Same. I miss the excitement around programming. New languages, new tricks, weird hacks, odd projects.
I have little to no interest in AI coding - I try it every couple months but always regret it, git reset, and go back to coding by hand.
It feels quite lonely these days. The general energy and enthusiasm from hn was a big source of motivation, or maybe community. Now using hn feels quite isolating.
I do see the occasional post about going back to hand coding though, and their frequency seems to be on the rise, so hopefully that correction continues
(I don’t need to see no AI, to each their own, just would be nice to see an equal amount of hand coding content one day)
Yeah personally I think he is right about a lot of the current state of affairs. I think he has a decent grasp of the situation despite being incredibly biased.
His predictions though? I don’t think I’ve ever read anything from him to get his read on how things will play out.
Just because one makes the wrong predictions does not mean that the data used to make them was wrong. A lot of people seem to dismiss his reporting because of his takeaways
Idk Google Maps is pretty bad. Clicking on the search bar force opens the App Store, and trying to load photos does the same and straight up lies to you saying it’s only available in the app. But if you scroll down to the second carousel of images it loads fine in web.
Google Maps has a better excuse for wanting to be an app than most since a primary use case on mobile is turn-by-turn navigation. That's possible to do in a web page now, but several features that improve the experience are not available in browsers.
I'm annoyed by a different thing ... It used to be when you searched for something, maps would always be a tab for results. Now it doesn't seem to be anymore...
What you need to do, in the modern Web, is to flip that around.
Anytime I need to search an entity with physical presence, I use Google Maps first. Maps is very good about getting the first result as intended and not showing superfluous non-matches. Maps will not chirp up with AI-generated responses. Maps will take me right to the place I want, and I can see a lot of profile info at-a-glance, and if I wanted their website, then Maps will give me their main website, and nothing else.
Whether it's a corporate HQ, a clinic, a local restaurant, or a geographic area, Maps can come up with a lot of relevant info and I don't waste my time in an enshittified Search. So I'm thankful for the Maps app and its mobile integrations.
I’m not sure how that’s a justification. If you want to app-wall the turn by turn directions, that would be one thing. The fact that turn-by-turn directions is better on mobile doesn’t rationalize lying about being unable to show photos, and auto opening the App Store three times every time you want to search for an address somewhere
However, I live with Activity Monitor open at all times. The computer constantly grinds to a halt, and I have to force quit apps at least 10 times per day.
Not really Apple's fault though, just most apps use around 4GB of RAM these days even when they're idle. Some use upwards of 16GB.
I've watched the computer slowly get obsoleted over time, not because the hardware is too old, but because software just get's worse every year.
Install Linux to unleash the full potential of your M1 (or to liberate any other system with a BloatOs, like macOS or Windows).
I resucitated and saved from the landfill a laggy and almost unusable laptop with Window 10, 4GB RAM and a Celeron processor, how?... Installing Manjaro (Arch), XFCE and kernel 6.18.
ZSwap and MGLru do wonders with memory and cache management.
It's fast enough with Thorium SSE4. I can easily open 15-20 tabs.
I mean, you could make a better comment about it, but in my opinion the sarcasm is justified.
AI has greatly increased the number of security bugs found on a weekly basis (which is great) and we're getting one of those one-shotted and then immediately abandoned open source "projects" every day (which is useless).
And yet there is no indication that any of this new software development capacity is going into improving the quality and efficiency of the software we use on a daily basis.
Why is widely used professional software not getting better and more efficient if bug fixing is supposedly so much cheaper now? Is it not worth putting any effort into optimisation at all?
I think the reason could be that AI can only do more of what we have done manually before, i.e. more lowest common denominator code.
Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming?
> Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming?
I doubt its coming, at least not within the timescale OpenAI or Anthropic would like to believe. If we were close, then we'd see the fruits of that, which like you said, we are seeing the opposite currently.
The bottleneck was never writing code, and it still isn't. Writing code is like 15% of the job, but the labs can't tell investors "Yeah we make everyone only 15% more efficient" and still be able to raise trillions in capital. Whatever AI accelerates, the bottleneck is still code review, comprehension, and security debt.
Vibe coded slop gets abandoned because non-devs were never going to be able to use AI to make commercial software beyond an MVP. Once your app needs multi-tenant auth, session invalidation, concurrency handling, API changes, graceful degradation under load, etc. natural language prompts will fail. You still need a mental model of how things work.
When building a house, lowering the cost of bricks and getting them delivered faster does nothing to speed up the rest of the process that still relies on engineering discipline.
I don’t get it either. What are these people doing that keep saying that Mac OS is snappy. It’s the same slow garbage as windows.
One problem is that you need Firefox because safari doesn’t peppery do ad blocking. But once you have 20 tabs open or so, it uses 5GB GB ram. But perhaps your also need safari for something else. That’s another 5GB of RAM. Then once you count a finder replacement (2GB ram), and some office stuff (probably 1-4GB for each app window), 16GB of ram are almost as sluggish as an old windows laptop. Add MS Teams, and the thing is brought to it’s knees. And Mac OS has a lot of quirks and the window management is atrocious (alt-tab doesn’t switch between app windows, a bunch of apps to get alt-tab behavior don’t work properly either).
I feel like more and more that Mac Users are being forced by the atrocious window management to only have one window open per software, so then the system is fast. Problem is when you have multiple tasks going on in parallel, then you need many windows and desktops.
I don't really think it's all that much about macOS. I think it more has to do with the state of web development - claude.com or chat.com or grok.com all can use up to 5GB of RAM as an idle webpage in the background regardless of browser. Most apps these days seem to be electron apps which can fire off multiple 4+ GB node processes doing who knows what.
I think most true native apps don't have these issues. Unfortunately there is very little incentive to build on the macOS platform these days, which is where I point more of the finger at Apple. UX, UI, & DX are all quite a bit worse for Mac native.
I live with safari and finder and all my office ware is native (mail.app) or web based (Google Docs). Chat is via slack, but I use the website and not the native app. I've adapted to the quirks and I'd bet that's a lot of the reason why it doesn't feel slow to me. I feel I have plenty of windows open at once but likely less than you do.
If you have to use specialized software to make your system snappy, then it is, as a system, not snappy. The attitude about the MacBook is that it never slows down … what, unless you use MS office?
my point was I'm not using specialized software, I'm using the software shipped with the system. MS Office isn't Apple Software, so holding apple responsible for Microsoft code quality seems counter to your first point.
If I have Office stuff open and the whole system crawls, then the system isn’t snappy.
It’s like the claim is “get a Mac and you’ll never see a slow down ever again! Just as long as you run software that won’t make the whole system come to a crawl”
Awesome will check this out. EUrouter is too cost prohibitive for me, and now that open router has been acquired by stripe it’s only a matter of time until it’s unusable
Depends on what’s being written, and who the audience is. Anything of any length would be hard to simulate in a way that would fool an author - writing has a certain flow to it. A cadence. The editing and restructuring, deleting of words, typos you don’t catch until some random reread, rephrasing of sections because you want to use the original phrasing later in the piece.
Could you simulate something be typed? Trivially. Could you simulate something be drafted? Honestly, even if you wanted to put in all that time and effort, I’m not even sure LLMs are sophisticated enough to send the logical drafts, loops and edits that would pass a writers sniff test
I think you could simulate something that passes a sniff test. A writer would probably spot implausibilities in the simulation if they paid attention, but then we're back to square one, because you can spot that something was written by an LLM after you've wasted your time reading it and realize that you've been led around in circles with superficial information and no coherent train of thought, but by then your time has already been wasted.
To add to this, one can’t ignore the relationship between signal and receiver. I’d imagine most people on HN have enough pre-LLM reading experience to have a decent sense of what was written by an LLM versus a human.
And as LLMs get better at producing human-like text, that same pre-LLM reading experience, which helps people tell the two apart, will become less and less common.
I think it’s safe to say that this will not be consensus. Personally, I am getting increasingly (irrationally) angry at AI generated content. AI generated art quite literally makes me nautious. I mean an actual, physical reaction where I feel queasy.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, and notice more and more people reporting the same. Several of my non-technical
AI generated content is bland and soulless. There’s only so much bland and soulless most people can take in their life before they start to get fed up.
When everything feels the same, nothing is interesting anymore.
Everyday AI writing was not a thing with GPT 3.5. It happened more around GPT 4o. And now some people are entirely comfortable with using AI writing and not even trying to hide it (while, I would agree, it's obviously still fairly garbage and easily identifiable, which helps with triggering strong averse reactions).
However the models are getting better at everything, including writing for the past years. Why would that stop now? It's reasonable to assume that the makers also know about bad writing, dislike it, and thus the models will get trained to get even better at it.
Eventually how will you be able to tell? You won't. You can't. And that goes for the rest of us. And I suspect everything will just feel somewhat nicer.
To claim there was amazing progress in the past therefore there will be amazing progress in the future is an inductive fallacy.
And as someone who gets dozens if not hundreds of AI generated emails I have to go through every day, it is _incredibly_ easy to spot which ones are AI generated and which are human written.
By its nature AI generated content is statistically consistent, the narrative equivalent of monotone speech. I don’t know anyone that can’t spot it a mile away at this point, and the more people are confronted with slop, the more attuned they become to it.
> AI generated art quite literally makes me nautious. I mean an actual, physical reaction where I feel queasy.
Have you tested yourself on this, e.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-ar... ? The works shown here are IMO very impressive overall, especially in the impressionist style. And the test was originally given in October 2024, i.e. an eternity ago in model-advancement years.
I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs. But I also don't know that I would classify LLMs as 'wildly useful' for coding. Most productivity gains seem to be hallucinated, and while it's too early to make any claims on long term outcomes, there are plenty of studies indicating they might be even more negative.
There are definitely use cases for LLMs in coding. And at times, they can be wildly useful. But I feel like the industry atm wildly overestimates their broader/long term utility.
Anecdotally, I have not seen an explosion in quality/bespoke software since LLMs. In fact I've noticed the opposite to quite the extreme. Not only are new products worse in quality, but the quality of existing products is falling off a cliff.
> Anecdotally, I have not seen an explosion in quality/bespoke software since LLMs. In fact I've noticed the opposite to quite the extreme. Not only are new products worse in quality, but the quality of existing products is falling off a cliff.
This is the big one. It's clear that AI can generate huge volumes of code by KLOC. It is not clear that spending a lot of money tokenmaxxing will eventually result in increased real revenue for software businesses, and eventually even an MBA has to look at a "money in vs money out" chart.
Have been thinking about this a lot recently. AI could be an absolute game changer for a small start-up rushing a product to market – you could quickly build an MVP that would take years and tens of hires before.
But how much ROI is there for large businesses with established products and huge development teams burning through tokens making subtle tweaks that can’t be directly tied to revenue?
Not much ROI, if any. My employer's been making some studies and come up with very modest productivity gains - so of course they want us all to use it, but I'm not sure they're taking the true costs into account. Especially not once token pricing actually reflects reality, and we all get brain rot from using the things instead of thinking. If this thing doesn't collapse before we can run a solid coding assistant model on a developer's machine, maybe it's got some legs.
That doesn't seem very likely.
The legacy of LLMs will live on in various models doing various specialist things (they seem like a really good progression on speech synthesis for example) but the current edifice will come crashing down and if we're very very very lucky they won't take the global economy with it.
I've been thinking about this too. The quality maintenance of large systems isn't something you can just completely automate away with AI. Even if the code is written with AI, you still have to read through and verify it.
Even though that is still faster than regularly writing code, I end up losing that nuanced knowledge that I get from going through documentation and writing it out by hand - actually doing the work. I just don't see it actually replacing developers unless managers are willing to produce MORE code with the SAME level of quality.
> I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs.
I think it's more complicated than that too. He's pretty well versed in the stated capabilities of LLMs.
The fact that he isn't a deeply involved technical developer who knows the ins and outs and nuances of using LLM tools is the point, because the stated capabilities of LLMs are that they are trivial to use, extremely powerful, and getting so much better every month that you personally can replace developers without even trying as a completely non-technical person with basic writing skills.
Given the hype and extreme claims being made, the fact that he remains ignorant and gets practically no use out of LLMs immediately disproves those statements. The counterargument boiling down to "you're using it wrong" is actually just a further indictment of Sam Altman and his like, because it shouldn't be possible to use LLMs wrong!
The rest, well, the hype needs to die before anyone can make sane estimates of what LLM tech can do for us in various fields. Right now it's all a complete mess.
I don’t get me wrong, I’m on Ed’s side and get where he’s coming from. I just think his arguments are normally taken to the extreme, making them less defensible, when he could make the same arguments from a more moderate stance and ultimately be more convincing.
His arguments, albeit valid, can often sound like reductos ad absurdums the way he presents them.
One of the worst things about LLM writing is how it makes big promises of what it can prove in some piece of writing, and then never really follows up on that, or has specifics that go all the way towards the original, grandiose statement.
And frankly, Zitron is guilty of that pattern of writing too, or of relying on some unstated "baseline" knowledge which is clear from his other writing but not in the specific piece.
So, basically yeah, agreeing about the ad absurdum thing.
(I will note, the tone, the swearing, etc. really doesn't matter nearly as much as these problems, and everyone instead obsessing about the swearing and personality is really boring)
Personally I only find his swearing and delivery annoying when he is not delivering his point well (ie reducto ad absurdum). I’d be welling to bet a good amount of the complaints about his swearing are really just from a poor delivery, and people don’t know why, so they latch onto his swearing.
His early stuff was just as degenerate and vulgar, but was much less of an issue for me.
Part of the problem is the like - sociomedia factor. Ed’s figured out how to break through the noise. I’m not surprised that Ed Zitron is the kind of counterpoint you get in the Musk-Trump attention economy / CEO’s that sound more like prophets than business executives world.
One person's ignorance of something can never be evidence that it doesn't exist. It's far too easy to be willfully ignorant; no one can force you to abandon ignorance if you don't want to.
On the other hand, the hype of "Sam Altman and his like" being plainly exaggerated doesn't mean there's nothing at all behind it. It's plain to see there's something important about LLM capabilities. I don't even use them myself, as emotionally I find them entirely repugnant, and I can still see that.
We need to wait to get the whole story about LLMs, but we don't need to wait to confidently reject both extremes of opinion about them.
> Anecdotally, I have not seen an explosion in quality/bespoke software since LLMs. In fact I've noticed the opposite to quite the extreme. Not only are new products worse in quality, but the quality of existing products is falling off a cliff.
Very little new or ground-breaking (I struggle to think of things AI has produced that aren't themselves just more AI), but various previously-stable sites and services breaking.
The studies you are talking about are probably outdated, it's difficult to deny the actual productivity boost of coding agents.
I'm not talking about the quantity of code produced, but about actual user needs that are now resolved that would not have been before.
The main productivity gain will not come from existing software engineer, but from people that couldn't code at all before but are now able to do things by themselves. We are still very early.
It still takes the same mindset and skills to use AI productively and effectively as regular programming. The productivity boost only applies if you know what you’re doing and can actually steer the agent carefully.
Vibecoding hits a glass ceiling very quickly and this will not be solved incrementally. Besides, if the agent could work autonomously to that degree then it would no longer need any prompting at all and we’re living in a very different world. On the other hand that would make the debt actually meaningless, so I guess that is 'a' solution.
As a developer who has not been able to get any boost in productivity from coding agents, I find it incredibly easy to deny.
I’m a solopreneur, if I could lighten my load I would. However I have yet to save time using coding agents, with the exception of “I made this change to my model file, update all model to match the new format.” Which is cool, but maybe 0.01% of my job, and took a 1 hour task down to 10 minutes.
We previously had a backlog of 2 years of features planned. Now we have no work and are just working on tech debt and planning to get more involved in the product side because they need help getting the developers work to do.
I have little to no interest in AI coding - I try it every couple months but always regret it, git reset, and go back to coding by hand.
It feels quite lonely these days. The general energy and enthusiasm from hn was a big source of motivation, or maybe community. Now using hn feels quite isolating.
I do see the occasional post about going back to hand coding though, and their frequency seems to be on the rise, so hopefully that correction continues
(I don’t need to see no AI, to each their own, just would be nice to see an equal amount of hand coding content one day)
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