If we can delegate incident response to automated LLMs too, sure, why not. Let the CEO have his way and pay the reputational price. When it doesn't work, we can revert our git repos to the day LLMs didn't write all the code.

I'm only being 90% facetious.

I think making stakeholders have to engage with these models is the most critical point for people having deadlines or expectations based on them.

Let Claude run incident response for a few weeks. I'll gladly pause pagerduty for myself.

Lord, forgive them, they know not what they do.

"Bobby Lehman is ninety three years old and he dances the twist. He is 100 years old! 120! Maybe 140! He dances like a madman!"

"A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

You see yourselves as the disenfranchised proletariats of tech, crusading righteously against AI companies and myopic, trend-chasing managers, resentful of their apparent success at replacing your hard-earned skill with an API call.

It’s an emotional argument, born of tribalism. I’d find it easier to believe many claims on this site that AI is all a big scam and such if it weren’t so obvious that this underlies your very motivated reasoning. It is a big mirage of angst that causes people on here to clamor with perfunctory praise around every blog post claiming that AI companies are unprofitable, AI is useless, etc.

Think about why you believe the things you believe. Are you motivated by reason, or resentment?

Also AI has been basically useless every time I tried it except converting some struct definitions across languages or similar tasks, it seems very unlikely that it would boost productivity by more than 10% let alone 400%.

FWIW, my own experiences with AI have ranged from mediocre to downright abysmal. And, no, I don't know which models the tools were using. I'm rather annoyed that it seems to be impossible to express a negative opinion about the value of AI without having to have a thoroughly documented experiment that inevitably invites the response that obviously some parameter was chosen incorrectly, while the people claiming how good it is get to be all offended when someone asks them to maybe show their work a little bit.

It’s like saying “I drove a car and it was horrible, cars suck” without clarifying what car, the age, the make, how much experience that person had driving, etc. Of course its more difficult to provide specifics than just say it was good or bad, but there is little value in claims that AI is altogether bad when you don’t offer any details about what it is specifically bad at and how.

That's an interesting comparison. That kind of statement can be reasonably inferred to be made by someone just learning to drive who doesn't like the experience of driving. And if I were a motorhead trying to convert that person to like driving, my first questions wouldn't be those questions, trying to interrogate them on their exact scenario to invalidate their results, but instead to question what aspect of driving they don't like to see if I could work out a fix for them that would meaningfully change their experience (and not being a motorhead, the only thing I can think of is maybe automatic versus manual transmission).

> there is little value in claims that AI is altogether bad when you don’t offer any details about what it is specifically bad at and how.

Also, do remember that this holds true when you s/bad/good/g.

But if all we have to go on is "I used it and it sucked" or "I used it and it was great", like, okay, good for you?

"Damn, these relational databases really suck, I don't know why anyone would use them, some of the data by my users had emojis in them and it totally it! Furthermore, I have some bits of data that have about 100-200 columns and the database doesn't work well at all, that's horrible!"

In some cases knowing more details could help, for example in the database example a person historically using MySQL 5.5 could have had a pretty bad experience, in which case telling them to use something more recent or PostgreSQL would have been pretty good.

In other cases, they're literally just holding it wrong, for example trying to use a RDBMS for something where a column store would be a bit better.

Replace the DB example with AI, same principles are at play. It is equally annoying to hear people blaming all of the tools when some are clearly better/worse than others, as well as making broad statements that cannot really be proven or disproven with the given information, as it is people always asking for more details. I honestly believe that all of these AI discussions should be had with as much data present as possible - both the bad and good experiences.

> If your experience makes you believe that certain tools are particularly good--or particularly bad--for the tasks at hand, you can just volunteer those specifics.

My personal experience:

  * most self-hosted models kind of suck, use cloud ones unless you can get really beefy hardware (e.g. waste a lot of money on them)
  * most free models also aren't very good, nor have that much context space
  * some paid models also suck, the likes of Mistral (like what they're doing, just not very good at it), or most mini/flash models
  * around Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude Sonnet 4 they start getting somewhat decent, GPT 5 feels a bit slow and like it "thinks" too much
  * regardless of what you do, you still have to babysit them a lot of the time, they might take some of the cognitive load off, but won't make you 10x faster usually, the gains might definitely be there from reduced development friction (esp. when starting new work items)
  * regardless of what you do, they will still screw up quite a bit, much like a lot of human devs do out there - having a loop of tests will be pretty much mandatory, e.g. scripts that run the test suite and also the compilation
  * agentic tools like RooCode feel like they make them less useless, as do good descriptions of what you want to do - references to existing files and patterns etc., normally throwing some developer documentation and ADRs at them should be enough but most places straight up don't have any of that, so feeding in a bunch of code is a must
  * expect usage of around 100-200 USD per month for API calls if the rate limits of regular subscriptions are too limiting

And if they don't, then you'd understand the anger surely. You can't say "well obviously everybody should benefit" and then also scold the people who are mad that everybody isn't benefiting.

Look I hope the workers get their fair share. I don't think I'm their enemy. But, also I am not one of them, I am a capitalist, I own a small business. I am a hacker, I am always trying to concoct creative solutions to problems through code. I happen to still think this is a great way for an American to make it in life, because I did, and mainly want to help like-minded folk, or learn from them.

I wish more of the original Hacker News spirit was still around, instead of this Reddity r/antiwork stuff that seems to be creeping in. I get it the US government and economy are controlled by nepo babies and monopolies I'm not happy about it either, but we don't really need Hacker News to become a Marxism forum.

I wondered whether you had a track record of promoting "creative solutions to problems through code" and saw your last submission was an attempt to drum up outrage about google trials, suggesting someone "should be investigated for conflicts of interest, and perhaps disbarred". Yes, purely items of technical interest for hackers, very un-politicized.

Whereas it IS a forum for discussing the biggest tech court case of the century.

The site was not established to give equal time to all political ideologies in all threads, which is what you seem to be implying.

This is all in the Hacker News guidelines. Let me paste the relevant part for you since you don't seem to know about it:

Hacker News Guidelines

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

And stop telling people to "look". You look. Because listen, I know that phrases like this one are well-loved by a certain type of person. Shows who's the adult in the room, and also frightens subordinates into silence, right? But understand me now when I say that it's much too transparent when used too often. Realize that there are other adults in the room, and when you toss out too many imperatives too fast then it's easy to see how much you want to control people as well as the topics under discussion.

Good that people finally open their eyes.

> But, also I am not one of them, I am a capitalist, I own a small business

And that's a false-consciousness at its finest. You are closer to these workers than to those that really own capital.

However, I did something which virtually none of them did. I wanted to get out. So I identified a skillset that the world desperately wanted, and I spent thousands of hours learning how to build and sell with that skillset. Frequently I was criticized or ridiculed or simply ignored, but it worked and I made money. Then I used that money to amass assets.

This doesn't mean I think Elon Musk is my friend or a good guy or something or even that I think the system is just, I don't. But I correctly identified the ladder out of the working class trap. I have Marxist friends who didn't. They're still poor. They still won't listen. Their lives still suck.

The biggest thing I don't like about these Marxist politics warriors is that they actually seem resigned to a future where huge corporations control our destiny, as long as an even huger government extracts some value for the little people. They seem to think that will work but I saw in my own life that concentration of wealth and power always fails the little guy. My philosophy is that it's better to bust all the big guys down (don't mistake this for an endorsement of unregulated capitalism, it isn't) and give everybody the ability to amass their own wealth by creating businesses. I think this idea is way more hackerish than Marxism, because it's all about people building and creating without needing someone else's permission.

If you are a worker, you should want to become an owner. You should not want to appeal to a higher authority for a distribution, because the hand that feeds you will always control you. You will not be free. You should strive to own and control your own slice of the pie because that is the only thing which will make you free. The more workers we can convert into owners, the better, and I'm not talking some fantastical idea of collective ownership here (at least in today's system, it basically doesn't exist).

The state owning things on your behalf is not very true to the spirit of it at all, I would say.

It wouldn't be false consciousness if you would be from wealthy family.

Yes, working people should climb the ladder, but without government intervention and putting collars on wealthy necks there won't be any ladder for them. There would be no small business owners like you. This is why I think you are very wrong when stating you are not one of them. In a sense that is true, but in other you have more common interest with those without any capital that with those really wealthy. But those really wealthy definitely want you to think otherwise.

And I have an impression your view of Marxism is forged on Reddit posts and not Marxists literature.

  > The biggest thing I don't like about these Marxist politics warriors is that they actually seem resigned to a future where huge corporations control our destiny, as long as an even huger government extracts some value for the little people. 

But I also really care about the quality of our code, and so far my experiments with AI have been disappointing. The empirical results described in this article ring true to me.

AI definitely has some utility, just as the last "game changer" - blockchain - does. But both technologies have been massively oversold, and there will be many, many tears before bedtime.

I think most people are motivated by values. Reason and emotion are merely tools one can use in service of those.

My experience that people who hew too strongly to the former tend to be more oblivious to what's going on in their psychology than most.

The two types of responses to AI I see are your very defensive type, and people saying "I don't get it".

Their claim following that is that because there hasn't been an exponential growth in App store releases, domain name registrations or Steam games, that, beyond just AI producing shoddy code, AI has led to no increase in the amount of software at all, or none that could be called remarkable or even notable in proportion to the claims made by those at AI companies.

I think this ignores the obvious signs of growth in AI companies which providing software engineering and adjacent services via AI. These companies' revenues aren't emerging from nothing. People aren't paying them billions unless there is value in the product.

These trends include

1. The rapid growth of revenue of AI model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. 2. The massive growth in revenue of companies that use AI including Cursor, replit, loveable etc 3. The massive valuation of these companies

Anecdotally, with AI I can make shovelware apps very easily, spin them up effortlessly and fix issues I don't have the expertise or time to do myself. I don't know why the author of TFA claims that he can't make a bunch of one-off apps with capabilities avaliable today when it's clear that many many people can, have done so, have documented doing so, have made money selling those apps, etc.

You can't use growth of AI companies as evidence to refute the article. The premise is that it's a bubble. The growth IS the bubble, according to the claim.

> I don't know why the author of TFA claims that he can't make a bunch of one-off apps

I agree... One-off apps seem like a place where AI can do OK. Not that I care about it. I want AI that can build and maintain my enterprise B2B app just as well as I can in a fraction of the time, and that's not what has been delivered.

> I want AI that can build and maintain my enterprise B2B app just as well as I can in a fraction of the time, and that's not what has been delivered.

AI isn't at that level yet but it is making fast strides in subsets of it. I can't imagine systems of models and the models themselves won't reach there in a couple years given how bad AI coding tools were just a couple years ago.

Oh, of course not. Just like people weren't paying vast sums of money for beanie babies and dotcoms in the late 1990s and mortgage CDOs in the late 2000s [EDIT] unless there was value in the product.

People paid a lot for beanie babies and various speculative securities on the assumption that they could be sold for more in the future. They were assets people aimed to resell at a profit. They had no value by themselves.

The source of revenue for AI companies has inherent value but is not a resell-able asset. You can't resell API calls you buy from an AI company at some indefinite later date. There is no "market" for reselling anything you purchase from a company that offers use of a web app and API calls.

I think the article's premise is basically correct - if we had a 10x explosion of productivity where is the evidence? I would think some is potentially hidden in corporate / internal apps but despite everyone at my current employer using these tools we don't seem to be going any faster.

I will admit that my initial thoughts on Copilot were that "yes this is faster" but that was back when I was only using it for rote / boilerplate work. I've not had a lot of success trying to get it to do higher level work and that's also the experience of my co-workers.

I can certainly see why a particular subset of programmers find the tools particularly compelling, if their job was producing boilerplate then AI is perfect.

The fundamental difference of opinion people have here though is some people see current AI capabilities as a floor, while others see it as a ceiling. I’d agree with arguments that AI companies are overvalued if current models are as capable as AI will ever be for the rest of time, but clearly that is not the case, and very likely, as they have been every few months over the past few years, they will keep getting better.

It's not ONE person. I agree that it's not "every single human being" either, but more of a preliminary result, but I don't understand why you discount results you dislike. I thought you were completely rational?

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/ai_code_tools_slow_do...

Mousing implies things are visible and you merely point to them. Keyboard implies things are non-visible and you recall commands from memory. These two must have a principal difference. Many animals use tools: inanimate objects lying around that can be employed for some gain. Yet no animal makes a tool. Making a tool is different from using it because to make a tool one must foresee the need for it. And this implies a mental model of the world and the future, i.e. a very big change compared to simply using a suitable object on the spot. (The simplest "making" could be just carrying an object when there is no immediate need for it, e.g. a sufficiently long distance. Looks very simple and I myself do not know if any animals exhibit such behavior, it seems to be on the fence. It would be telling if they don't.)

I think the difference between mousing and keying is about as big as of using a tool and making a tool. Of course, if we use the same app all day long, then its keys become motor movements, but this skill remains confined to the app.

I’m not concerned for my job, in fact I’d be very happy if real AGI would be achieved. It would probably be the crowning tech achievement of the human race so far. Not only would I not have to work anymore, the majority of the world wouldn’t have to. We’d suddenly be living in a completely different world.

But I don’t believe that’s where we’re headed. I don’t believe LLMs in their current state can get us there. This is exactly like the web3 hype when the blockchain was the new hip tech on the block. We invent something moderately useful, with niche applications and grifters find a way to sell it to non technical people for major profit. It’s a bubble and anyone who spends enough time in the space knows that.

I agree that there are lots of limitations to current LLM's, but it seems somewhat naive to ignore the rapid pace of improvement over the last 5 years, the emergent properties of AI at scale, especially in doing things claimed to be impossible only years prior (remember when people said LLM's could never do math, or that image models could never get hands or text right?).

Nobody understands with greater clarity or specificity the limitations of current LLM's than the people working in labs right now to make them better. The AGI prognostications aren't suppositions pulled out of the realm of wishful thinking, they exist because of fundamental revelations that have occurred in the development of AI as it has scaled up over the past decade.

I know I claimed that HN's hatred of AI was an emotional one, but there is an element to their reasoning too that leads them down the wrong path. By seeing more flaws than the average person in these AI systems, and seeing the tact with which companies describe their AI offerings to make them seem more impressive (currently) than they are, you extrapolate that sense of "figuring things out" to a robust model of how AI is and must really be. In doing so, you pattern match AI hype to web3 hype and assume that since the hype is similar in certain ways, that it must also be a bubble/scam just waiting to pop and all the lies are revealed. This is the same pattern-matching trap that people accuse AI of making, and see through the flaws of an LLM output while it claims to have solved a problem correctly.

And that´s actually quite useful - given that most of this material is paywalled or blocked from search engines. It´s less useful when you look at code examples that mix different versions of python, and have comments referring to figures on the previous page. I´m afraid it becomes very obvious when you look under the hood at the training sets themselves, just how this is all being achieved.

All intelligence is pattern matching, just at different scales. AI is doing the same thing human brains do.

Hard not to respond to that sarcastically. If you take the time to learn anything about neuroscience you'll realise what a profoundly ignorant statement it is.

But even if it's not a lot, it's more than the number of LLMs that can invent new meaning which is a grand total of 0.

If tomorrow, all LLMs ceased to exist, humans would carry on just fine, and likely build LLMs all over again, next time even better.

LLMs are not anything like Web3, not "exactly like". Web3 is in no way whatsoever "something moderately useful", and if you ever thought it was, you were fooled by the same grifters when they were yapping about Web3, who have now switched to yapping about LLMs.

The fact that those exact same grifters who fooled you about Web3 have moved onto AI has nothing to do with how useful what they're yapping about actually is. Do you actually think those same people wouldn't be yapping about AI if there was something to it? Yappers gonna yap.

But Web3 is 100% useless bullshit, and AI isn't: they're not "exactly alike".

Please don't make false equivalences between them like claiming they're "exactly like" each other, or parrot the grifters by calling Web3 "moderately useful".

Please, enlighten me with your gigantic hyper-rational brain.

AI stans don’t become AI stans for no reason. They see the many enormous technological leaps and also see where progress is going. The many PhDs currently making millions at labs also have the right idea.

Just look at ChatGPT’s growth alone. No product in history compares, and it’s not an accident.

Bad framing and worse argument. It's emotional.

Every engineer here is evaluating what ai claims it can do as pronounced by ceos and managers (not expert in software dev) v reality. Follow the money.

Yeah, it's frustrating to see someone opine "critics are motivated by resentment rather than facts" as if it were street-smart savvy psychoanalysis... while completely ignoring how many influential voices boosting the concept have a bajillions of dollars in motive to speak as credulously and optimistically as possible.

I'd widen the frame a bit. People scared of losing their jobs might underestimate the usefulness of AI. Makes sense to me, it's the comforting belief. Worth keeping in mind while reading articles sceptical of AI.

But there's another side to this conversation: the people whose writing is pro AI. What's motivating them? What's worth keeping in mind while reading that writing?

But I am not claiming that AI is useless. It is useful, but I would rather destroy every data center that enjoy strengthening of techno-feudalism.

Yeah so the thing is the "success" is only "apparent". Having actually tried to use this garbage to do work, as someone who has been deeply interested in ML for decades, I've found the tools to be approximately useless. The "apparent success" is not due to any utility, it's due entirely to marketing.

I don't fear I'm missing out on anything. I've tried it, it didn't work. So why are my bosses a half dozen rungs up on the corporate ladder losing their entire minds over it? It's insanity. Delusional.

Damn, when did it become wrong for me to advocate in my best interests while my boss is trying to do the same by shoving broken and useless AI tools up my ass?

The thing about hype cycles (including AI) is that the marketing department manages to convince the purchases to do their job for them.

If the self checkout scanner at the supermarket started bickering with me for entering the wrong produce code, that would wrap up the whole Turing Test thing for me.

---

[1] We generally budget about half an intern's time for finding the coffee machine, learning how to show up to work on time, going on a fun event with the other interns to play minigolf, discovering that unit tests exist, etc, etc.

I have backend development background so I was able to review the BE code and fix some bugs. But I did not bother learning Jira and Harvest API specs at all, AI (cursor+sonnet 4) figured it out all.

I would not be able to write the front-end of this. It is JS based and updates the UI based on real-time http requests (forgot the name of this technology, the new ajax that is) and I do not have time to learn it but again, I was able to tweak what AI generated and make it work.

Not only AI helped me do something in much shorter than it would take, it enabled me do something that otherwise would not be possible.

Challenge your manager to a race, have him vibe code

That's insane. Who the hell pulls a number out of their ass and declares it the new reality? When it doesn't happen, he'll pin the blame on you, but everyone else above will pin the blame on him. He's the one who will get fired.

Laying off unnecessary developers is the answer if LLMs turn out to make us all so much more productive (assuming we don't just increase the amount of software written instead). But that happens after successful implementation of LLMs into the development process, not in advance.

Starting to think I should do the inadvisable and move my investments far far away from the S&P 500 and into something that will survive the hype crash that can't be too far off now.

Product and Sales?

I wouldn’t count on it.

Not investing advice; the bottom 490 companies in the S&P500 are nominally flat since 2022 and down against inflation, GPUs and AI hype are holding everything together at the moment.

> In simpler terms, 35% of the US stock market is held up by five or six companies buying GPUs. If NVIDIA's growth story stumbles, it will reverberate through the rest of the Magnificent 7, making them rely on their own AI trade stories.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

> Capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, says Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-bubble-is-so-big-...

> Two Nvidia customers made up 39% of Nvidia’s revenue in its July quarter, the company revealed in a financial filing on Wednesday, raising concerns about the concentration of the chipmaker’s clientele.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/nvidias-top-two-mystery-cust...

Chatgpt.

I'd argue that compared to a decade. 15 years ago, relatively little value has been created. If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result.

Yet in this time the US has doubled its GDP, most of it owning to the top, to the tech professionals and financiers who benefited from this.

And some of this money went into assets with constrained supplies, such as housing, marking up the prices adjusted for inflation, making average people that much worse off.

While I do feel society is making progress, it's been a slow and steady march. Which in relative terms means slowing. Of I gave you $10 every week, by week 2, you'd double your wealth, by the end of the year, you almost didn't notice the increase.

Technology accumulation is the same, I'd argue it's even worse, since building on top of existing stuff has a cost proportional to the complexity for a fixed unit of gain (and features get proportionally less valuable as you implement the most important ones first).

Sorry got distracted from my main point - what happens when people stop believing that these improvements are meanigful or that technology that was priced in to produce 100x the value will come at all (and more importantly the company you're invested in will be able to caputre it)?

While you have decent points in your comment (essentially, the idea of tech industry growth slowing due to low hanging fruit being picked), if this statement going to be your barometer you’re going to end up looking stupendously wrong.

You can sit your Grandma down at her computer and have her type in “please make me a website for my sewing club that includes a sign up form and has a pink background” and AI will just do it and it’ll probably even work the first time you run it.

15 years ago tossing a website on Heroku was a pretty new concept, and you definitely had to write it all on your own.

10 years ago Kubernetes had its initial release.

Google Drive and Slack are not even 15 years old.

TensorFlow is just hitting its 10th birthday.

I think you’re vastly underestimating the last 15 years of technological progress and in turn value creation.

25 years ago we had wysiwyg editors to build web pages, and she could just include a link to email her to have people ask her to "sign up" (the entire point of a sewing club is to socialize. You don't need an automated newsletter or whatever. That's for people that want to sell you something). You'd put it into the space your ISP gave you, or Windows actually included a personal web server. You had to be somewhat technical to use the Windows server, but it could've been made more friendly instead of being removed, and personal computers should make it easy to share a static website.

We've clearly regressed since then. People think you need an engineer or AI to build basic web pages. My actual grandma was doing some of this stuff when I was a kid in the 90s, as was I.

What happened to the web seems analogous to me to as if we abandoned word processors and spreadsheets and said you need a six-figure engineer to do custom programming any time you need the features of one of those things.

You should not look back on those solutions and neglect to acknowledge their limitations. Access can only handle small databases (maximum 2GB) and about 100 simultaneous connections.

Access is basically a product of the technological limitations of its time. It isn’t designed the way it is because that way is the best design.

The kind of business that relied on Access is going to find that solutions like Airtable are far easier and more powerful, and certainly less prone to data loss than mom and pop’s shared drive. There are even open source self-hosted alternatives like NocoDB and Baserow (or cloud hosted).

You’ll inevitably complain about the subscription cost of SaaS solutions but it’s not like MS Office business licenses were ever cheap.

Explain to me how you did that 15 years ago. Ask on stackoverflow and wait for a human to respond?

You’re also taking my example application way too literally. No I don’t know why Grandma needs a signup form, I just couldn’t think of a web app off the top of my head.

And my goodness you’re acting like you’ve never heard of Squarespace, which is 1000x better than Geocities ever was, by the way.

MS Access and WSYWIG tools like FrontPage and iWeb were not good. I know because I was there and I used them at work. A link to your email (spam spam spam) is not a replacement for an application with a database.

Apart from doing the styles and layout, I don't think current tools have less friction. They're a lot safer though. Can't say I never dropped a production database.

I definitely agree that it’s a reasonable choice.

As for grandma, 15 years ago she could have just posted her sewing club on Facbook, she doesn't need Heroku or AI.

I would say that these technologies/products being so wildly popular puts burden of proof on you to show me some kind of evidence that these technologies aren’t productive. Like are you trying to say that something had better deployment velocity and reliablity than Kubernetes at handling high-complexity application infrastructure deployments for large enterprise companies? What was it? Why was it better than Kubernetes?

The analogy is that you’re basically saying that zippers aren’t really better than buttons but then literally everyone is overwhelmingly wearing pants and coats with zippers and very strongly prefer zippers. So really it’s on you to prove to me that I should be using pants with buttons instead.

Finally, there’s a lot of irony in your first paragraph complaining about a few tech oligarchs becoming fabulously wealthy and then suggesting that Grandma just use Facebook instead of building her own site. In any event, my web app example was just a poorly thought out example of a web app, I really just mean a website that has a little more utility than a static site.

The juice hasn't been worth the squeeze. You can look at all societal indicators except the stock market pointing downward to get to that conclusion. Nothing is actually better than it was in 2010 despite Uber, Airbnb, Kubernetes, Slack, and all the other SV tech "innovations". People are not happier or wealthier because of the tech coming from Silicon Valley. In general the end result of the last 15 years of tech is that it's made us more neurotic, disconnected, depressed, and angry.

We don't need "better deployment velocity and reliability for high-complexity application infrastructure deployments for large enterprises". Listen to yourself man, you sound like you've been hypnotized by the pointy-haired boss. The tech sector makes false promises about a utopia future, and then it just delivers wealth for shareholders, leaving everyone else worse off.

Grandma especially doesn't need deployment velocity, she's being evicted by her landlord because he wants to turn her flat into an Airbnb. She can't get to the grocery store because the town won't invest in public transport and Uber is the only option. She's been radicalized by Meta and Youtube and now she hates her own trans grandchild because her social media feed keeps her algorithmically outraged. Oh, and now she's getting scammed by AI asking her to invest her life savings in shitcoins and NFTs.

> The analogy is that you’re basically saying that zippers aren’t really better than buttons but then literally everyone is overwhelmingly wearing pants and coats with zippers and very strongly prefer zippers.

I don't agree that the ubiquity and utility are necessarily correlated, so I don't see the zippers and Kubernetes as analogous.

But the proliferation of zippers has more to do with the fact they are easier for manufacturers to integrate into products compared to buttons -- they come pre-measured and installing them is a straight stitch that can be done with a machine, whereas installing buttons is more time-consuming.

Zippers are worse for consumers in many ways, repairability chief among them. But really they are part of a general trend over my lifetime of steadily falling garment quality, as manufacturers race to the bottom.

> In any event, my web app example was just a poorly thought out example of a web app, I really just mean a website that has a little more utility than a static site.

You said it, not me. We had the technology to throw up a static site in 2010 and my grandmother could actually do that with dreamweaver and FTP, and it worked fine.

2. Like it or not, the customers of the tech industry include a lot of large enterprises that do find value in improving velocity and reliability for complex workflows. I am not some kind of corporate sellout for pointing out this plain factual reality.

3. I totally agree with your points about income inequality and happiness metrics among our population but they are not relevant to the topic at hand.

4. If Dreamweaver and FTP is your barometer, recall that Dreamweaver was an expensive paid product. There still are plenty of FTP-based web hosts and you can totally throw up a website with a tool like https://trix-editor.org/, which as I mentioned is a tool that did not exist 15 years ago. You can also just pay for a website service like SquareSpace or Wix (or not, they have free tiers).

The fact that specific individual tools do not exist/are not supported anymore is irrelevant, as there are dozens of often-better tools for throwing a website up that are definitely friendly to novices. Let's not forget the plethora of no-code application development tools that are mostly a recent development.

Mobile users prefer apps 60% over websites. So the real modern barometer is: could your Grandma put up an iPhone app in 2008 following the developer tutorials using Objective-C or would she have a much better time using Swift and/or a no-code app development solution?

You're assuming that people wear pants with zippers because they have a preference for it, and not because you literally cannot buy pants with buttons in 99% of stores.

based on your examples, I'd say you're vastly overestimating

sure, those are all new techs, but it's not like you couldn't do those things before in different ways or they are revolutionary in any way

In case you also need to control Spotify from Windows 95 :D

https://github.com/queenkjuul/spotify97

And to me this is worse news. People in higher paying jobs are the ones that would hurt the economic fabric more, but by that token they’d have more power and influence to ensure a better safety net for the inevitable rise of AI and automation in much of the workforce.

Entry level workers can’t afford to not work, they can’t afford to protest or advocate, they can’t afford the future that AI is bringing closer to their doorsteps. Without that safety net, they’ll be struggling and impoverished. And then will everyone in the higher paying positions help, or will we ignore the problem until AI actually is capable of replacing us, and will it be too late by then?

if history is anything to go by, it'll be the latter, sadly

This isn't entirely foreign to me; it sure looks a lot like the hype train of the dot-com bubble. My experience says that if you're holding stocks in a company going down this road, I'd say they have very low long-term value. Even if you think there's room to grow, bubbles pop fast and hard.

It’s that we are heading towards a big recession.

As in all recessions, people come up with all sorts of reasons why everything is fine until it can’t be denied anymore. This time, AI was a useful narrative to have lying around.

Who is we? One country heading into a recession is hardly enough to nudge the trend of "all things code"

2030 will be 2020 all over again.

When I started a CS degree in 2003, we were still kinda in the "dot com crash has happened, no-one will ever hire a programmer again" phase, and there were about 50 people in my starting class. I think in the same course two years ago, there'd been about 200. The 'correct' number, for actual future demand, was certainly closer to 200 than 50, and the industry as a whole had a bit of a labour crunch in the early 10s in particular.

This means that they inflate programmer salaries, which makes it impossible for most companies that could benefit from software development to hire developers.

We could probably have five times as many software developers as we have now, and they would not be out of work; they would only decrease average salaries for programmers.

Why would this be the case? Many programmers join Google or Meta (or similar tier companies) and immediately double or triple their income. Software salaries are famously bimodal and people often transition from the lower mode to the higher mode practically overnight.

In fact (and I'm not an economist) I conjecture that the lower mode exists because the upper mode exists. That is, people purposefully don't really care what their salary is (i.e. don't put upward wage pressure) when they're at lower-mode companies because they know one day they'll make the leap to the upper-mode. In other words, the fact that Google-tier companies pay well allows other companies to pay poorly because those guys are just padding their resumes to get a 350k job at Google and don't really care whether Bank of Nowhere pays them $90k or $110k.

1) fewer students are not studying computer science, I'm faculty at a top CS program and we saw our enrollment decline for the first time ever. Other universities are seeing similar slowdowns of enrollment [1]

2) fewer immigrants coming to the united states to work and live, US is perhaps looking at its first population decline ever [2]

3) Current juniors are being stunted by AI, they will not develop the necessary skills to become seniors.

4) Seniors retiring faster because they don't want to have to deal with this AI crap, taking their knowledge with them.

So we're looking at a negative bubble forming in the software engineering expertise pipeline. The money people are hoping that AI can become proficient enough to fill that space before before everything bursts. Engineers, per usual, are pointing out the problem before it becomes one and no one is listening.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/06/computer...

[2]: https://nypost.com/2025/09/03/us-news/us-population-could-sh...

2. It looks like rates will keep going down.

3. Fewer people are going into CS due to the AI hysteria. You might say oh there's a 4 year lag, but not quite. We should see an immediate impact from career changers, CS grads choosing between career and professional school, and those switching out of CS careers.

The tech AI fear hysteria is so widespread that I've even heard of people avoiding non-SWE tech careers like PM.

I wonder how that would even be measured? I suppose you could do it for roles that do the same type of work every day. I.e. perhaps there is some statistical relevance to number of calls taken in a call center per day or something like that. One the software development side however, productivity metrics are very hard to quantify. Of course, you can make a dashboard look however you want, but impossible, essentially to tie those metrics to NPV.

I'm legit not sure if that's sarcasm or not

And my answer - like the best of car mechanics who work on custom rides - is: I don't know how long until I actually get in there, but minimum 5x what you think, and my rate is $300/hr. Is it worth it to you to do it right?

Usually the answer is no. When it's yes, I have a free hand. And having a few clients who pay well is worth a lot more than having a few dozen who think they know everything and are too cheap to pay for it anyway.

I've never seen an LLM proclaim anyone to be an expert unabetted, alone the leading expert globally. And on the other side of the coin, very few people are willing to believe an obvious sycophant making claims of their greatness they themselves don't even believe.

I don't want to forego addressing your point though, and yeah, Kalanick seems to be one of the people delusional enough to believe what the bots tell him. That said, I'd argue that even then, it isn't the LLM that's puffing up his ego, it's actually his self-aggrandizing interpretation of the interaction. I doubt Grok was fawning over him and telling him he's was the smartest specialist physicist out there.

Ship more or STFU

And regex.

Part of the issue is that it is so fast to get to a working prototype that it feels like you are almost there, but there is a lot of effort to go.

People made tools specifically to make templates look like templates and not a finished product, just because client was ready to push the product just after seeing real looking mockups of interface.

Not too different in that respect from non-AI-assisted coding! The "last 10%" is always more like 50-80%.

That's pretty much nothing ... to me that line indicates a whole lot of other possible things.

Tell him to code it himself then? If it can be done with only prompting, and he's able to type a sentence or two in a web form, what's stopping him?

This sounds incredibly stupid. It’s going to take as long as it will and if they’re not okay with that, their delusional estimates should be allowed to crash and burn, which would hopefully be a learning experience.

The problem is that sometimes there’s an industry wide hysteria even towards useful tech - like doing a lift and shift of a bunch of monoliths to AWS to be “cloud scale”, introducing Kubernetes or serverless without the ability to put either to good use, NoSQL for use cases it’s not good at and most recently AI.

I think LLMs will eventually weather the hype cycle and it will settle down on what they’re actually kinda okay at vs not, the question is how many livelihoods will be destroyed along the way (alongside all the issues with large scale AI datacenter deployments).

On a personal level, it feels like you should maybe do the less ethical thing of asking your employer in the ballpark of 1000-3000 USD for Claude credits a month, babysitting it enough to do the 20% of the work in the 20% new estimate, babysit it enough to ship a functional MVP and when they complain about missing functionality tell them that the AI tech just isn't mature enough but thankfully you'll be able to swoop in and salvage it for only the remaining 80% of the remaining estimate's worth of work.