> I feel like I'm in a different field compared to the rest of hacker news.
And below you repeat what all of Hacker News hypemen say about AI (“I have stopped writing code”, “it’s mature and the next step of engineering”)
Thank you for reinforcing the point of OP
EDIT: you're the same person that a month ago said your company feels git is outdated now that you have agentic coding, and you don't even need to write your own commit messages. This is next-level trolling, or a serious case of AI psychosis.
vividfrier is a bot. You can see in many threads that if the general opinion does not go the way of AI companies, a completely outrageous pro-AI comment appears and is voted to the top, so that casual readers are tricked into thinking that the fake comment represents the general opinion.
Often such comments appear just before the submission is abandoned to wrap up the thing.
I like how they say they don't vibe in this comment, and then that they don't read the code anymore in just the previous comment in their comment history.
> I fought for years trying to convince my colleagues to write good commit messages. Now Claude is writing great commit messages but since *I'm no longer looking at code* - I never see them. I don't think Claude uses them either.
Now? Intelligence agencies have been doing this for decades. There’s a reason social media and the web had some much money and support behind its adoption, and why the US in particular forces its view of free speech worldwide, it’s a way to weaponize opinion.
I have almost certainty by now that half of the web is just bots steering the narrative of humans, because I’ve never seen so much non sense being normalized in my life. Dish soap drinking level I mean.
You can also see a recent comment of theirs saying they "don't look at code any more" but in this comment they say they "still require a code review" for changes.
Actually it's fully measurable but no one who's making these claims ever seems to want to measure it, nor share data in a public way so that others could measure it.
What we do see publicly is OSS projects overrun with poor submissions, for example.
Comparing hobbyist vibe code that goes into OSS projects vs what large companies are doing with infinite token budgets is an apples to oranges comparison.
It is like saying "no one can produce a viable CPU because I can't tape one out in my garage."
>Or he's just giving a sane take, one that most people in the Bay Area have by now.
I don't know what the Bay Area note is supposed to mean in the context of the whole post - unless you want to reinforce that it surely means that it's a sane take... In which case, I'm not certain the non-Bay readers would agree that it comes from an unbiased culture.
People started depending on GitHub more. Do people really think it was more reliable when it was a sprawling RoR app in 2010? (Not that there’s anything wrong with RoR; people just didn’t expect such high uptime back then.)
Help me understand how your above comment[0] squares with your previous one[1].
Above, you said:
> We still require a code review for any change
And:
> We don't really vibe though. At least I don't. I see it more as comment driven development. I need to understand the code and what I want to achieve where in the codebase
I've been here since 2008 and I'll say it. Vividfrier is a bot. The people behind the likes of vividfrier are vandals, shitting all over the commons just to get even more than the massive amount they have already been given.
HN was a tremendous resource built by its members and the moderators. In the last year or so a lot of that has been destroyed by people who have no sense of decency. They see deception as a virtue. They call it hustle or whatever. WTF?
My view is write the code that matters to you and that you want or need to be proficient with. If you need to defend, explain or discuss code, you are better off writing it yourself.
If nuclear power scientists claimed they had a bomb that could level an entire city, Hiroshima would prove them correct.
vividfrier claims they haven’t written a line of code (implying other employees are similar), and their big company is operating normally. Bun is a big project and the rewrite is entirely LLM-generated. If its development continues normally, it reinforces the claim’s plausibility and proves someone made a large change (rewrite) entirely using AI. If not, it provides strong doubt: either vividfrier’s company is doing something different that avoids Bun’s problems (maybe other employees are still writing code manually), or they’re misleading or lying.
The way it'll play out is, if nothing happens denialists will claim "nothing has happened YET!", and if anything happens, those same people will claim "you see, writing AI code is a terrible idea!".
People write code differently, AI models write code differently, AI systems write code differently, companies create systems that write AI-written code differently, etc.
The system that wrote Bun bears no relationship to the system that writes OP's code.
Making such absolute statements about AI-written code is as dumb as making absolute statements about human-written code on the basis that it's "human-written".
Likewise, if anything happens, AI hypists will claim they used the tools wrong, just wait 6 months, etc.
It's plausible that OP's company is succeeding with 100% AI-generated code, even if Bun fails, but it's also plausibly false. Anyone can claim anything on the internet, what separates BS from reality is evidence.
I didn't write that Bun's rewrite absolutely proves or disproves OP's claim, I wrote that it provides evidence; it does, much more than OP's word.
It's also plausible that OP's claim is true, but only because despite being in a "big tech" company, they've been working on small self-contained repos, throwaway scripts, etc. The implications of this would be much different than what their comment suggests, which is another reason evidence matters: it forces them to narrow their claim, because anyone can make an overzealous claim from a small example.
If Hiroshima were the only big public nuclear plant around the world, then yes, the aftermath of Hiroshima would provide strong evidence either for or against nuclear power.
That seems like an odd way to interpret what they wrote.
Imagine old school machinists saying to a CNC machinist “Ha! See, maybe you don’t jog the axes manually, but you still have to be involved in placing the stock material, and you have to do the CAD/CAM work - so did it really machine the part for you? No!”
AI is a tool like any other. It has its limitations. It has classes of problems that it is suited to handle, and others it isn’t. If it’s true that they haven’t written (as in “typed out by hand”) a single line of code, why can’t they say that without you making that statement into more than it is?
I haven’t written a single line of code in 6 months, and that’s simply fact. It is also true that I put in a lot of other work to make that feasible, but that work isn’t in the form of writing code.
“it’s mature and the next step of engineering”
Tautologically, it’s mature enough for what it is mature enough for, and it certainly is the next step in the same way that CNC was the next step for machining — if you’re not using it as a machinist, you’re going to produce less compared to those who are.
Same thing with garden hoses. Yes, you can go fetch water from a lake and splash it on your lawn, or, you know, you could just use a sprinkler connected to your garden hose. Doesn’t replace buckets. Buckets just have a narrower scope in a world where garden hoses exist.
I'm sorry but both of these are false equivalences. CNC isn't about making general machining operations faster or necessarily better. It's about making a single machine more versatile. Instead of needing an assembly line of machines you can get a bunch of different operations done on the same part without moving it to a different machine. You can also do compound operations that were otherwise highly specialized (like milling a turbocharger's radial compressor wheel). You can get the same job done with a series of manual operations though.
A garden hose vs a bucket is also the same situation. You can accomplish the same thing with either, but one might be more labor intensive.
AI is nothing like either of those. It would be like instead of a bucket you get a garden hose that points in a different direction every time you try to use it. Or instead of a 5 axis mill that rigorously executes the g-code it just randomly reinterprets tool paths each time it cuts a part. Both of these things would be worse than useless in their respective applications.
AI is different because it plays to the pliability of the software domain. Even fairly shitty, irreproducible results can be good enough for software development, if you don't look at it too closely. Make analogies to the physical world at your peril!
> AI is nothing like either of those. It would be like instead of a bucket you get a garden hose that points in a different direction every time you try to use it.
There is a reason why such discussions about CNC machines never happened. I wonder what it cculd be? Becausw their output is better than man-made atuff? Because they are reliable? Because their manufacturers generally don't lie?
Because it's a solution looking for a problem. All the AI companies lean in to coding because it actually helps with that to some degree but the amount that it helps doesn't justify their valuations. It needs to be good at everything to justify their target IPO price.
I think discussion with open registration is doomed precisely for this reason, it is too open to being influenced by bad actors. Maybe the lobste.rs invitation model would be better ...
What's up with all the new accounts astroturfing AI? There are multiple in these threads. People from the 'foundation model' companies having to keep up the AI hype?
Usually they provide grandiose claims (like the top-level comment) without any evidence or just anecdotal evidence that is not verifiable.
Just woke up from half my nights sleep to see what HN is talking about at 1 am pst on a Friday.
Oh look more useless arguing.
People who do things care about the doing more than how the sausage was made.
I do not care how software gets built. Only that it works. Results is the only thing that matters and I hope everyone in this thread internalizes that fact.
> I have nothing to hide. The metrics speak for themselves.
What metrics? Where are the amazing new projects and features you built? Where are the amazing products and features you built that are better than existing ones (run faster, consume fewer resources etc.)?
For a person who "has nothing to hide" somehow none of your comments ever mention what projects you work on, what you ship, or what metrics you employ.
Then I upgraded my 10 year old hand written framework to a new version that supports sqlite and postgres on top of existing MySQL support https://github.com/Divergence/framework
But then I was like eh lemme benchmark every PHP orm that exists just to check my framework's orm....
A brand new task manager written in C for Linux that supports a plugin architecture with an event bus. It's literally the best gui Linux task manager ever. Still working on it.
I'm not even talking about my paid job. This is me just fucking around.
If you’re killing it, do your thing and be happy. I didn’t say you were a bot.
What I said was: what is AI bad at?
Let’s start the conversation there. Can you one shot a new Linux kernel with AI? Does “new project, are me GTA 8!” Work?
No.
That is hard reality, disconnected from any ridiculous hype BS people are living in.
You need to start the conversation with: I acknowledge, AI is not good at some things.
Now, if you can accept that baseline reality that you live in you can ask some hard questions like:
Are the things I’m doing things I could do without AI?
Am I actually more productive?
Is what I’m building actually working?
Are the things that other people are claiming to do, things that it can actually do?
Is it the right tool for the next thing I’m going to work on?
Maybe you don’t care; but, if you don’t like people asking those questions; why?
This is genuinely great tech. No one is denying that; it’s effective and productive to get certain stuff done.
What scares me is people who you cant even have this conversation with. What’s AI bad that?
Nothing!
Thats AI psychosis.
Take a look at your own opinions and why you take it personally (it seems) when someone calls out a case where AI did a bad job, or someone who failed because they relied too hard on AI.
Seriously man, if those things are upsetting you, because, literally, they have nothing to do with you, other than the tiny voice in your head telling you that “critiquing AI is critiquing me”… then have a good think about that.
It’s not a good place to be.
Build things. Be happy, be proud. Coming here and ranting like you’re doing? It’s not good. It’s realllly not good.
>I do not care how software gets built. Only that it works.
I mean, I agree on a very high level of abstraction. But my problem is that I need to understand how software gets built so that I can have confidence in my ability to maintain and evolve the project.
I need to understand whether a feature is easy to add or requires a wholesale rewrite of the entire codebase, which comes with risks. I need to understand how new features affect existing users.
I also need to understand the economics of the process and the economics of my industry. That means I have to care to some degree about how software gets made, not just whether some specific program works at the present moment.
If you give me a choice between an implementation that is 100 LOC I can understand and an implementation that is a million LOC that I can never understand, I'm going to chose the former, even if both implementations pass all tests.
I may be able understand any given line of code but not necessarily all of them. The capacity of AI to generate code will quickly exceed human capacity to read and understand it.
Also, code quality matters for AI as well. Maintaining a million lines of code requires more tokens than maintaining 100 lines of code.
Not a bot (although I have been accused of it, due to my activity here, and on GitHub, but I’ve been this way for longer than LLMs have been a thing. I’m retired, “on the spectrum,” and don’t participate in any other social media).
I’m currently working on a rewrite of an app that originally took two years. It’s been about three months, and I’m probably about 70% done. It’s a total “from scratch” rewrite; both client and server (two versions of each, as I also have administrative code). It’s a pretty big system, for one guy. I couldn’t do it, without the LLM.
It’s not been a cakewalk. I’ve needed to toss out large swaths of LLM-generated code, and rewrite by hand, but, for the most part, it’s been a huge help.
But I’m also not doing it in a manner that eats tokens. I just use the standard $20/month subscription as a chat. I suspect my workflow is not one that Anthropic or OpenAI really wants out there.
But I also bet that many HN accounts are bots; although I think many may be ones run by enthusiasts, not some AI cabal.
For 5 million comments like yours I haven't seen a single one with the old code vs. the new code. I understand that not all code is public that way, of course, and I don't mean to put you on the spot personally. But where are all the open source projects that now do the same with better error handling using less resources? Where are 100+ MB Electron apps reduced to more correct sizes like a few MB, or even a few dozen kB? Why aren't startup times getting slashed across the board? Why isn't RAM usage falling faster than RAM prices are increasing?
Feel free to check out my GH profile. I'm working on a closed-source app, now, but several of its component dependencies have had significant LLM work, and they are open.
Other than that, I am not boosting AI, and have absolutely zero interest in doing a bunch of work to satisfy some random Internet Guy, who can't be bothered to examine my pretty damn extensive open portfolio.
And how did any of that relate to "Showing actual improved products and features. Showing actual code. etc." ? It's the opposite, someone says "I'm sick of milk and orange juice all the time, I want some water", and you reply with nothing but offering them a cup of milk.
> random Internet Guy, who can't be bothered to examine my pretty damn extensive open portfolio.
You cannot even be bothered to examine the comment you reply to, maybe get off your high horse.
And the main part of my comment was about something in the common realm, open source software, and hard performance/quality improvements. Not wishy-washy products and features, not yet another tone deaf cool story.
Eh, whatevs. When someone interacts with me, here, even if being unpleasant, I generally check out their profile, first thing. Sometimes, it has changed my opinion of them, and of myself.
For instance, I checked out yours, and there's not much, except a whole bunch of challenging people here. I am wondering if you came here to "set us straight." I know that a lot of folks have low opinions of HN, and not all of them are wrong, but I find this place a fairly good place to hang out. Being challenged, is one of the draws, for me.
By the way, have you tried the new unhomogenized heavy cream? Good stuff!
My answer to "show your work" was "No." I am not going to go through my code, and show a bunch of supporting evidence for a casual comment, in which I have exactly zero investment. I really don't care that much what people think of me. I was just sharing my personal experience. If you guys want to write me off, then knock yourselves out.
"No" is a complete sentence. What part of "No" didn't he understand?
> My answer to "show your work" was "No." I am not going to go through my code
An interesting answer to literally "Just what kind of evidence do you suppose they could have? - Showing actual improved products and features. Showing actual code. etc."
> "No" is a complete sentence. What part of "No" didn't he understand?
See above. After pointing this out you immediately started down the path of "why didn't you looko at my profile and followed the link to my github".
Not even close. The opposite even. Read more carefully.
> For 5 million comments like yours I haven't seen a single one with the old code vs. the new code. I understand that not all code is public that way, of course, and I don't mean to put you on the spot personally. But where are all the open source projects that now do the same with better error handling using less resources?
It’s not been a cakewalk. I’ve needed to toss out large swaths of LLM-generated code, and rewrite by hand, but, for the most part, it’s been a huge help.
But your anecdote is much more balanced and more in line with my personal findings. Not like all the AI astroturfing that happens here. I like to use LLMs as well, but in a very targeted way in places where LLMs shine.
Yes, LLMs can make you much more productive. But so could assembly -> C -> Python or Rust, or switching an IDE with code completion and support for refactoring. Each step makes you more productive.
Sure, LLMs can spit out greenfields projects. But on large projects with complex requirements, you still need senior engineers to guide them, carefully review the output, and as you say throw out code and write it from scratch in a better way.
I had some friends who ended up in bits of AI psychosis. They exclaim that a swarm of agents was writing all their code, but every time I ask them to show the end-result, all they have is a pile of code that they don't understand, nor doesn't really work either. At the same time, they stopped getting any actual work done.
At any rate, somebody had a great analogy on HN recently: think of it is a vector, LLMs can significantly increase the magnitude of the vector, but you still have to make sure that the orientation of the vector is correct.
> At any rate, somebody had a great analogy on HN recently: think of it is a vector, LLMs can significantly increase the magnitude of the vector, but you still have to make sure that the orientation of the vector is correct.
> It’s not been a cakewalk. I’ve needed to toss out large swaths of LLM-generated code, and rewrite by hand, but, for the most part, it’s been a huge help.
Same here :)
> not some AI cabal.
There are enough enthusiasts to make it feel like one. Also an unhealthy doze of marketers, people buying into hype, AI psychosis etc.
> There are enough enthusiasts to make it feel like one. Also an unhealthy doze of marketers, people buying into hype, AI psychosis etc.
There's absolutely no question that AI is a real thing, and that there's going to be a lot of money made, so there's a bunch of folks with commercial interest in pushing it.
It's just different from crypto. This has actual real-world utility for just about everyone. I am increasingly hearing people say "Ask ChatGPT," where they used to say "Google It" (where they used to say "Look it Up at the Library").
I had to convert a build pipeline from just one linux distro to multiple and then get arm64 going. Not the most difficult thing in the world but quite annoying when there's 100 binaries and a complex dep tree with lots of moving pieces. Anyway AI for sure increased project cadence by at least 2x. Not sure why there's so much denial in these threads.
I can also claim a bunch of things. If you manage to read the comment I was originally replying to, and my reply:
--- start quote ---
- Just what kind of evidence do you suppose they could have?
- Showing actual improved products and features. Showing actual code. etc.
--- end quote ---
Note how you provided neither. It's just claims.
> Anyway AI for sure increased project cadence by at least 2x.
As in: you claim this. Also, no one denies that you can ship a lot of code much faster with AI. However, somehow, very little actual evidence of grandiose claims (see farther up in the context) besides anecdotal "I'm so faster and features are being shipped left and right".
Oh, I certainly believe this. LLMs tend to be quite good at the: I'll give you a well-designed example, now extrapolate to other cases-cases.
I think it's a great example of using LLMs effectively. In the end becoming more productive is understanding where LLMs work great and where they fail miserably.
But it is a step similar to, say going from assembly to a higher-level programming language, not the silver bullet that AI astroturfers like you to believe (fire all the programmers to buy more tokens!)
Crucially, those rules were written before the invention of the new astroturfing machine which makes it more trivial than ever. HN had to impose restrictions around new amounts already, such as limitations on Show HN, so clearly something is going on and being recognised as such.
I find it worrying that you’re more concerned with the civil thing than the right thing. Placing an undue emphasis on civility is how bad actors control the conversation.
The comment you’re replying to wasn’t uncivil. It wasn’t rude. It was a lament.
I’m not advocating for this rule to change (I’d appreciate if you didn’t straw man and mischaracterise what I said), but I am saying if a problem happens over and over and people notice it and talk about it, then you should maybe pay attention. The rule for new accounts came about from multiple comments and even submissions asking for it, not private emails. It came about from community conversation and outcry.
> Placing an undue emphasis on civility is how bad actors control the conversation.
The load-bearing word in that claim is "undue", and it's not justified here. I'm not doing arcane rules-lawyering, I'm just saying people should avoid doing things the site guidelines quite specifically ask them not to do.
> I’m not advocating for this rule to change (I’d appreciate if you didn’t straw man and mischaracterise what I said),
I wasn't suggesting you did, I was suggesting the person I originally replied to might.
> I'm not doing arcane rules-lawyering, I'm just saying people should avoid doing things the site guidelines quite specifically ask them not to do.
Which I agree with. And I’m just saying the rules aren’t absolute, can’t cover every situation, and could not predict the change of the world around them, thus occasional deviation from them is OK, especially when it serves the larger goal of protecting discourse on a website whose rules were written to protect it.
It’s the spirit of the law VS the letter of the law. Let’s say the rules ask you to not shove people but say nothing about peeing on others. If someone suddenly starts peeing on everyone without consent and refuses to stop, shoving them to get them away becomes an appropriate response despite being technically against the rules.
> I wasn't suggesting you did, I was suggesting the person I originally replied to might. (…) Does that mean I now repeat your parenthetical back to you?
By your own logic, I wasn’t suggesting you did it, I was asking for no one else to do it (also, it’d make no sense anyway, it’s not a straw man to incorrectly say someone is straw manning). It also means the person you originally replied to wasn’t accusing their parent comment, thus making your original comment invalid.
not an astroturf and didn’t want to be associated with my main which has identifying info. Wanted to offer a perspective aside from the majority skeptic view on HN
And below you repeat what all of Hacker News hypemen say about AI (“I have stopped writing code”, “it’s mature and the next step of engineering”)
Thank you for reinforcing the point of OP
EDIT: you're the same person that a month ago said your company feels git is outdated now that you have agentic coding, and you don't even need to write your own commit messages. This is next-level trolling, or a serious case of AI psychosis.