It's disheartening. I got a colleague, very senior, who dislikes AI for a myriad of reasons and doesn't want to adapt if not forced by mgmt. I feel from 2022-2024 the majority of my colleagues were in this camp - either afraid from AI or because they looked at it as not something a "real" developer would ever use. 2025 it seemed to change a bit. American HN seemed to adapt more quickly while EU companies are still lacking the foresight to see what is happening on the grand scale.

I'm pretty senior and I just don't find it very useful. It is useful for certain things (deep code search, writing non-production helper scripts, etc.) and I'm happy to use it for those things, but it still seems like a long way off for it to be able to really change things. I don't foresee any of my coworkers being left behind if they don't adopt it.

AI gives you either free expertise or free time. If you can make software above the level of Gemini or Claude output, then have it write your local tools, or have it write synthetic data for tests, or have it optimize your zshrc or bash profile. Maybe have it implement changes your skip level wants to see made, which you know they are amateurish, unsound garbage with revolting UI. Rather than waste your day writing ill-advised but high quality code just to show them how it’s a bad idea, you can have AI write code for you, to illustrate your point without spending any real work hours on it.

Just in my office, I have seen “small tools” like Charles Proxy almost entirely disappear. Everyone writes/shares their AI-generated solutions now rather than asking cyber to approve a 3rd party envfile values autoloader to be whitelisted across the entire organization.

senior as well, few years from finishing up my career. I run 8 to 12 terminals entire day. it is changing existing and writing new stuff all day, every day. 100’s of thosands of lines of changed/added/removed code in production… and a lot less issues than when every line was typed in by me (or another human)

What sort of work do you do? I suspect a lot of the differences of opinion here are caused by these systems being a lot better at some kinds of programming than others.

I do lower level operating systems work. My bread and butter is bit-packing shenanigans, atomics, large-scale system performance, occasionally assembly language. It’s pretty bad at those things. It comes up with code that looks like what you’d expect, but doesn’t actually work.

It’s good for searching code big codebases. “I’m crashing over here because this pointer has the low bit set, what would do that?” It’s not consistent, but it’s easy to check what it finds and it saves time overall. It can be good for making tests, especially when given an example to work from. And it’s really good for helper scripts. But so far, production code is a no-go for me.

You're not doing yourself any favors by labeling people who disagree with you undereducated or uninformed. There is enough over-hyped products/techniques/models/magical-thinking to warrant skepticism. At the root of this thread is an argument to (paraphrasing) encouraging people to just wait until someone solves major problems instead of tackling it themselves. This is a broad statement of faith, if I've ever seen one, in a very religious sense: "Worry not, the researchers and foundation models will provide."

My skepticism and intuition that AI innovations are not exponential, but sigmoid are not because I don't understand what gradient-descent, transformers, RAG, CoT, or multi-head attention are. My statement of faith is: the ROI economics are going to catch up with the exuberance way before AGI/ASI is achieved; sure, you're getting improving agents for now, but that's not going to justify the 12- or 13-digit USD investments. The music will stop, and improvements slow to a drip

Edit: I think at it's root, the argument is between folk who think AI will follow the same curve as past technological trends, and those who believe "It's different this time".

> labeling people who disagree with you undereducated or uninformed

I did neither of these two things... :) I personally could not care about

- (over)hype

- 12/13/14/15 ... digit USD investment

- exponential vs. sigmoid

There are basically two groups of industry folk:

1. those that see technology as absolutely transformational and are already doing amazeballs shit with it

2. those that argue how it is bad/not-exponential/ROI/...

If I was a professional (I am) I would do everything in my power to learn everything there is to learn (and then more) and join the Group #1. But it is easier to be in Group #2 as being in Group #1 requires time and effort and frustrations and throwing laptop out the window and ... :)

If there is really amazing stuff happening with this technology how did we have two recent major outages that were cause by embarrassing problems? I would guess that at least in the cloud flare instance some of the responsible code was ai generated

> I would guess that at least in the cloud flare instance some of the responsible code was ai generated

Your whole point isn't supported by anything but ... a guess?

If given the chance to work with an AI who hallucinates sometimes or a human who makes logical leaps like this

I think I know what I'd pick.

Seriously, just what even? "I can imagine a scenario where AI was involved, therefore I will treat my imagination as evidence."

Microsoft is saying they're generating 30% of their code now and there's clearly been a lot of stability issues with Windows 11 recently that they've publicly acknowledged. It's not hard to tell a story that involves layoffs, increased pressure to ship more code, AI tools, and software quality issues. You can make subtle jabs about your peers as much as you want but that isn't going to change public perception when you ship garbage.

The whole point is that the outages happened not that the ai code caused them. If ai is so useful/amazing then these outages should be less common not more. It’s obviously not rock solid evidence. Yeah ai could be useful and speed up or even improve a code base but there isn’t any evidence that that’s actually improving anything the only real studies point to imagined productivity improvements

good thing before “ai” when humans coded we had many decades of no outages… phew

A mutually exclusive group 1 & group 2 are a false dichotomy. One can have a grasp on the field and keep up to date with recent papers, have an active Claude subscription, use agents and still have a net-negative view of "AI" as a whole, considering the false promises, hucksters, charlatans and an impending economic reckoning.

tl;dr version: having negative view of the industry is decoupled from one's familiarity with, and usage of the tools, or the willingness to learn.

> considering the false promises, hucksters, charlatans and an impending economic reckoning.

I hack for a living. I could hardly give two hoots about “false promises” or “hucksters” or some “impeding economic reckoning…” I made a general comment that a whole lot of people simple discount technology on technical grounds (favorite here on HN)…

> I could hardly give two hoots about “false promises” or “hucksters”

I suppose this is the crux of our misunderstanding: I deeply care about the long-term health and future of the field that gave me a hobby that continues to scratch a mental itch with fractal complexity/details, a career, and more money than I ever imagined.

> or some “impeding economic reckoning…”

I'm not going to guess if you missed the last couple of economic downturns or rode them out, but an economic reckoning may directly impact your ability to hack for a living, that's the thing you prize.

You should give a shit about how the field is perceived because that affects your ability to make a living whether you care about it or not

yea the “ai” is going to ruin this amazing reputation the field had before it :)

It ain't helping

Amazeballs shit yet precious little actual products.

this is a tool, you use it to create just like you use brush and oils to paint a masterpiece. it is not a product in it of itself…

They were obviously asking where are the masterpieces.

I see the first half of group 1, but where's the second half? Don't get me wrong, there's some cool and interesting stuff in this space, but nothing I'd describe as close to "amazeballs shit."

you should see what I’ve seen (and many other people also). after 30 years of watching humans do it (fairly poorly as there is extremely small percentage of truly great SWEs) stuff I am seeing is ridiculously amazing

Can you describe some of it? On one hand, it is amazing that a computer can go from prose to code at all. On the other hand, it’s what I like to describe as a dancing bear. The bear is not a very good dancer, but it’s amazing that it can dance at all.

I’d make the distinction between these systems and what they’re used for. The systems themselves are amazing. What people do with them is pretty mundane so far. Doing the same work somewhat faster is nice, and it’s amazing that computers can do it, but the result is just a little more of the same output.

Can you show me some of the “amazeballs shit” people are doing with it?

> I did neither of those 2 things

>> ...there are people that are professionals and are willing to put the time in to learn and then there’s vast majority of others who don’t...

being lazy and unprofessional is just a tad different than uneducated :)

They're not logistic, this is a species of nonsense claim that irks me even more than claiming "capabilities gains are exponential, singularity 2026!"; it actually includes the exponential-gains claim and then tries to tack on epicycles to preempt the lack of singularities.

Remember, a logistic curve is an exponential (so, roughly, a process whose outputs feed its growth, the classic example being population growth, where more population makes more population) with a carrying capacity (the classic example is again population, where you need to eat to be able to reproduce).

Singularity 2026 is open and honest, wearing its heart on its sleeve. It's a much more respectable wrong position.