Knowing the right question to ask is what makes a person an engineer.

> What I mean there is that AI can solve those questions for every possible domain application.

Yes, if you know what to ask. You're doing an excellent job of demonstrating my point!

> Armed with Claude any non technical person can make this decision.

You just disproved that by asking the wrong question. Much like you, the CEO won't even know what to ask an AI.

Or maaaaaybe.... an engineer?

Who do you think the will be choosing whether the database uses a pessimistic or optimistic concurrency strategy? The CEO?

This isn't even the right question to ask, I think you've basically proved my point. You are in charge of deciding what the system should do when two users update a record at the same time. It's extremely dependent on what you're trying to do.

> Your example btw is ALREADY a solved problem. AI can answer it and design around it.

What's the one-size-fit-all solution for concurrency management that works for every single domain and application? I'm curious.

> Claude! how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed? Give me all the possible ways ranked from best to worst, also explain to me all these concepts so I can understand as I don’t have a cs degree".

Who's going to make this decision? The CEO?

No it isn't lol. Have you worked on any real systems with customers? Good luck telling your boss at AWS that a poison pill message stopped the payment queue from processing so they lost $100 million in sales but hey, it's an implementation detail, no big deal.

Right, companies won't need software engineers. They'll just need someone who can use tools to produce source code and maintain the generated artifacts, plus make domain-specific technical decisions like "what should the system do when two users update the same record as the same time" or "how should the system behave when a message in the queue cannot be processed".

We really oughta come up with a job title for these people.

AI coding. Which can be interpreted one of two ways:

* The generous way, which is that Github is so overloaded with massive volumes of AI codebases and AI-driven automation that they're hitting a scale they never anticipated; or

* The not-so-generous way, which is that Github itself was one of the first companies to push everyone to AI code as much as possible, which has lead to an eventual breakdown of the stability of the system, as the people responsible for it no longer understand how it actually works, leading to production outages once every few days.

If you've been on HN long enough you recognize that the OP is quite prolific in making absurd claims about AI: infamously predicted that children would be making professional, Hollywood level films by the end of 2025, and is now spending their time building the 5000th barely functional clone of Adobe tools[0]. It's probably a little unfair, but they are bold claims from someone who really does not have the ground to be making bold claims.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958850

Well, kind of, yeah; the dictionary definition of spying requires secrecy and lack of consent.

> to secretly collect and report information about the activities of another country or organization[0]

The only real debate is whether or not having a clause tucked away in a EULA that few people read makes it a secret. If Anthropic had a big flashing red banner that said "FYI we automatically flag and review any conversations about illegal things!!" on the front page nobody would call it spying.

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/spying

This is only true if your definition of "hobby project" is limited to "initial prototype with basic functionality and a generic corporate-looking landing page".

Yeah, a lot of tools that would have made fun weekend projects can now be one-shot by Claude and aren't even worth sharing, because someone who needs that functionality can just use Claude too. But you can accomplish so much more now. Someone just did a hobby project to reverse engineer NVidia drivers and make them work on Windows XP. Dream bigger!

I wager that's mostly due to the Jevons paradox, though; it's so much cheaper and easier to build out systems with cloud than on-prem that you end up building way more systems than you would have without it, resulting in an overall headcount increase.

Yeah. To me it seems very much like the "use dynamic typing for everything" fad. You had a bunch of junior and/or incompetent developers who went around insisting that type declarations are bad, static typing slows down development, you just code so much faster if everything is dynamically typed. And in the context of a new project, they were totally right. It took a few years for the debt to finally catch up, and people realized that these massive, untyped monoliths they had were unmaintainable. Now the two biggest dynamic languages (Python/JavaScript) are effectively typed languages, because nobody uses their untyped variants for serious work.

Dynamic typing still has great uses -- interactive data exploration, putting together quick scripts (though less relevant with AI...), or even just simple prototypes -- but what we tried to do with it at the start, as an industry, was clearly dumb as hell. I suspect we'll look back in 5-10 years and realize that with some of the stuff we're doing with AI, too. It's already happened with things like Gastown.

This UI slop is the same deal. A slightly misaligned dot off the timeline, color choices which don't really make sense given the website as a whole, using LLMism text. Nothing in here is an obviously major problem on its own. But when you add up 50 of these on a website, users get hit with that "this is slop" feeling.

The details matter. In isolation they seem irrelevant, but as a whole it's what elevates something from the AI slop garbage pile to something actually good.

Do we know that? I don't think we do. When a person's computer (or smart TV, or smart fridge, etc...) is compromised and used as part of a botnet, they don't get criminally charged.