Past threads :

2012 : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3987566

2014 : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367258

2021 : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26837152

> mastering the agentic process

It would have been worth it if the frontier models were open weight. Right now, if you invest time in mastering tools like Claude Code or Google’s Antigravity, there is no guarantee that you won’t be removed from their ecosystems for any reason, which would make your efforts and skills useless.

If there is a skill to using LLM coding agents, I think it is mostly just developing an intuitive sense for how to prompt and the “jagged frontier” of LLMs.

IME, the tools are largely interchangeable. They are all slightly different, but the basics of prompting and the jaggedness of the frontier is more or less the same across all of them.

Switching from codex to claude code is orders of magnitude simpler than switching from c# to java or emacs to vim.

It was an easy project, but managed to hit frontpage here :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46345897

Who said employees in India are unaffected by these layoffs?

AI is definitely a solid reason. Even a 10% increase in developer efficiency translates to roughly 9% fewer workers needed to do the same job. For AI to be cost effective, it must reduce headcount.

Jevon's Paradox will show up too though. When employees get more efficient companies just demand more of them.

You really have to be in "the room where it happens" to know the motivations behind any one layoff.

I have noticed this while working in a startup, how efficiency gains impacted work in the last 3 months with better coding models coming in. If you have someone senior that is effective at using these tools and can own the outputs and be capable of correcting things that are sloppy, you are immensely more valuable than 2-3 more developers in the same area of work. It's actually faster to empower fewer people than try to have 3 fast guys where there would be coordination overhead, which would become a bottleneck and bring down a lot of the efficiency gains. A good full stack engineer who can work with these tools at speed with caution is more valuable similarly as it requires less coordination. 3 junior devs shipping 90% good code and 10% slop would make the senior who is reviewing everything the bottleneck.

To help us use your anecdote, could you tell us what product area is your startup is working in?

Amazon is mostly laying off managers, however, not developers.

Probably the same happening for websites being built or apps being published.

Thanks for the heads up. Corrected it.

By searching in all categories, I can see it's mentioned once : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42659243#42662874

For a cult, this is some remarkably low-effort proselytizing though :/

> For a cult, this is some remarkably low-effort proselytizing though :/

I think we take for granted having dang as a member and it makes us apathetic.

> I expect two of the listed to have very positive sentiment, and one generally negative in 2025.

You are quite correct! Crafting Interpreters actually has the highest average sentiment score across all books with more than 10 comments. This is the average sentiment score of all three( range being -10 to 10) :

Crafting Interpreters(7.8) > SICP(4.3) > Clean Code(-3.2)

Just missed by a day I guess. Cutoff is 15th December.