But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after.
Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste.
It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.
Agreed. I think there are people who like coding for the sake of it, akin to solving a puzzle. Then there are those who like building, and coding is a necessary step in that. The former are sad, the latter are happy.
That is how I feel. The first couple things I build with AI were exciting.
Now I derive no satisfaction from anything 'I' have built with it. At some point I am just stuck asking myself "Why am I doing this if someone can prompt an LLM the same way I have and get a similar result?". I can have the LLM write documentation, only to think "who am 'I' writing this for?". Why bother if someone isnt even going to read it, its just going to become context for someone else's LLM session.
I know there are other ways to look at but this is where I am at currently.
There are certainly people that are a mix of both, i lean towards the latter group, but still enjoy the feeling of being lost in the flow of certain tasks. What i lost was the hard problems, instead of considering how to solve those problems, that time is spent thinking up the next features or whatever, its a funny pivot and certainly pushes me towards being more of a generalist.
I still wouldn't say im "happy" with the current state of things though, despite mostly fitting in that latter group. AI is still fairly tiring to interact with, and everything feels contested. If its not contested, it feels like putting almost anything out there... means it will become contested when certain people see it and decide "that is a solid idea", and just throw agents at mirroring it.
It's not a dichotomy, though. I loved coding for the sake of it. I found it relaxing, meditative, and I was very good at it. I also like building things where coding is a necessary step.
And while I don't go all in on the notion of revealed preferences, a few facts stand out to me:
1. Nothing is actually stopping me from writing code by hand for fun, but I don't
2. There is no practical reason to manually write homebrew SNES games in assembly language, but some people do
3. I still have no deficit of fun problems to dig into, to sit and ponder, and then experiment with. They just aren't coding problems, and I have far more powerful tools to help me navigate prior art, test out hypotheses, and so on.
I like both. From an economic perspective I'm a little sad my programming skills give me less of an edge in the job market, but I still hand program here and there for fun.
I’m in the former group and I’m happy. I don’t think many people enjoy all coding. I like working on intricate details of difficult systems. I don’t like screwing around with build systems or writing a bunch of tests that are almost but not quite the same in order to cover all cases. I get to do what I like and delegate what I don’t.
This seems overly reductive. I’m firmly in the second camp, I don’t enjoy typing code, I want to be solving real world problems, not riddles. But I don’t consider a problem solved until I have understood it entirely, until I’ve anchored that new piece of understanding within my mental model of the domain, until I feel like I’m able to deploy that knowledge on demand and build upon it.
Working with AI tools the way many people seem to be doing it (multiple sessions at once, not even reading the output, rubber-stamping MRs) makes me anxious and paranoid, and it’s definitely NOT because I miss punching in if statements.
I didn't mean to make the options seem mutually exclusive, you just typically hear from one side or the other but there are plenty of people in the middle.
It's not the middle though, it's a rejection of that binary entirely. (I feel the same way as GP and also resent - not you per se, but we hear the more aggressive or reductionist version of this all the time - the world being framed such that the only possible reason we could have qualms about handing off understanding to the machine is that we just were too up our own butts in love with for loops.)
I’ve got a foot in both worlds and I feel pretty discombobulated. It’s amazing to be able to build whatever I imagine, but I also feel like something I loved has been taken away from me.
I keep thinking it would be interesting to do a series of interviews with software engineers on how they’re dealing with this change.
I think that’s not really true, it just looks that way from HN. I did a series of UXR interviews maybe 3 months ago for an unrelated project but one where we had to gain an understanding of how people use AI in their workflow, and it really still runs the gamut.
This dichotomy keeps coming up, but I think there are actually three phases of making, and three phases of pleasure, and people keep overlooking the third phase:
1. The joy of the process itself. If you're a programmer, it's writing code, running it, fixing bugs, making tests pass. If you're a woodworker, it's the feel of wood sliding under your fingers, a deft hand on a chisel.
2. The satisfaction of a completed work. For a programmer, that's an app you can run and click around and see the features up and running. For a woodworker, it's a sanded finished piece of furniture sitting there in the workshop.
3. Seeing the completed work make a difference in someone's life. For a programmer, that's a user telling you how your app helped them achieve a goal. For a woodworker, it's seeing that furniture in a room, watching it accumulate the patina of use.
So much of people talking past each other about AI comes from people who care a lot about 1 and people who never really cared about 1 but care about 2. It turns out there are many programmers who never really liked programming, they just wanted to have made an app. They are delighted about AI because it lets them skip a lot of step 1 and get right to 2.
But what I think is critically missing is that for most people, step 2 is marginal. It's step 3 where most of the real joy is. An app with zero users does not get you up in the morning. A piece of furniture collecting dust in an attic is not a source of meaning.
And the core problem with AI is that it gives you 2 by burning a whole lot of 3. Yes, you can whip up your "exercise tracker for cats" app in a tiny fraction of the time. So can a million other people. Your app is going to drown in a sea of other forgotten apps. Probably none of them will be maintained and none will reach critical mass.
I've done a lot of creative work over the years and time and again, as digital technology has lowered the barrier of entry, I've watched a horde of enthusiastic new people become disillusioned when it turns out they can make things now, but it's harder than ever to actually connect those things to people because everyone else can too.
I remember when DSLRs got a million people excited about being professional photographers, but now almost none are because photos are a mostly worthless commodity. I remember when CD mixers and Serato opened the doors to a million DJs who no longer had to buy expensive vinyl and struggle with beatmatching records. Now DJ mixes are a dime a dozen and it's harder than ever to be a working DJ. Recording an album used to require a room full of very expensive gear. Now anyone with a laptop and a DAW can do it. Publishing a novel required getting one of a small number of publishers to like it enough to print a thousand copies. Now anyone can upload a PDF to Amazon and share it with the world.
What happens when the barrier of entry gets radically lowered is that it requires some other extrinsic attribute to rise above the competition. In practice, that is either being rich and connected already, or getting extremely lucky. Domains where anyone can play have the steepest power law distributions. You have a few stars that everyone wishes they were and a million people doing it in their limited spare time. Unless you're already one of the elites, it's basically a lottery.
Now that's going to happen with software development.
Hmm, very pessimistic conclusion. Not that there's anything to disagree with, it's just putting it all down to luck or being born rich sounds too limited and narrow. If it isn't, then the only option would be becoming an activist no? But, maybe those are the only two things you see because you're putting the end goal way too high... as in being a renowned novelist to take one example, instead of someone with some following.
> If it isn't, then the only option would be becoming an activist no?
It certainly wouldn't hurt! I think a lot about how many people in the US would be willing to be artists barely making ends meet if doing so didn't also mean losing access to healthcare.
> But, maybe those are the only two things you see because you're putting the end goal way too high... as in being a renowned novelist to take one example, instead of someone with some following.
Yeah, I agree that it's important to set your sights lower. You can be a successful novelist without being the next J.K. Rowling.
But power laws and the way word of mouth works iteratively within social media is a merciless popularity engine. The best way to get popular is to be popular. There is a positive feedback loop that consolidates most attention on a small number of winners.
You can still find your niche (my two books did!), but it's hard. And finding a niche small enough to not get dwarfed by the superstars but large enough to be a sustainable source of income is nearly impossible. Almost every creative has a day job these days.
what is pessimistic about it? it seems spot-on to me. it is so weird how so many people in tech who should be capable at analysing seem to see logic and deductive thinking as pessimism these days.
I like coding for the sake of it, like solving a puzzle. for example I love Advent of Code challenges each year. I don't use AI for it (except for documentation look up) even though it could solve it trivially.
I used to like coding, and I did look at it as a puzzle. But at the end of the day I always thought it didn't go fast enough, and I had to do so much more work to be able to finish my own projects. That actually made me sad. Now I actually can do all of that. And while Claude is doing that, I just play Minecraft or something.
Serious question: Does the ease of building cheapen the final product? Like something I've been struggling with is how can I show effort in the design of a product if I can just one-shot it with a prompt?
I'm doing the same thing as op and at least for me no; There are soooo many details i like to have changed, it doesn't feel like its just slop.
It feels like a very very well done exhaustive PoC.
Like executing an Idea is a 1000 times more fun than just thinking it and rethinking it a few month later again and then typing a few things down, again, and then thinking about it again and then thinking "i should do some sabatical to work on that stuff" Just to talk to friends who did sabaticals and never done anything with their time and realizing that you wouldn't just do that just because you took some sabatical.
The ease of building highlights the mental overhead of maintenance for me.
This is why SAAS is here to stay. Yes, I can one shot it, but then I've got to maintain it, and I want to get on and play with the next shiny thing!
Doing things for me, awesome, that works. Doing things that have an expectation from a third party, not so fun.
If you build something, sit with your users, listen, build community etc. I don't think that cheapens the final product.
Cheapen to whom? If you're building software for yourself I don't think this matters a whole lot as long as its valuable to you
If you're building it to sell.. I don't see how this doesn't commodify most products if a competitor can just clone what you're selling with minimal effort
Essentially no actual product that users will pay for can be one-shot with a prompt. But you can dream bigger and do harder, more valuable things.
Design is still hard. People are very good at sniffing out shortcuts and inconsistencies and AI “smell”. The last 10% of designing a product is more like the last 400% (because you’ll probably need to throw it away or start over). It’s not spending time on design that cheapens the product
> Like something I've been struggling with is how can I show effort in the design of a product if I can just one-shot it with a prompt?
You're discovering that effort doesn't matter, only results.
I bought an old house and started renovating it. Countless hours of back breaking work to get things up to a modern standard of living. Yet bringing people over to see the finished result felt so hollow. There's no "gosh this must have been so hard, great work!". To them it is just a house, like any other. The incredible amount of effort on my part to get it to that point meant absolutely nothing. No one cares how much work you put into something. It ultimately only matters what something is or isn't, and competence is the expected baseline.
I want to renovate a house myself too and we would ask your ears off and you could show us every single detail of your renovation story and challanges.
It doesn't cheapen the product, but it may cheapen the experience of developing it. Part of the satisfaction of being a developer is overcoming the complexity and challenges of the task, learning something new, some amount of struggle. You're not going to get that same satisfaction from a task that is too easy, or has become too easy.
The current state of AI seems to be more about automation of well defined tasks rather than things like creativity and challenging design that bucks convention, or requires human sensibility, so I think there is still room to get satisfaction from that aspect of it (you do the design, AI does the coding).
People point out how computer chess hasn't killed human chess, but I don't see much satisfaction from doing any development work by hand that could equally well (at least as far as the resulting artifact goes) be done by one/few-shot prompting, even though part of the fun of being a developer is being able to conjure dreams into reality - the end result is part of the satisfaction, but the challenge in getting there also matters.
There's a way in which it can definitely cgeapen things.
When you are vibecoding or vibe engineering, you're moving so quickly that it's difficult to evaluate what you're actually building and why. This often significantly reduce the quality and usefulness of the result.
It seems very difficult to mitigate, even if you were aware of the phenomenon. I think that the speed alone plays a large role. I'm not sure how one can build quality products without careful reflection and thoughtful iteration throughout the process.
What matters is human hours invested. A tic tac toe game hand coded in 30min and a fully playable 3d platformer created in 30min both have the same value in my eyes.
You can make cheap things with AI, but you can also make things that are rich and have depth. That deepness though comes from days of thinking, reflecting, and iterating on the problem. It doesn’t come from a fire and forget prompt.
Two days ago I had someone on socials send me a message saying they had cloned my platform, and that they were going to undercut me. It gave me a good laugh. A prompt isn’t a product, it’s the first step of one. I’ve poured thousands of hours into the part of the product that makes it real - the administration, the financials, the infrastructure, the marketing, the iteration and refinement. One thing a lot of people are now facing the realities of is that there is far, far more to a product than just code. AI can’t one shot a business - that still takes blood sweat and tears.
> Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me.
That is the problem, why OP is so sad, you spam with your great ideas taking up the oxygen around him. AI is absolutely amazing when you use it for your own ideas and projects, and terrible when others do the same, raising the bar and making your own efforts look smaller. Have you read the open letter written by Fields medalists? They complain "the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion".
A space elevator from Earth's surface requires low-defect manufacturing of vast quantities of long, single walled carbon nanotubes. Developing a solution (if it is possible at all) requires extensive R&D work in laboratories and factories. If it takes an hour to run an experiment, and the next experiment depends on the outcome of the current one, then extremely fast and capable intelligence accelerates scientific research much less than it can mathematics or software.
It makes me wonder if the current app dopamine/gold rush will be similar to the Sora/MidJourney dopamine hit in 2023 or the AI "make me a story to make fun of my friend on Discord" dopamine hit in 2022. "We have never been able to make more images, movies and now apps... but they don't seem to have made a single killer art, film... or dare I say app?" Maybe just maybe, the novelty will wear off and people realize how artificial and soul-less these AI-tokenmaxxed app's are, with their temu Cyberpunk aesthetics, California minimalist Dashboard UX flow and mid-witted Rust stack.
I wonder what is the equivalent in 2026 of what Dave should do to be a human cosmonaut to go against the transformer VAE probability-based machine we call Claude.
It reminds me of object oriented programming. There was a time when OO was going to revolutionize everything. Ordinary people would make their own programs. Programmers would 10x their productivity. Companies sprinkled it in their marketing materials the way they do “AI” today. People put it on their resumes.
It didn’t revolutionize everything but it did quietly take over. Almost every production language has some version of it and pretty much everybody uses it.
LLMs are changing rapidly so I won’t even try to speculate about where they’ll end up, but that’s how it looks now.
Hoping when J2EE/Java Beans of the late 2020's consultants from Accenture takes over and makes a million ClaudeHelloWorldFactoryBuilder, there will be a profitable niche in the Haskell and Erlang of 2020's for the rest of us!
AI has confronted me with the reality of some of my ideas.
I've wanted to build something rather specific for a long time.
With AI i'm close to release, but had AI not come along it would not have happened for at least another 5 or 10 years depending on what life throws in my way.
There's an initial AI mania stage. It's when someone starts using AI to code and they come to think that they now have superpowers (and to some extent they do). I certainly had that mania and to some extent still do. There's a frenzy of working on 3 or 4 projects at once that's exhilarating. Even right now I've got Claude working on a couple of different projects and GLM-5.3-flash working on another. But I have to wonder how much of this stuff I'm co-creating with AI will actually get used.
That's the thing. There's no point in sharing most of the results anymore. When and if someone needs a version of this, they will likely need it to be slightly different. By then the model will have trained on your session and be a bit better in general.
They will just prompt their own version into existence without any obvious heritage to yours.
I've already seen this a few times already. For example, someone on r/locallama vibecoded a new feature for llama.cpp. When people asked if they had submitted the PR to llama.cpp because they wanted the same feature, the poster replied that it had been vibe coded and llama.cpp doesn't accept vibe coded PRs so, no, they did not intend to submit a PR.
Kinda sounds like the problem there is that llama.cpp has decided it doesn't want any of the ideas of its users that they build on top of it. If I built a feature that solves my problem, I'm not going to completely redo it from scratch by hand just to make a PR. There's a lot of stuff that would be valuable to build that doesn't because people who have the idea don't have the time/energy/etc to pursue it. Now they have an assistant they can delegate to and have the energy, but only because of the assistant being able to take on large portion of the work in the area they're not as expert in.
So if you reject projects largely coded by supervised AI, then you simply won't get any of the value from them.
In a sense, all these features and ideas etc were always things that could have existed, but before they sat in the fog of the invisible, and now you get to see many more of them and it can be frustrating. But in a no-LLM world we weren't going to get those features and products anyway.
I wonder if the next addicting tech will be AI mania like you described. Rather than folks watching videos picked by the algorithm as a kind of addiction, folks will be "building" all day addicted to making things with AI. In the AI silo you're a super genius as it eggs you on to keep building
On the surface that seems like the case, but after going through a situation similar to what GP described I'm not sure that's the case.
It's like everyone is fighting for your attention. One argues that an educational video is what you should watch. Another argues that building some piece of software you could easily pay a $1-$10 but now custom built for you is a better use of your time.
Also there's the lottery aspect. Where you use Claude thinking that something you build may strike gold. So it becomes like one big addicting lottery ticket for builders.
I, and I'm pretty sure I share this impression with many of you, would feel a whole lot more optimistic about AI for software engineering (which truly has been transformational) if it didn't come with layoffs or the promise of layoffs.
A sad realization I've had is that even though we can create so much with the help of AI, what we're creating isn't the same as what it was before AI, even if the artifact is exactly the same.
Like immagine 200 years ago being able to produce a photorealistic depiction of a scene. Then, it would command you a reputation, a salary, you would have cultural prowess attached to your work, it would generate a legacy for yourself, etc.
Before AI, any cool project would give back so much more than after AI: experience, a following, a community coming around your project which could increase your social capital. It would even give you momentum, spending a long time working on something which would mark you as someone who works on that type of thing, which could lead you to interesting places.
Nowadays, these fleeting project ideas that you can grind out with AI have the effect of children's art projects: you feel a sense of pride at what you made, you like the way it looks, you may hang it somewhere, but no one else really cares, or if they do care, it's not for long.
jjcm · · focus · HN ↗
But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after.
Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste.
It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.
jrflo · · focus · HN ↗
kyguy23 · · focus · HN ↗
tempest_ · · focus · HN ↗
Now I derive no satisfaction from anything 'I' have built with it. At some point I am just stuck asking myself "Why am I doing this if someone can prompt an LLM the same way I have and get a similar result?". I can have the LLM write documentation, only to think "who am 'I' writing this for?". Why bother if someone isnt even going to read it, its just going to become context for someone else's LLM session.
I know there are other ways to look at but this is where I am at currently.
tortilla · · focus · HN ↗
assumed_throwaw · · focus · HN ↗
There is more to software engineering than just "coding" or "building," and it's not even correct to oppose the two.
sidrag22 · · focus · HN ↗
I still wouldn't say im "happy" with the current state of things though, despite mostly fitting in that latter group. AI is still fairly tiring to interact with, and everything feels contested. If its not contested, it feels like putting almost anything out there... means it will become contested when certain people see it and decide "that is a solid idea", and just throw agents at mirroring it.
mistercow · · focus · HN ↗
And while I don't go all in on the notion of revealed preferences, a few facts stand out to me:
1. Nothing is actually stopping me from writing code by hand for fun, but I don't
2. There is no practical reason to manually write homebrew SNES games in assembly language, but some people do
3. I still have no deficit of fun problems to dig into, to sit and ponder, and then experiment with. They just aren't coding problems, and I have far more powerful tools to help me navigate prior art, test out hypotheses, and so on.
derangedHorse · · focus · HN ↗
throwaway89864 · · focus · HN ↗
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juanani · · focus · HN ↗
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wat10000 · · focus · HN ↗
Toutouxc · · focus · HN ↗
Working with AI tools the way many people seem to be doing it (multiple sessions at once, not even reading the output, rubber-stamping MRs) makes me anxious and paranoid, and it’s definitely NOT because I miss punching in if statements.
jrflo · · focus · HN ↗
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slopinthebag · · focus · HN ↗
vigilantpuma · · focus · HN ↗
I keep thinking it would be interesting to do a series of interviews with software engineers on how they’re dealing with this change.
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
Beware of survivor bias though.
vigilantpuma · · focus · HN ↗
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
vigilantpuma · · focus · HN ↗
munificent · · focus · HN ↗
1. The joy of the process itself. If you're a programmer, it's writing code, running it, fixing bugs, making tests pass. If you're a woodworker, it's the feel of wood sliding under your fingers, a deft hand on a chisel.
2. The satisfaction of a completed work. For a programmer, that's an app you can run and click around and see the features up and running. For a woodworker, it's a sanded finished piece of furniture sitting there in the workshop.
3. Seeing the completed work make a difference in someone's life. For a programmer, that's a user telling you how your app helped them achieve a goal. For a woodworker, it's seeing that furniture in a room, watching it accumulate the patina of use.
So much of people talking past each other about AI comes from people who care a lot about 1 and people who never really cared about 1 but care about 2. It turns out there are many programmers who never really liked programming, they just wanted to have made an app. They are delighted about AI because it lets them skip a lot of step 1 and get right to 2.
But what I think is critically missing is that for most people, step 2 is marginal. It's step 3 where most of the real joy is. An app with zero users does not get you up in the morning. A piece of furniture collecting dust in an attic is not a source of meaning.
And the core problem with AI is that it gives you 2 by burning a whole lot of 3. Yes, you can whip up your "exercise tracker for cats" app in a tiny fraction of the time. So can a million other people. Your app is going to drown in a sea of other forgotten apps. Probably none of them will be maintained and none will reach critical mass.
I've done a lot of creative work over the years and time and again, as digital technology has lowered the barrier of entry, I've watched a horde of enthusiastic new people become disillusioned when it turns out they can make things now, but it's harder than ever to actually connect those things to people because everyone else can too.
I remember when DSLRs got a million people excited about being professional photographers, but now almost none are because photos are a mostly worthless commodity. I remember when CD mixers and Serato opened the doors to a million DJs who no longer had to buy expensive vinyl and struggle with beatmatching records. Now DJ mixes are a dime a dozen and it's harder than ever to be a working DJ. Recording an album used to require a room full of very expensive gear. Now anyone with a laptop and a DAW can do it. Publishing a novel required getting one of a small number of publishers to like it enough to print a thousand copies. Now anyone can upload a PDF to Amazon and share it with the world.
What happens when the barrier of entry gets radically lowered is that it requires some other extrinsic attribute to rise above the competition. In practice, that is either being rich and connected already, or getting extremely lucky. Domains where anyone can play have the steepest power law distributions. You have a few stars that everyone wishes they were and a million people doing it in their limited spare time. Unless you're already one of the elites, it's basically a lottery.
Now that's going to happen with software development.
card_zero · · focus · HN ↗
aquentinn · · focus · HN ↗
munificent · · focus · HN ↗
It certainly wouldn't hurt! I think a lot about how many people in the US would be willing to be artists barely making ends meet if doing so didn't also mean losing access to healthcare.
> But, maybe those are the only two things you see because you're putting the end goal way too high... as in being a renowned novelist to take one example, instead of someone with some following.
Yeah, I agree that it's important to set your sights lower. You can be a successful novelist without being the next J.K. Rowling.
But power laws and the way word of mouth works iteratively within social media is a merciless popularity engine. The best way to get popular is to be popular. There is a positive feedback loop that consolidates most attention on a small number of winners.
You can still find your niche (my two books did!), but it's hard. And finding a niche small enough to not get dwarfed by the superstars but large enough to be a sustainable source of income is nearly impossible. Almost every creative has a day job these days.
jambalaya8 · · focus · HN ↗
harpersealtako · · focus · HN ↗
I also like using AI to make things
I am happy
skerit · · focus · HN ↗
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Germanioum · · focus · HN ↗
It feels like a very very well done exhaustive PoC.
Like executing an Idea is a 1000 times more fun than just thinking it and rethinking it a few month later again and then typing a few things down, again, and then thinking about it again and then thinking "i should do some sabatical to work on that stuff" Just to talk to friends who did sabaticals and never done anything with their time and realizing that you wouldn't just do that just because you took some sabatical.
_puk · · focus · HN ↗
This is why SAAS is here to stay. Yes, I can one shot it, but then I've got to maintain it, and I want to get on and play with the next shiny thing!
Doing things for me, awesome, that works. Doing things that have an expectation from a third party, not so fun.
If you build something, sit with your users, listen, build community etc. I don't think that cheapens the final product.
tripleee · · focus · HN ↗
If you're building it to sell.. I don't see how this doesn't commodify most products if a competitor can just clone what you're selling with minimal effort
weitendorf · · focus · HN ↗
Design is still hard. People are very good at sniffing out shortcuts and inconsistencies and AI “smell”. The last 10% of designing a product is more like the last 400% (because you’ll probably need to throw it away or start over). It’s not spending time on design that cheapens the product
ramesh31 · · focus · HN ↗
You're discovering that effort doesn't matter, only results.
I bought an old house and started renovating it. Countless hours of back breaking work to get things up to a modern standard of living. Yet bringing people over to see the finished result felt so hollow. There's no "gosh this must have been so hard, great work!". To them it is just a house, like any other. The incredible amount of effort on my part to get it to that point meant absolutely nothing. No one cares how much work you put into something. It ultimately only matters what something is or isn't, and competence is the expected baseline.
samfar90 · · focus · HN ↗
Germanioum · · focus · HN ↗
I want to renovate a house myself too and we would ask your ears off and you could show us every single detail of your renovation story and challanges.
HarHarVeryFunny · · focus · HN ↗
The current state of AI seems to be more about automation of well defined tasks rather than things like creativity and challenging design that bucks convention, or requires human sensibility, so I think there is still room to get satisfaction from that aspect of it (you do the design, AI does the coding).
People point out how computer chess hasn't killed human chess, but I don't see much satisfaction from doing any development work by hand that could equally well (at least as far as the resulting artifact goes) be done by one/few-shot prompting, even though part of the fun of being a developer is being able to conjure dreams into reality - the end result is part of the satisfaction, but the challenge in getting there also matters.
dwaltrip · · focus · HN ↗
When you are vibecoding or vibe engineering, you're moving so quickly that it's difficult to evaluate what you're actually building and why. This often significantly reduce the quality and usefulness of the result.
It seems very difficult to mitigate, even if you were aware of the phenomenon. I think that the speed alone plays a large role. I'm not sure how one can build quality products without careful reflection and thoughtful iteration throughout the process.
jjcm · · focus · HN ↗
What matters is human hours invested. A tic tac toe game hand coded in 30min and a fully playable 3d platformer created in 30min both have the same value in my eyes.
You can make cheap things with AI, but you can also make things that are rich and have depth. That deepness though comes from days of thinking, reflecting, and iterating on the problem. It doesn’t come from a fire and forget prompt.
Two days ago I had someone on socials send me a message saying they had cloned my platform, and that they were going to undercut me. It gave me a good laugh. A prompt isn’t a product, it’s the first step of one. I’ve poured thousands of hours into the part of the product that makes it real - the administration, the financials, the infrastructure, the marketing, the iteration and refinement. One thing a lot of people are now facing the realities of is that there is far, far more to a product than just code. AI can’t one shot a business - that still takes blood sweat and tears.
visarga · · focus · HN ↗
That is the problem, why OP is so sad, you spam with your great ideas taking up the oxygen around him. AI is absolutely amazing when you use it for your own ideas and projects, and terrible when others do the same, raising the bar and making your own efforts look smaller. Have you read the open letter written by Fields medalists? They complain "the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion".
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
"Ah, I see you are trying to build an amateur rocket, but what do you think of the space elevator I just made?"
philipkglass · · focus · HN ↗
noname123 · · focus · HN ↗
I wonder what is the equivalent in 2026 of what Dave should do to be a human cosmonaut to go against the transformer VAE probability-based machine we call Claude.
wat10000 · · focus · HN ↗
It didn’t revolutionize everything but it did quietly take over. Almost every production language has some version of it and pretty much everybody uses it.
LLMs are changing rapidly so I won’t even try to speculate about where they’ll end up, but that’s how it looks now.
noname123 · · focus · HN ↗
Terr_ · · focus · HN ↗
mrpopo · · focus · HN ↗
athrowaway3z · · focus · HN ↗
I've wanted to build something rather specific for a long time.
With AI i'm close to release, but had AI not come along it would not have happened for at least another 5 or 10 years depending on what life throws in my way.
UncleOxidant · · focus · HN ↗
KeplerBoy · · focus · HN ↗
They will just prompt their own version into existence without any obvious heritage to yours.
UncleOxidant · · focus · HN ↗
joshjob42 · · focus · HN ↗
So if you reject projects largely coded by supervised AI, then you simply won't get any of the value from them.
In a sense, all these features and ideas etc were always things that could have existed, but before they sat in the fog of the invisible, and now you get to see many more of them and it can be frustrating. But in a no-LLM world we weren't going to get those features and products anyway.
ryandrake · · focus · HN ↗
ddj231 · · focus · HN ↗
UncleOxidant · · focus · HN ↗
ddj231 · · focus · HN ↗
It's like everyone is fighting for your attention. One argues that an educational video is what you should watch. Another argues that building some piece of software you could easily pay a $1-$10 but now custom built for you is a better use of your time.
Also there's the lottery aspect. Where you use Claude thinking that something you build may strike gold. So it becomes like one big addicting lottery ticket for builders.
dfxm12 · · focus · HN ↗
throwyawayyyy · · focus · HN ↗
uludag · · focus · HN ↗
Like immagine 200 years ago being able to produce a photorealistic depiction of a scene. Then, it would command you a reputation, a salary, you would have cultural prowess attached to your work, it would generate a legacy for yourself, etc.
Before AI, any cool project would give back so much more than after AI: experience, a following, a community coming around your project which could increase your social capital. It would even give you momentum, spending a long time working on something which would mark you as someone who works on that type of thing, which could lead you to interesting places.
Nowadays, these fleeting project ideas that you can grind out with AI have the effect of children's art projects: you feel a sense of pride at what you made, you like the way it looks, you may hang it somewhere, but no one else really cares, or if they do care, it's not for long.