Nothing happened, except maybe you forgot what it means to be a hacker.

If they are using your data, you're still paying just not in cash.

As a former reliability engineer, I'm trying hard to remember back when we had multiple months in a row never reaching 100% uptime, and I can't. Yes, we've seen runs of painful months, but also runs of easy months without down time.

But let's talk root cause here, the cost of improving them here, is someone caring. This isn't simply a hard problem, it's a well understood hard problem that no one who makes decisions cares about. Which as a reliability engineer is an embarrassment. Uptime is one of those foundational aspects that you can build on top of. If you're not willing to invest in something as core as your code or service works. What are you even doing?

The number of bots that try to hide who they are, and don't bother to even check robots.txt is new.

This is too shallow of a take. Especially when your very next point objects to what he uses as a default reference frame that you disagree with. Lord forbid drew disagree about, I think priorities, and values?

> why not change your frame of mind from "Why don't others understand how awful it is?!" to "People are seeing something I'm not, what am I missing?"

It's the same question. I sympathize with both questions, I constant feel both frustrated, and broken with how few people care about quality, and participating fairly. I try very hard to find the positive aspects "everyone" claims llm codegen provides. I'm looking hard, and can't find them. It's painfully average, often worse so when it gets lost. It doesn't and can not help me, only get in the way, what am I doing wrong? Why is everyone missing something I see as obvious? But again, both could easily be true from both frames you suggest. "Why can't people identify this as trash" could very easily be followed by "what I'm I missing from the equation?" and be the same thought/idea.

> so your article could actually contain something else than personal and emotions rants?

I mean, it's titled, A Eulogy for Vim. That seems to be what it says on the tin, no?

Ask more questions. It takes work when dealing with smart people who think beyond the question you asked, adding their own context, and then replying with a different question. But those are the people who are willing to engage with you. Statements without questions can be ignored, and people who engage with different questions than the ones that you asked can be safely ignored as those who don't want to engage.

The cure to a purely adversarial conversation is educated curiosity. The educated part being being able to differentiate the threads that will lead down a tribalistic path vs those that will lead down an exploratory one.

More important than all of the above, is knowing when to walk away. It's barely a majority, but that barely majority "want" to waste your time. Ignore their DOS attempt, and save your time for people who want to engage, fairly. The fairly part being the most important.

> I want to do good engineering, not produce slop, but for [...]

IFF this is true, you can already stop. This will never be good engineering. Guess and check, which is what your describing, you're letting the statistical probability machine make a prediction, and then instead of verifying it, you're assuming the tests will check your work for you. That's ... something, but it's not good engineering.

> That has to be worth something.

if it was so easy, why hasn't someone else done it already? Perhaps the cost value, in the code base you don't understand isn't actually worth that specific something?

> I could see a few ways forward:

> Send it, but be clear that it came from AI, I don't know if it works, and ask the reviewers to pay special attention to it because of that...

so, off load all the hard work on to the maintainers? Where's that 2 days of eng time your claiming in that case?

> Or Send it as normal, because it passes tests/linters, and review should be the same regardless of author or provenance.

guess, and check; is not good engineering.

> Interestingly, the pro-AI folks almost universally doubled down and said that I should use AI more to gain more confidence – ask how can I test it, how can we verify it, etc – to move my confidence instead of changing how review works.

the pro-ai groups are pro AI? I wouldn't call that interesting. What did the Anti-AI groups suggest?

> the AI "fixed" so many things to "improve" the code that I completely lost all confidence in the change because there were clearly things that were needed and things that weren't, and disentangling them was going to be way more work than starting from scratch.

Yeah, that's the problem with AI isn't it? It's not selling anything of significant value... it's selling false confidence in something of minimal value... but only with a lot of additional work from someone who understands the project. Work that you already pointed out, can only be off loaded to the maintainers who understand the code base...

General follow up question... if AI is writing all the PRs, what happens when eventually no one understands the code base?

You might not feel the vitriol is warranted for this specific example, but you tell anyone that they are wrong to feel the way they do, at your own peril.

Is it that big of a deal? IMO, no and I say that as someone who was pissed off by it too. But then again the straw the breaks the camel's back never does seem heavy.

But in context:

> every post is turned up to 11.

Everyone is being disrespected all the time, from every direction. Here, it feels like Firefox is doing it too. Every one is already at 11, Firefox added an AI button nobody wanted, with no (real) way to disable it. And we now have an 11.05 post. As everyone paying attention would expect.

It's about the disrespect of not asking. Could Firefox have asked if users wanted to enable AI features? Of course they could have, did they? Of course not, just think about how would asking would effect the shareholders!!

I don't disagree with the premise that it's hard to make everyone happy, but the problem isn't about pleasing everyone, it's about treating users with respect, and not jumping on the AI everywhere bandwagon, without asking first. Especially because Firefox has billed itself as privacy protecting, and AI is definitely not privacy focused. One might even say, privacy violating... From the privacy focused browser...

Firefox used to release features that improved privacy. Today they add features that reduce privacy. Enabled by default, with no easy way to disable or remove the spyware link.

The tone should shift, in step with how much disrespect companies decide to inflict on their users.

For most people the point is to be respected by people who's opinion you value. Which is often distinctly different from the opinion of genpop.

I've never called them MircoSlop before, I haven't even written the word. But it's now my exclusive word for the company.

All I can hear is, it's working.

> Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

Is spam on topic? and are AI codegen bots part of the community?

To me, the value of Show HN was rarely the thing, it was the work and attention that someone put into it. AI bot's don't do work. (What they do is worth it's own word, but it's not the same as work).

> I don't want to exclude these projects, because (1) some of them are good,

Most of them are barely passable at best, but I say that as a very biased person. But I'll reiterate my previous point. I'm willing to share my attention with people who've invested significant amounts of their own time. SIGNIFICANT amounts, of their time, not their tokens.

> (2) there's nothing wrong with more people being able to create and share things

This is true, only in isolation. Here, the topic is more, what to do about all this new noise, (not; should people share things they think are cool). If the noise drowns out the signal, you're allowed that noise to ruin something that was useful.

> (3) it's foolish to fight the future

coward!

I do hope you take that as the tongue-in-cheek way I meant it, because I say it as a friend would; but I refuse to resign myself completely to fatalism. Fighting the future is different from letting people doing something different ruin the good thing you currently have. Sure electric cars are the future, but that's no reason to welcome them in a group that loves rebuilding classic hot rods.

> (4) there's no obvious way to exclude them anyhow.

You got me there. But then, I just have to take your word for it, because it's not a problem I've spent a lot of time figuring out. But even then, I'd say it's a cultural problem. If people ahem, in a leadership position, comment ShowHN is reserved for projects that took a lot of time investment, and not just ideas with code... eventually the problem would solve itself, no? The inertia may take some time, but then this whole comment is about time...

I know it's not anymore, but to me, HN still somehow, feels a niche community. Given that, I'd like to encourage you to optimize for the people who want to invest time into getting good at something. A very small number of these projects could become those, but trying to optimize for best fairness to everyone, time spent be damned... I believe will turn the people who lift the quality of HN away.

Ignore that feeling, it's wrong. Because it's not what I'm arguing for. Reasonable is a load bearing qualifier.

It doesn't feel like the people making the decisions that meaningfully contribute to causing harm to other people, ever have to deal with the fallout or repercussions for their unfortunate choices. Deincentivizing that behavior is my goal. And I'll unfortunately take iterative or suboptimal options at this point. I don't like it, but I do want to try to be realistic.

Literally, and intentionally avoiding any attempt to examine the implications? No probably not.

But reasonable punishment discourages bad behavior. And software engineers have a habit of ignoring the implications of a defective design. I think apocalyptic fines applied to the companies creating the systems for automated cars would also create the correct incentives, but I find that to be less likely than imprisonment.

What I want is software and systems to not suck ass. I don't want to deal with defective... everything, because it was faster to deliver. That's especially true when it contributes to the death or injury of a person that didn't do anything wrong.

I don't care what works, but people being afraid of going to jail for hurting someone absolutely does work. And 'administrative fines' don't work.

This is true *only* in isolation. The pain of going through said depth of detail, is what builds the intuition for the whole system. Once and twice may not be noticeable, but a new habit, and that new habit's corresponding extreme downtime because no one understands the quirks anymore... Despite a few engineers who stake their life on the testing system, tests can't catch all issues. And it's extremely difficult to stop an oil tanker.

I would probably say a shell is "the correct tool for the job" but other than the appeal to authority, or appeal to tradition. There's not a great argument for a shell script over a language you're already comfortable with.

There are hundreds of examples that are easier or faster in python than shell.

Engineers are bad at making tooling, we're even worse making ephemeral tooling we're willing to throw away. Contrasted with other makers, you have machinests who gladly make a one off tool to make a single process easier.

The more 'correct way' than a shell script, is something simple and composable. A large unwieldy shell script that you can't make simple changes in, is terrible design, and it's a mistake to allow that inertia to gain speed.

It's not exactly a complete refutation but something I've been thinking about recently.