Also it might be hard to grasp for most of us, used to constant stimulation and lack of space for contemplation and incorporation of information (I recommend the works of philosopher Byung-Chul Han on the matter) with yet unknown effects on our psyche and creative output. It takes days or weeks for one to sit and digest novel viewpoints; asking a machine to skip all that work for us is just another example of seeking instant gratification. I have no time to think, do it for me, so I can scroll to the next post already.
If you like good indie sci-fi make sure you see Sleep Dealer, Primer, Banshee Chapter, and Moon.
Going back further I’d add Pi.
This one’s not quite sci-fi but if you like indie and very weird and cultural references that are really deep cuts check out an indie series called Hellier. If you’d like to see some hipsters try to talk to aliens with transcranial magnetic stimulation equipment, then it’s for you. Kind of ghostsploitation meets sci-fi meets conspiracy occult weirdness, all played straight Blair Witch style. The music and cinematography are great. I’ve compared it to Primer in terms of cost/originality/quality trifecta.
Falsehoods US programmers believe about addresses: there are no other countries than the US of A, and if there are, they don’t really matter.
This person bought a whole domain for something that doesn’t work for 90% of the world, claiming it does, never even testing their assumption. Great job!
Yeah, this is 100% an instant classic in the lies programmers believe series.
How long have we had browser auto complete for addresses? A long time, I assume it's devs like this one who just can't be bothered to support it and have to pretend their flawed approach is somehow faster than literal auto complete.
> Fine, maybe country first. The purists in the comments are technically correct — postal codes aren't globally unique. You could do country first (pre-filled via IP), then postal code, then let the magic happen. The point was never "skip the country field." The point is: stop making me type things you already know.
It’s addressed in the article (at the end, admittedly).
Because it overwhelmingly attracts a certain demographic of people who have a higher-than-average rate of various paraphilias as well as interest in software but such arguments are a bit taboo to discuss even if they are quite self-evident.
I liked the Internet better when it was all nerds and only code cared, rather than gender identity or listing neuroses in own's social media profile as if it was an audition for an echo chamber choir.
I’ve seen the Internet from the 1980’s until today. It has always had people exploring gender identities and public sharing of neuroses. Mostly nerds, though.
> I feel like there just something about "this thing is slightly difficult to get started using" that keeps normies out and keeps the place reasonable.
I think about this when people say that contributing to Linux is difficult and they should adopt more user-friendly ways of accepting changes, rather than mailing patches from the command line.
The friction is a feature. You don't want too much, but no friction just invites the spammers and the trolls wasting everybody's time. If anything, as the Internet grows and machines compete with humans, you want even more friction than ever before.
> Claude Code has killed my ADHD and turned me into an always-on hyper-focused machine.
> I am getting 20x done. This is a literal superpower.
Adding this comment to favourites to revisit in half a decade.
I've already "made fun" of your exaggerated hype comments, so I'll use this opportunity to say that I hope you remain sane and grounded in your discoveries. You wouldn't be the first to go psychotic after interacting with these stochastic parrots.
Don't you have anything better to do with your time?
I told you people back in 2019 that these models would replace Hollywood and you and others have been calling me all kinds of names, and every step of the way calling me an idiot. I'm a filmmaker - I know what I'm talking about. And now we're almost here. We have million dollar VFX services at our disposal for pennies.
Claude Code is doing the exact same thing for software engineering. I've been a senior software engineer for a good while - these capabilities are otherworldly and they can generalize to all new unseen problems. You're not paying attention.
I'd be more worried about whether or not you have a job in 5 years than whether I have or have not created a business or whatever criteria you want to use to thumb your nose at me.
You know how you can quickly ideate software plans for some large scale idea? Architecture, infrastructure, data models, etc., but the implementation takes longer? Claude Code short circuits that last bit. You need to hold your nose so you stop smelling whatever you're smelling and just try the damn tool.
I wish I could slap sense into you grumpy folks. You're so stiff in your beliefs. This is a train headed your way. Pay attention.
> I told you people back in 2019 that these models would replace Hollywood
What kind of alternate reality are you living in?
I wish you would disclose your credentials (though I admit privacy is an inalienable right of yours) so I could place the biggest AI hype-man on this forum. Actually, there is hype, and there is being completely gone with hubris and you’re towards the latter end of the spectrum, given your doomsday calls on other comments that software engineering is done for and that you believe AI is close to ‘putting all the HN engineers out of work’ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185284)
> I wish I could slap sense into you grumpy folks. You're so stiff in your beliefs. This is a train headed your way. Pay attention.
Lay off the violent thoughts and get some rest, man. Sounds like you need it.
part of my adhd/bipolar is reacting like the guy you're replying to and I was thinking the same. Comment reminded me of when I'm in the "YES THIS IS IT" mode which usually isn't far off from hitting the wall. Hopefully just projection on my part, though, and this guy is really doing well. When I start talking like him though I usually have to take a step back and it'll be a topic in therapy next session.
> Years ago I completely stopped coding, becoming tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks for everything, node for this, npm for that, Angular, React, Vue, whatever
Have you tried Claude? No, Opus? No, not that version, it's two weeks old, positively ancient lol. Oh wait, now OpenClaw is the cool thing around the block.
My dude, the rat race just became a rat sprint. I hope you're keeping up, you're no spring chicken any more.
Only running one agent? You should have a distributed network of them at least, if you don’t you will get left behind! Running on the cloud? Stupid, buy hardware for tens of thousands of dollars to run it locally, own your tools. Etc etc, I haven’t seen a crazier rat race in tech ever, the JavaScript framework era is looking like the most stable of software times compared to where we are right now.
> But since I retired a few years ago it was clearly not LLMs that precipitated the decline of my enjoyment of the profession. Instead it was the slow erosion of agency and responsibility that did that.
I've been working on a contract for a large corp. They asked me to design a piece of software over 6 months which I delivered on time and worked great — by the time we had to ship into PROD, the whole thing was canned unceremoniously.
Luckily they liked my work so much they moved me to another greenfield project. Worked on it for a year, had to invent novel solutions which I'm pretty proud of, and we shipped into prod last Autumn. I haven't heard a peep from anyone, whether the thing is working and by masterful skill of mine it hasn't crashed yet, or if no one is using it and it was just another bullshit job.
All this work, good pay, and nothing to show for it. Not even a pat in the back. I'm just a well-oiled cog in an unfathomable machine. I wonder if my career has any meaning at all. Recently they've asked me to deliver a feature for yesterday because of bad planning on their part, and when I mentioned how long it'll take, they've half-jokingly suggested to use LLMs so I can ship it in half the time to make their arbitrary deadline.
Joke's on them, in less than 6 months I'm out. 20 years as a software engineer, 15 as a contractor, and all I feel when I get at my desk is existential dread. There is just no pleasure at it, that I'd rather risk poverty but feel like my actions and efforts have tangible effects on the physical world.
Was producing more mediocre code ever the problem? This all feels like a Kafkian fever dream.
I remember arriving at Apple Park to meet a friend/coworker a few years before I retired. Sitting there enjoying the food by one of the huge, curved glass walls, he was distractedly focused on one of the gardeners that Apple employs. This man was out in the center part of Apple Park trimming a plant or something similar.
It was clear that my friend was looking on somewhat enviously and when I asked, he admitted as much.
And I knew too immediately the draw. Before I was old enough for "gainful employment" there was a neighbor who hired my sister and I (I think I was 11, my sister 10) to ride along with him and his kids (our neighborhood friends) and help with his lawn services business.
I know. But this was the 1970's, a small working-class neighborhood in a Kansas suburb… And he paid us by the hour, helped load/unload the lawn mowers. We'd get a free lunch at a "Wiley's" fast-food hamburger joint.
But despite the physical labor of pushing a lawn mower all over someone's yard, there was a curious sense of satisfaction that came from having arrived at a tatty, overgrown lawn but then leaving it looking neat, tidy. It is the usual "sense of accomplishment" that physical labor often metes out that is often more elusive in the white-collar world.
To be sure there's no arguing about the differences in pay—I'm talking strictly about a sense of job satisfaction. (And, over the course of my three decade career as a programmer, the closest to that had been early on when I had full ownership of the code.)
I fear this will be horribly self-indulgent, but I'll share it anyway:
I'd always been a computer person, but it wasn't until I'd reached my thirties that I realized I could make a career out of that interest. The joy of programming still gets me out of bed in the morning and sends me skipping happily to my desk in my home office. What I do wouldn't impress anybody at a technical level. I'm not an innovator. The world of software and tech would not suffer if I had never existed. But I like the guy I work for. I like the people I work with. I write stuff that lots of people use. I do it well enough that I can feel decently good about it.
And I'm watching all of what I enjoy in software as a career and craft gradually disappear. Upper management are now all True Believer AI zealots who know, just know, that AI is the future and therefore ensure that it is also the present. They've caused nothing but organizational chaos, shoved out knowledgeable people, in some misguided effort to remake the company in their image, and replaced them with, to me, obvious bullshit artists.
Engineering time and effort that might a few years ago have produced value and good experiences for users now produce mediocre "MCPs," used only internally, that turn out even more mediocre code and tests that don't test anything.
I don't have nearly the chops or talent you and your peers have. I never could have run with you guys or made the mark on the world that you did. What I do, and the processes I follow, are probably the exact stuff that drove you to retirement. Still, I enjoy what I do and hate that it's being taken from me and replaced with something I hate, overseen, in my company's case, by vapor merchants pretending to be visionaries/cutting-edge 'thought leaders.'
I'm glad some of us got to build things when the inmates ran the asylum, and I regret the money and 'progress' that strangled the life and joy out of it for you.
Just an aside: I've really enjoyed everything you've posted on HN and look forward to your comments. Thanks, and cheers.
I have to call you out a bit on the: "I don't have nearly the chops or talent you and your peers have".
Trust me, when I started at Apple in 1995 I was way in over my head. Or so I thought.
After a couple months on the job I asked a coworker down the hall (who seemed particularly chill—Hi, Brian!), "How long until I feel like I know what I'm doing?"
"6 months."
I liked the unambiguity of his answer even if it seemed kind of off the cuff.
He was more or less right. It was somewhere about 6 months that I more or less knew what I was headed in each morning to work to accomplish. And I felt like I, with a little help perhaps, could even contribute in a small way.
Still, I was always surrounded by some of the most amazing programmers I had ever met. One guy (hi, Cam!) could walk through a "backtrace" in machine code, look at the registers, addresses and data on the stack, and then declare, "You're accessing memory after you've already released it. Do you know what could be 24 bytes in size?"
And who was I? Some kid from Kansas with no degree in software engineering.
It may have in fact taken closer to two decades before I was able to shake off the imposter syndrome. At some point I had to admit that I wasn't so dense to have not learned anything in my 20+ years of coding. I was still not on Cameron's level, never will be, but I might have made up for that shortcoming by leaning into being prolific, coding two or three prototypes quickly in order to finally determine The Best Path.
Just from your comment I would be willing to bet your enthusiasm alone would make you a valuable asset.
That is kind of how it worked: there were some people that could hold multiple threads in their head and rattle off a semaphore strategy that was performant, skirt a deadlock.
There was the "math guy". We all knew who they were and would cycle by their office when we were wrestling with matrix inversions and the order of transforms.
And there were people that you could rely upon to take perhaps the most dreaded task of a project and work diligently at it. Trust me, no one split hairs over whether that individual could disassemble PPC code just by looking at it. The team appreciated the "tanks" that could do some of the drudge-work. (I was from time to time that person.)
I don't need to belabor a point, you get it, it took all types. It took me some time to see that though, and longer still to see where I fit in as well.
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