Many kinds of software cannot be yeeted 10x faster with AI. Someone has to sit down and understand what the right thing to do is, first.

It also matters how many users you expect to be able to reach. If you're Facebook you can afford to use the first 10,000 users as unpaid QA. If you're an indie shop that's barely getting downloads you really want to make a positive impression on your initial users or you're toast anyway.

The air temperature is higher in the sun in busy marketplaces from high surface temperature of tarred roads and the thermal island effect of poor Indian urban design. Also on the top floors of buildings it tends to be really bad (roofs are mostly uninsulated).

As a person with severe hemophilia in the third world, where the condition is very under-treated (no prophylaxis, very little clotting factor and sometimes none), I've grown up facing this issue with the dominant arm being out of commission due to a bleed for days at a time. I gradually learned to do almost everything with the left hand: brush my teeth, shave, eat, shower, type with one hand (autocompleting IDEs help), even drive a stick shift (using the right hand to hold the wheel briefly while shifting, technically illegal I'll admit).

It's not that difficult to adapt. The barriers are mostly mental because it feels awkward at first. There are some dexterity issues but if you don't mind going slowly, you can get by.

Just sharing my experience, not meant to undermine the challenges faced by left-handed individuals in a right-handed world.

Well, I can think of one reason why it wasn't that much more trouble. François Chollet had a nice tweet [1] on why removing human cognitive friction is resulting in needless software complexity.

[0] https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable/blob/main/Sources/...

[1] https://x.com/fchollet/status/2045929951539707957

The poet Ghalib, who was the emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar’s contemporary, considered himself a descendant of the aristocracy and referred to himself as a “Mughal baccha” in a well-known quote (sourced from his letters, I believe).

The author passed away 15 years ago so I will mention the PDF of the book shows up in the first few search results on Google.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483567 is pretty much (paraphrasing) sucks to be you if you can't make it work.

Well, people who are not above a threshold of experience yet are not in a position to self-assess and course-correct if their long term learning is being affected. And even less so if there is pressure to be hyper-productive with the help of AI.

Speculating here but I think even seniors who rely on AI all the time and enjoy the enhanced output are going to end up with impostor syndrome over the things they suspect they can no longer do without AI, and FOMO about all the projects they haven't yet attempted with AI despite working as hard as they can.

Handmade pottery can certainly be better quality than mass-produced pottery, just like handwritten code can be better quality than AI-assisted code. There is a spate of new MacOS apps that are clearly AI-written, with memory leaks, high CPU usage and UI that doesn't conform to MacOS conventions (in one instance I'm aware of, the interface has changed completely between updates). Of course users can tell the difference.

If you're going to spend a lot of time making sure the AI-generated code is perfect, does the industrialisation analogy still hold? There's a spectrum here from vibe-coded to agentic to Copilot-level assistance to no AI assistance (which may be a little silly) of course.