News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

misterderpie

I'm gonna cite myself here:

«We came full circle on the problem that also exists with Google Search, and why so many people don't get good results out of it.» [0] It is not that access to all information was hidden to anyone before, it was harder to find it, sure. Now it can be found easily and aggregated, however, it is not as simple as saying "Do X" and believe that X is correct. Recall the infamous Swing & Product Management meme? [1] The problem is the absence of information you provide, the LLM will have to make a guess of what you mean, much like the human. Likelihoods of this guess being correct depends on the domain and background. So yes, it'll likely build whatever you ask it (I do think we're there already), but if that matches what you intended to actually get is vastly different. You'll be settling with "Good enough" though and declare it working.

Others already pointed out that 6 months seem to be the constant of distance, irrespective of the date.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063427#50063744

[1] - https://www.productftw.com/productftw-2-the-tire-swing-carto...

Re:AI is a tool and using it well takes skill on Monday October 12, 2026 @06:16PM (#50063850)
> It’s hard to know the difference when you’re not in your area of expertise.

I may be misunderstanding your earlier statement then. The moat here is the knowledge, or how would the next iteration of RL solve that?

> it’s just that it can and should be faster.

Not sure if "Make it faster" works, it sounds like "Make no mistakes" 2.0

Re:AI is a tool and using it well takes skill on Monday October 12, 2026 @06:07PM (#50063744)
> The meta at this point seems to be mostly around "knowing what to ask for"

We came full circle on the problem that also exists with Google Search, and why so many people don't get good results out of it.

> For now, I have an advantage over these people when building applications. But perhaps that's just one round of RL away from being obsolete too.

I don't have a crystal ball, but my eggs are in the basket of "It isn't, and it won't be"

> The only thing that seems relatively future-proof is just being able to communicate clearly what you're trying to do

This somehow contradicts the previous statement. The advantage you have is, because of domain knowledge expertise, you're able to articulate what you want. It's not that you knowing what LazyLoading is that you now can describe it better, you can immediately tell that when your Frontend stalls for 5 seconds after hitting the "Load" button, perhaps it eagerly loads and blocks.

Re:Coding Is Not Solved on Monday September 28, 2026 @12:42PM (#49880796)
I would draw the difference here that a library is used by hundreds (of thousands) of people, and established across different scenarios. I don't read the boto3 library AWS provides, but I can trust them and the amount of customers enough to be certain enough that it behaves the way I expect it to. The same can't be said with code we write in silos at our workplace or at home. It simply does not have the same test bench.

Yes, libraries aren't bug-free, but they give me a reliable abstraction tested in the field. Not rarely you dig into library code if you notice unexpected behavior.

If we could rely on our LLM or colleague written code, or own code, have run through the same amount of requests, sure I wouldn't need to review it, as my confidence can be north of 99.9999% it works correctly. But we can't.

Re:I am often wrong on Monday September 28, 2026 @12:59AM (#49873844)
It's fixed. I can't believe it's gone, finally Amazon is usable from the phone again. Hopefully that's not due to a bug.
Re:I am often wrong on Monday September 21, 2026 @01:33AM (#49783392)
Preaching the choir.

Another example of "More AI, worse app" is amazon.com for me lately. Alexa AI Chat keeps showing whenever I scroll up on the amazon.com mobile page. I don't want Alexa to search for products. Worst thing is, I can't close it. The "X" button just isn't doing anything. So the only way out of it is to refresh the page and avoid scrolling up ...

This has been going on for at least 1 1/2 months by now, and I wonder if it'll ever be fixed.

Re:Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices on Monday September 21, 2026 @12:22AM (#49783021)
Genuine Q: Are they buying failing businesses because they see potential and want to get those on the right track, or are they buying them because their forecast tells them they can still make money, before shutting them down for eternity?
Wasn't there an article here, or was it under another HN post as a comment? Someone pointed out that the before the dawn of LLMs, "bad contributors" had a rate limiter of sorts. Now anyone can prompt their LLM and throw their output at you, shifting the burden entirely on the reviewer at highest possible speed.
Re:An Alien Mind on Sunday September 06, 2026 @12:52PM (#49588368)
> And, in line with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from the end of the XXth century (opens in a new window), we now find ourselves at the moment in history of computing where machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways.

It is kind of strange to see this sentence, when OAI's definition of what AGI is has been watered down throughout the years.

> I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.

Read: Please play by our rules, so we can be the first.

Re:The Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew [video] on Thursday September 03, 2026 @07:02PM (#49558323)
For anyone looking for the reference, it's stated at 10:16 [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/nM86DBOqgPM?si=BdoZzp1Dxa4S3C_9&t=616

Re:GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked? on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @11:11PM (#49459136)
> Core parts of the product, like navigating to individual files in a code review, are broken

I think this is a good argument to underline "It's not _just_ the scale". Adding to this, the Github Code Review experience is kind-of broken, the way comments/threads are stacked in the PR overview has not improved, pagination isn't really a thing, and these issues are age old. Hopefully, one day, Github will mature.

Re:Stop Making TUIs on Saturday August 22, 2026 @02:29PM (#49402399)
> Modern cloud systems shouldn't even have shell access, immutable containers with telemetry data.

Genuine question, what is your alternative suggestion to accessing lower level features then? A hard time I have with GUIs is that their input/output can't be piped. It's much more cumbersome to try to automate a GUI than to automate something in the terminal.

Whilst I get that this is about TUIs, I do believe there is a reason for shell access due to automation. Good abstractions can be put into the GUI, but I'd argue that you should first build the abstraction, then put a GUI on top of it. AWS is a prime example, any of their APIs can be used w/out AWS Console.

Re:Run Kimi K3 using 29 GB of RAM at 0.50 tok/s on Friday July 31, 2026 @04:31PM (#49128218)
> I'm using my skills to orchestrate LLMs and agents, and I can write better code much faster.

The fact that the top comment on this thread calls it out, in a negative way, hints at that you aren't.

> every technical profession getting disrupted to oblivion

Where is this disruption? The longer we go, the more people report that the supposed net-gain of easily 100s of percents is not visible.

I do strongly believe "It's just a tool" - A powerful one, but not one like the invention of the steam machine.

Re:AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @09:38AM (#49083695)
I'm yet to see what part of AI really wealthy people would like to spend their money on. It's not like we can get AI Yachts and AI Rockets. What would the premium product for the upper class be?
Re:AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @09:31AM (#49083604)
If many people lose their jobs, thus consumers having less and less money, where would that money come from?