say these folks have clearly tried the tool out too long ago… but, I mean, at the time they tried it out they could have found other comments just like yours, advertising the fact that now the tool really is revolutionary right now. So, we can see where the skepticism comes from, right?
amarant · 4h ago
I feel like this whole "but sure, let's fire the engineers" part is just anti-ai narrative. Like, is anyone actually firing engineers because they have AI now? Does anyone know anyone who's lost their job as an SWE due to being replaced by AI?
I sure don't, and noone I've asked so far knows anyone who's had that happen to then either.
I want to say it's a sign of the times to try and make technology a political issue, but my understanding is the same thing happened during the industrial revolution, so maybe it's just human nature?
Well the industrial revolution didn't make us all homeless beggars, so I doubt AI will, either.
aerhardt · 3h ago
I have literally seen dozens, if not hundreds of people claim here, on Reddit and LinkedIn things like "we have downsized our engineering team from 50 to 5 engineers", "I produce 5x the amount of code", etc. A few tech CEOs - both from frontier labs and traditional software companies - are also claiming software engineers are a thing of the past.
I think these two audiences - tech CEOs and random anons on the internet - tend to be full of shit and I give very little credence to what they say, but to your point, some people are at least claiming things of the sort.
geraneum · 3h ago
> from frontier labs
The target market of these companies are software shops. You don’t see them advertising the model capabilities in i.e. Civil Engineering much. They are trying specifically to sell a cheaper replacement of software engineers to those CEOs. You have to read the news and announcements with this lens:
A vacuum cleaner manufacturer claims that dirty dusty house is a thing of the past. Of course they say that.
aerhardt · 3h ago
A similar thing could be said about traditional tech CEOs like Benioff - that it's part of their fiduciary duty to stakeholders to say things like that. I don't disagree with you; I'm merely saying it's the nature of the game, and that people are definitely claiming that there is an imminent (or even ongoing) firing of engineers.
bee_rider · 1h ago
I don’t think you should let them off the hook with this fiduciary duty idea. If anything, they should be aware of what their company’s concrete plans are for firing off 90% of their engineers. If they are saying something like that, and it doesn’t happen… they are lying. There’s no duty to lie to everyone (including shareholders) for… their own good? (Not that I see how it would be for their own good).
softwaredoug · 3h ago
Well at least companies use AI as a reason for layoffs / not hiring. Though there are other reasons that may be masking.
Generally what actually seems to be happening is companies want to focus on AI so they close non-AI parts of their business and beef up the AI parts. Which isn’t the same as “replacing engineers with AI”
cjbgkagh · 3h ago
Perception precedes reality, being a dev was already a low status job. Consider a top tier FAANG vs white shoe lawyer. With AI that has dropped further. Even if AI only takes the very junior roles there will be increased competition at the more senior roles which will again drive down prestige and salary.
Additionally, I’m not hiring anymore which is kind of the same thing as firing. I did have a few roles open for junior assistant types but those are now filled by using AI. AI helps improve my productivity without the added overhead of dealing with staff / contractors. I even hired junior devs and put them on full time study mode to try to skill them up to be useful, one guy was in that mode for 6 months before I had to fire him for learning too slowly. Technically LLMs did learn faster than he did and it was his full time job. It’s easier for me to communicate with the AI, especially with the quick responses and being always available.
I figure the AI will eventually get to my level and eat my lunch but hopefully there are a few years before that happens.
And designers, OMG AI is far easier to deal with and produces far better results.
bgwalter · 3h ago
But why don't you steal directly from GitHub, it will make you more "productive", too?
cjbgkagh · 3h ago
I need code that works within the specialized context of my project, I couldn't steal code from GitHub even if I wanted to.
marcosdumay · 1h ago
> Like, is anyone actually firing engineers because they have AI now?
Look no further than the Microsoft layoff they announced earlier this week.
Of course, you are free to doubt the honesty of the people making those announcements.
deelowe · 3h ago
Literally the org I was formerly in.
codingdave · 3h ago
I know many people who have lost their jobs after the leadership wanted to go "all-in" on AI. I also know of multiple leadership teams who have been fired en masse after pushing for that direction and the organization failing to deliver.
But if you are asking if I know of an organization that was successful after firing their people... Nope, I don't know any of those.
in_ab · 3h ago
I think a lot of AI replacing engineers talk is just cover for layoffs or lack of business growth. If AI ever gets to that point, it's not going to just replace software engineers in isolation. If it was capable of replacing engineers, what's to stop it from replacing management as well? And why would you need HR when all your employees are AI?
bgwalter · 3h ago
I wonder why all these prompt geniuses don't write AppleScript, it should be the perfect language for them:
But AppleScript does not let you steal other people's code.
siliconc0w · 3h ago
In my experience these models are extremely bad at debugging and can often do better either regenerating the code with a tweaked prompt/context/premise. We need like a DebugBench to really measure and push the SoTA here since that is a core part of the SWE Journey.
epignosisx · 3h ago
To be fair, AI never had a chance against Stephen Toub . One of the smartest engineers out there.
epignosisx · 3h ago
To be fair AI never had a chance against Stephen Toub . One of the smartest engineers out there.
ekaryotic · 3h ago
wouldn't it make more sense for ai to be tasked with detecting and fuzzing for bugs instead of attempting to fix them. the cost could be balanced by requiring less payments to bug bounty schemes since the bugs would be caught before a human saw them.
Vvector · 3h ago
He laughed. “AI makes my team unstoppable. Why would I want fewer unstoppable people?”
bgwalter · 3h ago
It is true, but in the opposite sense: AI makes the kind of 0.1x but high volume developer unstoppable, so the code base will degrade even faster.
deadbabe · 3h ago
I think what people in these discussions are missing is that AI isn’t free. You have to fire a couple engineers to pay for the costs of your whole org now using AI daily.
jarym · 3h ago
Looking at the speed of AI advancement a lot of this ‘funny failure’ will be gone within months.
Those humans explaining why fixes aren’t complete are proving data for the next training run - really training their replacements.
Then when you do have AIs fixing bugs you won’t need the more mediocre engineers.
mosdl · 3h ago
I haven't seen code quality improve much over the past year, in fact some things like react hooks I've seen them get worse at.
dannersy · 3h ago
Except for the fact that this sentiment has been repeated for _years_ by now.
randunel · 4h ago
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, or even good enough.
AstralStorm · 48m ago
Also don't let bad be the enemy of good enough, if it brings shareholders?
quantadev · 3h ago
Stack Overflow never fixed any bugs either, but a developer with access to S.O. always had a huge productivity boost from using it. So with even a 1% productivity boost that means a big company can fire 1% of developers, and we're seeing that happen already, although for largely political and reputation reasons company management is currently denying that AI is a direct cause of the layoffs.
Only an AGI will ever "replace" developers. Current AI merely boosts us.
rvz · 4h ago
> Microsoft’s .NET runtime,
That is why, it's not a web app. (As Javascript is the most used language on the internet)
This sort of software (language runtime) requires that it HAS to be correct and no room for clumsiness.
Why do you think almost every AI copilot "demo" is on typical web apps and not on the Linux kernel or on the PyTorch compiler?
It would ruin the "AGI" coding narrative.
The AI boosters need to show that the hype train isn't slowing down. Tell it to replace the Linux kernel developers and watch it struggle in real time.
criley2 · 4h ago
CEOs laying off engineers for AI is a good thing.
It's a natural selection mechanism whereby poorly run companies will fail extremely quickly.
These are bad companies with horrible leadership that are wasting resources. Their existence is a net negative to society and our industry. Good bye to the garbage Klarna's and DuoLingos. No one will miss you.
deathanatos · 3h ago
> It's a natural selection mechanism whereby poorly run companies will fail extremely quickly.
Sure, but at the short term cost of engineers' livelihoods.
Or were you thinking C-suite would be held to account for the failure?
FredPret · 3h ago
No-one has to hold the C-suite to account or directly communicate with them in any way.
You just need investors and consumers to allocate capital to their competitors. The flow of capital and consumer preference is a decentralized communication method. Price signals, supply and demand, and government regulations are a form of stigmergy.
throwanem · 3h ago
So you'd rather be a parasite than a free agent?
gopher_space · 3h ago
It's a mutualistic relationship. I get paid to learn and employers get to ingest my nutrient-rich metabolite.
Poorly run companies can be an opportunity to direct development towards whatever I'm curious about, and that's usually beneficial to both parties.
mancerayder · 3h ago
Right. Except jobs are useful to help people pay rent/mortgage, food and other essentials. How is it good if companies fail?
Who gives a crap if bad companies fail or don't fail? And for that matter how is it good or bad for you and me if bad companies fail or succeed despite being poorly run?
I'm curious about the context of your judgment.
FredPret · 3h ago
Bad companies tie up capital and talent unproductively.
If a CEO is making a tech product, but knows so little about tech that he's replacing engineers with 2025's AIs, we're all better off if that CEO goes and does something else, and those engineers go work for technical people.
Temporary stability is not a substitute for long-term prosperity. Creative destruction.
criley2 · 3h ago
If paying rent, mortgage and food is all that matters, why not just pay people to dig ditches and then pay them to fill them back in? Why go through the rigamarole of engineering at all?
If we accept that we should be productive, then it seems easy to justify that engineers should be working at good, well run companies producing real value for society.
mancerayder · 1h ago
In theory I agree, companies should be productive.
In practice having worked in financial services and ad tech, at high salaries in each, it was absolutely the equivalent of intellectual digging of ditches for pay. The only job I ever had that felt productive was in academia, and the pay was off the charts low.
rudedogg · 3h ago
The narrative and hype is out of control. After seeing all the praise on Twitter for the latest frontier models, I figured I'd' try to generate a semi-simple View for SwiftUI. All the features I'm asking for have been covered in a 2023 or 2024 WWDC session, and are in the sample code, as well as public repos.
The prompt was "Please create a basic NSTextView wrapper in SwiftUI, that uses TextKit2 and SwiftUI best practices."
Claude 4 Sonnet produces something I can't type in and the font is invisible, Gemini 2.5 Pro produces a bunch of compiler errors.
I use this stuff for React at work, and while it's slightly better in that context, it still makes completely idiotic mistakes and it really is a toss up on whether I save any time at all IMO.
I think the positive experiences are some mix of people who:
- Lack the skill/experience to recognize bad code or issues
- Don't care about the quality at all (future upgrades or maintainability)
- Only care about the visual output
--------------------
The more I use these tools the more I think the raw generation aspect is a complete crapshoot. The only thing I've had success with is data marshaling or boilerplate code where I provide examples - and even then they'll do random things I specifically instruct them not to in the prompt. Even for small context windows. And to do anything useful I have to be a fucking surgeon with the context and spend a lot of time crafting a really good prompt, and they still mess it up frequently.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667... was posted in a comment here a few days ago, and I think it explains a lot of the issues. Programming works because it's a rigid language to communicate precise instructions to the machine. We're trying to circumvent that by using natural language, but natural language isn't precise. So the LLM has all this ambiguity to deal with, and output isn't what we want.
To counteract this the new idea is to provide tools to the LLM so it can check that its output is rigid/valid to at least fix some of the issues, but it's never going to be 100% due to the fundamental way this all works (LLMs using probabilities/randomness and us instructing them with natural language).
--------------------
Not to be completely negative, I think there are really exciting use cases that we can leverage well today:
- Embeddings for semantic/similarity search is amazing and will have all kinds of applications
- Processing error messages/logs with LLMs is awesome. They can parse out the actual issues much faster than I can
Just like any other tool, there are people who use it poorly, and people who use it well.
Yes, we're all tired of the endless parade of people who exaggerate the abilities of (current day) AI and claim it can do more than it can do.
But I'm also getting tired of people writing articles that showcase people using AI poorly as if that proves some sort of point about its inherent limitations.
Man hits thumb with hammer. Article: "Hammers can't even drive a simple nail!"
You cannot manually train it for your case.
You cannot tell it to not touch particular parts of your project either. It will stomp over all of the code.
You cannot even easily detect this tool has been used except for typical failures.
The tool may also leak your secrets to some central database. You cannot tell it to not do that.
(If you try either tack of those, it will lie to you that it complied while actually not doing that at all.)
When your networking fails, the tool does not work. It's fragile in all cases.
I've never seen so many false assumptions in one place.
These are hooked up to control theory algorithms based on aggregate and regional KV and prompt cache load. This is true of both fixed and per-token billing. The agent will often be an asset at 4am but a liability at 2pm.
You get experiment segmented always, you get behavior scoped multi-armed badit rotated into and out of multiple segment categories (an experiment universe will typically have not less than 10000 segments, each engineer will need maybe 2 or 3 and maybe hundreds of arms per project/feature, so that's a lot of universes).
At this stage of the consumer internet cycle its about unit economics and regulatory capture and stock manipulation via hype rollercoaster. and make no mistake about what kind of companies these are: they have research programs with heavy short-run applications in mind and a few enclaves where they do AlphaFold or something. I'm sure they created an environment Carmack would tolerate at least for a while, but I gibe it a year or two we saw that movie at Oculus and Bosworth is a pretty good guy, he's like Jesus compared to the new boss.
In this extended analogy about users, owners, lenders, borrowers and hammers, I'd be asking what is the hammer and who is the nail.
Not to say that LLMs are at the same reliability of tractors vs. manual labor, but just think that your classification of what's a tool vs. not isn't a fair argument.
People on HN love to bring up farm subsidies, and its a real issue, but big agriculture has special deals and what not. They have redundancy and leverage.
The only time this stuff kicks in is when the person with the little plot needs next harvest to get solvent and the only outcome it ever achieves is to push one more family farm on the brink into receivership and directly into the hands of a conglomorate.
Software engineers commanded salaries that The Right People have found an affront to the order of things long after they had gotten doctors and lawyers and other high-skill trades largely brought to heel via the joint licensing and pick a number tuition debt load. This isn't easy in software for a variety of reasons but roughly that the history of computer science in academia is kind of a unique one: it's research oriented in universities (mostly, there are programs with an applied tilt) but almost everyone signs up, graduates, and heads to industry without a second thought, and so back when the other skilled trades were getting organized into the class system it was kind of an oddity, regarded as almost an eccentric pursuit by deans and shit.
So while CS fundamentals are critical to good SWE's, schools don't teach them well as a rule any more than a physics undergraduate is going to be an asset at CERN: its prep for theory research most never do. Applied CS is just as serious a topic, but you mostly learn that via serious self study or from coworkers at companies with chops. Even CS graduates who are legends almost always emphasize that if you're serious about hacking then undergrad CS is remedial by the time you run into it (Coders at Work is full of this sentiment).
So to bring this back to tractors and AI, this is about a stubborn nail in what remains of the upwardly mobile skilled middle class that multiple illegal wage fixing schemes have yet to pound flat.
This one will fail too, but that's another mini blog post.
Does what it says: When you swing a hammer and make contact, it provides greater and more focused force than your body at that same velocity. People who sell hammers make this claim and sometimes show you that the hammer can even pull out nails really well. The claims about what AI can do are noisy, incorrect and proffered by people who - I imagine OP thinks and would agree - know better. Essentially they are saying "Hammers are amazing. Swing them around everywhere"
Right to repair: Means an opportunity to understand the guts of a thing and fix it to do what you want. You cannot really do this to AI. You can prompt differently but it can be unclear why you're not getting what you want
> those aren't what the vast majority of folks are using or pushing.
Good for them.
If you do not want to use SaaS, use a local model.
More if you want to actually train it.
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Man hits thumb with hammer. Hammer companies proclaim Hammers will be able to build entire houses on their own within the next few years [0].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/podcasts/google-ai-demis-...
AI coding stuff is a massive lever on some tasks and used by experts. But its not self-driving and the capabilities of tge frontier vendor stuff might be trending down, they're certainly not skyrocketing.
Any other tool: a compiler, an editor, a shell, even a browser, but I'd say build tools are the best analogy: you have chosen to become proficient or even expert or you haven't and rely on colleagues or communities that provide that expertise. Pick a project or a company: you know if you should be messing around with the build or asking a build person.
AI is no diffetent. Claude 4 Opus just went GA and its in power user tune still, they don't have the newb/cost-control defaults dialed in yet and so its really useful and probably will be for a few days until they get the PID controller wired up to whatever a control vector is these days, and then it will tank to useless slop just like 3.7.
For a week I'll get a little boost in my ouyput and pay them a grand and be glad I did, and then it will go back to worse than useless.
These guys only know one business plan.
They call it a tool and so people leave reviews like any other tool.
We are not talking about random folks here but about the largest software company with high stakes in the most popular LLM trying to show off how good it is. Stephen Toub is hardly a newbie either.
You mean the people who create and sell these AIs.
You would blame the hammer or at least the manufacturer if they claimed the hammer can do it al by itself.
This is more a your-car-can-drive-without-supervision-but-it-hit-a-another-car case.
I wouldn't because I'm not stupid and I know what a hammer is and isn't capable of despite any claims to the contrary.
Precisely. AI needs appropriate and sufficient guidance to be able to write code that does the job. I make sure my prompts have all of the necessary implementation detail that the AI will need. Without this guidance, the expected result is not a good one.
Oh, you want to fire your engineers? Easy, just perfectly specify exactly what you want and how it should work! Oh, that's what the engineers are for? Huh!
Note that the example (shitty Microsoft) implementation was not able to properly run tests during its work, not even tests it had written itself.
If you have an existing codebase that already has a plenty tests and you ask AI to refactor something whilst giving it the access it needs to run tests, it can already sometimes do a great job all by itself.
Good specification and documentation also do a lot, of course, but the iterative approach with feedback if things are actually working as intended is a game changer. Not unsurprisingly also a lot closer to how humans do things.
I drove 200 screws in one weekend using this hammer!
With hammers like these, who needs nails?
Hammers are all you need
Hammers deemed harmful
Episode 606: Spreadsheets! https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/epis...
The 1984 story it was inspired by (acording to the episode description).
https://medium.com/backchannel/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledg...
There are of course still accountants.
Accountants didn't stop increasing in numbers.
(Much the same as programmers will be replaced by "A.I." ... They won't as long as they educate themselves on proper use of the tools available to them. It'll likely someday be like the "Star Trek" computers, but even they still needed folks with the technical skills to use those computers well / properly.)
Check my SQL stored procedure for possible logical errors. It found a join error that I didn't remember including in my SQL. After double-checking, I found that it had hallucinated a join that wasn't there before and reported it as a bug. After I asked for more information, it apologized for adding that.
I also asked for a C# code with some RegEx. It compiled, but it didn't work; it replaced the order of two string parameters. I had to copy and paste it back to show why it didn't work, and then it realized that it had changed the order of the parameters.
I asked for a command-line option to zip files in a certain way. It hallucinated a nonexistent option that would be crucial. In the end, it turned out that it was not possible to zip the files the way I wanted.
My manager plans to open our Git repository for AI code and pull request (PR) review. I already anticipate the pain of reviewing nonsensical bug reports.
So the point is, it is not about whether AI can fix a bug or do something useful. It is about reporting and staying competitive via claiming. Just like many other reports which don't have any specific other purpose other than reporting itself.
A few years back, I asked an Architect who was authoring an architecture document, about who the audience for this document is. She replied saying the target audience is the reviewers. I asked, does anyone use it after the review? She says, not sure. And not surprisingly, the project which took 3 years to develop with a large cost, was shelved after being live for an hour in prod, because the whole thing was done only for a press release, saying the company has gone live with a new tech. They didn't lie.
Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet seem much better for me. The models needed alignment and feedback but worked fairly well. I know Copilot uses Claude but for whatever reason I don't get nearly the same quality as using Claude Code.
Claude is expensive, $10 to implement a feature, $2 to add some unit tests to my small personal project. I imagine large apps or apps without clear division of modules/code will burn through tokens.
It definitely works as an accelerator but I don't think it's going to replace humans yet, and I think that's still a very strong position for AI to be in.
I've tinkered with the pay as you go, but wonder if a higher cap on max for 100/month would be worth it?
I have not tried the $100/month subscription. If it's net cheaper than buying credits I would consider it, since that's basically 10 features per month.
Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152 21-may-2025 544 comments
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
> Become the AI expert on your team. Don't fight the tools, master them. Be the person who knows when AI helps and when it hurts.
Is something I’ve been wondering about. I haven’t played with this AI stuff much at all, despite thinking it is probably going to be a basically interesting tool at some point. It just seems like it is currently a bit bad, and multiple companies have bet millions of dollars on the idea that it will eventually be quite good. I think that’s a self fulfilling prophecy, they’ll probably get around to making it useful. But, I wonder if it is really worthwhile to learn how to work around the limitations of the currently bad version?
Like, I get that we don’t want to become buggywhip manufacturers. But I also don’t want to specialize in hand-cranking cars and making sure the oil is topped off in my headlights…
It's not even comparable to free tiers. I have no idea how big the machines or clusters running that are, but they must be huge.
I was very unimpressed with the local models I could run.
My point of view, I guess, is that we might want to wait until the field is developed to the point where chauffeurs or C programmers (in this analogy) become a thing.
But this is the same for any tech that will span the industry. You have people who want to stay in their ways and those who are curious and moving forward, and at various times in people's careers they may be one or the other. This is one of those changes where I don't think you get the option to defer.
^^^ This is actually one of the currently "in-demand" skills in "The Industry" right now... ;)
I would bet about 90% of the people commenting how useless llms are for their job are people that installed copilot and tried it out for a few days at some point not in the last month. They haven’t even come close to exploring the ecosystem that’s being built up right now by the community.
Like, you say these folks have clearly tried the tool out too long ago… but, I mean, at the time they tried it out they could have found other comments just like yours, advertising the fact that now the tool really is revolutionary right now. So, we can see where the skepticism comes from, right?
I sure don't, and noone I've asked so far knows anyone who's had that happen to then either.
I want to say it's a sign of the times to try and make technology a political issue, but my understanding is the same thing happened during the industrial revolution, so maybe it's just human nature?
Well the industrial revolution didn't make us all homeless beggars, so I doubt AI will, either.
I think these two audiences - tech CEOs and random anons on the internet - tend to be full of shit and I give very little credence to what they say, but to your point, some people are at least claiming things of the sort.
The target market of these companies are software shops. You don’t see them advertising the model capabilities in i.e. Civil Engineering much. They are trying specifically to sell a cheaper replacement of software engineers to those CEOs. You have to read the news and announcements with this lens:
A vacuum cleaner manufacturer claims that dirty dusty house is a thing of the past. Of course they say that.
Generally what actually seems to be happening is companies want to focus on AI so they close non-AI parts of their business and beef up the AI parts. Which isn’t the same as “replacing engineers with AI”
Additionally, I’m not hiring anymore which is kind of the same thing as firing. I did have a few roles open for junior assistant types but those are now filled by using AI. AI helps improve my productivity without the added overhead of dealing with staff / contractors. I even hired junior devs and put them on full time study mode to try to skill them up to be useful, one guy was in that mode for 6 months before I had to fire him for learning too slowly. Technically LLMs did learn faster than he did and it was his full time job. It’s easier for me to communicate with the AI, especially with the quick responses and being always available.
I figure the AI will eventually get to my level and eat my lunch but hopefully there are a few years before that happens.
And designers, OMG AI is far easier to deal with and produces far better results.
Look no further than the Microsoft layoff they announced earlier this week.
Of course, you are free to doubt the honesty of the people making those announcements.
But if you are asking if I know of an organization that was successful after firing their people... Nope, I don't know any of those.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript
But AppleScript does not let you steal other people's code.
Those humans explaining why fixes aren’t complete are proving data for the next training run - really training their replacements.
Then when you do have AIs fixing bugs you won’t need the more mediocre engineers.
Only an AGI will ever "replace" developers. Current AI merely boosts us.
That is why, it's not a web app. (As Javascript is the most used language on the internet)
This sort of software (language runtime) requires that it HAS to be correct and no room for clumsiness.
Why do you think almost every AI copilot "demo" is on typical web apps and not on the Linux kernel or on the PyTorch compiler?
It would ruin the "AGI" coding narrative.
The AI boosters need to show that the hype train isn't slowing down. Tell it to replace the Linux kernel developers and watch it struggle in real time.
It's a natural selection mechanism whereby poorly run companies will fail extremely quickly.
These are bad companies with horrible leadership that are wasting resources. Their existence is a net negative to society and our industry. Good bye to the garbage Klarna's and DuoLingos. No one will miss you.
Sure, but at the short term cost of engineers' livelihoods.
Or were you thinking C-suite would be held to account for the failure?
You just need investors and consumers to allocate capital to their competitors. The flow of capital and consumer preference is a decentralized communication method. Price signals, supply and demand, and government regulations are a form of stigmergy.
Poorly run companies can be an opportunity to direct development towards whatever I'm curious about, and that's usually beneficial to both parties.
Who gives a crap if bad companies fail or don't fail? And for that matter how is it good or bad for you and me if bad companies fail or succeed despite being poorly run?
I'm curious about the context of your judgment.
If a CEO is making a tech product, but knows so little about tech that he's replacing engineers with 2025's AIs, we're all better off if that CEO goes and does something else, and those engineers go work for technical people.
Temporary stability is not a substitute for long-term prosperity. Creative destruction.
If we accept that we should be productive, then it seems easy to justify that engineers should be working at good, well run companies producing real value for society.
In practice having worked in financial services and ad tech, at high salaries in each, it was absolutely the equivalent of intellectual digging of ditches for pay. The only job I ever had that felt productive was in academia, and the pay was off the charts low.
The prompt was "Please create a basic NSTextView wrapper in SwiftUI, that uses TextKit2 and SwiftUI best practices."
Claude 4 Sonnet produces something I can't type in and the font is invisible, Gemini 2.5 Pro produces a bunch of compiler errors.
I use this stuff for React at work, and while it's slightly better in that context, it still makes completely idiotic mistakes and it really is a toss up on whether I save any time at all IMO.
I think the positive experiences are some mix of people who:
- Lack the skill/experience to recognize bad code or issues
- Don't care about the quality at all (future upgrades or maintainability)
- Only care about the visual output
--------------------
The more I use these tools the more I think the raw generation aspect is a complete crapshoot. The only thing I've had success with is data marshaling or boilerplate code where I provide examples - and even then they'll do random things I specifically instruct them not to in the prompt. Even for small context windows. And to do anything useful I have to be a fucking surgeon with the context and spend a lot of time crafting a really good prompt, and they still mess it up frequently.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667... was posted in a comment here a few days ago, and I think it explains a lot of the issues. Programming works because it's a rigid language to communicate precise instructions to the machine. We're trying to circumvent that by using natural language, but natural language isn't precise. So the LLM has all this ambiguity to deal with, and output isn't what we want.
To counteract this the new idea is to provide tools to the LLM so it can check that its output is rigid/valid to at least fix some of the issues, but it's never going to be 100% due to the fundamental way this all works (LLMs using probabilities/randomness and us instructing them with natural language).
--------------------
Not to be completely negative, I think there are really exciting use cases that we can leverage well today:
- Embeddings for semantic/similarity search is amazing and will have all kinds of applications
- Processing error messages/logs with LLMs is awesome. They can parse out the actual issues much faster than I can