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.

And unlike at (this hypothetical) Ikea, you wouldn't have to maintain the impression of 20x AI-augmented output to avoid being fired. Well, you could still use AI as much as you want, but you wouldn't have to keep proving you're not underusing it.

Why do we estimate stories? Because developer time is expensive and someone has to budget for it.

Why do we prioritise features in backlogs? Because we can’t build everything and we need to choose what’s worth the cost.

Why do we agonise over whether to refactor this module or write that debug interface? Because the time spent on one thing is time not spent on another.

We have compilers: either it compiles or it doesn’t.

We have test suites: either the tests pass or they don’t.

Planning. Estimating. Feature prioritisation. Code review. Architecture review. Sprint planning. All of it is downstream of the assumption that writing code is the expensive part.

... type systems, linters, static analysis. Software gives us verification tools that most other domains lack.

But this isn’t really about AI enthusiasm or AI scepticism. It’s about industrialisation. It has happened over and over in every sector, and the pattern is always the same: the people who industrialise outcompete those who don’t. You can buy handmade pottery from Etsy, or you can buy it mass-produced from a store. Each proposition values different things. But if you’re running a business that depends on pottery, you’d better understand the economics.

So which is it?

Will an industrialised process always outcompete a pre-industrial process? Or do they not compete at all, because they value different things?

Presumably you've already listened to every piece of music ever recorded? Otherwise it seems it would be more efficient to do that first than wait for AI to generate it and you chancing upon it.

In a way, maybe it going off-piste is coherent with the idea of the first third. I'm sure this was not the author's intent, but fun from an ironic perspective.

> There's nothing stopping you from doing that with an LLM.

There may be, though. The LLM's initial output may anchor your thinking in insidious ways that may not be obvious at all especially since you're feeling productive. I bet the lack of confidence around starting would also increase over time every time you use an LLM to get over the hump.

Predictions without a deadline are unfalsifiable.

I've also managed to make an E-Bow work with a steel-string acoustic guitar (but only on one string IIRC).

It's nice you got something out of it in just two hours. If the LLM companies are doing their caching right, the next person to ask for this set of apps with prompts close enough to yours can get it in five minutes.

Also there's a typo in the URL.

There's definitely a chunk of the developer population that's not going to trade the high-craft aspects of the process for output-goes-brrr. A Faustian bargain if ever I saw one. If some are satisfied by what comes down to vibe-testing and vibe-testing, I guess we wish them well from afar.