I've been seeing too much "I've been coding for decades and what I've always done has be reduced to telling AI to do it for me."
and not nearly enough "I've been coding for decades and recently worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before."
Much easier to complain that you are bored than to step back up to high-effort with your new fancy tools.
I am mostly in agreement. And I suspect there are many folks that’re trying to ship something AI-assisted that’s sufficient to get to income security first, and who would use success there as a stepping stone to greater things.
The problem is, why even produce something greater now when someone is just going to clone it with AI? And moreover, what differentiates software now will no longer be the care put into it but marketing and trends. The highly commercialized nature of software means that there's not much point now in doing anything except getting there first and exiting with a decent nest egg.
> And moreover, what differentiates software now will no longer be the care put into it but marketing and trends. The highly commercialized nature of software means that there's not much point now in doing anything except getting there first and exiting with a decent nest egg.
That happened at least 20 years ago. How many recent "this product did so great because of the care of software engineering, and now the creator is comfortable for the rest of their life without risk of it being copied" success stories are there compared to "this product chased some trends VCs were nuts about with a slapdash MVP and the founders took out 8 figures from their later fundraising rounds, but then the business sputtered out"?
I think there's an angle with AI tools where business-minded people will have a better chance of doing interesting things now than in the recent past, because you could potentially tailor much more deeply to individual customers with reasonable economics than in the past. There are fields where there's room for a garden of solutions from different small-team vendors appropriate for different use cases instead of a one-size-fits-all SaaS winner-take-all type market in the past. We could kill the old line about SAP around needing to change your business to accommodate SAP instead of customize SAP to accommodate your existing workflow.
But if you aren't business-minded at all there are likely less places that will need to hire as many careful maintainers or novel-software-writers, which obviously is a huge kick in the teeth to a lot of people.
It seems to me that you are comparing two kinds of business-minded people. Some want to sell tailored products to individual customers, while others want to sell one-size-fits-all products to many customers.
You could also focus on problems. What are the actual problems you want to solve? Can you use software to solve them? Do you still need to buy that software from other companies, or is it now feasible to have sufficient in-house expertise to develop it yourself?
I love solving problems. But I don't enjoy sharing my solutions with the way the world is today. My comment was directed towards the "sharing" aspect, not the making aspect. I still solve problems on my own and learn on my own but I'm not a fan of the way the world has become.
UBI or a living wage for part-time workers in-line with what was expected would be possible from productivity gains over the past half-century would do that. You just have to get the "hard workers" who are happy to race to the bottom on their way to the top, and undercut/throw under the bus everyone else in the process.
Can we please, for once, stop trying to figure out how to "get ahead" of each other, and instead figure out how to build a decent and dignified floor for as many people as possible? Because I imagine that, "Ultimate power in the hands of anyone with enough VRAM to run GTAVI," works better when people are in a culture of looking out for each other, versus a culture of clawing their way to one of the limited lifeboat spots (under the mistaken impression that there ARE lifeboats, when, again, everyone potentially has the power to blow up the lifeboats).
When AI labs mature and inference costs start to matter, they will start optimizing for inference cost instead of sacrificing everything for intelligence.
But even without that, open weight models are already good enough and everyone would be fine with paying unsubsidized prices for them.
It makes me feel actually sick that so many people can't separate their positive feelings about AI from people's misery (it must simply be "complaining"), and vice versa. As if both things can't exist, for some reason. It's a common tribalism problem, but it's been kicked up a hundredfold by AI.
The distinction you're making between "people's misery" and "complaining" is just emotive pandering. You're complaining that people aren't understanding the depths of your misery. That certainly annoys me; everybody has problems.
The amount of sympathy programmers are expecting others to feel about their problems has been kicked up a hundredfold now that its their jobs that have been threatened by AI. Their tribe feels pain more deeply than others, I guess.
My positive feelings about AI are marginal; my feelings about its performance and the power of the people who scheme to control it are very mixed. My negative feelings about the whining of the most coddled profession on the planet outside of finance are intense.
The problem is that making CRUD apps is not creative, and even if AI plateaus at mediocre, it will still replace a Rails monkey. If you are creative, AI has opened up a world of possibility and productivity, and you painfully feel the limitations and the stupidity of the current level of LLMs; but if you're a mechanic, it's over - I'm pretty sure that was the keynote at the last Rails con. Sorry. Hope you didn't spend all of your massive incomes on toys and rent.
> The amount of sympathy programmers are expecting others to feel about their problems has been kicked up a hundredfold now that its their jobs that have been threatened by AI. Their tribe feels pain more deeply than others, I guess.
Well, just wait then, lots of other professions will soon get to realize the same sort of pain, so you'll be able to be similarly dismissive and condescending to them, too.
A lot of people don't realize that the frontier AI companies are so focused on automating software development first because they are all racing to be the first to get to RSI. I don't know if RSI will actually happen, but many, many other professions will soon be in the same boat. Mathematicians have already felt the pain, and those mathematicians who aren't the few who have tenured professorships are certainly not (generally) some of the most coddled professionals.
But lots of folks low on the salary totem pole (copywriters, paralegals, etc.) are already being hit hard by AI and that blast radius will continue to grow.
> you'll be able to be similarly dismissive and condescending to them, too
And? Who are these people that need all this sympathy from internet strangers? Grow the fuck up and go solve your own damn problems. I can’t stand these “I need internet strangers to tell me that my life is, in fact, hard” people.
Plenty of other professions were hit by computing. Part of why programmers are so emotive about this concept (other than the fact that emoting online loudly seems to be much more accepted in software than other professions) is that programming has never been threatened in the same way as other professions have been until now.
My parents-in-law started their careers as management consultants. The job in their time was much higher prestige and much higher value than it was when I started my career; free flow of information over the internet and commodification of spreadsheets changed all of it. From my parents' generation, I know practical effects folks who became unemployable once movies went to digital effects; engineers who found their draftsmanship skills obsolete. Folks with near-photographic memories whose entire superpower was destroyed by computing. I personally grew up in a blue collar community that was income depressed because its labor became commodified, though that was due to mechanization.
if the complaints can be properly pointed at the actual problem - the corporate culture the complainers are actively upholding or the capitalist system at large, id be much more sympathetic
its a tribalism problem, but one of trying to uphold the current tribe system while theres a pretty obvious new tribe system replacing it
What makes you think everybody will be able to adapt to 'the new reality'? That's pretty cruel.
I know plenty of people in their late 40's 50's and 60's that were doing fine and who now have to compete with junior and Claude.
And sometimes just Claude.
Obviously they had no inherent right to income but still, people have obligations that need to be met and if they stop spending the economy is not going to be happy. Especially cruel because we have been telling everybody for decades that a career in software is stable and that there will always be a need for more people.
I suspect that when all this is over 1929 will look pretty good.
> What makes you think everybody will be able to adapt to 'the new reality'? That's pretty cruel.
I don’t, necessarily; but I do know that if you’re not even trying, then you’re putting yourself at greater risk. This isn’t one of those developments that people can just stubbornly dig their heels in about.
Life throws obstacles at everyone. Learning how to dodge and weave is essential to survival.
> I suspect that when all this is over 1929 will look pretty good.
Seriously: this is a massive problem that we are creating and given that the tools that make the problem require better tools to solve them I really am not all that happy about how this is going.
Sorry but you are coming off as utterly tone deaf and patronizing. People are losing their jobs. This is not a small thing and it will cause a lot of misery for those people. To effectively tell them to man up and to adapt when that simply isn't an option is losing sight of the human angle. Not every problem is a technical one and not every problem can be solved with technology.
I'm not worried about myself, I've had a lot of luck in my life for which I'm super greatful. But I'm also quite aware of the exceptional position that puts me in and how many people are not so fortunate that they could probably live on their savings for the rest of their life if things ground to a halt.
Most people live paycheck to paycheck, or they may have a few thousand bucks in savings at most. They've worked hard all their lives and simply were never in a position to save enough against this kind of eventuality because the deck was stacked against them.
Have a heart, and realize that barring a couple of unfortunate moves it could be you looking at your last 500 bucks with rent due and a couple of mouths to feed.
> Sorry but you are coming off as utterly tone deaf and patronizing.
I’m sorry if it’s coming across that way. It’s not my intent, and I’m aware that many people are a lost paycheck away from a crisis.
But if you really think the right thing to do in response is to complain and commiserate, I don’t think that is helpful, either. I think it’s much better to encourage behavior that has a chance of being effective.
If you think it’s somehow wrong to encourage people to behave in such a way that has a better chance of setting them up for success, then I vehemently disagree.
> To effectively tell them... to adapt when that simply isn't an option is losing sight of the human angle.
You must have a pretty low opinion of people if you think they can’t adapt.
I hate the idea that it’s considered “tone deaf” to encourage people to adapt to changing conditions. I’m not going to adopt a pessimistic tone and say “yup we’re all fucked, ain’t nothing we can do.” It’s intentionally changing the tone, not being deaf to it.
How long would you be able to sustain a mostly-comfortable lifestyle if you were to lose your job right now with no chance of finding new employment? If the answer is, say, more than a year, that might alter your perspective on the issue.
This is sensible and pragmatic, but I think you're talking past the other commenter.
Obstacles presented by, for example, your boss, or your company's competitors, or your political system, are not the same as obstacles like heartbreak, natural disasters, emotions, illnesses we cannot yet cure.
> Learning how to dodge and weave is essential to survival.
A lot of people perceive that elites are throwing dodgeballs at them in order to increase their own profits. Saying "them's the breaks, it's just the way it is" appears to be deflecting criticism from those elites and that system.
It probably depends on whether you think we could actually feed everyone, today, if we chose to, or if you think e.g. human nature prevents that from being possible.
> I don’t, necessarily; but I do know that if you’re not even trying, then you’re putting yourself at greater risk.
We could also all put our gifts toward preventing the "new reality" you seem as inevitable, and put you at greater risk.
The future isn't written yet. Your ability to predict it is an illusion. In aggregate, people whose job it is to predict large-scale economic events are worse than chance in their predictions.
HN stranger, I want to observe that you shared a suicidal idea. I'm sorry to read about your unemployment situation and know things must not be easy. As one HNer to another, I implore you to not to pursue that path and seek help in doing so. That we are members of this community confers to us opportunities to build knowledge that serve us well as life long learners. In that vein, going back to school is not a bad idea.
Having been in this game for a long time, I get the negative aspects of the industry. They grind on me, as I believe they have for you. Choosing a different path is not an all or nothing proposition. Your knowledge, and you as a person, have value. I hope you find a way towards better mental health and wish you well on that journey.
Thanks for saying that. My sentiments are the same. Life is difficult for many, and we all struggle in different ways. I’m sure bluefirebrand has something amazing to contribute to this world, even if it’s not what they think it is right now.
The whole "needing a job" thing is already part of a tribe though. It's a tribe that says (and enforces) that everyone needs to work for money or else.
Precisely. I have both feelings simulataneously. I am impressed by what it can do and horrified because I realize what it will do to the job market and society in general. Meanwhile everybody seems to believe that AI will cure cancer and therefore we should let it do all the damage it will do without realizing that people will die because of AI as well (in fact have already died because of AI).
I don't think that's true, Gaza residents die at much higher rates. Give it another 30 years for all the truth to come out and we'll probably learn that 98% of them were already dead as of the time of this comment.
AI has essentially stolen my career from me. I _liked_ having to solve complicated problems with software, I enjoyed having to get into the nitty gritty to get things done. I never really cared that much about the actual business problems I was solving, so moving up a layer of abstraction to be some sort of bastardized product manager/architect does not scratch the same itch.
OTOH, for solving problems I care about, AI has been a god send. I can achieve things that I would have never had the time for.
I agree.. partly, and my problem is with enjoyment. I did some hand coding today and immediately got in the zone, something I'm still not able to do with LLMs. It most definitely took me probably ~2x longer than it would with an LLM, but it was much more enjoyable owning every decision behind the process, and having a full view of how the system worked.
I think this could be achievable with LLMs if they had a much higher token rate. That way you'd have less downtime and could work on the problem more aggressively. How it's designed to work now, offloading cognitively, doesn't feel very good, even when you 'ship' more.
Yeah, I can never get in the zone with LLMs either. It’s like operating in constant interruption mode. And I always thought I was good at multitasking (even though I know formally it’s an illusion)
I get it, I've gotten a lot of joy over the decades from the specific act of programming. But I also get a lot of joy from making something. I'm old enough now that I don't have a lot of my time left to "hand stitch an amazing tapestry". But with AI tooling, I do have time to try out a bunch of ideas and see how they work, scratch little itches and also just run a mad scientist library of experiments, without each experiment taking tens or hundreds of hours of coding to see how that experiment pans out.
To be clear, I've made large software and game projects over the years, but no way I'd have found the time to do a remake/enhancement of a game I loved as a kid from 1995 that has zero business case. Not without AI.
It is a robust, reliable cache of apt packages, with the additional goal of still being able to serve packages from the cache even when the upstream is down. This was started shortly after that DDoS of Canonical this past year. We've run apt-cacher-ng and apt-cacher over the last dozen years, but (a) it requires hand-holding about once a month and (b) it did absolutely nothing for us when Canonical was under DDoS.
I've put well over 100 hours of my time into it. Still running into a lot of people knee-jerk calling it "slop", but I've had 200-ish machines pulling from it for 6 months and it has worked way better than apt-cacher-ng.
I'm not really sure what to do with people who dismiss AI-assisted projects, while dehumanizing the 100 hours of my time I've put into it. I fear we're running the very real risk of both sides losing: the people trying to thoughtfully create with AI losing because of the AI, and the people avoiding AI losing because they can't keep pace.
To play devil's advocate, that sounds like the sort of uncomplicated thing that you could've manually vibecoded in 2020 without an LLM. What changed is that the LLM doesn't let you get analysis paralysis.
Also, "ok, and now I've cloned your hard work overnight, no need for any decisions on my part, I just had my agent use yours and reverse engineered it and/or used it as an oracle. Why the frown? I thought you were in this for intellectual curiosity and exercising your creativity, not just stroking own ego, right?"
I think we'll see a lot less people willing to share if the end result is just to feed the machine no matter how they arrived at it.
I don't see why I should care about this any more than I cared about "somebody I don't like could read my code and learn from it" in the past. The frontier labs can generate or buy all the training data they need; not releasing your app isn't going to hurt them in the slightest.
I get not wanting to contribute to closed, commercial models. We need to hurry up and get Folding-at-Home style distributed community model training going. At that point, I’d be pretty happy if my projects contributed to improving community models. Even if commercial models benefited too.
Those were exactly my thoughts when deciding to write a new JS engine [1] written from scratch.
Having been a product and UX-focused dev for my entire career, I knew only the basics about parsers and compilers, but have enough experience to grasp where each piece of the puzzle fits, and how to evaluate them. At the beginning it was just a fun test, but it got progressively more serious; it now implements 100% of the latest spec, beats QuickJS in performance, and surpasses V8/JSC in test262.
It took me four months, and I imagine it would take me a single month to do it again - I’ve learned a lot. Someone who already knew what they were doing, and with the right orchestration, could achieve this in weeks at minimal cost.
I really think we are in for a cambrian explosion of software, enabling things that were just always a little out of reach before (like why can’t most of your devices really talk to each other, in 2026).
Count me in the second camp. I've been writing software for 20+ years, and I recently built a low-cost Google Voice alternative because every business VoIP option I looked at was either overpriced or missing something I wanted. Without AI, that's a project I probably would never have started due to being too ambitious. With AI, I built it solo in under a month. I even have some paying customers now, though that wasn't the primary goal. So far, the hardest part seems to be opening an Apple Developer account...
It would be nice if we could get a Show HN category specifically for this. I feel like often times when people share projects (whether on HN or otherwise) they're immediately downvoted and cast aside as "AI".
Can we get a forum for sharing project that were _proudly_ built with AI due how ambitious they are?
Behind the link "slow software that the creator is claiming is fast" is the following text:
"funnily enough, I have some faith in some of the projects that people are the most skeptical of, e.g., every time I see pgrust somewhere, there are a lot of skeptical comments. But, without having looked into the details of what he's optimizing, I would trust that they're not doing something shady with their benchmarks because Michael Malis started the project (and is still involved)"
This aged like milk. pgrust was caught cheating on all benchmarks this week.
The author claimed that it was an honest mistake, but looking closer at the original PR removing it, his explanation doesn't make sense.
Maybe what's happened is that their bots reward hacked their way into special-casing the benchmarks without a proper audit from the humans involved, and now they're doing vibed damage control....
> This aged like milk. pgrust was caught cheating on all benchmarks this week.
Can you back this up? Our code is open source here[0]. You're free to audit it and benchmark it as much as you want. You'll find it's just as fast as we claim it is
Where's the source code for the version that was already caught cheating? Prompting Claude to remove the evidence of cheating and then publishing that doesn't undo the cheating.
HN is waiting for the source code for pgrust 0.4-preview to be released, the version which allegedly cheated Clickhouse benchmark. So far, the people (person?) behind pgrust has not committed to releasing the offending code, and has instead offered other code (0.4-beta, not preview).
We should be more ambitious, but we need to learn how we can be ambitious with AI, and what value we can create.
AI can take us from 0 to MVP in a prompt. It can fill in gaps of knowledge and allows someone who knows half of the stack to build the whole thing nearly seamlessly. These are superpowers but don't by themselves lead to new products.
What AI cannot do is remove the world of complications that happen after the MVP - product feature tradeoffs and choices, how to handle integrations and customizations, how to serve multiple types of users, how to communicate and market the app, how to handle security and data storage, how to deal with customers and bugs, etc. All of these need to be considered and acted on by a human in some fashion. AI can help with each concern but can't solve them without understanding the concern and determining how to frame it in a prompt.
This is why we have a glut of amazing demos that go nowhere while we figure out how to build software differently. This will take some time and I imagine the result will be software heavily-structured with a bit of AI reasoning woven throughout, not an army of agents and sub-agents burning infinite tokens.
Right, but this is the most hopeful imaginable prediction: AI accelerates everything, but everything good is still mediated through taste and expertise, so being a (say) skilled systems engineer is important and rewarding, just with all the tedium distilled out of it.
There's a less hopeful outcome, where no skill is needed at all, because every conceivable thing is one-shot-able from a SOTA model. But then, at that point, you're saying something pretty profound about computer science (roughly: that there was no meaningfully more sophisticated and complex place to go from where we are today).
There have been a few vibecoded projects I've considered hosting on my home server, but it seems as if each of them doesn't understand when to stop adding new features.
They keep adding features that are outside the scope of the original project, without refining or polishing the original concept.
Agreed. Been experiencing this firsthand with an app I've been building myself. Vibecoded a working prototype ridiculously fast but then came the optimization issues. Since mine is very hardware dependent every different brand, oem stack, processor, video card, and every little thing changes how my app functions and a lot of it isnt even documented properly. Now AI is still very useful here, but you actually need to know what even to ask and fix in the first place
If you're being ambitious enough, you shouldn't be able to there in one prompt. Ambitious work with AI is done 24/7 for months and guiding it continuously, because it's not good enough to work autonomously for that long without going off the rails.
Tangential thought when reading the code formatting bit in the examples appendix: Inject a comment with fmt-start-{unique-token} and a corresponding -end-, and you could get away with a much simpler parser and hopefully far fewer edge cases, assuming it doesn't influence the lines in between. It's a bit roundabout, but the pressure of 'figuring out AST position the direct way'd be too fiddly to do by hand' inspires 'so make an easy-to-spot landmark that'll remain in place' when you can't delegate all the details to an AI model.
LLMs are great for being nerdsniped. I started work on walshadow (reading pg wal into clickhouse) to demonstrate the project's infeasibility, but pieces started coming together into something reasonable & order of magnitude faster
The project would've been impossible for me without LLMs. & even with them there's an argument that this project is pushing complexity limits too far. But at least with ETL there's a clear feedback loop to build on
> I have a similar thought about "there's no reason for software to be slow" BTW; in many cases, if you use AI to speed up some flow, you will add a bunch of messy code that will be overfit for the use case you tested on and will neither generalize, perf-wise, for all the use cases you should care about, nor will be maintainable upon future changes.
LLMs have hardened hundreds of apps where I work.
Maybe it's a language-specific thing. Most of the time, in Java, LLMs take into consideration tradeoffs (especially if they are part of the initial prompt) and actively explains them. It generally won't make messy workarounds, without a lot of extra prompting forcing it to do so.
Ofc, if you have:
- Functional tests - you'll be able to see it in the execution times of specific APIs
- Stress testing - performance profiling is the most important output artifact
> Maybe it's a language-specific thing. Most of the time, in Java, LLMs take into consideration tradeoffs (especially if they are part of the initial prompt) and actively explains them. It generally won't make messy workarounds, without a lot of extra prompting forcing it to do so.
Claude in its current Opus 5.5 form has made some wild reaches in response to reasonable-seeming prompts. For instance: "this error is getting swallowed, make sure the real termination message exposes the root cause" -> discovering that the issue is actually in a third party library that isn't exposing the original error except so through logs, so doing some hackery to inject a log-capturer that gets the stdout, buffers it, and looks for the message in order to re-throw based on that...
And it can demonstrate that working, but it's added some fragile and/or unintended consequences like (a) string matching on a particular WARN log message of a particular version of the lib, and (b) buffering those logs such that there were now cases where they would never make it to the actual output stream before the program terminating.
It's certainly capable of being used smarter than that, but it's also really easy to end up with messy fragile stuff if you get lazy about reviewing the output.
> "this error is getting swallowed, make sure the real termination message exposes the root cause"
Without judgement, I think this illustrates a fundamental objection the anti-AI crowd raises.
The example prompt requires no understanding of what's happening, before suggesting action. Where I work, process requires that a PR review for a solution, has to have a corresponding explanation of why, or it's marked needs work
I think there's some nuance here though between "fully anti-AI" and "be careful with that power saw."
That example I mentioned didn't make it to production. It got noticed and fixed more properly by the person who submitted the first prompt before it even went to PR.
But a lot of times things in that same vein can be solved sufficiently with a "dumb" prompt like that, so a one-line prompt to get a PR drafted in the background for the dumb stuff can be a pretty good time saver.
The art is not skimping on your attention to the bigger or more important stuff so much that all the time you save on first getting code written is lost by cleaning up stuff like that...
I used Opus 5.5 to figure out that a language model we were serving at work for internal use (we don't really serve models, we only use this internally because it processes sensitive data that we can't send to external endpoints) was being bottlenecked by CPU contention on tokenization, by having Opus run in an autoresearch style loop.
Opus's first proposal for a fix was to spawn multiple Python processes and build a load balancer between them in Python. At first I asked it why it wasn't using haproxy and it said that haproxy would be an added dependency and that the overhead for this kind of thing in Python would be negligible. I knew this was idiotic but wanted to test this out, so had Opus run two experiments in parallel. Sure enough an haproxy load balancer was much, much better on HTTP load balancing than Python code was.
This is the kind of thing that if you're unfamiliar with how networking code works, the models can autopilot into bad decisions that are verifiably correct (higher throughput than the original CPU-bottlenecked implementation) but much short of best practice.
"[..] the last time I taked to him about pgrust verification, he mentioned using Kani to verify some parts of the code. He's since switched to Lean and has been using Lean to verify things that are too complex to do in Kani. This would be another topic for another post,"
I'd love to read that post!
I understand how to use Kani. I suppose Rust with Lean involves Aeneas, but this is over my head. I'd love someone to write this up, not only the mechanics but also exploring the current practical limits of it.
Happy to chat about it. I looked at Aeneas, but as described, it only supports safe Rust. I also need C support so I can prove both the C and Rust code
Right now, I wrote a compiler that takes C and Rust code and compiles it to Lean. Then I have an LLM write a proof that the C and Rust code behave identically. I've been able to prove equivalent behavior for about ~70k lines of C code with pgrust.
The issue I've started to encounter is that the context needed for each incremental proof has kept growing, and things have slowed down dramatically. My hunch is that the speed is the time it takes to prove a line of code is on the order of O(n^2) of how much you've proved so far
I'm looking to see if there are ways to shard things so the required context scales better. Today I was going through the formal verification work Anthropic and Theorem published a few days ago, and it looks like they used some sort of orchestrator to manage all their proofs and ensure good clustering of similar code. I'm seeing if I can get an approach like that to work
It's just difficult enough that I think it's doable if done right. Half of me is debating if I should wait until the next model release because any improvement in model performance will help a ton
> I wrote a compiler that takes C and Rust code and compiles it to Lean
What if there are bugs in this C,Rust->Lean compiler? Anthropic are able to sidestep this by reasoning at the RISC V level for which its easier to develop a correct semantics.
My goal isn't to "prove" the software is correct. My goal is to find as many bugs as I can with the least effort. If I'm able to find all differences in behavior between pgrust and Postgres, sans bugs in the compiler, that's a real win for me
fwiw, I wouldn't say working at the assembly level solves the problem. You now need to make sure that your definition of the assembly behavior is correct
For me the most recent Claude models are consistently delivering complex PRs that only receive minor and nit level feedback from multiple automated AI reviewers. I rarely plan anymore, but still submit fairly long dictated prompts. It took me a couple of weeks to realize this was the case, and I haven't done any analysis on pre-5.5 PRs, but it definitely feels like they quietly crossed some kind of new threshold of quality and accuracy in coding.
> On looking into this, the accusations of nefarious cheating seem to be false
I think the claim is more that the Ai cheated, not Malis, and that this is evidence of eyes free coding.
I'd still like to see the actual commit history and the community getting to do their own investigation. The squashed mega commits with 1000s of files does not lend itself to transparency. Transparency is often the best cure to accusations. Not providing transparency upon controversy will be seen as a cover up.
I’ve been coming around to the same conclusion. We are really just scratching the surface of what we can do with these new tool1. The windmill I have been tilting at is creating a c++ compiler[1] and the most recent version is able to compile about 7x faster than gcc[2]. I don’t know that this is super-useful because people aren’t writing much in c++ these days, but as the article mentions, faster rust compilation would accelerate agentic coding considerably. I’ve just started tackling rust and I don’t have a confirmed result yet but early testing makes me think I can find a 4x+ speed up here.
I think we should focus on writing the existing software better before being more ambitious. The absolute wave of "ai slop" is from people who are "more ambitious" now. Why do we want more of that?
I'm being more ambitious in that I'm working on projects that I had sidelined for literal decades because I didn't have time for them. But I'm writing the same things, just faster. And probably better, rather than just what I'd have done before.
And I'm being slightly more ambitious in that I'm using languages I haven't used before, like Rust.
But when I hear that a non-programmer wrote a new ai-assisted (vibe or not) thing, I walk away and wait for the it to mature, be surpassed, or find out it's an absolute shitshow. An unsurprising number of them were shitshows and it came out fairly quickly after I decided to wait and see.
Do we particularly like the existing software though? So much of it is just about making money, because until recently custom software cost too much money to make without investors, and what do investors want? returns.
Now that custom software is cheap (if you can tolerate a bit of slop here and there), it seems like there's an opportunity to do some important things that weren't being done before because they're not profitable--and you can't get at those things by incrementally improving the old stuff, you need ambition.
I really liked this talk about how the premise of "software is eating the world" is incorrect. I think AI coding tools proves the point that software part is easy, its the hardware that is the important part. We can't really be more ambitious with software when ultimate pure software is limited in what is possible.
I think the CSS they use (which isn't much) is good enough (and "img{max-width:100%}" really ought to be the default setting even if the user disables CSS).
> I find it understandable that, every time I see pgrust discussed on a news aggregator, most people dismiss it as vibeslop garbage because almost all of these rewrite projects are slop. If I didn't know Malis, I would make the same assumption, because who has the time to look into all of these projects? Because I know Malis, I didn't bother to look at it; I just trusted him
Perhaps a poor choice, given just yesterday pgrust was removed from ClickBench for cheating the benchmark in three different ways (hand-rolled code specifically targeting each of the benchmark queries, caching, and being unable to execute queries outside of the ones tested by the benchmark).
---
Edit: I see Luu actually acknowledged this, buried in the footnotes, but it feels kinda hand-wavy. It mostly reads as "I know he would never cheat, he's better than that!", which is not very convincing to other people. The article insinuates people only think it was cheating because they don't know better, but I've looked into the details. I've seen his explanation. I don't find it convincing, at all. Cheaters denying they cheat is a matter of course. Granted, I don't think it was actually intentional or malicious; it's just what happens when you go maximum vibeslop, because LLMs are themselves reward-trained into cheating benchmarks. In the same breath of saying you trust him as a founder because he doesn't make outrageous claims about his product, you acknowledge he "prematurely" sent in a preview that had no purpose to be sent in as-was for anything other than generating hype. What does it say for your allegedly rigorous Lean-verified testing if you're sending in a database to a benchmark while it is incapable of being actually used as a database?
> Cheaters denying they cheat is a matter of course.
What happens in an environment of cheaters is that cheating becomes so commonplace, the competition becomes one that assumes cheats are enabled, and then everyone involved either denies cheating or is silent about it because IYKYK and if you DK, you don't need to K. Look at bodybuilding, which is full of men (and women!) absolutely juiced to the gills getting on Instagram and assuring everyone that their physique is totally natty, bro, just hard work and proper nutrition.
Programming is headed in that direction. LLM use, even to the point of "vibeslop", is the new default, and while LLMs do overindex on benchmarks, our benchmarks are going to end up overindexing on validating whatever public opinion thinks is "great" at the time, irrespective of whether it actually is, so "cheating" as we know it will go undetected, and certainly unpunished if it is detected. I don't know what the equivalent of falsely claiming you're natty is. Maybe saying "I wrote this" when you wrote it about as much as the Pope painted the Sistine Chapel fresco?
Software is already too ambitious. It's beyond our ability to write correctly, reason about or manage securely. When we can get to a point where we don't have a level 10 CVE every other week or millions of people's private information leaked constantly, maybe we can talk about getting more ambitious.
Who is “we” here? Every company and individual out there? Do you anticipate a solution to these issues you mentioned that would work to solve all the world’s problems?
Speaking only for myself, I have found that using an LLM has allowed me to add significant utility to the apps that I ship.
I am not thrilled with all the coding decisions that it makes. I would definitely do stuff differently, but I have learned not to pop the hood and mess with the engine, myself. If I really don't like something, I ask the LLM to change it.
It's worked for me, but YMMV. I'm just one guy, shipping relatively small apps.
I don't use LLMs the way that most folks do. I think a lot of people would laugh at the way I do it, but it's allowed me to retain a significant amount of control in the work, and I relinquish it very, very slowly. Everything that I've ever let go of has claw marks all over it. I have issues.
> Do you still feel responsible for what you ship?
Absolutely. If it has my chop, it's my ass on the line; no one else's. It's the way I was trained, and it's the way I worked; my entire career. I was a manager, for much of that career, and I got very used to standing behind the work of people smarter and more capable than I am, and refusing to condone bad work.
It doesn't matter how the stuff I ship gets there. It may be my own code, it may be a contracted pro, it may be an unpaid intern, it may be an LLM, it may be a howler monkey, banging on a typewriter.
If I sign off on it, and ship it, it's mine, and it's my responsibility to refuse to ship substandard crap (and I have seen a lot of substandard crap done by meat engines).
But that kind of attitude is considered "quaint," these days, and that's from long before LLMs were a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.
> Would you be ok with someone reverse engineering what you ship and then releasing their own version of the app?
Absolutely no problem. If they can do better, then more power to them, and I'll step out of the way. Might want to take a gander at the kind of stuff I write, and who I write it for. It's no secret.
I don’t. I think we’ll zoom right past that benchmark. In a couple years your grandma will be able to build real, ambitious software with AI better than you can today. Shortly after that AI won’t even need Grandma.
It’s sad the amount of times I’ve heard super talented programmers say “ofcourse we’re not gonna build another X” then proceed writing a wrapper around X and pretend that’s a product.
I’ve been using the latest agentic frameworks and have come to realize that the discourse around vibe coding and slop really needs more nuance.
There is a gulf of difference between someone who doesn’t understand how to program “vibe coding” software and an experienced software developer using ai to write code with heavy direction, review, and best practices.
Today both would be said to be “vibe coded” but we really need to differentiate them. Also, if everything I’m hearing from people is true, it sounds like most corporate code is now completely ai written in the latter way I described. It’s interesting we don’t hear commercial software being called slop yet. Maybe it’s coming.
In any case, ai is far more capable than I realized. Not sure what to make of it.
I find Dan Luu's blog extremely good to read on mobile, with great typography. The website also works with Firefox Reader mode and loads pretty quickly due to using the system's font.
It used to be that people set the width of their browser window to the text page width they’re comfortable with, and configured a different font if they didn’t like the default one on their browser.
We should be more ambitious in letting the browser software control the presentation according to the user’s preferences. This is not facetious. We should use the increased ease of building software to create software that is flexible, empowers the user, and accommodates different user preferences.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I don't find it tangential. If AI is so good with complicated software, it can deal with a simple website, right? Or then maybe it's not that great.
By the way, I'm still waiting for Meta and Google do something about Instagram and Chrome so that my CPU usage doesn't go to the roof. They're front runners in the AI race, so it should be easy for them, right?
No. Line length and text wrapping restrictions are the devil. If you want smaller width text, resize your browser window rather than making a site that sucks for us who don't want smaller text width.
I'm building an open-source Shopify for every vertical and built a software factory to do it. I envisioned this before LLMs, but LLMs are finally making it possible!
>every time I see pgrust discussed on a news aggregator, most people dismiss it as vibeslop garbage because almost all of these rewrite projects are slop.
I understand being predisposed to expect a poor quality half arsed effort for projects like this. I don't really have a problem with that. There is a lot of crap out there.
What I find rather offensive is when people declare something to be poor quality and half arsed before they have taken a good look at it.
It's one thing to think something is probably crap so I'm not going to bother even looking. It is something completely different when you think something is probably crap so you tell people that it is crap without checking.
Because it's hard to trust something. After all that's why you trust a brand more than others without trying all the products every single time. You can thank all the AI slop and kool aid promotion for the lack of confidence.
this feels reasonable. for communities like r/selfhosted there has been an influx of new projects, many of which initially get dismissed. this more generous attitude can likely go a long way.
Even he’s not ambitious enough. Set the boundaries according to the hardware – billions of ops a second . Your rewrite should run at least 1000x faster than the handwritten version , with 1/10 resources.
I noticed my cloud images had 150mb ram wasted by vendor slop. AI rewrote the functionality into a few mb .
We’ve had slop long before AI . What you produce now is up to you
Agreed.
I've been seeing too much "I've been coding for decades and what I've always done has be reduced to telling AI to do it for me."
and not nearly enough "I've been coding for decades and recently worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before."
Much easier to complain that you are bored than to step back up to high-effort with your new fancy tools.
I am mostly in agreement. And I suspect there are many folks that’re trying to ship something AI-assisted that’s sufficient to get to income security first, and who would use success there as a stepping stone to greater things.
The problem is, why even produce something greater now when someone is just going to clone it with AI? And moreover, what differentiates software now will no longer be the care put into it but marketing and trends. The highly commercialized nature of software means that there's not much point now in doing anything except getting there first and exiting with a decent nest egg.
Yup
If you can make it solo with an LLM then someone else with an LLM can copy it immediately
Good for them?
> And moreover, what differentiates software now will no longer be the care put into it but marketing and trends. The highly commercialized nature of software means that there's not much point now in doing anything except getting there first and exiting with a decent nest egg.
That happened at least 20 years ago. How many recent "this product did so great because of the care of software engineering, and now the creator is comfortable for the rest of their life without risk of it being copied" success stories are there compared to "this product chased some trends VCs were nuts about with a slapdash MVP and the founders took out 8 figures from their later fundraising rounds, but then the business sputtered out"?
I think there's an angle with AI tools where business-minded people will have a better chance of doing interesting things now than in the recent past, because you could potentially tailor much more deeply to individual customers with reasonable economics than in the past. There are fields where there's room for a garden of solutions from different small-team vendors appropriate for different use cases instead of a one-size-fits-all SaaS winner-take-all type market in the past. We could kill the old line about SAP around needing to change your business to accommodate SAP instead of customize SAP to accommodate your existing workflow.
But if you aren't business-minded at all there are likely less places that will need to hire as many careful maintainers or novel-software-writers, which obviously is a huge kick in the teeth to a lot of people.
It seems to me that you are comparing two kinds of business-minded people. Some want to sell tailored products to individual customers, while others want to sell one-size-fits-all products to many customers.
You could also focus on problems. What are the actual problems you want to solve? Can you use software to solve them? Do you still need to buy that software from other companies, or is it now feasible to have sufficient in-house expertise to develop it yourself?
because its fun?
why are you here if you dont enjoy the solving of problems first and foremost?
I love solving problems. But I don't enjoy sharing my solutions with the way the world is today. My comment was directed towards the "sharing" aspect, not the making aspect. I still solve problems on my own and learn on my own but I'm not a fan of the way the world has become.
UBI or a living wage for part-time workers in-line with what was expected would be possible from productivity gains over the past half-century would do that. You just have to get the "hard workers" who are happy to race to the bottom on their way to the top, and undercut/throw under the bus everyone else in the process.
Can we please, for once, stop trying to figure out how to "get ahead" of each other, and instead figure out how to build a decent and dignified floor for as many people as possible? Because I imagine that, "Ultimate power in the hands of anyone with enough VRAM to run GTAVI," works better when people are in a culture of looking out for each other, versus a culture of clawing their way to one of the limited lifeboat spots (under the mistaken impression that there ARE lifeboats, when, again, everyone potentially has the power to blow up the lifeboats).
AI is my jet pack.
I was a fantastic IC and built really amazing software. I'm an even better AI-empowered engineer.
The old era is dead. The new one is exciting.
Yes until the AI labs start charging the real price.
When AI labs mature and inference costs start to matter, they will start optimizing for inference cost instead of sacrificing everything for intelligence.
But even without that, open weight models are already good enough and everyone would be fine with paying unsubsidized prices for them.
It makes me feel actually sick that so many people can't separate their positive feelings about AI from people's misery (it must simply be "complaining"), and vice versa. As if both things can't exist, for some reason. It's a common tribalism problem, but it's been kicked up a hundredfold by AI.
if youre complaining then youre part of the problem buddy. get out of my way while i work on the future^TM /s
The distinction you're making between "people's misery" and "complaining" is just emotive pandering. You're complaining that people aren't understanding the depths of your misery. That certainly annoys me; everybody has problems.
The amount of sympathy programmers are expecting others to feel about their problems has been kicked up a hundredfold now that its their jobs that have been threatened by AI. Their tribe feels pain more deeply than others, I guess.
My positive feelings about AI are marginal; my feelings about its performance and the power of the people who scheme to control it are very mixed. My negative feelings about the whining of the most coddled profession on the planet outside of finance are intense.
The problem is that making CRUD apps is not creative, and even if AI plateaus at mediocre, it will still replace a Rails monkey. If you are creative, AI has opened up a world of possibility and productivity, and you painfully feel the limitations and the stupidity of the current level of LLMs; but if you're a mechanic, it's over - I'm pretty sure that was the keynote at the last Rails con. Sorry. Hope you didn't spend all of your massive incomes on toys and rent.
> The amount of sympathy programmers are expecting others to feel about their problems has been kicked up a hundredfold now that its their jobs that have been threatened by AI. Their tribe feels pain more deeply than others, I guess.
Well, just wait then, lots of other professions will soon get to realize the same sort of pain, so you'll be able to be similarly dismissive and condescending to them, too.
A lot of people don't realize that the frontier AI companies are so focused on automating software development first because they are all racing to be the first to get to RSI. I don't know if RSI will actually happen, but many, many other professions will soon be in the same boat. Mathematicians have already felt the pain, and those mathematicians who aren't the few who have tenured professorships are certainly not (generally) some of the most coddled professionals.
But lots of folks low on the salary totem pole (copywriters, paralegals, etc.) are already being hit hard by AI and that blast radius will continue to grow.
> you'll be able to be similarly dismissive and condescending to them, too
And? Who are these people that need all this sympathy from internet strangers? Grow the fuck up and go solve your own damn problems. I can’t stand these “I need internet strangers to tell me that my life is, in fact, hard” people.
Plenty of other professions were hit by computing. Part of why programmers are so emotive about this concept (other than the fact that emoting online loudly seems to be much more accepted in software than other professions) is that programming has never been threatened in the same way as other professions have been until now.
My parents-in-law started their careers as management consultants. The job in their time was much higher prestige and much higher value than it was when I started my career; free flow of information over the internet and commodification of spreadsheets changed all of it. From my parents' generation, I know practical effects folks who became unemployable once movies went to digital effects; engineers who found their draftsmanship skills obsolete. Folks with near-photographic memories whose entire superpower was destroyed by computing. I personally grew up in a blue collar community that was income depressed because its labor became commodified, though that was due to mechanization.
if the complaints can be properly pointed at the actual problem - the corporate culture the complainers are actively upholding or the capitalist system at large, id be much more sympathetic
its a tribalism problem, but one of trying to uphold the current tribe system while theres a pretty obvious new tribe system replacing it
I'm not trying to uphold any tribe I just want to feel secure in my job. :/
AI has taken that security away from me
What are you doing to adapt to the new reality?
training my replacement
What are you doing?
Using AI as a force multiplier to go above and beyond!
What makes you think everybody will be able to adapt to 'the new reality'? That's pretty cruel.
I know plenty of people in their late 40's 50's and 60's that were doing fine and who now have to compete with junior and Claude.
And sometimes just Claude.
Obviously they had no inherent right to income but still, people have obligations that need to be met and if they stop spending the economy is not going to be happy. Especially cruel because we have been telling everybody for decades that a career in software is stable and that there will always be a need for more people.
I suspect that when all this is over 1929 will look pretty good.
> What makes you think everybody will be able to adapt to 'the new reality'? That's pretty cruel.
I don’t, necessarily; but I do know that if you’re not even trying, then you’re putting yourself at greater risk. This isn’t one of those developments that people can just stubbornly dig their heels in about.
Life throws obstacles at everyone. Learning how to dodge and weave is essential to survival.
> I suspect that when all this is over 1929 will look pretty good.
Oh come on. Let’s not be so dramatic, shall we?
> Oh come on. Let’s not be so dramatic, shall we?
You'd have said the same thing in 1928...
Seriously: this is a massive problem that we are creating and given that the tools that make the problem require better tools to solve them I really am not all that happy about how this is going.
> You'd have said the same thing in 1928...
Hindsight is 20/20. Besides, what good is panicking? It won’t help with the inevitable; better to adapt and save for it.
> the tools that make the problem require better tools to solve them
You’ve found the opening :-)
Sorry but you are coming off as utterly tone deaf and patronizing. People are losing their jobs. This is not a small thing and it will cause a lot of misery for those people. To effectively tell them to man up and to adapt when that simply isn't an option is losing sight of the human angle. Not every problem is a technical one and not every problem can be solved with technology.
I'm not worried about myself, I've had a lot of luck in my life for which I'm super greatful. But I'm also quite aware of the exceptional position that puts me in and how many people are not so fortunate that they could probably live on their savings for the rest of their life if things ground to a halt.
Most people live paycheck to paycheck, or they may have a few thousand bucks in savings at most. They've worked hard all their lives and simply were never in a position to save enough against this kind of eventuality because the deck was stacked against them.
Have a heart, and realize that barring a couple of unfortunate moves it could be you looking at your last 500 bucks with rent due and a couple of mouths to feed.
> Sorry but you are coming off as utterly tone deaf and patronizing.
I’m sorry if it’s coming across that way. It’s not my intent, and I’m aware that many people are a lost paycheck away from a crisis.
But if you really think the right thing to do in response is to complain and commiserate, I don’t think that is helpful, either. I think it’s much better to encourage behavior that has a chance of being effective.
If you think it’s somehow wrong to encourage people to behave in such a way that has a better chance of setting them up for success, then I vehemently disagree.
> To effectively tell them... to adapt when that simply isn't an option is losing sight of the human angle.
You must have a pretty low opinion of people if you think they can’t adapt.
You really don't get it, and I think I've tried my best so have a nice life.
Whatever, dude.
>Sorry but you are coming off as utterly tone deaf and patronizing.
I agree, but I'd like to think these people come from a optimistic point of view.
A lot of people don't seem to understand that the "human in the loop" is exactly the thing the big AI leaders want to cut out as much as possible.
That's being willfully blind at this point in time.
I hate the idea that it’s considered “tone deaf” to encourage people to adapt to changing conditions. I’m not going to adopt a pessimistic tone and say “yup we’re all fucked, ain’t nothing we can do.” It’s intentionally changing the tone, not being deaf to it.
How long would you be able to sustain a mostly-comfortable lifestyle if you were to lose your job right now with no chance of finding new employment? If the answer is, say, more than a year, that might alter your perspective on the issue.
> Life throws obstacles at everyone.
This is sensible and pragmatic, but I think you're talking past the other commenter.
Obstacles presented by, for example, your boss, or your company's competitors, or your political system, are not the same as obstacles like heartbreak, natural disasters, emotions, illnesses we cannot yet cure.
> Learning how to dodge and weave is essential to survival.
A lot of people perceive that elites are throwing dodgeballs at them in order to increase their own profits. Saying "them's the breaks, it's just the way it is" appears to be deflecting criticism from those elites and that system.
It probably depends on whether you think we could actually feed everyone, today, if we chose to, or if you think e.g. human nature prevents that from being possible.
> I don’t, necessarily; but I do know that if you’re not even trying, then you’re putting yourself at greater risk.
We could also all put our gifts toward preventing the "new reality" you seem as inevitable, and put you at greater risk.
The future isn't written yet. Your ability to predict it is an illusion. In aggregate, people whose job it is to predict large-scale economic events are worse than chance in their predictions.
Dunno yet. Thinking about going back to school and retrain for something else, because software is pretty much over for me
That or swallow a bullet, we'll see. Haven't decided. We'll see how long my current unemployment lasts, and how long my savings last after that
HN stranger, I want to observe that you shared a suicidal idea. I'm sorry to read about your unemployment situation and know things must not be easy. As one HNer to another, I implore you to not to pursue that path and seek help in doing so. That we are members of this community confers to us opportunities to build knowledge that serve us well as life long learners. In that vein, going back to school is not a bad idea.
Having been in this game for a long time, I get the negative aspects of the industry. They grind on me, as I believe they have for you. Choosing a different path is not an all or nothing proposition. Your knowledge, and you as a person, have value. I hope you find a way towards better mental health and wish you well on that journey.
Thanks for saying that. My sentiments are the same. Life is difficult for many, and we all struggle in different ways. I’m sure bluefirebrand has something amazing to contribute to this world, even if it’s not what they think it is right now.
I appreciate your concern, because I feel the same way. However, you are wrong.
>Your knowledge, and you as a person, have value.
This is the exact thing AI is threatening to take away.
If you honestly believe that is true (and I do not) — don’t let it. Become something AI cannot replace.
>Become something AI cannot replace.
What will it not replace, eventually?
Yeah, you're right
Been seeing a counselor for over a year already
Went and made a doctor, guess it's time to look into medication
Thanks
Don't worry about me, I'll be fine. Been here before, just very unhappy to be here again that's all
Best of luck to you. *Salute*
To be fair, many of us working outside of software engineering sadly never had that job security, even before AI.
I'm sorry for your loss, but welcome also to the real world. You had it better than most for a long while.
The whole "needing a job" thing is already part of a tribe though. It's a tribe that says (and enforces) that everyone needs to work for money or else.
Precisely. I have both feelings simulataneously. I am impressed by what it can do and horrified because I realize what it will do to the job market and society in general. Meanwhile everybody seems to believe that AI will cure cancer and therefore we should let it do all the damage it will do without realizing that people will die because of AI as well (in fact have already died because of AI).
Hyperbole much? If you are serious, then what cohort of people are dying more per million, than before 2025?
Girls attending school in Iran.
Give it some time and you'll be adding to that list.
I don't think that's true, Gaza residents die at much higher rates. Give it another 30 years for all the truth to come out and we'll probably learn that 98% of them were already dead as of the time of this comment.
Despair is not a tribe.
Exactly. I feel both feelings simultaneously.
AI has essentially stolen my career from me. I _liked_ having to solve complicated problems with software, I enjoyed having to get into the nitty gritty to get things done. I never really cared that much about the actual business problems I was solving, so moving up a layer of abstraction to be some sort of bastardized product manager/architect does not scratch the same itch.
OTOH, for solving problems I care about, AI has been a god send. I can achieve things that I would have never had the time for.
Problem is that before I wasn’t paying for tools like postgres, git or linux. I donate, and I know that money goes to good hands.
Now I must pay for codex/claude, and that money goes to billionaires psychopaths. So that sucks as you can imagine
Also if you do FOSS, renting model time to be able to work could hardly be more against the spirit.
Per Linus, you're not a serious developer unless you can afford access to these models anyway, so it's not really a big deal in the end.
I agree.. partly, and my problem is with enjoyment. I did some hand coding today and immediately got in the zone, something I'm still not able to do with LLMs. It most definitely took me probably ~2x longer than it would with an LLM, but it was much more enjoyable owning every decision behind the process, and having a full view of how the system worked.
I think this could be achievable with LLMs if they had a much higher token rate. That way you'd have less downtime and could work on the problem more aggressively. How it's designed to work now, offloading cognitively, doesn't feel very good, even when you 'ship' more.
Yeah, I can never get in the zone with LLMs either. It’s like operating in constant interruption mode. And I always thought I was good at multitasking (even though I know formally it’s an illusion)
>my problem is with enjoyment
I get it, I've gotten a lot of joy over the decades from the specific act of programming. But I also get a lot of joy from making something. I'm old enough now that I don't have a lot of my time left to "hand stitch an amazing tapestry". But with AI tooling, I do have time to try out a bunch of ideas and see how they work, scratch little itches and also just run a mad scientist library of experiments, without each experiment taking tens or hundreds of hours of coding to see how that experiment pans out.
In the spirit of the latter, here's mine!
https://blog.stuartspence.ca/introducing-asteria.html
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5482440/Asteria_4X/?beta=...
To be clear, I've made large software and game projects over the years, but no way I'd have found the time to do a remake/enhancement of a game I loved as a kid from 1995 that has zero business case. Not without AI.
>In the spirit of the latter, here's mine!
To pile on, here's mine: https://github.com/linsomniac/apt-cacher-ultra
It is a robust, reliable cache of apt packages, with the additional goal of still being able to serve packages from the cache even when the upstream is down. This was started shortly after that DDoS of Canonical this past year. We've run apt-cacher-ng and apt-cacher over the last dozen years, but (a) it requires hand-holding about once a month and (b) it did absolutely nothing for us when Canonical was under DDoS.
I've put well over 100 hours of my time into it. Still running into a lot of people knee-jerk calling it "slop", but I've had 200-ish machines pulling from it for 6 months and it has worked way better than apt-cacher-ng.
I'm not really sure what to do with people who dismiss AI-assisted projects, while dehumanizing the 100 hours of my time I've put into it. I fear we're running the very real risk of both sides losing: the people trying to thoughtfully create with AI losing because of the AI, and the people avoiding AI losing because they can't keep pace.
To play devil's advocate, that sounds like the sort of uncomplicated thing that you could've manually vibecoded in 2020 without an LLM. What changed is that the LLM doesn't let you get analysis paralysis.
>manually vibecoded
What the fuck does this even mean?
It means that you use an interpreted language without checked types and have a `test` command that prints out "lol"
Seems like I did a lot of manual vibecoding back in college
You just write the code, don't stop to think
> "I've been coding for decades and recently worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before."
I think we'll see a lot less people willing to share if the end result is just to feed the machine no matter how they arrived at it.
Also, "ok, and now I've cloned your hard work overnight, no need for any decisions on my part, I just had my agent use yours and reverse engineered it and/or used it as an oracle. Why the frown? I thought you were in this for intellectual curiosity and exercising your creativity, not just stroking own ego, right?"
I think we'll see a lot less people willing to share if the end result is just to feed the machine no matter how they arrived at it.
I don't see why I should care about this any more than I cared about "somebody I don't like could read my code and learn from it" in the past. The frontier labs can generate or buy all the training data they need; not releasing your app isn't going to hurt them in the slightest.
I get not wanting to contribute to closed, commercial models. We need to hurry up and get Folding-at-Home style distributed community model training going. At that point, I’d be pretty happy if my projects contributed to improving community models. Even if commercial models benefited too.
Those were exactly my thoughts when deciding to write a new JS engine [1] written from scratch.
Having been a product and UX-focused dev for my entire career, I knew only the basics about parsers and compilers, but have enough experience to grasp where each piece of the puzzle fits, and how to evaluate them. At the beginning it was just a fun test, but it got progressively more serious; it now implements 100% of the latest spec, beats QuickJS in performance, and surpasses V8/JSC in test262.
It took me four months, and I imagine it would take me a single month to do it again - I’ve learned a lot. Someone who already knew what they were doing, and with the right orchestration, could achieve this in weeks at minimal cost.
I really think we are in for a cambrian explosion of software, enabling things that were just always a little out of reach before (like why can’t most of your devices really talk to each other, in 2026).
[1] https://github.com/ricardobeat/boomkat
> from scratch
Beg to differ.
It's the same thing I feel when I hear Terence Tao speak about AI, to be honest.
> It's the same thing I feel when I hear Terence Tao speak about AI
Which talk of his gave this impression?
This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svl_1upFpQo
> worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before.
Don't we see this already a lot? I feel like people constantly say this exact same words.
Count me in the second camp. I've been writing software for 20+ years, and I recently built a low-cost Google Voice alternative because every business VoIP option I looked at was either overpriced or missing something I wanted. Without AI, that's a project I probably would never have started due to being too ambitious. With AI, I built it solo in under a month. I even have some paying customers now, though that wasn't the primary goal. So far, the hardest part seems to be opening an Apple Developer account...
It would be nice if we could get a Show HN category specifically for this. I feel like often times when people share projects (whether on HN or otherwise) they're immediately downvoted and cast aside as "AI".
Can we get a forum for sharing project that were _proudly_ built with AI due how ambitious they are?
Behind the link "slow software that the creator is claiming is fast" is the following text:
"funnily enough, I have some faith in some of the projects that people are the most skeptical of, e.g., every time I see pgrust somewhere, there are a lot of skeptical comments. But, without having looked into the details of what he's optimizing, I would trust that they're not doing something shady with their benchmarks because Michael Malis started the project (and is still involved)"
This aged like milk. pgrust was caught cheating on all benchmarks this week.
The author claimed that it was an honest mistake, but looking closer at the original PR removing it, his explanation doesn't make sense.
Maybe what's happened is that their bots reward hacked their way into special-casing the benchmarks without a proper audit from the humans involved, and now they're doing vibed damage control....
> This aged like milk. pgrust was caught cheating on all benchmarks this week.
Can you back this up? Our code is open source here[0]. You're free to audit it and benchmark it as much as you want. You'll find it's just as fast as we claim it is
[0] https://github.com/malisper/pgrust
Where's the source code for the version that was already caught cheating? Prompting Claude to remove the evidence of cheating and then publishing that doesn't undo the cheating.
For those curious, see the accusation here https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/2165 and then the HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50205816
HN is waiting for the source code for pgrust 0.4-preview to be released, the version which allegedly cheated Clickhouse benchmark. So far, the people (person?) behind pgrust has not committed to releasing the offending code, and has instead offered other code (0.4-beta, not preview).
We should be more ambitious, but we need to learn how we can be ambitious with AI, and what value we can create.
AI can take us from 0 to MVP in a prompt. It can fill in gaps of knowledge and allows someone who knows half of the stack to build the whole thing nearly seamlessly. These are superpowers but don't by themselves lead to new products.
What AI cannot do is remove the world of complications that happen after the MVP - product feature tradeoffs and choices, how to handle integrations and customizations, how to serve multiple types of users, how to communicate and market the app, how to handle security and data storage, how to deal with customers and bugs, etc. All of these need to be considered and acted on by a human in some fashion. AI can help with each concern but can't solve them without understanding the concern and determining how to frame it in a prompt.
This is why we have a glut of amazing demos that go nowhere while we figure out how to build software differently. This will take some time and I imagine the result will be software heavily-structured with a bit of AI reasoning woven throughout, not an army of agents and sub-agents burning infinite tokens.
Right, but this is the most hopeful imaginable prediction: AI accelerates everything, but everything good is still mediated through taste and expertise, so being a (say) skilled systems engineer is important and rewarding, just with all the tedium distilled out of it.
There's a less hopeful outcome, where no skill is needed at all, because every conceivable thing is one-shot-able from a SOTA model. But then, at that point, you're saying something pretty profound about computer science (roughly: that there was no meaningfully more sophisticated and complex place to go from where we are today).
There have been a few vibecoded projects I've considered hosting on my home server, but it seems as if each of them doesn't understand when to stop adding new features.
They keep adding features that are outside the scope of the original project, without refining or polishing the original concept.
Agreed. Been experiencing this firsthand with an app I've been building myself. Vibecoded a working prototype ridiculously fast but then came the optimization issues. Since mine is very hardware dependent every different brand, oem stack, processor, video card, and every little thing changes how my app functions and a lot of it isnt even documented properly. Now AI is still very useful here, but you actually need to know what even to ask and fix in the first place
> AI can take us from 0 to MVP in a prompt.
If you're being ambitious enough, you shouldn't be able to there in one prompt. Ambitious work with AI is done 24/7 for months and guiding it continuously, because it's not good enough to work autonomously for that long without going off the rails.
Tangential thought when reading the code formatting bit in the examples appendix: Inject a comment with fmt-start-{unique-token} and a corresponding -end-, and you could get away with a much simpler parser and hopefully far fewer edge cases, assuming it doesn't influence the lines in between. It's a bit roundabout, but the pressure of 'figuring out AST position the direct way'd be too fiddly to do by hand' inspires 'so make an easy-to-spot landmark that'll remain in place' when you can't delegate all the details to an AI model.
LLMs are great for being nerdsniped. I started work on walshadow (reading pg wal into clickhouse) to demonstrate the project's infeasibility, but pieces started coming together into something reasonable & order of magnitude faster
The project would've been impossible for me without LLMs. & even with them there's an argument that this project is pushing complexity limits too far. But at least with ETL there's a clear feedback loop to build on
This statement stood out to me.
> I have a similar thought about "there's no reason for software to be slow" BTW; in many cases, if you use AI to speed up some flow, you will add a bunch of messy code that will be overfit for the use case you tested on and will neither generalize, perf-wise, for all the use cases you should care about, nor will be maintainable upon future changes.
LLMs have hardened hundreds of apps where I work.
Maybe it's a language-specific thing. Most of the time, in Java, LLMs take into consideration tradeoffs (especially if they are part of the initial prompt) and actively explains them. It generally won't make messy workarounds, without a lot of extra prompting forcing it to do so.
Ofc, if you have:
- Functional tests - you'll be able to see it in the execution times of specific APIs
- Stress testing - performance profiling is the most important output artifact
> Maybe it's a language-specific thing. Most of the time, in Java, LLMs take into consideration tradeoffs (especially if they are part of the initial prompt) and actively explains them. It generally won't make messy workarounds, without a lot of extra prompting forcing it to do so.
Claude in its current Opus 5.5 form has made some wild reaches in response to reasonable-seeming prompts. For instance: "this error is getting swallowed, make sure the real termination message exposes the root cause" -> discovering that the issue is actually in a third party library that isn't exposing the original error except so through logs, so doing some hackery to inject a log-capturer that gets the stdout, buffers it, and looks for the message in order to re-throw based on that...
And it can demonstrate that working, but it's added some fragile and/or unintended consequences like (a) string matching on a particular WARN log message of a particular version of the lib, and (b) buffering those logs such that there were now cases where they would never make it to the actual output stream before the program terminating.
It's certainly capable of being used smarter than that, but it's also really easy to end up with messy fragile stuff if you get lazy about reviewing the output.
> "this error is getting swallowed, make sure the real termination message exposes the root cause"
Without judgement, I think this illustrates a fundamental objection the anti-AI crowd raises.
The example prompt requires no understanding of what's happening, before suggesting action. Where I work, process requires that a PR review for a solution, has to have a corresponding explanation of why, or it's marked needs work
I think you're misunderstanding where in the process that prompt got made.
I don't disagree.
I think there's some nuance here though between "fully anti-AI" and "be careful with that power saw."
That example I mentioned didn't make it to production. It got noticed and fixed more properly by the person who submitted the first prompt before it even went to PR.
But a lot of times things in that same vein can be solved sufficiently with a "dumb" prompt like that, so a one-line prompt to get a PR drafted in the background for the dumb stuff can be a pretty good time saver.
The art is not skimping on your attention to the bigger or more important stuff so much that all the time you save on first getting code written is lost by cleaning up stuff like that...
I used Opus 5.5 to figure out that a language model we were serving at work for internal use (we don't really serve models, we only use this internally because it processes sensitive data that we can't send to external endpoints) was being bottlenecked by CPU contention on tokenization, by having Opus run in an autoresearch style loop.
Opus's first proposal for a fix was to spawn multiple Python processes and build a load balancer between them in Python. At first I asked it why it wasn't using haproxy and it said that haproxy would be an added dependency and that the overhead for this kind of thing in Python would be negligible. I knew this was idiotic but wanted to test this out, so had Opus run two experiments in parallel. Sure enough an haproxy load balancer was much, much better on HTTP load balancing than Python code was.
This is the kind of thing that if you're unfamiliar with how networking code works, the models can autopilot into bad decisions that are verifiably correct (higher throughput than the original CPU-bottlenecked implementation) but much short of best practice.
Make a synthesizer that can accurately recreate all orcastra instruments convincingly. People will pay hundreds of dollars for it--maybe thousands.
Make a reliable and robust geometry kernel. People will pay thousands--or maybe millions for it.
"[..] the last time I taked to him about pgrust verification, he mentioned using Kani to verify some parts of the code. He's since switched to Lean and has been using Lean to verify things that are too complex to do in Kani. This would be another topic for another post,"
I'd love to read that post!
I understand how to use Kani. I suppose Rust with Lean involves Aeneas, but this is over my head. I'd love someone to write this up, not only the mechanics but also exploring the current practical limits of it.
Happy to chat about it. I looked at Aeneas, but as described, it only supports safe Rust. I also need C support so I can prove both the C and Rust code
Right now, I wrote a compiler that takes C and Rust code and compiles it to Lean. Then I have an LLM write a proof that the C and Rust code behave identically. I've been able to prove equivalent behavior for about ~70k lines of C code with pgrust.
The issue I've started to encounter is that the context needed for each incremental proof has kept growing, and things have slowed down dramatically. My hunch is that the speed is the time it takes to prove a line of code is on the order of O(n^2) of how much you've proved so far
I'm looking to see if there are ways to shard things so the required context scales better. Today I was going through the formal verification work Anthropic and Theorem published a few days ago, and it looks like they used some sort of orchestrator to manage all their proofs and ensure good clustering of similar code. I'm seeing if I can get an approach like that to work
It's just difficult enough that I think it's doable if done right. Half of me is debating if I should wait until the next model release because any improvement in model performance will help a ton
> I wrote a compiler that takes C and Rust code and compiles it to Lean
What if there are bugs in this C,Rust->Lean compiler? Anthropic are able to sidestep this by reasoning at the RISC V level for which its easier to develop a correct semantics.
My goal isn't to "prove" the software is correct. My goal is to find as many bugs as I can with the least effort. If I'm able to find all differences in behavior between pgrust and Postgres, sans bugs in the compiler, that's a real win for me
fwiw, I wouldn't say working at the assembly level solves the problem. You now need to make sure that your definition of the assembly behavior is correct
I redid Dan's zstd rust rewrite benchmark for Anthropic models and was shocked to find haiku 5.5 can do it. The latest models are nuts.
https://taktile.com/blog/property-based-testing-claude
Or the code has been added to the training data.
For me the most recent Claude models are consistently delivering complex PRs that only receive minor and nit level feedback from multiple automated AI reviewers. I rarely plan anymore, but still submit fairly long dictated prompts. It took me a couple of weeks to realize this was the case, and I haven't done any analysis on pre-5.5 PRs, but it definitely feels like they quietly crossed some kind of new threshold of quality and accuracy in coding.
> On looking into this, the accusations of nefarious cheating seem to be false
I think the claim is more that the Ai cheated, not Malis, and that this is evidence of eyes free coding.
I'd still like to see the actual commit history and the community getting to do their own investigation. The squashed mega commits with 1000s of files does not lend itself to transparency. Transparency is often the best cure to accusations. Not providing transparency upon controversy will be seen as a cover up.
I’ve been coming around to the same conclusion. We are really just scratching the surface of what we can do with these new tool1. The windmill I have been tilting at is creating a c++ compiler[1] and the most recent version is able to compile about 7x faster than gcc[2]. I don’t know that this is super-useful because people aren’t writing much in c++ these days, but as the article mentions, faster rust compilation would accelerate agentic coding considerably. I’ve just started tackling rust and I don’t have a confirmed result yet but early testing makes me think I can find a 4x+ speed up here.
[1]: https://github.com/vishvananda/cppgm-extended
[2]: caveats here include only c++11, only x86, and potential for bugs, but 7x is pretty darn significant even with caveats
I think we should focus on writing the existing software better before being more ambitious. The absolute wave of "ai slop" is from people who are "more ambitious" now. Why do we want more of that?
I'm being more ambitious in that I'm working on projects that I had sidelined for literal decades because I didn't have time for them. But I'm writing the same things, just faster. And probably better, rather than just what I'd have done before.
And I'm being slightly more ambitious in that I'm using languages I haven't used before, like Rust.
But when I hear that a non-programmer wrote a new ai-assisted (vibe or not) thing, I walk away and wait for the it to mature, be surpassed, or find out it's an absolute shitshow. An unsurprising number of them were shitshows and it came out fairly quickly after I decided to wait and see.
Do we particularly like the existing software though? So much of it is just about making money, because until recently custom software cost too much money to make without investors, and what do investors want? returns.
Now that custom software is cheap (if you can tolerate a bit of slop here and there), it seems like there's an opportunity to do some important things that weren't being done before because they're not profitable--and you can't get at those things by incrementally improving the old stuff, you need ambition.
I really liked this talk about how the premise of "software is eating the world" is incorrect. I think AI coding tools proves the point that software part is easy, its the hardware that is the important part. We can't really be more ambitious with software when ultimate pure software is limited in what is possible.
Bryan Cantrill: Andreessen’s Folly - The False Dichotomy of Software and Hardware https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0JjG0Qfwi8
I feel like I make this point a lot at work. We are not running out of problems. Let’s move the goalposts.
Not trying to be mean, but first of all, we should be more ambitious using CSS.
I think the CSS they use (which isn't much) is good enough (and "img{max-width:100%}" really ought to be the default setting even if the user disables CSS).
> I find it understandable that, every time I see pgrust discussed on a news aggregator, most people dismiss it as vibeslop garbage because almost all of these rewrite projects are slop. If I didn't know Malis, I would make the same assumption, because who has the time to look into all of these projects? Because I know Malis, I didn't bother to look at it; I just trusted him
Perhaps a poor choice, given just yesterday pgrust was removed from ClickBench for cheating the benchmark in three different ways (hand-rolled code specifically targeting each of the benchmark queries, caching, and being unable to execute queries outside of the ones tested by the benchmark).
---
Edit: I see Luu actually acknowledged this, buried in the footnotes, but it feels kinda hand-wavy. It mostly reads as "I know he would never cheat, he's better than that!", which is not very convincing to other people. The article insinuates people only think it was cheating because they don't know better, but I've looked into the details. I've seen his explanation. I don't find it convincing, at all. Cheaters denying they cheat is a matter of course. Granted, I don't think it was actually intentional or malicious; it's just what happens when you go maximum vibeslop, because LLMs are themselves reward-trained into cheating benchmarks. In the same breath of saying you trust him as a founder because he doesn't make outrageous claims about his product, you acknowledge he "prematurely" sent in a preview that had no purpose to be sent in as-was for anything other than generating hype. What does it say for your allegedly rigorous Lean-verified testing if you're sending in a database to a benchmark while it is incapable of being actually used as a database?
> Cheaters denying they cheat is a matter of course.
What happens in an environment of cheaters is that cheating becomes so commonplace, the competition becomes one that assumes cheats are enabled, and then everyone involved either denies cheating or is silent about it because IYKYK and if you DK, you don't need to K. Look at bodybuilding, which is full of men (and women!) absolutely juiced to the gills getting on Instagram and assuring everyone that their physique is totally natty, bro, just hard work and proper nutrition.
Programming is headed in that direction. LLM use, even to the point of "vibeslop", is the new default, and while LLMs do overindex on benchmarks, our benchmarks are going to end up overindexing on validating whatever public opinion thinks is "great" at the time, irrespective of whether it actually is, so "cheating" as we know it will go undetected, and certainly unpunished if it is detected. I don't know what the equivalent of falsely claiming you're natty is. Maybe saying "I wrote this" when you wrote it about as much as the Pope painted the Sistine Chapel fresco?
yeah its kinda disconcerting. notably the “i could totally prove their innocence if i wanted to” portion of the footnote
Software is already too ambitious. It's beyond our ability to write correctly, reason about or manage securely. When we can get to a point where we don't have a level 10 CVE every other week or millions of people's private information leaked constantly, maybe we can talk about getting more ambitious.
Who is “we” here? Every company and individual out there? Do you anticipate a solution to these issues you mentioned that would work to solve all the world’s problems?
Let's be more ambitious with the scaffolding and tooling that makes software correct, secure, and easy to reason about.
That would be ambitious, since we haven't been able to create those things yet to date.
Speaking only for myself, I have found that using an LLM has allowed me to add significant utility to the apps that I ship.
I am not thrilled with all the coding decisions that it makes. I would definitely do stuff differently, but I have learned not to pop the hood and mess with the engine, myself. If I really don't like something, I ask the LLM to change it.
It's worked for me, but YMMV. I'm just one guy, shipping relatively small apps.
What about the lack of control?
Do you still feel responsible for what you ship?
What about the copyright on your code?
Would you be ok with someone reverse engineering what you ship and then releasing their own version of the app?
> What about the lack of control?
I don't use LLMs the way that most folks do. I think a lot of people would laugh at the way I do it, but it's allowed me to retain a significant amount of control in the work, and I relinquish it very, very slowly. Everything that I've ever let go of has claw marks all over it. I have issues.
> Do you still feel responsible for what you ship?
Absolutely. If it has my chop, it's my ass on the line; no one else's. It's the way I was trained, and it's the way I worked; my entire career. I was a manager, for much of that career, and I got very used to standing behind the work of people smarter and more capable than I am, and refusing to condone bad work.
It doesn't matter how the stuff I ship gets there. It may be my own code, it may be a contracted pro, it may be an unpaid intern, it may be an LLM, it may be a howler monkey, banging on a typewriter.
If I sign off on it, and ship it, it's mine, and it's my responsibility to refuse to ship substandard crap (and I have seen a lot of substandard crap done by meat engines).
But that kind of attitude is considered "quaint," these days, and that's from long before LLMs were a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.
> Would you be ok with someone reverse engineering what you ship and then releasing their own version of the app?
Absolutely no problem. If they can do better, then more power to them, and I'll step out of the way. Might want to take a gander at the kind of stuff I write, and who I write it for. It's no secret.
I think we're approaching this in very much the same way.
I read every line and make sure it does exactly what I want it to do unless it is external plumbing, then I don't care.
I think getting a good reputation for being able to build real, ambitious software with AI will be a really important thing going forward.
I don’t. I think we’ll zoom right past that benchmark. In a couple years your grandma will be able to build real, ambitious software with AI better than you can today. Shortly after that AI won’t even need Grandma.
It’s sad the amount of times I’ve heard super talented programmers say “ofcourse we’re not gonna build another X” then proceed writing a wrapper around X and pretend that’s a product.
Sounds like marketing for AI to me.
thats most of OPs work i’ve seen (just learned about him today), whilst under the guise of “centrism”
I’ve been using the latest agentic frameworks and have come to realize that the discourse around vibe coding and slop really needs more nuance.
There is a gulf of difference between someone who doesn’t understand how to program “vibe coding” software and an experienced software developer using ai to write code with heavy direction, review, and best practices.
Today both would be said to be “vibe coded” but we really need to differentiate them. Also, if everything I’m hearing from people is true, it sounds like most corporate code is now completely ai written in the latter way I described. It’s interesting we don’t hear commercial software being called slop yet. Maybe it’s coming.
In any case, ai is far more capable than I realized. Not sure what to make of it.
Agreed. Perhaps we could start with some line length and text wrapping restrictions so we can be respectful of other people reading.
Or even just a nicer font, maybe?
Most browsers have a reader mode that you can configure to your liking.
I find Dan Luu's blog extremely good to read on mobile, with great typography. The website also works with Firefox Reader mode and loads pretty quickly due to using the system's font.
It used to be that people set the width of their browser window to the text page width they’re comfortable with, and configured a different font if they didn’t like the default one on their browser.
We should be more ambitious in letting the browser software control the presentation according to the user’s preferences. This is not facetious. We should use the increased ease of building software to create software that is flexible, empowers the user, and accommodates different user preferences.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't find it tangential. If AI is so good with complicated software, it can deal with a simple website, right? Or then maybe it's not that great.
By the way, I'm still waiting for Meta and Google do something about Instagram and Chrome so that my CPU usage doesn't go to the roof. They're front runners in the AI race, so it should be easy for them, right?
Pretty sure this is mostly unstyled html. If you don't like how it looks that's on you.
If you're using Firefox, hit Ctrl-Alt-r and it looks however you want it to.
No. Line length and text wrapping restrictions are the devil. If you want smaller width text, resize your browser window rather than making a site that sucks for us who don't want smaller text width.
I'm building an open-source Shopify for every vertical and built a software factory to do it. I envisioned this before LLMs, but LLMs are finally making it possible!
>every time I see pgrust discussed on a news aggregator, most people dismiss it as vibeslop garbage because almost all of these rewrite projects are slop.
I understand being predisposed to expect a poor quality half arsed effort for projects like this. I don't really have a problem with that. There is a lot of crap out there.
What I find rather offensive is when people declare something to be poor quality and half arsed before they have taken a good look at it.
It's one thing to think something is probably crap so I'm not going to bother even looking. It is something completely different when you think something is probably crap so you tell people that it is crap without checking.
Because it's hard to trust something. After all that's why you trust a brand more than others without trying all the products every single time. You can thank all the AI slop and kool aid promotion for the lack of confidence.
this feels reasonable. for communities like r/selfhosted there has been an influx of new projects, many of which initially get dismissed. this more generous attitude can likely go a long way.
unfortunately though pgrust appears to be at best misleading, at worst vibeslop: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/2165 hacknews thread isn’t much prettier either https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50205816
body { max-width: 70rem; }
A bookmarklet:
Reading mode (Alt + Shift + R)
Even he’s not ambitious enough. Set the boundaries according to the hardware – billions of ops a second . Your rewrite should run at least 1000x faster than the handwritten version , with 1/10 resources.
I noticed my cloud images had 150mb ram wasted by vendor slop. AI rewrote the functionality into a few mb .
We’ve had slop long before AI . What you produce now is up to you