Lol, what is up with everyone assuming there's no learning curve to these things? If you applied this argument to literally any other tool you would be laughed at, for good reason.

Probably because "there's no learning curve they are just magic tools" is how they are marketed and how our managers are expecting them to work

Sure, but people are allowed to have their own opinions too.

Yes, exactly. Learning new things is hard. Personally it took me about 200 hours to get started, and since then ~2500 hours to get familiar with the advanced techniques, and now I'm very happy with the results, managing extremely large codebases with LLM in production.

For context before that I had ~15 years of experience coding the traditional way.

Has anyone else noticed the extreme dichotomy of developers using AI agents? Either AI agents essentially don't work, or they are apparently running legions of agents to produce some nebulous gigantic estate.

I think the crucial difference is that I do actually see evidence (ie the codebase) posted sometimes for the former, the latter could well be entirely mythos -- a 24 day old account evangelizing for the legion of agents story does kind of fit the theme.

How many users is production and how large is extremely large.

200k DAU, 7 million registered, ~50 microservices, large monorepo

You have 50 microservices for 200k daily users?

Let me guess this has something to do with AI?

No, It has something to do with experience. The system is highly integrated to other platforms and have to stay afloat during burst loads.

.. what is this thing and can we see it?

you can OSINT me pretty easily, not going to post it here for the sake of anonymity against crawlers who train models on our conversations. today's HN comments are tomorrow's coding LLMs

You should write a blog post about your learnings. If you could even give some high level highlights here that’d be really helpful.

Funnily enough the same kind of approach you get from Lisp advocates and the more annoying faction of Linux advocacy (which isn't as prevalent these days, it seems)

I'm also a lisper, yes.

> the same kind of approach you get from Lisp

In what way? Lisp (Common Lisp) is the most stable and unchanging language out there. If you learned it anytime after the late 80s, you still know it, and will know it until the end of time. Meanwhile, here, we hear that "a year ago" is so much time that everything changed (for the better, of course).

Or is it about needing some serious time investment to get comfortable with Lisp? Even then, once you do spend enough time that s-exprs stop being a problem, that's it; there's nothing else to be getting comfortable with, and certainly, you won't need to relearn any of that a year into the future.

I don't think AI coding and Lisp are comparable, even considering just the tone of messages on the topic (as far as I can see, "smug lisp weenies" are a thing of the ancient past).

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html