Hacker News: crnkofe

New comment by crnkofe in "One Month Without AI"

crnkofe — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 14:22:43 +0000

I find LLMs are a hit&miss. Can be great at rewriting a function from lang A to lang B. Fails completely at a refactor. Great at coming up with a bunch of networking hosts/IPs to test a particular func. Fails when doing simple validation. Great for prototyping an alternative UI but not even remotely production ready. Always confident regardless of whether the result is correct or false. Run it three times with same query get 3 different results etc. Plenty of claims online how people have become a 1000x developer but 0 actual examples of working code in production. Given they're stochastic by design all of this makes sense in a way.

There's no clear path moving forward. Overreliance on LLMs means your knowledge will exponentially decay and you will absolutely crash any future tech interviews becoming unemployable. Not using it for some quick wins feels wasteful. Finding balance between the two extremes in addition to all existing software development woes is really hard.

New comment by crnkofe in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

crnkofe — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 07:10:37 +0000

I used to be happy to have one conclusion derived from a meeting. Now with every word catalogued via AI summaries and pages of slop you'd think we have gotten somehow more productive. Alas the amount of conclusions didn't change. It does look like a lot of work was produced though so maybe on the plus side I can "prove" we did talk about stuff when eventually management comes looking for answers.

New comment by crnkofe in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

crnkofe — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:50:45 +0000

AI-generated style right now has a what I'd call a grotesque aesthetic. Its offputting and immediately recognizable. The biggest offender being the rounded fonts and "wrong" smiles. Its probably going to get better but until it does I will feel free to ignore it same way as highway commercials.

New comment by crnkofe in "My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test"

crnkofe — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:30:26 +0000

Software engineers are splitting into two camps either by choice or by being forced to by management. Those who have the self-discipline to use LLMs responsibly and those that are going all-in on AI. Imo there's a place for both camps but I don't think they can coexist in the same team.

New comment by crnkofe in "An Alien Mind"

crnkofe — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 09:28:35 +0000

The language of these LLM posts makes me think they're considering the option to be a defense subsidiary. It doesn't seem like they're actually constraining or limiting the models in any way. They don't seem to understand how the model actually works. Poke the beast and see what happens. Also the use of passive language as-in AI is becoming more and more of a threat as opposed to the reality where they're making the model more and more aggressive and useful for military is very hypocritical.

New comment by crnkofe in "The asteroid currently hitting front end web development"

crnkofe — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:46:51 +0000

Lots of people mention this higher abstraction level but its not really the case. C has a grammar. You write C and get C as output. Assembly is hidden from the user. Natural language also has a grammar ("sort of"). You write prose into your preferred cli/app of choice BUT it outputs code in C or other language. So its basically a code generator. A code generator is not even remotely a form of abstraction. Its just a facade that breaks down as soon as the generator fails to produce a meaningful result.

New comment by crnkofe in "CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO"

crnkofe — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 10:45:31 +0000

To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. As a developer I keep running into problems that require some measure of creativity to solve or workaround. And regardless of how many years I've been in the industry I'm not running out of issues. They just keep getting more obscure. On the other hand leadership communication and problem resolution seem like the exact opposite of creativity and innovation. Its all about time proven, reliable solutions. Same layoff notices, recommendations, design everywhere. Repetitive, boring, politically correct and therefore easy to automate. Accountability will likely become reason n1 for keeping leadership roles intact that is until people become accustomed to AIs everywhere. After all what's the difference between a bot showing a layoff notice at 5am or an AI generated message/video from a human doing the very same thing.

New comment by crnkofe in "Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots"

crnkofe — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 07:21:59 +0000

Imo it can support the separation in meaningful ways. There are many political topics where opinions are flooding online forums much quicker than anyone with informed opinion can answer or digest them Having a quick reference for "verifying" statements would be useful. Sure LLMs are probabilistic but we don't have any issues using them for building software which runs as part of society infrastructure nowadays.

New comment by crnkofe in "Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots"

crnkofe — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 10:25:03 +0000

I'm kind of hopeful AI some wikipedia-inspired AI "oracle" will happen in the future. Why not use some central AI to separate fact from fiction (faster than trolls and griefers can come to muddy the debate).

New comment by crnkofe in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

crnkofe — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:48:51 +0000

All this mindless droning about societal collapse, destruction of jobs, people moving on is really getting old. Sure people have caused mayhem by following (and enforcing) bad practices which resulted in a toxic workplace, a mix of pissed of client due to constantly failing to reach deadlines, unimaginably bad codebase that was a horror to work with and teammates each defending their own turf. LLMs now allow this deterioration to happen much quicker and more effectively.

On the other hand the problem can also be triaged quicker and rewritten faster. Pretty much every startup I joined had at its core disastrous code written by students and overworked techies. I can totally see this shitty base being the future base all startups. It'll likely need an army of agents or devs to make sense of all the spaghetti being written. I won't be surprised if demand for devs skyrockets after the first generation of spaghetti western code "matures".

New comment by crnkofe in "OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining"

crnkofe — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:28:13 +0000

I wonder if this book will eventually be bought up by LLM companies, scanned, shredded and become a source of ethics info for the future generations. Who knows...

New comment by crnkofe in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

crnkofe — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:39:39 +0000

The problem and what the article is pointing out is that original content is slowly and progressively being replaced by AI content. And since AI gets trained on this content as well it will eventually train itself on previous gen. content that was also AI generated. It is slowly eating the web. Eventually you won't even be able to evade it because it'll be everywhere. Before AI became this expressive I could at least expect someone writing articles, FAQs, blog posts to have some backbone. Now I frequently run into content that obviously was never even checked by a human.

New comment by crnkofe in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

crnkofe — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 07:47:22 +0000

I have this nagging feeling that the depression, anxiety and pessimism is as-of-late coming from people from all the companies that risked it by adopting token maxing and AI usage enforcement. Its not representative of the whole industry though. There are still many places where engineers or knowledge workers are respected and left to lead (or not) AI adoption.

New comment by crnkofe in "Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls"

crnkofe — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:33:05 +0000

Rovo is one of those intrusive AI buttons that suddenly appeared everywhere without any warning. Its so annoying having already shitty UI get borked with features I never use. Almost as annoying as Whatsapp suddenly getting the same FOMO AI button. Its not like I need an AI agent to talk to friends and family. And a summary is something I can always generate via copy&paste into CLI chat session.

I'm still on the edge about security as an afterthought in LLMs. Given its now so easy to generate a ton of slop - why not focus on nonfunctional stuff making LLMs operate faster than thinking for X minutes and limiting exfiltration of local env secrets?

New comment by crnkofe in "AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol"

crnkofe — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:40:56 +0000

I feel any criminal is a big beneficiary of AI. Its something that's not being talked enough by the big AI players who are just chasing profit by burning books, consuming water, promising people getting thrown out of jobs and of course productivity. Now that the cat's out of the bag I don't event see a way to limit all the negative net effects that will ripple through society.

New comment by crnkofe in "The AI Productivity Gap"

crnkofe — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:51:26 +0000

It doesn't really matter how much more productive a developer is if all other roles at the company don't follow suit. Before a developer picks up something to work on a series of roles had to set their eyes on work to be done. Project/product leads, tech leads, business people stamping and deciding on priorities. Then there's all the work that happens after a developer finishes work which tends to be manual as well. Review, QA, education, ops changes, marketing material, education articles, webcasts, showcasing features to end users and lets not forget end users actually making good use of the amazing new features shipped and likely many more largely sequential processes depending on company size and product/project type.

There's no real way to get to a 10x developer nowadays. Even if a company somehow achieved the magic productivity increase in all employees you still need a 10x consumer to gulp it all down.

New comment by crnkofe in "The Religion of Speed"

crnkofe — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:53:08 +0000

I find this speed-obsession to just be a natural side-effect of obsessive toxic competitiveness that's plaguing the internet. And its been around for a while. Clickbait videos and articles like top 10 holiday destinations or how to improve on X are top recommended content. What to do and not to do to be the "best" runner/cyclist/manager etc. Then there are small things like measuring "time" it takes to read an article. This obsessiveness feels in many ways harmful. You don't need the best pen to draw or not code because AI can do it better. You also don't need to have the best bike for going up and downhill and neither do you need the classic Tour douchebag attire. Its totally ok to be a human, run short small laps around a nearby hill, draw shitty landscape art and write semi-legible prose on Hacker news. Its also fine to write code to maintain sanity in AI-infested workplace (shocking I know). The internet won't tell you that though.

New comment by crnkofe in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

crnkofe — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:03:58 +0000

Hacker news is so one-dimensional when it comes to China. Its like people here are living in an alternate dimension where everyone outside the horizon is playing catchup. Imo a sandboxed local expert handheld or mobile AIs are the future. They'll be open weight and maybe even open sourced if we ever figure out a way to beatdown training costs. And I find that pretty exciting. There will be some bloodbath on the Wallstreet for sure but I don't anticipate or shiver anticipating double digit losses from any major corp.

New comment by crnkofe in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

crnkofe — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:53:28 +0000

I don't get this US medical system. And the more I get to read about it the less informed I feel. Sounds like every involved medical service out there is just to rip the patient off.

New comment by crnkofe in "AI changes the economics of software rewrites"

crnkofe — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:00:28 +0000

I had an itch to rewrite every project after it got large enough and have rewritten some of them. The tragedy of rewriting stuff is that it often ends up becoming more of a duplicate than an improved original. Its hard to see all the edge cases when skimming codebase from afar. Maybe for prototyped code it could work. Not sure if feeding prototype AI slop into AI will produce results though. GIGO. Rewriting code is anyhow not the critical aspect. Its testing and QAing the result and legacy edge cases that's the most time consuming part and that isn't really covered by writing more code.