I'm trying to think in terms of small wins more and 1 minute spent creating something dumb or doing something not on a phone is 1 less minute creepy, greedy tech bros can extract your data for profit.

I backed it myself.

It took ~5 months for anyone to notice and fix something that is obviously wrong at a glance.

How many people saw that page, skimmed it, and thought “good enough”? That feels like a pretty honest reflection of the state of knowledge work right now. Everyone is running at a velocity where quality, craft and care are optional luxuries. Authors don’t have time to write properly, reviewers don’t have time to review properly, and readers don’t have time to read properly.

So we end up shipping documentation that nobody really reads and nobody really owns. The process says “published”, so it’s done.

AI didn’t create this, it just dramatically lowers the cost of producing text and images that look plausible enough to pass a quick skim. If anything it makes the underlying problem worse: more content, less attention, less understanding.

It was already possible to cargo-cult GitFlow by copying the diagram without reading the context. Now we’re cargo-culting diagrams that were generated without understanding in the first place.

If the reality is that we’re too busy to write, review, or read properly, what is the actual function of this documentation beyond being checkbox output?

Thanks for doing what you do and for sharing your story!

My issue is that we’ve now got a million secondary “paradigm shifts” layered on top: agent frameworks, orchestration patterns, prompt DSLs, eval harnesses, routing, memory, tool calling, “autonomous” workflows… all presented like you’re behind if you’re not constantly replatforming your brain.

Even if the end-state is “engineers code less”, the near-term reality for most engineers is still: deliver software, support customers, handle incidents, and now also become competent evaluators of rapidly changing bot stacks. That cognitive tax is brutal.

So yes, follow where the ball is going. I am. I’m just not pretending the current proliferation is anything other than noisy and expensive to keep up with.

I also keep getting job applications for AI-native 'developers' whatever that means.

The AI fatigue is real, and the cooling-off period is going to hurt. We’re deep into concept overload now. Every week it’s another tool (don’t get me started on Gas Town) confidently claiming to solve… something. “Faster development”, apparently.

Unless you’re already ideologically committed to this space, I don’t see how the average engineer has the energy or motivation to even understand these tools, never mind meaningfully compare them. That’s before you factor in that many of them actively remove the parts of engineering people enjoy, while piling on yet another layer of abstraction, configuration, and cognitive load.

I’m so tired of being told we’re in yet another “paradigm shift”. Tools like Codex can be useful in small doses, but the moment it turns into a sprawling ecosystem of prompts, agents, workflows, and magical thinking, it stops feeling like leverage and starts feeling like self-inflicted complexity.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599076

Points: 68

# Comments: 117

The more I rely on, the more problems I’ll inevitably have to deal with.

I’m not thinking about anything particularly complex—just using things like VSCode, Emacs, Nix, Vim, Firefox, JavaScript, Node, and their endless plugins and dependencies already feels like a tangled mess.

Embarrassingly, this has been pushing me toward using paper and the simplest, dumbest tech possible—no extensions, no plugins—just to feel some sense of control or security. I know it’s not entirely rational, but I can’t shake this growing disillusionment with modern technology. There’s only so much complexity I can tolerate anymore.

The funny thing is, for years I've had this SEO-farm bullshit content-farm filter and the AI impact for me has been, an increasing mistrust of anything written by humans or not. I don't even care if this was AI written, if it's good, great! However, the... 'genuine-ness' of it or lack of it, is an issue. It doesn't connect with me anymore and I feel/connect to any of it.

Weird times.