It's also just patently false. Taste is not all that is left. Are software engineers really so full of hubris that they thought coding is all that there is to making a product?

> Are software engineers really so full of hubris that they thought coding is all that there is to making a product?

Frankly, this barely scratches the surface of the hubris of engineers. I personally think AI has been one of the best things to happen to software engineering. Writing boilerplate or my millionth auth implementation was never why I fell in love with the craft in the first place.

We have computers, computers can automate things. Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language (not a bad engineer). But then we add infinite automation features to reduce boilerplate and we get C++, and C++ programmers decry the excessive number of features and want to delete them all and go back to writing boilerplate by hand.

I once wrote a pile of C++ templates that would let you wrap a C++ function as a JavaScript function, automatically converting all the arguments and the return type. Then I left the company. How did my successors find it? No idea. Maybe they pulled out all the automation complexity and replaced it with manually operated boilerplate.

> Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language (not a bad engineer).

It's also a sign of refusal to learn an editor or IDE deeply. Most of the ones I know have mechanisms (or plugins) for generating the boilerplate.

Although back to the language, usually the biggest boilerplate killer are macros and so many developers seem to really have a problem with them.

This pretty much, Emacs, Sublime, Vim, Jetbrain’s IDE,… have snippet tooling solutions that are very configurable. And most unix editors support piping so you can easily write a programs for that. Or just a good old code generator.

My goal when writing a software is always to reach a point where modifying a business rule is as easy as writing it in plain english. Which means abstracting the essential complexity (while being pragmatic).

> Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language

This is true, but I was mostly referring to framework boilerplate (Spring, React, etc.) or plumbing boilerplate. If you've ever written code professionally, you know that most code that you write is just making your thing fit with someone else's thing.

If your consumer or your provider made bad engineering decisions, you have to absorb them. If your company mandates the use of a framework, you have to absorb that, and so on. So I think it's great that AI can write all the dumb shit I didn't come up with anyway.

Spewing out tons of boilerplate has always been the hallmark of a bad engineer.

What is left? The second-best architecture for any given technical problem is, in the majority of cases, still good enough.

When all else breaks, absurd() is your friend.

So i guess proven secure architecture will come and stay.

I think I am over opinion articles on AI, as a genre, in general.

Are you saying they are... tasteless?

> So let me be plain about it: Claude was not here. No LLM wrote this—not a sentence of it, nor was it outlined, drafted, reviewed, checked, etc. by one, and there is no prompt behind it either

Following form of the words I just read: these 100% animous filled HN threads about how everyone is bad and everything deserves mocker have to be some elaborate power game to undermine hope and human will, I genuinely do not understand how genuine human people could think it good to "comment" like this.

There's just such a ridiculous pile on of people with such enormous overwhelming negativity underneath this ocmment. This off-gassing is almost never engaged with the material. Now there's an excuse to write off any material we don't like instantly, to accuse it of fakeness. But I still do not see a realness enscribed upon people who so actively work to tear down & prevent thought & consideration.

To engage with the post: I do think the definition of fashion is interesting, and a real power dynamic to be aware of. But do think there's a lot of things that take off in the world because they are good and interesting and nice, especially in technology and products, that the world wants nice things, and will happily support you for doing that. And especially in tech, the technical decisions we start from and build underfoot steer us towards success in subtle compounding ways, that matter, and that taste is crucial, where fashion is not a factor.

Again, at a meta level: my distress & frustration at the top is less from seeing this comment, and far more from seeing everything down thread trying to out-do one another with how cynical and anti-meaning anti-trying they can be. But I think this post definitely started on an all too familiar note, blood in the HN waters that all too often gets us so sharky.

IMO giving "benefit of the doubt" to something beyond doubt is bad, straight up. If someone can't tell this article is AI then they need to go spend an hour a day reading known AI writing vs known human writing until they develop the skill; the voice of this author SCREAMS AI.

I'm a firm believer in not engaging with or promoting the content of misrepresented AI.

That's where you're wrong. It sounds close to AI, but it's very clearly not AI generated.

Let's look at

> So let me be plain about it: Claude was not here. No LLM wrote this—not a sentence of it, nor was it outlined, drafted, reviewed, checked, etc. by one, and there is no prompt behind it either

AI would've chosen rule of three (instead of 4 + etc), wouldn't have used the either at the end (doesn't fit into the rhythm), wouldn't have used "let me be plain" (more likely to use "let me be clear" or "let me be frank"), and wouldn't have chosen "Claude was not here".

If you've actually read a lot of essays and AI generated text (and sadly, I have), it's very obvious that this was neither generated nor rephrased by AI.

This is very much like the recent "kurzgesagt got banned by YouTube's AI detector" story, where the humans whose style was copied by AI now get accused of being AI