Can’t say you’re the only one but I certainly want an assistant.
I’ve been putting off some dental work for a year or more because I have an implant that’s come lose, and the two dentists I saw about it said they’d have to remove the crown, send pictures to some lab that might be able to identify the manufacturer (or maybe not), maybe get the right tooling, maybe have to replace the entire thing (thousands of dollars, removing and resetting a post in my jaw), etc etc. all because I didn’t know the manufacturer of an implant I got 20 years ago.
Claude cowork was able to understand the problem, interview me, find dental insurance paperwork in my email, identify the prosthedontist used, find that that office had closed years ago, find where the practitioner moved to, their new practice, and get me a number to call.
Within a couple of ours I had the manufacturer, procedure notes, and X-rays from the installation.
Is that WALL-E style laziness? Maybe. But I’m good with it, as I have line of sight to solving an annoying problem that seemed insurmountable.
I'm just not that annoyed by having to search for a flight, or train, or bus. Or make plans. Or find a restaurant. I'm not annoyed enough by these trivial tasks to want to outsource them.
I don't want to ask Siri to book me a restaurant, when the alternative is a quick google search.
Is it possible they have families, aging relatives to care for, health issues or other reasons that time is precious and “spend an hour correlating amazing restaurants with their available bookings against my crazy schedule” is not a good solution?
IMO the greatest failure of the HN-style tech community is complete lack of empathy, or even awareness, for people whose lives have different shapes.
Today's billionaires aren't like yesterday's. They could be doing cool shit but they are just padding their own private real estate and stock portfolios. Yawn.
Why not make an epic bridge or tower with gargoyles on it? Why not a museum or park?
You can walk around Europe and see buildings from centuries ago. Who is building the things and spaces people in 2426 will marvel at?
Isn't it better that Bill Gates instead pumped huge amounts of money into philanthropy? Meanwhile SF has the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. A cathedral would be nice to look at but preventing malaria or helping sick kids seems preferable. In the past money couldn't have easily be deployed for good like this and helping fund cathedrals was likely done to increase the donors likelihood of getting into heaven.
My understanding is that represents only a tiny fraction of their wealth. As I understand it, the idea is that it would be better if the billionaire's other frivolous spending was on something that would endure for future generations. (Setting aside the religious question of weather cathedrals are frivolous.)
Did prior generations of billionaires spend a higher percentage of their wealth on charity?
I also genuinely wonder how the ratio of "paper wealth" has changed. How much money would Elon or Jeff have of they actually sold their shares in their companies? How does that compare to John D Rockefeller or the Getties? I also wonder when those created their charities.
Who cares about the past. They should be building public infrastructure and do some things the rest of society enjoys instead of buying castles and islands surrounded by fences they visit once every 2 years
Many places I've worked didn't promote hard workers at all. Hard workers were hard to replace so they were kept where they were and even blocked from promotions at times. People floating about with few duties were easy to backfill so could move to new positions, including up.
Those people “floating about” were doing something: building relationships with others who could promote them. Something that’s very difficult for hard workers to do, because they’re busy actually…working.
Or something they are not willing to do. Genuinely, my career development plan is to be so good at a certain technical niche that people are still going to hire me even if I spit before them.
Of course reality hits hard so I’m now good with people. Not my taste but I can fake it easily.
I would recommend reconsidering that strategy; it’s not sustainable for your entire working lifetime. There WILL come a point where you cannot maintain the pace of being “so good” that the works speaks for itself. When you reach that point, the relationships you build NOW, will become very important to that future you.
It doesn’t mean you need to stop being technical now, but at least start allocating a few hours a month to relationships in a meaningful, intentional way.
> Many places I've worked didn't promote hard workers at all.
There's a type of hard worker who puts in a lot of effort and hopes it's noticed, but gets stuck being loyal to jobs like this.
If you work at one of those jobs, they're going to collect around you. You might be getting pulled into that type of work without knowing it.
The successful ones know that getting promoted is just 1 out of many potential career moves for them to consider at a given point. If they're not getting promoted, they get up and leave for another company where their hard work will be appreciated.
Some people get stuck at those companies, watch people working hard and getting nowhere, and go in the opposite direction: They stay put and stop trying hard. That can be fine for people whose goal is to have a stable job that isn't too demanding. However it gives a very wrong impression of the relationship between hard work and success when extrapolate over an entire career.
There are a lot of things about dysfunctional and broken companies that shouldn't be generalized. It's too easy to get trapped in cycles of cynicism and defeatism in a place like those.
I find lower intelligence/ status people especially like it. Many of the earliest adopters of AI at my company were the ones who weren't performing. They often felt unappreciated or ignored (for good reason) but AI started telling them they were right. It became their only ally and allowed them to spread their terribleness on a scale we couldn't have imagined. This was a government agency where firing wasn't a thing, only 'performance management'.
For me hearing that every idea is my best yet is my cue to touch grass
I've used AI for building a hobbyist note app myself. It's also a mixed bag but a lot of that comes down to how I've changed.
Before AI dev was expensive so I'd spend hours planning features. I filled 5 notebooks with UI sketches and data schemas and lists of names of what to call things. Building was more or less final as I only had 5-10 hrs a week max and wanted to move on.
Now I type directly into the Claude Code chat box and it writes it in front of me. I haven't planned a thing in months. As a result the app swings wildly around based on my whims and feelings. I can rewrite the whole thing based on something I thought of in the shower. Then days later I realize it isn't right and I rebuild it again. All of the rewrites have done a number on the code and I see dead patterns everywhere from stuff long since deleted.
In a professional app I'd have others to hold me accountable so it's not exactly the same but AI has made it very easy to make a lot of bad apps quickly. If you know exactly what you want though it can feel like magic.
I just hope it's still respecting the data loading and caching algorithms I designed so carefully cause I wouldn't know if it wasn't anymore.
I have noticed the exact behavior change on myself that you describe.
But, thanks to the magic of keeping track of time and tasks, I have discovered:
- I am not all that faster when project timelines are concerned
- I've often built things with AI with the latest and greatest technologies that I've always wanted to learn but never did, like write a microservice backend with the trendiest frameworks with infrastructure as code and all the bells and whistles, while previously I was content with a server executable sitting on disk (maybe in a container), writing to a sqlite db file next to it.
- The new tech has serious performance DX/UX and cost issues. While previously deployment was just a copy, now I have to wait for terraform to churn through the monstrosity I made with AI. Debugging is hard.
- There's no prestige in building with fancy tech. AI can build using microservice orchestration. It can build using a simple CRUD blob as well. You just have to ask it. A lot of appeal of said fancy tech lay in prestige, newness, and exclusivity, and it sucks in very tangible ways.
- I used to be much more awesome than I gave myself credit for. Looking back at my old code, the amount of highly dense and quality code I cranked out during my productive periods was way more than I though, and you could feel it was thought through. Rather than doing the feature sloppily then fixing the 5 corner cases, like AI does, I carefully considered execution flow and made sure the simple looking code actually did everything correctly. This meant that it had a ton of missing mental context that I couldn't replicate just by looking at it after a long while, and touching the code without rebuilding it was a futile exercise.
- I fooled myself into thinking I understood what AI was doing, but in reality, I was far less aware than I expected and needed to be
> I carefully considered execution flow and made sure the simple looking code actually did everything correctly
That is what I love about coding. Not just insofar as it's necessary and useful (it is both), but just as a puzzle in its own right, to a fault. It's just a type of "imagination" that I don't really apply often otherwise, since e.g. I'm not into math, not an organizer or manager etc. Though I did have jobs where I instantly saw ways to optimise some things I do credit to having practised with code. You just try to think through what will happen given the known landscape and the given decided plan, what could happen given the known unknowns, how your heuristics would deal with that, and unless it's all green you see if you can change the landscape, the plan, explore some unknowns, and/or improve your heuristics (by which I just mean what you use to make ad-hoc decisions when things don't go according to plan). That kind of becomes a habit which can get applied to and improve lots of things. Measure twice, cut once, so I don't have to spend three days because of a stray comma (again).
Amazing how many software engineers don't do this and continue to fool themselves into thinking they're faster with AI. If only more people would track and reflect on their time use.
> AI has made it very easy to make a lot of bad apps quickly
Is it bad from a user or performance perspective, or just untidy and unaesthetic from a developer’s perspective? Because the developer’s perspective is becoming increasingly unimportant as LLMs become the main readers and writers of the code.
At least some of it (not all of it) will leak from devs pain to users pain... Untidy unaesthetic unreviewed code will sooner or later introduce inconsistencies, poor performance, and bugs, and as you get more of it, the harder it is to clean up properly and get things under control.
> developer’s perspective is becoming increasingly unimportant as LLMs become the main readers and writers of the code.
Until the LLM itself becomes confused by the 10 layers of old patterns that weren't fully deleted from the code base, 5 of which do more or less the same thing but in minutely different ways that cause issues.
I don’t think you shouldn’t go and clean up dead code and ensure that you have code reuse, as it probably does help the LLM somewhat. I just don’t think that it needs to be as strict as we’re used to for human consumption. And the LLMs will get better at both reading such messy codebases and not making a mess as time goes on. Assuming of course, that not making a mess even helps.
Code that is untidy and unaesthetic from a developer’s perspective is also likely to be confusing to a user and perform or scale poorly, in my experience at least.
Elegance kinda-sorta has to be token efficient in the micro and the macro. Easier & better LLM results.
Aesthetic code is clear & consistent and therefore more readable. Supposedly we’re all awesome at PR review and use an aggressive process of manual review now, so readability should be a priority.
LLMs have context windows and compress them arbitrarily, inconsistent or messy areas of code can be read and improperly weighted in any given session, code base cleanliness gives consistency of generation.
… LLMs or not, I simply can’t imagine making a large(r) pile of crap for myself to maintain & customers to use in their businesses is some grand engineering benefit over time. If those agents are so great make ‘em do the entire job and refactor tested utility into a digestible & defensible product.
I think these are separate things. I get the heuristic you’re applying, but with rigorous testing code quality doesn’t matter the same way anymore. Indeed, what is quality?
I don’t think any of what you just said is true. Code quality matters even with testing even up to proof of correctness using formal methods, because working software is a moving target and quality is a measure of how easy / expensive it is to continue to track that target going forward.
Both. I debugged an issue a few days ago where a messy, incomplete migration was causing every agent that drove by to very confidently assert the wrong behavior and try to make breaking changes.
Depends on how it manifests. If things change every app release sometimes for better sometimes for worse and nothing really stays consistent over time it is clearly bad for user.
Users really like stability of their experience. They want the things that are working to keep working. If something is bit weird but acceptable they expect it to continue like that. Going back and forth between things might be the worst. After bad bugs like data being lost or thing not working at all.
For sure, but I think solid automated testing is what gets you to a good and consistent user experience. Validation of the outcome rather than the code itself.
I mean that it's allowed more bad apps to be created. It hasn't lowered the quality of apps necessarily but the low barrier to entry means things can be created that don't need to exist
I've been searching for the perfect notes app my whole life, and have been contemplating just building it myself now. I'd love if you could link me to your github and share it.
I feel like I'm crazy here but isn't China just sitting there doing nothing?
On one hand there's the relentless barage of American propaganda. I get that a militaristic society needs an enemy to fight against lest they turn on each other. I get that if you tell people a bad guy is coming for your jobs or your lives then you can maybe get your workers to accept worse conditions and living standards which increases profits. It's ghoulish but there's some logic.
On the other hand I can't see China doing anything except minding its own business. No tariffs. No bullying other nations. No wars started. No threatening allies. They don't let their people waste their lives on brain rot or gambling. They largely align with UN resolutions. They respect international institutions instead of always being the asterisk.
Has American propaganda just failed to work outside it's borders? It's not landing at all
I don't trust any American company because they will switch into extraction mode eventually and squeeze every cent they can out of you.
Even if the founders didn't want that, eventually the upper ranks will fill with MBAs and the board with private equity and they will make it that way. Their bonuses are based on quarterly performance not customer experience
Long gone are the companies who served their communities for decades or centuries, providing a stable return to the owners, jobs for the workers and value to the customers.
I'd rather China have my data than America. China might do something with it one day but America built exploiting it into the business model (disclaimer that I'm not Uyghur or Taiwanese though)
What I like about Hacker News is each day I open it up, scan the first three pages, open 2-5 links to read, then close it again. Those pages make it easy to monitor my usage and set limits. I used to do the same with Reddit before that changed
I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds
Unless you also believe the neutral view is earth being half flat and half round
I like this analogy. You can't just average two ideas and call it a centrist position. Sometimes one position is right and the people supporting the losing idea should be ignored. Facts are how we decide. People are not logical creatures and will cling to ideas beyond all reason or common sense once they've incorporated it into their identity. There is a reason that right wing appeals to emotion aren't popular with LLMs
I want to be an active player in my own life. I want to do things even if there's some friction.
All I can imagine is that future from WallE where everything is so easy no one tries or does anything at all