OP does not want to censor AI topics from every news source. They want news sources which provide access to topics that exclude AI. (Without necessarily those same sources excluding AI entirely.)

This is legitimate. There are many topics in computing and tech.

Not wanting to read about AI in every category is much the same like not wanting to see a C++ forum filled with threads about Angular.

Thanks for the clarification.

To use your example; if the next version of the C++ language was switching to interpreted and compiled C++ was becoming an obsolete thing of the past, then I would expect every forum discussing C++ to be discussing this change. Trying to exclude that topic and still read interesting news about C++ would be very difficult, obviously, because everyone would be expressing their opinion on that change.

LLMs are the biggest change in the tech industry for ~50 years. It's not a separate tech (like C++ and Angular) it's a fundamental change in the way we develop software across the board. Yes you can still hand-code software (in the same way that in the example you could still compile C++) but the entire industry is moving in a different direction, and trying to ignore that seems quixotic.

Obviously, everyone is entitled to ignore whatever they want, so good luck to OP. I hope they find their source of non-AI tech news.

> It's not a separate tech

Yes it is.

> fundamental change in the way we develop software across the board

Whether you produce your code using "ed" on a hard copy printer TTY, or use an IDE, is off topic in a C++ forum.

The way you develop software is a specific topic: the way-you-develop-software topic. Someone not interested in that topic should be able to easily filter that out from their feed, like any other topic.

You speak it gracefully. People who have never coded....

Are you volunteering to fix their bugs?

I was fired from my first software job the day I showed up. It was 1982. The Apple II was quite mature the PC was on scene.

I showed up 30 mins late. The software chief fired me.

I said "why Im only 30 mins late?", he replied "because I can write a complete accounts receivable system in 30 mins."

I was 14.

And he wasnt lying. He could. Using tools available to him in 1982.

You in 2026, cannot using an LLM, maybe the sass is there. But YOU cant make it. Copy and paste and prebuilt apps will always and forever beat intellectual property theft obfuscation.

Dont get any ideas this didnt happen here. This was in Alabama.

Im still coding professionally.

An Apple II in 1982 has 256 Kb of RAM. My first computer, an Acorn Atom, had 12Kb of RAM with the expansion pack, and packed two programming languages into 1Kb of RAM. I used to write Assembler on it, and there were 3 registers and no paging at all.

I wrote an timesheet tracking system for my A-level in 1986 on my BBC micro (the Atom's big brother). It took me more than half an hour, but it worked and did useful things. I'm sure it had bugs in it.

So I remember this period you're describing. Your software chief was a dick, though turning up 30 mins late on your first day would be a firing offence in any job back then.

We learned how to code when coding was very simple. There were no GUIs, no mice, all professional software was menu-driven. Screens had one resolution. None of these systems were networked, you only ever had to deal with one user. Security was never an issue, there was no external interface at all. Performance was usually not an issue, because everything was so simple. The OS was tiny and did almost nothing [0]. You could write software quickly because everything was much, much, simpler back then.

I'm seeing people who have never coded before write useful apps in 2026, against our modern massively more complex and intricate tech stack, using LLMs. No it's not perfect, but it's improving. There is absolutely zero chance that they could write an app themselves, or learn how to do that in less than a year, like we did back in 80's, because everything is so much more complex now.

[0] yes there were systems that did do all these things, but they weren't on the machines we're talking about here.

More useful than a working accounting system?

Because of the disaster of screen resolutions, mobile form factors and all the previous dishonesty inherent in the past 30 years of software development?

That must be really useful. The machines are not the problem. UI layout was solved 40 years ago on all windowed and non windowed platforms.

Mobile breakpoints are not special.

How about the browser as a "failed platform"? Seems to fit! Hardware is irrelevant.

> An Apple II in 1982 has 256 Kb of RAM.

Just to nitpick, because this was my first computer. The Apple ][+ from 1982 featured an 8- bit 6502 processor capable of addressing max. 64 KB. If I remember correctly, the base model shipped with 16 KB and could be upgraded.

nitpick gratefully accepted :) I never had one, so had to look it up and got it wrong. Thanks :)

Apple II's could be upgraded up to 48 kB. Then you could have a memory peripheral in one of the slots (I think restricted to slot 1?) that could provide another 16 kB of memory, which could be shadowed with the ROM are that occupied the upper 16 kB already.

(Probably the first card like that was the Language Card which had not RAM, but a 16 kB ROM providing Wozniak's Integer Basic, which would replace/overlay the Microsoft-developed Applesoft Basic.)

RAM cards featured more than 16 kB and could provide access to it via bank-selecting I/O registers.

A friend of mine had a 128 kB card. It was used by disk copying software to snarf floppy into RAM. His board had a row of 3 LEDs on the PCB to indicate the bank currently selected: as the disk copying software was running, you could see the LEDs counting from 0 to 7 in binary.

As a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code.

I saw this play out in Y2K, and yes, I was also looking forward to getting paid an absolute fortune to refactor all those old VB applications at their end of life.

Now, no. All that work will be done by an LLM. I'm afraid we don't get to play at being the returning heroes like those old COBOL dudes did.

Idk if someone paying attention to how 2025 and 2026 have gone thinks that by 2028 we will be backing off of agenting coding that is wild. Like the other comment says: future models refactor the code of older models.

You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.

Yea it’s hard for me to think of what the end state equilibrium is. A pile of vibe coded junk today is bad. You need humans. But we’ve made such a ridiculous amount of progress in such a short amount of time and, most importantly, this shows no sign of slowing down or plateauing. So will we hit a point where “vibe coding” is just all there is? Where human intervention is bad, just as hand tuning assembly is bad?

Is there a level of abstraction where human involvement will always be necessary? If so where?

I think it's not going to be a straight line upwards, it's going to get weirder. LLMs are still riffing on what we humans have done. If we stop giving them good examples because we aren't architecting anymore I don't really know what's going to happen. Probably some kind of meta architecture that emerges from lots of agents working in parallel but I worry it might have a strong house of cards theme to it.

if you were paying attention you would've noticed that between 2025 and 2026 the pricing of these things have somewhat changed. How does the extrapolation look with that?

Good thing we have reams of data on this, holding performance constant the cost goes down 10-40x per year: https://epoch.ai (like the first box)

Also, frontier token prices have remained roughly constant:

3.5 sonnet: $3/$15 3.7 sonnet: $3/$15 Opus 4: $15/$75 (opus tier) opus 4.1: same Opus 4.5: $5/$25 Opus 4.6 (same) 4.7 (same) 4.8 (Same) Fable: $10/$50

So Fable is cheaper than Opus 4 was at launch.

One thing that has increased quite significantly? Spending and adoption.

Great that you know the future when nobody else can.

No, I just have a prior that’s informed by real information and evidence and that’s quite strong.

- scaling laws exist

- downstream perf trends also exist (epoch capability index)

- gpt4 to gpt5 leap in capabilities every 16-18 months

- actual adoption and retention and engagement numbers are out of this world

- RL with verifiable rewards will get you to super human performance even with poor sample efficiency

- zero evidence of a plateau

I don’t know the future I am just skeptically looking at the data.

What data are you looking at?

I already get hired to replace/fix code built by humans.

I wonder if people said this about compilers. Some day they’ll replace all that compiler generated junk with hand crafted ASM.

This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode.

I entered the programming world circa 1995. There were indeed still some holdouts. A few of them were even good enough to hold out up to that point and write some code that would have been hard to replicate with the compilers of the time.

By the 200xs they were gone. Interestingly, I would say what killed them in the early 2000s wasn't actually compilers, it was the interpreted languages. Others may disagree. Even if they were dog slow by comparison, scripting languages made some things so much easier to program that it didn't matter. And then it prompted static languages to up their game to try to match that. By the time that process played out, people writing only in assembler couldn't keep up anymore.

My first job in tech was writing desktop applications in VB3 (1994, so around the same time)

The company also had an AS400 with a collection of COBOL programmers. They were utterly scathing of the new toy language for doing toy things on PCs. There was no way that VB would ever be a "real" language or that anyone would do anything "real" with it.

And yeah, in terms of serious computing, that's probably true. But the industry leapt at the new tools and tooling, and COBOL faded to obscurity (though there are still AS400s out there, and some of the code they wrote is still managing vast swathes of our essential services).

And all of that was less of a revolution in the industry than the last 12 months have been.

Yeah, the process I described was several years. Depending on how you measure this could well be a 15-20 year process overall, but even what I witnessed was at least 5 years, and that was already the tail end of an ongoing process.

I'm a little reluctant to go too triumphalist on the "adapt or be left behind" bandwagon, because I think that loses some very important nuances as well... but on the other hand, last week I set up a new project and the AI chewed through a lot of boring boilerplate and setup and configuration in about 30 minutes that would have taken me at least a tedious week just a year ago. Anyone who is leaving that on the table is going to find it hard to compete. I still had to go over it line-by-line, and make quite a few changes here and there, but it was also way, way faster to do that then to do it all from scratch.

My position has been to encourage the skeptics to give it an honest try (no deliberately picking something you pretty much know it can't do, or withholding info from it so it fails) but at the same time, hold on to the skepticism, it helps you use it properly. Excessive trust in the AI is definitely a problem right now.

I had great times making simple things I can describe well. But compared to what people get excited about, that's all toy stuff, I still read every line, and massage it into what I actually want, unless it's a throwaway/experiment.

For me, the main thing, the only thing really, is the pushiness.

To put a point on it: I think the wine is poisoned. So what? Are you offended? Or is it that you are so scared that I, some random stranger you never cared about and never offer to help with something I actually want, might miss out on some fine wine? Then let me miss out.

It's the fact that it gets so pushy and insulting and full of gibberish, that it sets my spider senses tingling, yeah. So I would even say: what if I hold on to the skepticism regardless of ability? That even if it cures cancer, I still want to be able to use tools without a black box in-between? That at most we can have a "fully AI" world after we have dealt with the people, I would even say dudes behind curtains, that for whatever reason just cannot let that happen? Fuck the dark enlightenment and the dumb dorks it consists of, is what I'm trying to say, and where that is agreed on, we can discuss earnestly. Where that is a "deal breaker", I want separation, because I have trust issues and intend to keep them.

The difference between compilers and LLMs is that compilers actually work. LLMs do not produce a usable result, no matter how much AI bros try to convince everyone else otherwise.

> LLMs do not produce a usable result

At this point, this is categorically false. Your mental model is very out of date.

The results may not be ideal but I can't say I've had a single output so far this year that wasn't usable.

That, if true, was pure luck. Compilers are deterministic, LLMs are casinos.

Have you tried them recently?

They absolutely 100% produce usable results for large classes of problems. Usually problems on the more "boring" side, but that's most code.

Even local ones are getting "usable." As an experiment I used OpenCode + Qwen coder to code a text based side scroller game in Rust. Left my laptop on and went to bed and in the morning I had a passable demo that looked like the old DOS game ZZT. This was with a 30b model at 4-bit quantization, so pretty tiny by LLM standards.

BTW LLMs seem to do well with Rust. I think it might actually be the guard rails. It lets the LLM iterate against itself. Dynamic languages don't give any compile time feedback, so it's harder to do that. This is something that's 100% the opposite of what I would have expected.

Compiler developers didn't hoover up as much human creative work as they could, legally or not, to evolve a giant inscrutable thing that does what it does probabilistically, with the explicit goal of replacing as much human labor as possible for the enrichment of the already rich. Whatever benefits we get out of generative AI are just a side effect, and one that may not last when the investors stop subsidizing our access to the big models.

As I said, I think we need to separate the business of AI, which is full of the usual bullshit, and the technology of AI, which is producing some useful tools.

The open source models are proving just as capable as the commercial ones. If Anthropic goes bust tomorrow (which seems likely) then we will still have those useful tools.

LLMs are not going to replace all our jobs. I know they've been claiming this, but anyone who actually uses the tools can see that this isn't true. This is part of the business bullshit. Hopefully it stops when the bubble pops and we get into the depressed phase of the Gartner Hype Cycle, and start building the actual businesses and tools that this tech can provide.

Compilers produce the same output for the same input. You can reason about the output by looking at the input, if you know the compiler (that many modern compilers are way, way too complex for anyone to be actually able to predict the machine code byte by byte doesn't take away from that fundamental determinism). LLM introduce a black box middle man, and that is the feature, whatever short bursts of autonomy people get seduced by is the bug.

It's like saying "we no longer need to be able to read and write because Friendly Company Man provides each of us with an assistant that will always act with our best interests in mind." On a technical level, it's wrong and sloppy, on a societal level it's suicidal. So I'd say whoever wants to follow the pied pipers can do so, when someone tries to drag you off your property for some promised land, stand your ground. If I'm wrong, the Luddites will wither away so why worry. I think the worry actually is that they might be right, and to attempt to not have a control group, because if everything is slop, nothing is slop. If nobody can think, everybody is perfectly fine. If everybody is a slave, all are free.

AI is not an abstraction.

Sure but I'd still use an LLM to do the grunt work

I'm waiting for Fable to come back online so that it can do the refactor while I sleep, for peanuts.

Not only that but it impinges on your life; it would be irresponsible to ignore it. There goes your job while you weren't paying attention... This is the mother of all tech revolutions. There will never ever be anything as big as AI, especially after embodiment.

> The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam

That is straight-up false. It's best to not speak of things you don't properly understand. If it were true, they wouldn't hold the financial value that they do or anywhere close to it. You don't know the first thing about its utility and place in the financial sector.

People will try to scam others in basically every sector, even in academia. It doesn't in any way invalidate the respective sector.

I don't want to get into the argument here, so won't respond.

You started the dumb argument, and you don't actually have any case to make. If this site didn't have policies protecting even its most asinine users, you would really hear it from me.

Also, if you think that AI will never become sentient, then you're no technologist at all, but an offense to it. The buffoonery you speak of is present most of all in your comments.

There are lots of MLM and pyramid schemes worth billions of dollars. Doesn’t means they aren’t scams.

The stock market is one, although a regulated one.

Crypto projects don't define their price, only their emission schedule. One doesn't buy without an understanding of the schedule. There are laws that are enforced against crypto rugpulls. Fundamentally there is no scam with the large crypto projects.